When you start up Dead Island 2, you’ll quickly find yourself prompted to choose between six potential protagonists, and this choice is binding… unless you’re willing to start over, anyways. These characters have varying Attributes and Innate Skills, the former of which aren’t really explained until after you’ve made your selection. This page will discuss what the seven Attributes do and help you make an informed decision.

What Do the Character Attributes Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Each character have seven Attributes in Dead Island 2 - Toughness, Stamina, Health Recovery, Critical Damage, Agility, Peak Health and Resilience, and if you can tell me what the in-game difference between Toughness and Resilience are at the character selection screen, you’re a more intuitive gamer than we are. Others, like Peak Health, are more obvious, but for the sake of completionism we’ll explain what all these mean.

What Does Toughness Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Toughness determines the total physical damage you take from zombie attacks. The tougher you are, the less physical damage you’ll take.

Toughness determines the damage you sustain, and along with Peak Health and Resilience, it ultimately reflects how durable a character is. Ryan has the most Toughness and Amy has the least. It should also be noted that Amy has the second lowest Peak Health, too, making her especially squishy.

What Does Stamina Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Stamina determines how many heavy attacks and special moves you can perform in quick succession in combat before needing to catch your breath.

Charging up heavy attacks and using special moves like Drop Kick and Ground Pound consumes Stamina, which will be indicated by a white bar that appears when your Stamina isn’t maxed out. Fortunately dodging and sprinting do not consume Stamina, making Stamina almost exclusively an offensive consideration. Characters with high Stamina, like Dani, will have somewhat more utility in combat than characters with low Stamina, like… well, every other character besides Jacob. Stamina regenerates when not being used, and overall, we didn’t find Stamina to be a terribly important attribute - your mileage may vary.

What Does Health Recovery Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Health Recovery determines how quickly your health recovers – both when critically hurt and for normal health regeneration.

You recover Health in Dead Island 2. Passively. Just by standing there! You don’t even need to be in a safe location. Everybody gets it! Granted, this health regeneration is fairly minor, and the more you dawdle about, the more likely it is that a zombie will crawl out of a vent or from under a vehicle or some other murky location. Still, there are plenty of opportunities to catch your breath and wait for your Health to restore, if you have the patience. Some characters will be waiting longer than others - Bruno, Carla, Ryan and Amy all have decent Health Recovery, while Jacob and Bruno have less. The difference isn’t drastic, none of the characters can really use this as a source of life-saving healing in a pinch, nor is anybody’s regeneration so prohibitively slow that they’re disincentivized from taking a break to freely recover health.

What Does Critical Damage Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Critical Damage determines the total damage you do when performing a critical hit.

The higher a character’s Critical Damage, the more damage they’ll deal with critical hits. Critical hits aren’t uncommon - in the early game, most headshots will inflict critical damage, but enemy weakpoints may vary. It’s not a bad little damage boost, all things considered… if you’ve got the aim for it. Bruno deals the most Critical Damage, while Carla deals the least.

What Does Agility Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Agility determines your base movement speed.

Running past zombies is an underrated strategy. Let’s be honest, after a few dozen zombies, bashing in the heads of walkers starts to be a bit of a chore, especially if you just want to get on with a quest or avoid wear and tear on your weapons. Dani is the slowest character, while Amy is the fastest, but nobody is astonishingly fast or dodderingly slow.

What Does Peak Health Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Peak Health determines your maximum health.

Perhaps the most straightforward attribute in the game, Peak Health determines your maximum health. This isn’t just your starting health, however, it’s also the amount of health you gain every time you level up, meaning the gap between the healthiest character (Jacob) and the least healthy (Bruno) will only grow as time goes on.

What Does Resilience Do in Dead Island 2?¶

Resilience determines your protection against Fire, Shock and Caustic damage, and the harmful status effects Ignited, Electrified and Melting. The higher your resilience, the less such damage you’ll take and the slower you’ll build up these status effects.

Zombie teeth, claws and fists aren’t the only thing you need to be wary of - zombies and the survivors that tried to survive them left things in a poor state, and you’ll often find elemental hazards lying around. Live power lines, slicks of oil waiting for an igniting spark, vats of corrosive substances lying around… the higher your Resilience, the less damage you take from these sources, and the slower their relevant debuffs build up. Jacob is particularly susceptible to elemental damage and debuff buildup, while Carla is the most resistant.