Lionheart

He feels safe by a naked flame

**Lionheart** is a fire-wielding warrior armed with a red pike pole and a small red drip torch, and dressed in a yellow firefighter suit with white reflective strips, faded green pants, a wildland firefighter pack with a chest strap and waist belt, and a black firefighter helmet. He sports a black goatee.

He can be unlocked by spending 30,000 coins and upon reaching player level 12.

## Functionality

### Basics

Lionheart is a **Heavyweight**, meaning he engages in close-quarters combat, can take significant damage, and can destroy the barricade. He primarily attacks using his spear to stab and impale enemies.

Upon death, he will turn into his unique undead form, Forest Firefighter.

### Perks and Abilities

Enemies struck by any of Lionheart's attacks will be knocked back.

Lionheart has full fire resistance, 90% bullet resistance, and 50% explosion resistance.

Lionheart also has some fear resistance. More enemies have to be nearby to affect his performance.

Lionheart's manually activated ability is to take the drip torch strapped to his waist and use it to spray flaming fuel over a small area in front of and to the side of him, setting the affected area on fire and any non-fire-resistant enemies with it. This ability has a 7-second cooldown that begins after the fire spray animation is complete. Lionheart is fairly useful for burning corpses, especially when dealing with reviving enemies such as Sergeant and Undead, ensuring that they will remain permanently dead. Naturally, fire immune enemies such as Firefighter Zombies and Small Insectoids will render it completely ineffective. Additionally, since his ability’s damage is as low as a level 0 Molotov Cocktail, it is unrealistic to use it as a damage method, which means that burning corpses is likely the only purpose of it. If used unwisely, it can also harm friendly units. This can be partially negated by bringing along a fellow emergency team unit to activate the 2/2 synergy, though it is ill-advised to do so solely to avoid friendly fire.

Upon reaching level 13, Lionheart's special ability can be unlocked, increasing his melee damage by 30% for every enemy that he has set on fire.

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

On paper, Lionheart's design attempts to make him similar to a damager or fighter; Due to his slow speed that is unusual amongst them, however, and lack of health that makes up the heavyweights, he falls somewhere within the middle. With a new perk and improved stats, Lionheart functions like a more powerful firefighter with an ability, knockback, and a decent Special.

### Skirmish

In League, he works similarly to other damagers and heavyweights, that is to protect the ranged units as a fireproof bullet sponge, which theoretically makes him useful. However, within the same price range, there are more versatile options such as Guard and Turbo, who despite lack fire resistance, are better units in general as they are faster, forcing enemies to concentrate the firepower and can manage better on their own as a single unit. On the other hand, Lionheart only works well against a few specific decks, such as Flamethrower based compositions, in which he can fully negate its attack with his perk unlike a typical damager. However, once again his speed hinders him, not to mention his ability that is simply a deadweight, since it activates automatically once encountering an enemy unit, doing a pitiful amount of damage while idling in the middle of the battlefield, making him an easy kill for any incoming unit that can still take Lionheart down with it even with the burn debuff.

**Item sets**

As one of his few perks, Lionheart has rather high crit chance among other units of his kind. Therefore he benefits most from items that boosts crit chance and damage and the item set Gentleman, giving him a 50% added bonus apart from his special ability, while the Surgery set offers similar benefits at the cost of having to maintain his health below half. Since Lionheart isn’t particularly bulky, the latter can’t offer him as much as the first. Supposedly, it is possible to use the Firefighter set in conjuncture with his manual ability, though this is likely not worth the endeavor as slowing his attacks down all but doom him to death against fast zombies like Witches, Blue Runners, etc.

Despite Lionheart’s usually underwhelming performance, his manual ability is the safest way for the player to activate the fire debuff on friendly units. This makes him and the Rednecks synergy a good combo, as it constantly causes minimal damage to activate the ability.

## Skins and Synergies

Lionheart is a part of Emergency team.

 Team

## Trivia

* During a 2023 Reddit Developer Q&A:
	+ It was stated that Lionheart (or his name) was apparently a reference to a movie. It was never stated which movie it was, though, leaving fans to speculate what he references.
	+ It was stated that Lionheart is classified as a Fighter due to not having enough health to be a Heavyweight. This answer still does not explain why he isn't classified as a Damager then, since his stats line up with the units from the Damager class.
		- This was fixed in the 2023 Christmas Update.
* Lionheart is one of 3 base-game characters that do not have skins, the other 2 being Firefighter and Guard.

 Humans
 TMF Squad