What?! What are you upgrading first (outside of knockback) to get those kinds of results?
I feel like Leon is really only a dominating factor near the end of the game (after hes been able to afford his damage boosting upgrades), until that point I find that hes actually quite limited.
In terms of Froggy's splash, yeah that thing is silly. Double damage if you hit with the attack and the shockwave skill. Really just a super multipurpose skill. I may have to try your full cooldown (both skills?) build though. Sounds neat.
Without looking at the game the main key to pulling off that kind of shit with Voltar early on (at least for me) is just at least unlocking the Healbot and Drones, then getting the perk that gives you more Solar for healing and probably most importantly the knockback effect on healing. What people may not realize is you don't have to actually be healing something for the knockback wave to still go out. I'm not sure if it's time-based or # of shot based (I'm assuming it's timed) but if I'm holding down the heal button the knockback comes out every 3rd shot. So in an ideal scenario if I can get on a turret early on with just two droids even with the base level heal and healbot I can usually take it out; the base level healbot and heal will allow me to keep my droids fully healed because the knockback coming out that frequently is blowing enemy droids coming out to protect the turret away. That additional damage they're no longer doing to your droids allows you to keep them healthy enough to keep them going, then by that point you probably have two more droids theres and your drones are also helping somewhat as well to do minimal damage (since it's only the base unlock) but also to provide a distraction for the turret to shoot at. Then in theory you've got at least 4 drones with a super droid on the way and you can start to work towards the second turret, and at that point usually the enemy players will come for you but given the situation your allies will usually come as well and you can just brute force it. Worse case if you have to bail or even die by that point I've usually accumulated 1200+ Solar so you can go to town on upgrades.
Obviously that's much easier to do if your teammates are either with you, or keeping the other human players busy so it's not something I can pull off every single time but I can do it pretty often, and as has been mentioned multiple times the momentum in this game is a big deal, so being able to take out a turret in one or even two goes very early on is huge. But yeah short version is knockback is totally clutch, and like I mentioned in my post is actually good enough to let me get away from Leons most of the time who is your only real nemesis. Using knockback didn't even occur to me until someone was doing it to me in a couple of games and I couldn't even figure out what they were doing at first.
I saw one lonestar actually using the bull to push people into opposing turrents which was quite funny, what isn't funny is the big robot's jacked up self destruct. Oh my it hurts. Still love the brain the most.
I do that all the time with Lonestar, just drop down/come up behind a group of people jacking our turret and push them into it, half the time if you have droids out at the turret as well it will trap them between the droids and the turret and you can often times wipe their team there, especially if you have slowdown on the bull or any allies nearby.
I mainly just play lonestar, I usually lose whenever I don't have a bull constantly pushing back everyone/toward my turrets because my team is butt fucking retarded.
Fuck that god damn monkey and the fucking healer. This one monkey sat above our turret and just dropped bombs the whole fucking time. We couldn't hit him because he would just retreat up and kill worms for health. The healer can keep the entire team alive single handily and get filthy rich from it, sometimes I wonder if there's even a point to my bull if my team can't deal any damn damage so I should just jumbo 3 dynamite them just for a chance of survival. And fuck that lizard too, I swear I can NEVER hit one because he just disappears every 5 seconds.
FYI you can get an ability for the bull that makes it explode and do damage when it runs out, I haven't messed with enough to get a feel for how damaging/worthwhile that is though.
Also just because I don't think I saw it mentioned, when you Prestige you do have to re-earn all ability unlocks, but you DO keep all the characters themselves unlocked, thought that might be worth mentioning.