TierZoo treats Real Life animals and how well they survive as Character Tiers in an MMO "game", and there are several builds or strategies that are described as Game-Breakers.
Builds:
- For starters, humans are the uncontested biggest Game Breaker in Outside history. Their extremely high intelligence allows them to build inventions that massively raise all their other stats (except base health), allowing them to potentially overpower every other build in the game. Of note is that even if you could take away all of a human's inventions and nerfed their intelligence (which is the max possible and unlocks the so far unique civilization skill tree), they'd still be overpowered thanks to their rapid stamina gain, superb throwing distance and accuracy, and ability to get more experience from eating food thanks to gut flora. Their lack of thick fur gives weaknesses in low defense and vulnerability to flying eusocial stinging insects, but they even remedy that with their inventiveness, equipment, and their special teaching skill. Humans are near-universally accepted to be so game-breaking that players who pick the human as their species only really face threats if they're juveniles, get no prep time, or go in a Player Versus Player scenario with other humans.
- Elephants are extremely bulky and powerful due to their thick hide, sheer mass, and disjointed weapons, while also extremely intelligent — just below humans — and have a long lifespan and high dexterity via their trunks to make the most use of it. Their ears give them vital heat resistance as well as low-frequency hearing for very long-distance communication. Finally, their trunks are a versatile all-purpose tool that can function as smell detection, weapon, prehensile appendage, sonic intimidation, breathing tube, and more. Their weaknesses (lack of stealth and middling speed) aren't an issue since most predators can't do meaningful damage to adult elephants, and while their young may be vulnerable, their herd strategy allows the stronger members to cover for the weaker ones. This gives Elephants no bad matchups against everything else but armed Humans, and makes them the dominant force in the nasty India server and the especially brutal Africa server.
- Orcas have been repeatedly referred to as "Overpowered" across various videos. The meta considers them the second-most powerful build right under humans thanks to high intelligence (slightly below dolphins) allowing them to bait enemies or work together to generate a wave. They're even smart enough to avoid attacking humans. However, they cannot get close to a human's level of power because they lack opposing thumbs to manipulate and craft objects, and even if they did they would be unable to create the fire that is necessary for advancement due to living in an aquatic environment. That said, they are the apex of the ocean predators and are the only non-human build that stands a slight chance of attacking and defeating a non-juvenile Blue Whale which has the max HP possible in the game but can only grief things like krill with its baleen instead of teeth.
- In the "Pick Two Animal Groups. They will defend you. The rest are coming to kill you." scenario, it's not the lone human sniper that is this, but the Swarm of Rats and the 50 eagles. TierZoo even outright says that it's an instant loss if you do not pick the rats since their numbers will overrun you, while if you do pick them they can make short work of all the other animals on the list that aren't the 50 eagles. The eagles are the other top choice for their similar swarming group size and aerial mobility, given that you start outside the human's kilometer-long sniping range. The eagles' broken pentachromatic eyesight will always see the sniper before he sees you no matter how good his scope is and how good a marksman he is, provided that your position is not blatantly obvious. Once the eagles have dive-bombed the sniper and gouged out his eyes, he's a sitting duck for the rats to tear up like every other animal.
- The Cave Bear was considered to be one in the Ice Age, even more than the other S-Tier in the Giant Ground Sloth. They had Lightning Bruiser stats that were basically a bear's taken up to eleven meaning that they could easily fight, defeat, and scavenge from other powerful builds, and they could rely on berries if meat could not be found. Finally, unlike the Giant Ground Sloth, early humans did not pose a threat to the Cave Bear nor did they contribute to its decline.
- The Mammoth would have been this as an intelligent tank nearly immune to S-tier predators like the related elephant, but it had such a bad matchup against the human that it failed to get to S-tier.
- Sauropods were considered the only S-Tier dinosaur for their time periods in a meta full of broken builds who were balanced out against each other, as their massive size gave them the highest HP of all land animals and a Tail Slap with massive range, allowed them to use the most powerful attack in the game via their stomp thanks to their sheer weight, and their height made them great at detecting and avoiding stealth attacks. Their tendency to travel in herds also immensely helped their survivability. Essentially, nothing short of the oceanic S-tier Mosasaurus could touch a herd of adult sauropods, and being aquatic they weren't likely to meet. The sauropods were by far the strongest build in a meta full of broken, unbalanced builds. Nothing short of a prepared human pack (which didn't exist then) could possibly take a healthy group down.
- Speaking of the mosasaurus, just as the sauropods were untouchable titans of the terrestrial server, they were the unstoppable monster of the oceans of the time, only vulnerable if juvenile, injured, or elderly.
- Beetles in general are considered S-tier due to being a Master of All Lightning Bruiser. They boast extremely thick armor that lets them No-Sell attacks even from builds in higher weight classes, powerful offense thanks to their jaws (which in some subclasses is supported by devastating ranged attacks using chemicals) as well as having some of the best strength proportionate to size, topped off with the best ground mobility of any insect. The closest thing to a weakness they have is that they traded some of their wings to boost their armor, lowering their aerial maneuverability, but even then, their flight is still more than good enough in most situations. In fact, beetles are so powerful that over 25% of all builds in the game are beetle variants.
Strategies:
- Pack hunting. Since Conservation of Ninjutsu does not apply here, it means that a pack hunter can overwhelm bigger classes and thus get a lot more Exp. It also opens up several effective tactics that cannot be used otherwise.
- Eusocialism for insects. Like pack hunting, it allows effective communication techniques and tactics as well as the ability to overwhelm bigger classes and thus get a lot more Exp. A later video explained it more in-depth — thanks to Arrhenotokynote , female Workers have 75% of each others' genes. As they would only pass down 50% of their genes if they reproduced compared to 75% if they let the Queen do it, the Workers' primary objective in life shifts from reproduction to assisting the queen's survival, providing them with much more loyalty to the queen over themselves, increased morale to work for her, while forgoing the need to reproduce. This in turn allows workers to hyper-specialize into different roles, being highly effective at a task while covering the weaknesses of each other. Eusocialism allows much more efficient ways of foraging and food storage to make highly stable sources of food, mitigating the chances of famine. Finally, eusocial cooperation allows the construction of extremely effective structures that can easily keep predators away. In the Insect tier list, both hymenopterans and termites were considered the top of S-tier, beating out even the Lightning Bruiser Master of All but non-eusocial beetles because of how broken Eusocialism is — while Beetles make up 25% of all builds in the game, hymenopteran and termite players vastly outnumber any other insect build.
- Long lifespans with high intellect. As a class' wisdom increases based on both intelligence and lifespan, having both means that they'll end up extremely wise and be capable of learning several skills. Elephants are considered S-tier partly because of this while also having the high dexterity to manipulate objects via their trunk, and Parrots are also considered S-tier partly because of this while sporting a dexterous beak. Humans reached the indomitable god-tier thanks to having the highest intellect in the game along with a very long lifespan accumulating more wisdom than every other build, which combined with the opposable thumb ability unlocks the currently human-exclusive civilization ability tree.
- Flight carries several perks and advantages. For offense, flight makes a build tough for ground-bound builds to defend against, and can add extra attack power via Meteor Move or if used with a grapple drop targets from above for massive damage. For defense, flight gives huge amounts of mobility and evasion and access to hard-to-reach safe places. For utility, it gives access to other servers and hard-to-reach food sources such as fruit and easy scouting of terrain. The weakness is that it requires a light body which sacrifices defense and HP, can make one Too Fast to Stop which causes crashing into obstacles to be deadly, and is countered by stealth builds as most eyes from above are useless at spotting stealth builds, unless those eyes are highly specialized.
