Andrea

The only thing more precise than a bullet is my arrow. Inspired by Reddit user u/Advanced\_Ad\_1422

## Abilities

### Perks

Silent perk, knockback perk, high accuracy

###  Special Ability

Critical ranged attacks creates a small explosion that damages stacked enemies

## Unlock Requirements

### Price

Reward for opening Halloween Cases

 **Andrea** is a huntress skilled in the art of archery. She is armed with a compound bow with a pair of short blades attached to the limbs, and dressed in a green tank top, a brown scarf, a brown belt, and dark pants. A brown quiver is attached to her hip behind her. There is a gray pin in her hair and some of it is kept in a short ponytail held by a brown hair tie.

She is unlocked from the Halloween Event by opening Halloween Cases.

## Functionality

### Basics

Andrea is a **sniper**, meaning she will deliver high damage from long distance.

Compared to other snipers, she wields a mechanical bow which does not have an ammo capacity. Instead, she acts as if she has infinite ammo, never needing to reload in the traditional sense. This makes her unable to perform melee attacks unless the enemy is very close to her.

Some time after dying, she will turn into Girl. Notably, she turns 1 second faster compared to most units.

### Perks and Abilities

Andrea has three perks, the silent perk, meaning she will not alert idle enemies with her attacks nor her deployment, the knockback perk with her melee attacks, and the high accuracy perk, shared by all units of the sniper class.

At level 13, Andrea's special ability can be unlocked, which allows her attacks to create a small explosion on critical hits. The splash damage deals an extra 80 explosion damage on nearby enemies (mostly stacked enemies), while it’s not a reliable source of damage, it bypasses bullet resistances, even the bullet immunity of Egg or a charged Paramedic can’t ignore, making it worth unlocking, but not necessarily a priority. Additionally an item with %Crit. Chance/Team Power is required to make the special ability usable.

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

As an event unit, players will not be able to obtain her through regular gameplay, and must participate in the Halloween Event to use her. Like all Snipers, Andrea is useful for picking off weak enemies one by one. She can provide long-range support for melee units and extra damage support for other rangers. Her high damage also makes her very effective at slowly chipping away at the health of stronger, tougher enemies from afar, such as Rams and One-armed Soldiers.

Unfortunately for her, she suffers from the same problems as all snipers being slow movement speed and very long preparation time. Due to this, she is only useful on missions which might take long time to finish, so she can at least slightly speed up the completion and provide high damage against certain enemies clogging up the fight, however most units will accomplish this task better and faster. While she only takes five seconds longer to prepare than most shooters, her damage output can often feel inadequate for the time it took to send her out.

Andrea also suffers from competition, as both Sniper Polina and Charlotte can often be better choices to use due to their special abilities being far more useful in the main campaign past low level threats. In addition they have higher base damage and range than Andrea, at the cost of lower health which is fairly redundant considering their role as a Sniper. A smaller and more minor downside is that Andrea uses her melee only after she completes the whole animation to shoot an arrow, while not a hinderance in most circumstances it can result in problems when Insectoids are introduced. This is also not mentioning that both other options are not limited units, and are much more accessible than Andrea without potentially having to resort to using money if a player is unlucky enough not to get her. The one advantage Andrea does have over other Snipers is her bullet spread being 5° in comparison to the usual 10°, making her more accurate though this is hardly noticeable.

### Skirmish

In League, Andrea's high damage makes her a solid ranged unit, easily picking off vulnerable enemies with the advantage of a greater range. While she fights very similar to Sniper Polina and Sheriff Charlotte, she runs into the issue of her significant wind up time to fire arrows. During this time, it is likely other ranged units that are close enough to hit her will shoot her, as they have no cooldown between attacks granted high enough agility. Even melee units with high speed such as Mechanic, Redneck or Glenn will quickly close the gap on her while she is still preparing to fire.

In addition to her long fire rate, Andrea possesses limited bullet resistance penetration, unlike her counterpart Sniper Polina. Due to the abundance of bullet resistant units in Skirmish such as Juggernaut, combined with her lackluster firing speed, her high damage attacks will mostly fall short of expectations for a Sniper.

Andrea will often as well find herself at risk of attacks from Grenadier, as her lower range in comparison to other Sniper units will put her often in dangerous positions, combined with her slow movement speed hampering her ability to move out of harms way. In addition it affects her ability to fight against units using Range% equipment as despite being a Sniper, she may find herself being out-ranged by Specops or Swat.

### Item Sets

As with all Snipers, she benefits greatly from the Hunter item set due to her long range and high base damage. SwissMade is a serviceable option but it'll still be a strictly worse than Hunter which will often grant a higher damage bonus towards her. As a result, Range% options offer an exceptional bonus towards her DPS while using Hunter making up for her lackluster range stat compared to other Snipers.

Like the majority of ranged units, she benefits most from preparation time watches. She is also one of the few units for whom ranged damage books are significantly better than any other options. Andrea can also get great use out of percentage ranged dmg. bonuses thanks to her high base ranged damage, making them more preferable than flat boosts.

## Skins and Synergies

Andrea is a part of the Northerners team.

While Andrea isn't a bad option in the team, Sonya is often a better pick for 2/2 and 3/3 powers than Andrea, with a higher overall DPS and better late game use. Andrea like all Northerners benefits well from guaranteed critical hits greatly. It significantly increases her damage due to already having a high base ranged damage stat, and can result in her attacks being devastating to higher health enemies. Otherwise, the 5/5 ability isn't particularly useful.

## Trivia

* The unit is based off a character concept by the user u/Advanced\_Ad\_1422 on Reddit.
* Andrea is the only unit in the game with a description written in first person.
	+ This is due to the lack of quotes around the around the description, unlike Juggernaut who does.
* Andrea's name might be a reference to The Walking Dead's sharpshooter; Andrea "the fearless sharpshooter."

## Gallery

Andrea sketch art made by developer Pixel Wachowski following news for update 3.9.0.

 Humans
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