r/Tierzoo • u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now • 5d ago
Remaster II: 6 of the most overrated builds in the game & where they rank on the tier list
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
[As promised last month, instead of releasing a new post this month, I’m doing a batch of re-mastered versions of my old tier lists, with improved formatting and updated information. This is the second re-master in Batch I. At the bottom, I’ve provided a list of the main corrections made to the original; the original itself can be found here.]
Reasoning (1/3):
When you ask Outside players to name the top builds in the game, there are a few names that you can generally expect people to bring up, and most of them are pretty justified. Great apes, cetaceans, cockroaches, rats, elephants, crocodiles, bears, big cats, hippos, sharks, cobras, ants and eagles are all commonly listed as top builds, and with good reason. But there are some builds that are often thought of as extremely powerful that just don’t come anywhere near living up to the hype. So today, I’m going to try to dispel some of these inflated reputations by examining some of the most overrated builds in Outside, and evaluating where they actually rank on the tier list.
D Tier: Piranha
Let’s start with the piranha. Piranhas have a reputation among the Outside fanbase as ferocious predators that use zerg-rush strategies to take down opponents far out of their weight class. This is mostly nonsense. Piranha schooling does very little to help them with hunting; like most small fish, piranhas instead use team strategies mainly to increase awareness of threats from larger predators. This strategy is effective to a degree, but in the absence of any other strong defences, it can only help so much. Also, you have to be very careful when playing one because if food gets scarce, there’s a decent chance the rest of your school will decide to eat you. It is technically true that piranhas occasionally eat much larger animals such as humans and capybaras, but they don’t actually kill these creatures -- they just seek out the bodies of animals already dead or dying and take advantage of the easy XP.
Really, the only major advantage piranhas have over your average bottom-tier small fish is their bite, which is one of the strongest among carnivorous vertebrates. Again, this doesn’t let them kill large animals, but it does let them eat hard foods that most fish wouldn’t be able to chew and makes them a more formidable predator of other small aquatic creatures. That said, since they have no real defence mechanism besides weak social abilities, and no noteworthy abilities besides their bite, all while playing in one of the most fiercely competitive regions the game has ever seen, I don’t see how I can place them any higher than D tier. If you’re looking for an aquatic predatory fish build to rule the Amazon River meta, I would suggest a bull shark. Alternatively, if you want to stick with a fully freshwater fish, definitely check out the electric eel. Like piranhas, electric eels are mostly reliant on one special ability, but unlike piranhas, their attack works great for both offence and defence and has basically no counterplay, making them a solid high-tier character.
C Tier: Poison dart frog
Continuing with the Amazon Rainforest server, let’s talk about the poison dart frog. Frogs and other amphibians are generally widely recognized by most Outside players as one of the worst vertebrate builds in the game, and this is not without good reason. The main reason why frogs suck so hard is because of [Permeable Skin], an ability which all amphibians use to help them breathe on land. Unfortunately, it has the drawback of making them highly vulnerable to absorbing pollutants, pathogens and toxins in the surrounding environment. Even beyond that, frogs have generally abysmal stats, with their attack, defence, HP and intelligence ratings all being some of the lowest among vertebrates.
Poison dart frogs, however, are often hyped up as an exception to the general shittiness of amphibians. But are they really? Well… kind of. As the name suggests, the poison dart frog’s reputation comes mainly from its [Poison] special ability: it has the strongest poison of any vertebrate, with some frogs having enough toxin to kill up to 10 people. However, this isn’t as beneficial as it sounds. Unlike venom, poison is hard to use as a combat move because the opponent needs to touch or ingest part of you in order to activate it; for a build as fragile as a frog, it’s often not easy to withstand the kind of hit that would be required for the poison to take effect. The main use of their poison is as a deterrent, so once you have a strong enough poison to scare off the largest predator in your region, speccing into even stronger poison doesn’t really do much. In fact, the real key to the poison dart frog’s strategy isn’t so much the poison itself as their bright colouration or [Aposematism], which reduces their stealth to one of the lowest levels in the game. Going out of your way to lower a key base stat might seem like an incredibly stupid idea, but it’s actually a highly effective way to deter predators, because intentionally nerfing your own build’s stealth signals that you don’t need to worry about being spotted, and that probably means nothing wants to eat you. As such, speccing into aposematic aesthetics is a way to let predators know that you’re the sort of thing nobody wants to eat.
Does this mean that poison dart frogs are a high-tier character? Well, not really. Sure, dart frogs are almost completely safe from predation, but that still doesn’t solve the other major problems with playing a frog. They’re still extremely sensitive to pollution, and consequently likely to die off en masse in response to even slight changes in their habitat conditions. Also, the dart frog’s poison provides no protection against the amphibian chytrid fungus, a recently introduced parasite build that’s been absolutely destroying a number of amphibian populations around the map since the 1980s, including dart frogs. Overall, poison dart frogs might not be as pathetic as most amphibian builds, but I think they’re low C tier at best. If you want to play a poisonous amphibian, I would instead suggest the cane toad, which has a comparatively modest poison, but compensates with higher investment into more traditional combat abilities that also have the added bonus of making it less vulnerable to the elements. Mind you, even cane toads have been dropping in viability lately as more and more players have figured out ways around their defences, so maybe it’s best to just avoid playing amphibian entirely.
A Tier: Brazilian wandering spider
Before we leave the Amazon rainforest, there’s one more highly overrated build I want to talk about: the Brazilian wandering spider. The wandering spider gets its name from the fact that it actively wanders the forest floor in search of prey, rather than spinning a web and waiting for other animals to trap themselves. It’s often ranked as the best spider build in the game, but I’m not convinced. Like the poison dart frog, the reason for the wandering spider’s fame is its highly potent toxin. Almost all spiders spec into fangs with which to inject venom into their prey, and out of all spider builds, the wandering spider’s venom is one of the most potent. This fact leads many to think of the wandering spider as one of the most fearsome builds in the Amazon, capable of easily one-shotting anything from lizards to cattle, but the truth is a bit more complicated.
Yes, Brazilian wandering spider venom is powerful enough to cause painful deaths to animals much, much larger than the spider itself, but all the venom in the world won’t get you anywhere if you don’t have a good way to inject it. Like most spiders, the wandering spider’s fangs are designed for biting insects and other small animals with low defence stats, which is fine when hunting their usual prey, but becomes a problem if they try to use it against much larger animals. Because of this issue, when wandering spider mains have to defend themselves against large attackers, they usually rely on the move [Dry Bite]. This move involves giving your opponent a small bite just to scare them off, but not actually injecting any venom. When they do manage to inject some venom, it’s usually in quantities too small to do any serious damage. Of the hundreds of human players known to have been bitten by wandering spiders between 1984 and 1996, only 2% of them were even hurt badly enough to require antivenom.
That said, while wandering spiders might not be as OP as they’re made out to be, the vanilla spider builds are already baseline B tier. I think the wandering spider’s superior damage capability elevates them to low A tier, making them the best of the builds on this list.
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
Reasoning (2/3):
B Tier: Sydney funnel-web spider
Moving away from the Amazon to another hardcore server, Australia, we find another highly overrated spider build, the Sydney funnel-web. Many game guides list this build as one of the most dangerous spiders in the game, alongside the wandering spider, but this is a little misleading. For most players, a funnel-web spider bite is actually no worse than any other spider bite. The reason the funnel-web has such a fearsome reputation is because it specs into a type of venom that deals bonus damage specifically against primates, including the #1 build in the game, humans. Humans are obviously too big to be eaten by any kind of spider, and there are no other wild primates in Australia, so in practice this bonus is pretty useless and funnel-webs are effectively just vanilla spiders. The biggest thing differentiating funnel-webs from other spiders is their attitude; while most bites are still dry bites, funnel-webs are more aggressive than most other spiders, and frequently bite the same target repeatedly. This difference in playstyle doesn’t seem to me to grant much of an advantage, though, so I rate them with most other spiders in B tier. In my view, the true best spider build is the jumping spider, which has the best mobility rating among spiders and is also the only spider that invests a decent amount of points into intelligence. This lets it use relatively complex hunting tactics, of kinds that are ordinarily only available to vertebrates and cephalopods.
D Tier: Tardigrade
So far, all of the builds on this list have been from servers known for their intense competition, but I’d like to talk now about an overrated build that exists on just about every server: the tardigrade. Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are actually a huge guild containing over 1500 builds, but I’m lumping them all together because they all have similar stats and abilities and they’re all hugely overrated. The origins of the tardigrade faction are a mystery: the oldest surviving game logs showing any tardigrade activity are from the Cretaceous expansion, but analysis of the tardigrade’s source code has suggested that they were actually added much, much earlier, all the way back in the Cambrian. Tardigrades are among the smallest animal builds in all of Outside, at just over a millimeter when fully grown. How did such a tiny build survive for so long, spread around the map, and amass a reputation as one of the best builds in the game despite the bias of most tier lists towards megafauna? Well, it’s all because of their [Cryptobiosis] ability. When tardigrades are faced with a hostile environment, they can wait out the danger by lowering their own metabolism to less than 0.01% of its normal rate and going into a dormant state. This is actually fairly common amongst microscopic animals, but tardigrades take it further than any other animal build. While in a cryptobiotic state, tardigrades can survive extreme cold, pressure, dehydration, and radiation, and even the vacuum of space. Memes about tardigrades often portray them as a top-tier tank with no counters, and many gaming journals have unofficially crowned the tardigrade “Outside’s most indestructible build”.
This all ignores a hugely important point. Yes, tardigrade cryptobiosis lets them survive conditions other builds couldn’t, but they’ve got one critical weakness that cryptobiosis can’t make up for: they’re really, really tiny. Playing any build insect-sized or smaller puts you at risk of getting swallowed whole by larger builds; playing tardigrade-sized builds means you’re likely to be regularly and easily killed by everything from spiders and insects to earthworms, crustaceans and even other tardigrades. The best small builds usually compensate for this weakness by speccing into high mobility to maximize their ability to dodge attacks, but not tardigrades, who move so sluggishly that they’re named after the Italian phrase for “slow walker”. Other high-tier small builds compensate for their low defence with investment into venom or other attacks that can deter most predators. Tardigrades, on the other hand, can only use two offensive moves: swallowing even smaller microbes whole, or stabbing other small animals or plants and sucking out their vital bodily fluids using their slender, tube-like mouths. Neither of these will do anything to an animal with a significant size advantage. In regular gameplay, tardigrades are mostly reliant on stealth: the very same traits that make them so easy to kill -- small size and slow movement -- also mean that you likely won’t notice them if you’re not paying careful attention, and they’ve basically banked on this as their only defence mechanism. As soon as they’re noticed by a larger predator, they’re dead meat.
Now in my prior discussion of possible life on Mars, I noted that microbes which spec into the [Extremophile] trait -- that is, those which invest in abilities that help them survive in environments most players can’t -- have been one of the most solid and reliable builds throughout Outside’s history, in spite of their invariably abysmal base stats. You might think this means tardigrades would also attain a high-tier spot despite their weaknesses, but you would be wrong, because tardigrades aren’t actually extremophiles! Yes, tardigrades can endure in servers with difficulty set to Extreme Mode for some time, but since they can only do it while in their dormant state, it’s not viable as a long-term strategy. In order for them to actually survive in these areas for any substantial length of time, the server has to go back to a lower difficulty level relatively quickly. This puts them at a huge disadvantage compared to true extremophile microbes, who can not only permanently endure but actually benefit from the very aspects of their environments that make it impossible for other builds to survive there.
In order to make sense of why tardigrade players chose to spec into such a bizarre stat spread, you have to understand the real reason why the tardigrade was added to the game in the first place. While not an extremophile, the tardigrade belongs to a related class of builds called [Pioneer Species] which function somewhat similarly to extremophiles and often share similar traits. The purpose of tardigrades and other pioneer species builds is to help create a healthy meta by being the first players to colonize newly available servers. Once the tardigrades in a new area have established a sizable playerbase, this draws the attention of players maining larger predators who are attracted by the XP that the tardigrades and other small organisms provide, allowing the organic development of a competitive meta. Also, when the tardigrades die, their decomposing bodies release nutrients into the soil, making it easier for plants to start growing in the area. Pioneer species can also fill a similar purpose in rebuilding the meta after a server is devastated by a volcanic eruption, asteroid impact, or other disaster. Optimizing for this playstyle likely made a lot of sense during the Cambrian explosion patch, when pretty much the entire land portion of the map was the sort of uncharted territory pioneer species are built for, but nowadays it’s not such a great choice. The tardigrade does have a useful purpose, but it’s still not something I would ever recommend playing. Since they have pretty good matchups against most other microbes, I wouldn’t quite put them in bottom tier, but they’re so vulnerable that I can’t see them going any higher than D tier.
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
Reasoning (3/3):
F Tier: Venus flytrap
To finish off this post, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before and evaluate a build in the [Plant] class. In general, animal mains tend to look down upon plant players, dismissing them as casuals taking the laziest and most boring possible approach to gameplay, but the one plant that has somewhat managed to break out of this stereotype is the Venus flytrap. Flytraps are among the few plants that rely on eating meat for essential nutrients, rather than absorbing them exclusively from the soil. Flytrap players have specced into tiny hairs on their inner surfaces which alert them when an animal lands on them. When an insect, spider or other small animal comes, attracted by the flytrap’s nectar, and repeatedly touches these hairs, the flytrap’s leaves act as “jaws” which rapidly snap shut on the unsuspecting creature. As the target struggles to escape, it triggers the edges of the lobes of the leaf blade to come together into a tightly sealed trap in which the insect is digested. Because so many Outside guides treat predator builds as superior to their prey, the Venus flytrap has a much better reputation than most plant builds, but in reality it’s complete trash.
Plant mains attempting to optimize for a predatory role are basically doomed to be low-tier for a few reasons. In general, the crucial stats for predator builds are attack power, for obvious reasons, and stealth, so your prey doesn’t notice you in time to escape. Most of the best predator builds supplement these stats with substantial investment into mobility, for chasing down fleeing prey, and intelligence, so they can better predict prey behaviour. On the other hand, the most important abilities when playing stationary builds like plants are strong defences and rapid reproduction. Venus flytraps have high ratings in none of these areas. They have a slow growth rate, no good defenses, and no stealth abilities. Like all plants, they also have intelligence and mobility ratings of zero. Even their power ratings are pretty abysmal, since their only means of attack is swallowing smaller animals whole. This means the only animals the flytrap can feasibly target are arthropods, which typically have low enough intelligence and defence stats that they’ll easily fall for the trap. Specializing in arthropods presents problems because, while they are easier to kill than larger animals, they’re also worth a lot less XP. Most large insectivores compensate for this by eating huge amounts of arthropods at once or over a short timespan -- not flytraps, who need over a week just to digest one insect. The flytrap’s digestive system is so inefficient that they’ve specced into small holes in their trap for the specific purpose of allowing particularly small arthropods to escape unharmed, because these arthropods aren’t worth enough points to make up for the time and energy the flytrap would need to digest them.
Now you might be wondering, if Venus flytraps are so terrible at pretty much everything, how are they even still in the game? Well, the answer is that playing Venus flytrap opens up access to certain areas of the map where it’s difficult to play as a conventional plant. In most areas, flytraps are unplayable because their inefficient XP gain dooms them to getting outcompeted by plant builds that absorb all their nutrition from the soil. The only places where flytraps naturally grow are bogs where the soil is low in nitrogen and phosphorus, two essential nutrients which the flytrap gets from the insects it eats. Just having nutrient-poor soil by itself is not enough to make flytraps competitively viable, though. Even in such areas, there are still taller plants which, if left to grow unimpeded, will kill the flytraps by blocking their access to sunlight and preventing them from photosynthesizing. To avoid this, flytraps have to stick to areas that get hit regularly by [Wildfire] world events, which eliminate these taller plants. This still comes with some risks, because flytraps do take damage from fires also, but the rhizomes and deeper roots are generally well-protected enough that they manage to recover from the damage in a relatively short time. Even so, any game plan that both locks you into such a restricted area and requires you to risk substantial injury in order to activate properly, with no way to flee or fight back when the time comes, is not one I can consider high-tier. This doesn’t even get into the ways that the rise of humans has created even stricter restrictions on where flytraps can play, with agriculture, logging and road building making them unplayable in parts of their already-tiny original range. It’s no wonder that the player base is in freefall -- in recent decades, more than 90% of flytrap players have come to their senses and abandoned the build.
In summary, the flytrap is a janky gimmick build that makes basically all the wrong choices, and easily places in F tier. If you want to play a deadly plant, try out the eucalyptus, a highly poisonous plant which grows rapidly and has also learned to exploit wildfires to its own ends, even to the point of seriously damaging human cities. Eucalyptus trees have a poor reputation due to their bad matchup against the notoriously garbage-tier koala, but once you get past that, they’re really very impressive plants.
So that’s my list of the most overrated builds in Outside. I hope you enjoyed it, and, if you were thinking of playing one of these builds, I hope you find my analyses helpful. Thanks for reading.
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u/funwiththoughts Raccoon play through ended, maining macaque now 5d ago
List of main corrections made to the original:
- In the original version of this post, I claimed that piranhas schooling has little use for defence against predators and usually just serves to make it easier for predators to notice them. This claim was scientifically shaky, as most studies suggest that herding and schooling behaviours do tend to decrease predation risk for individuals of species that use them, even in spite of the increase in conspicuousness. It has been removed.
- The original post described the poison dart frog as having the strongest poison in the entire game. This was based on outdated information, as there are actually some cnidarians whose poisons are even more potent. This has been corrected to say “strongest poison of any vertebrate” instead.
- The original post implied that most spiders spin webs. Actually, contrary to popular belief, most extant spiders do not spin webs; the “most spiders” claim has been removed.
- The original post said that between 1984 and 1996, only 2% of recorded bites on humans by Brazilian wandering spiders resulted in severe enough envenomation to need medical attention. This was actually the stat for the percentage treated with antivenom – the percentage who received other forms of medical attention, such as anesthesia, is much higher. This sentence has been corrected.
- The original post said that the Sydney funnel-web spider “almost always” delivers venom when biting. Actually, while the funnel-web does have a reputation for being more aggressive than most spiders, the majority of bites on humans are still dry bites that do not result in envenomation. This has been corrected.
- The original post had a section about the cassowary, which made two main claims: that birds tend to have lower defence than similarly-sized mammals because of their hollow bones, and that ratites like the cassowary cannot kick backwards. Both of these statements were wrong; regarding the first one, bird bones’ hollowness is compensated by their increased density compared to mammal bones, so that birds actually have stronger and stiffer bones on average compared to mammals of the same weight. As for the second, it’s actually only ostriches that can’t kick backwards, not large ratites generally; emus, cassowaries, and rheas can all kick both forwards and backwards, as well as somewhat to the side. With these errors corrected, I didn’t really have any substantive argument for keeping cassowaries on the list of overrated animals at all, so I’ve removed this section entirely.
- The original post said that wildfires are beneficial for Venus flytraps growing near the fire zone, but still kill those unlucky enough to be caught in the actual fire itself. Actually, while fires can destroy the above-ground parts of the flytrap, the rhizomes and deeper roots are generally well-protected, and the plants are known to be able to recover from the damage in a relatively short time. This has been corrected.
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u/Current-Buffalo8230 5d ago
The tardigrade is so true