User blog:CausalityOrigin/Pyromancer, Defense Points, and Speed

Pyromancer has been, well, hated for speeding up zombies, and I decided to see if it's defense point melting was worth it.

To do this, I used one of the towers most affected by defense points, Minigunner, Golden to be precise.

What I did: I played a match with my friend where he placed down a single Golden Pyro, and I farmed at the beginning and placed down a golden minigunner. (Pyro is actually half decent early game), he maxed it and placed GM's, while I only placed GM's, while the pyromancer did speed up zombies, we were able to kill them rather fast.

However, we lost to Abnormal bosses without golden pyromancer due to the damage values being nerfed bc of defense points

Now for some math. Let's take Giant Boss into account

25 x 0.5 = 12.5, round to 12.

Now since damage can't go below half of it's original value, I'll take a maxed Golden Minigunner.

That would turn it into about, from 75 DPS, to around 36 DPS. That would take around 55 seconds to kill it, of course, we would have more minigunners, but I'm assuming we have one to keep it simple, it doesn't matter as scaling it up would have the same proportions, and therefore, basically the same result.

Now with Golden Pyromancer, you could easily delete half the defense points, leaving 6. Allowing the minigunner to deal the same amount of damage as before, basically no difference except for extra speed! Screw it, I'm doing Turret.

Turret: With Giant Boss, and no pyro, it would lose around 12 damage per shot, leaving 13 dmg per shot, and only 65 DPS. It would take a single maxed turret around 30 seconds to kill a giant boss.

With Pyro: 12 defense points deleted, and therefore only 6 damage is loss. If you take that into account, Turret does 95 DPS. Which would 21 seconds. Much better than without Pyro.

I think that 10 Seconds is totally worth just 5% increase in speed

About the speed boost however, it doesn't really matter because the speed boost grows more as the speed of the zombie increases, meaning it's rather negligible when applied to Giant Boss. Sadly, we don't have the studs per second that a zombie travels, so I can't do any precise calculations.

TL;DR, Pyro is a effective against high defense slow enemies, especially when paired with Minigunners, Turrets, Pursuits, etc. While it's speed boost can be annoying, compared to the benefits that you COULD reap from it, it's not much of a cost.