ZiP .22

Overview

In the spirit of her weapon, ZiP .22 is potentially a greater threat to herself and her team than to who she’s pointing at. But on the other hand, she is an incredible asset to those who know how to use her kit.

ZiP .22’s skill has a one second initial cooldown, which lets her control the fight from very early on. As leader, she can get teams that don't really care about evasion to deal tons of damage early on. As a non-leader, if a different support HG or a SG is set as the leader, then ZiP .22 can cripple the enemies’ defenses, attack, buy the team more time, and help units that scale off enemy debuffs.

However, her kit is not well suited for standard HG DPS support, so it’s recommended to only use her for the specific cases. She is niche, but incredibly useful in the right fights.

Strengths

Low Initial Cooldown

The 1 second cooldown on ZiP .22 is nice if looking for a budget early firepower buff or powerful early debuff and crowd control.

Nice Tile Layout

ZiP .22’s tilebuff layout allows her to be on position 8 on most standard teams, as well as reach some very interesting places in less standard team layouts.

Weaknesses

Debuffs Allies

ZiP .22 is able to hit her allies as well as enemies with some of the nastiest debuffs in the game. A 90% evasion debuff virtually always spells death for evasion-tanks like SMGs and HGs.  The quadruple targeted debuff of damage, accuracy, evasion, and movespeed can cripple tanks and DPS alike.

Weak Tilebuffs

20% firepower, 50% accuracy is an objectively worse tilebuff than SAA’s tilebuff of the same rarity. The low firepower benefit also makes K5’s generally better, making ZiP .22 a poorer candidate for general buffer in the tile buff department.

Poor Uptime

ZiP .22 is not well suited to be a standard support unit, as her skill’s uptime is only a 5/12. She is automatically desynchronized from other HGs due to her 1-second initial cooldown and has lower than a 50% uptime.

Low Base HP

330 HP is low for a HG, making ZiP .22 a poor tank on top of her dumpstering some allies’ survivability.

Leader Conditional

ZiP.22’s skill is based on who is the leader. This potentially leads to conflict and anti-synergy with other skills that have a similar requirement, such as Webley or Desert Fairy.

Full Analysis

When leader, ZiP .22 gives the whole team a big early 35% firepower buff and then a massive 90% evasion debuff. Needless to say, this 90% evasion debuff is a death sentence for any evasion tanks and should not be used with them. When compared to similar firepower HGs such as Grizzly, with her 30% firepower tiles and 25% firepower skill, ZiP .22 is slightly weaker. Grizzly has a massive advantage in uptime too, 8/12 instead of ZiP’s 5/12. Paired with the anti-survivability debuff, it's clear ZiP .22 is not suited for how other support HGs are used.

However, ZiP .22 has a 1 second initial cooldown, so this version of her skill is well suited for teams that specialize in burst DPS and do not plan on evading anything, like MGSGs, farming teams, or RFHGs with early burst RFs like HS.50. When all the enemy is dead before they can reach you, no amount of evasion debuffs will make a difference. Potentially better choices for this role are Kolibri or Nagant Revolver Mod.

When not leader, she hits the doll that is the leader AND every enemy with an early 30% debuff to accuracy, firepower, movespeed, and evasion. Lower Accuracy and Firepower are bad news for DPS units. Lower Move Speed and Evasion are bad news for some tank units. To basically entirely negate the downsides of the debuff, setting a unit that does not need any of those stats to function as leader is the usual move. Support units like backline HGs that don’t do much kiting, DPS, or tanking; or SGs that usually just sit there and take shots anyways are good candidates.

The 4 separate and early debuffs on the enemy team can be utilized by certain units. For example, RO635 Mod gets an additional 40% extra reroll chance on her skill 2 just from ZiP .22 alone, making her supremely hard to kill. Debuffs one second in also lets units like C-93, KSVK Mod, and HP-35 contribute plenty early. The move speed reduction on enemies is also global, unconditional, and free, unlike other common enemy slowing methods like smoke grenades, M950A’s Mod 2 skill, or fairy skills. This can buy valuable time for whatever a team needs to set up to kill the enemy.

Team Options

M2HB

RPK-203

HS.50

Early Burst

1s icd 35% firepower buff. Useful.

Debuff Users

RO635 Mod

KSVK Mod

Units that use debuffs can utilize the sheer number and earliness of ZiP .22’s debuffs to act quickly.

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