Queen

Explosions put a smile on her face!

**Queen** is a deranged carnival jester armed with an M79 grenade launcher with the leaf sight unfolded and dressed in a cropped red tank top, a black skirt with red lining, white gloves, white stockings, black shoes, and a black and red fool's cap with a yellow bell on both prongs. She wears red lipstick.

To unlock Queen, players must purchase the Circus Pack for 925 money.

## Functionality

### Basics

Although Queen is a human unit, her price is valued in rage points instead of courage.

She is a **Psycho**, meaning she behaves similarly to other units and possess fear immunity.

Queen is a weak melee unit, with her base stats fit in closely with other units in the fighter class, but with much slower attack and movement speed. Her critical attack speed is as slow as her regular attacks. Her rage cost and preparation time are both high.

Some time after dying, she will turn into Girl.

### Perks and Abilities

Queen has negative charisma and massive valor, making her effectively immune to Fear under most circumstances barring the Halloween Event.

Queen's manually activated ability is nearly the same as Grenadier's ability. Firing a grenade from her weapon at medium range ahead of her, dealing high Area of Effect damage. Grenade damage is fixed at 160 and is not affected by any form of damage modification. This ability has a cooldown of 3 seconds. The grenade can harm friendly units, so properly aiming before launching is advised. Queen's grenade has no delay on activation, but she has to take a second afterwards to reload her launcher, leaving her vulnerable.

Upon reaching level 13, Queen's special ability can be unlocked, which causes her grenades to generate fire pools. Combined with the fast cooldown on her grenades, spamming them can easily accomplish area denial. Since they deal high fire damage, it greatly increases her DPS and makes her more effective against groups of stronger enemies who can typically survive her initial explosion. It doesn't do much anywhere else, being hard-countered by rain and fire-resistant enemies.

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

Queen can prove to be a powerful unit much like Grenadier, in contrast though since her ability has an incredibly short cooldown in comparison and can also come with fire pools, it allows her to preform better in certain cases. This is especially useful in the mid-game since most of the threats come as a form of running horde. In addition, Queen doesn't explode on death, making her much less of a risk to friendly units.

While Queen's fear perk makes her an excellent pick for clearing out large weak hordes of enemies, it's somewhat advised against using Queen on missions that require having a large number of units on the battlefield at once since the fear debuff can actually hinder other units' total DPS. It's important to understand that Queen can't be the only melee unit brought along for a mission since rage can only be replenished by killing enemies. This is problematic since rage units always take a long time to prepare until other units are already out and dealing with the enemies, and that she has an already high rage cost. She can not be used as a main melee fighter however due to these reasons and her pitiful DPS in comparison, and acts best as a supporting role for horde clearing. Additionally (given that the player has accumulated enough rage points), Queen works well with fellow units with the Psycho trait such as Saw and Berserker given that they will be immune to fear, though making room for rage deployables such as the Turret can prove necessary in the late-game making the combination less useful.

Despite her much stronger grenade and psycho perk, Queen quickly becomes unviable due to a multitude of reasons. Her low health, damage, and attack speed mean she cannot stand for herself in melee combat. Her manual ability to throw a grenade is largely inefficient in the late game progress much like Grenadier's, since all enemies are simply very sturdy and most possess full fire resistance. A particularly harsh example is Blue Runners. Finally, Her rage cost, and preparation time are both high, making it not worth the resource to send her out. As such, replacing Grenadier with Queen will prove to be counterproductive.

### Skirmish

In league, Queen is a very strong choice much like Grenadier thanks to her powerful grenade, which is further complimented by a much shorter ability cool down and creating a fire pool, meaning she can fire off multiple grenades in one round, and enemy units who manage to survive the explosion will eventually get burned to death. However, her overall strength is severely less than that of Grenadier's due to her lackluster performance as a melee unit, low health, and the lack of bullet resistance. She will die to any enemy ranged unit easily as well as any enemy melee unit, especially those with faster attack speed and/or higher damage. Since her cost is identical to Grenadier's, there are not many reasons to use Queen if his damage is enough to kill the grenade targeted unit. Bringing both in combination is rather pointless as most of the time one grenade is sufficient enough to take out an enemy.

### Item Sets

Because of her issues with her slow attack speed, long preparation time, and her grenade's damage being unaffected by any item set, Queen is one of a few units who is unable to find any set that can meaningfully benefit her. Builder is the best item set for Queen in general, since it gives a flat chance to ignore received damage, allowing Queen to *possibly* gain more value through more grenades launched. Otherwise, Swissmade can make a great choice provided that the player specs into Queens survivability as damage increases are always useful. Any ranged damage set should not be taken, as it **doesn't** increase the damage of the grenade.

Queen works only with +Flat Melee Damage books, as ranged damage boosts don't affect the flat damage of the grenade. Due to the large preparation time she has, getting preparation cooldown reduction % watches greatly increases the effectiveness of the unit. As for books, + Melee Dmg and +% Health both can assist the unit greatly by increasing the survivability, however it won't effectively neuter the obvious shortcomings in damage and health. Queen can actually benefit well with -Cost substats, as unlike with courage, rage can be hard to gain and it isn't guaranteed how much will be made throughout the mission, it also makes it easier to synergize her with deployables.

## Skins and Synergies

Queen is a part of the Psychos team.

 Team

In the team above, Queen is never a good option. Her lackluster performance as a melee unit renders her unable to realistically frequently activate the 2/2 power. Meanwhile, Queen struggles to keep the 3/3 power activated due to her fragility. To add insult to injury, the 5/5 power is largely inefficient and possibly impossible to be utilized to begin with, mostly due to mediocre unit rotations.

## Trivia

* Queen is one of three members of the Circus Squad, the others being Berserker and Saw.
* Her costume design and appearance, as well as her psychotic female jester motif, are a reference to DC Comics character Harley Quinn.
* Queen was released in update 2.6.0 as an expansion to the "Circus Pack" unit pack. She was also awarded to everyone who purchased it earlier.
* Queen's special ability behaves exactly as Grenadier's grenades did in the past. Before update 2.4.0, Grenadier's grenades would create a fire pool after exploding.
* Her weapon is based off of the M79 break-action grenade launcher developed in the Vietnam War, also known as the "Thumper".

## Gallery

Queen shooting and reloading her grenade launcher.

 Humans
 TMF Squad