Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 - How to Make the Best Solo Ops Team

Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 features a brand new Solo Ops mode that allows you to build a team of AI companions to defend a capture point. This guide offers suggestions for building the best plant or zombie team for Solo Ops to help you successfully survive each wave.

Garden Ops was the main single player feature of the first Garden Warfare game. Though this mode was wildly popular, it only allowed players to play and defend as the plant team. Due to popular demand, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 now features a Graveyard Ops mode that allows players to defend as a zombie. These two complementary game types are considered the Ops modes, and can be played solo or with friends.

In Solo Ops, you can recruit up to three additional AI companions to help defend against the enemy waves. Playing alone is still an option, and you can invite one or two companions rather than three. As you recruit more AI helpers, the enemies become a bit stronger to increase the challenge and enhance the difficulty.

Solo Ops also offers the unique ability to hot swap between the AI characters, allowing you to use any character you’ve recruited for your team. When you take control of a character, they will gain coins and XP for as long as you are using them. This means you can gradually level up four different characters in a single Solo Ops match, as long as you hot swap and distribute play time between each one.

While you may be tempted to just pick some random characters for your team, some character classes and team compositions are more beneficial than others. We’ve put together several tips that can help you build the best Solo Ops team, whether you’re defending as a plant or a zombie.

Always Have a Healer

In Solo Ops, your ability to sustain each enemy wave is greatly dependent on your ability to heal. Whether it’s a medic character or a consumable, you should always have a means for healing beyond the normal health regeneration. We suggest you recruit at least one medic character for your team, as they can heal you quickly and allow you to get back into the fight.

The medic character classes for the plant and zombie teams are the Sunflower and Scientist classes, respectively. If you are on the plant team, the Vampire Flower and Stuffy Sunflower are great options, as both of these characters can offer healing for themselves as well as their teammates. Along with the Metal Petal, these sunflower variants are capable of great personal sustain while still effectively playing their supportive role. Any sunflower will work, but try to pick from the ones we mentioned if you have them unlocked.

The Scientists on the zombie team are a bit different, as they do not normally come equipped with both a heal station and a heal beam, like how the Sunflowers do. You should still have at least one Scientist on your team to provide healing for the other three teammates. However, you may consider recruiting two Scientists that can heal one another with heal beams, or simply recruit one Scientist and replace their heal beam with the heal station. All teammates can heal on the heal station, so this may be the best option.

Speaking of heal stations, don’t forget that you can place your healing consumables somewhere near the capture point if your medic is slacking with the heals. There are heal flowers and heal stations available as stationary consumables, provided you have some in your inventory.

Prioritize Health and Sustain

As you progress through each wave in Garden or Graveyard Ops, the enemies increasingly become more challenging. You will need characters that not only can deal a significant amount of damage, but can also hold their own while taking damage. An effective Solo Ops team should have at least one character that has higher health who can mitigate damage long enough to receive healing from a medic or consumable without getting knocked out. This is especially true if you have more than one medic on your team, as medics only have 100 health.

While defending as a plant, consider equipping at least one Chomper on your team. AI Chompers can do surprisingly well on their own when you are in control of another character. Plus, at 150 health, Chompers can take a decent amount of damage compared to other plant characters.

However, the Citron is arguably the best plant to have on your team in terms of damage output, sustain, and damage mitigation. Citron has a base stat of 200 health, plus his Peel Shield can mitigate plenty of damage while still allowing Citron to fire his weapon. Citron is a great choice if you want a balanced character for the front lines.

For the zombie team, the All Star and Super Brains classes both offer high health as well as high damage output. They also have a combination of long and short range attacks. These characters provide the added muscle you need to fend off the enemy hordes while being able to handle most damage done to them.

You may be tempted to recruit the Imp for the added benefit of the Z-Mech, but this is only useful if you plan to control the Imp and call in the Z-Mech yourself. Otherwise, you may end up with little more than a low health Imp scrambling across the combat zone.

Slow Enemies with Traps

In Solo Ops, your primary objective is to protect the garden or tombstone from being destroyed by incoming enemies. Depending on your difficulty setting, having a perfect wave each round becomes nearly impossible during the later waves, as enemies will eventually break through your front line and begin attacking your base. One way to fend off enemies is by using a character that can place traps near or around the base.

As a plant, consider recruiting either the Cactus or Chomper. Both of these characters have the ability to place traps on the ground. Well placed Potato Mines can detonate upon any zombies that set foot near the garden, while Spikeweeds can slow individual zombies long enough for you to secure a vanquish.

The zombie team has somewhat different traps compared to the plants. As far as damage-dealing traps go, the Scientist can place several Sticky Balls around the base that will detonate and damage any nearby plant. The Engineer has an alternate ability called Proximity Sonic Mines, which are small sonic horns that don’t do damage, but can significantly slow down enemy plants. Keep in mind that you must change the Engineer’s Sonic Grenade to this alternate ability in order to place these traps.