Gadgets people pick wrong
A gadget is not an upgrade. It is a limited answer to a specific way you keep losing, and most bad picks answer a question the player was never being asked.
The wrong way to choose a gadget is to read both descriptions and take whichever one sounds larger. The right way is to work out how you actually lose matches on that brawler and check which of the two addresses it. Those methods disagree more often than not, because the impressive gadget usually makes a good position better, and the matches you lose are the ones where your position was already bad before you pressed anything.
It helps to remember what a gadget is. A small number of uses across an entire match, with a cooldown between them, and no way to earn more once the match has started. That makes frequency part of the value rather than a footnote to it. A gadget that rescues you from a situation occurring once a match is worth more than one that adds damage to a fight you were winning anyway, and worth considerably less than one you can press four times because the situation it answers keeps arriving.
Four ways the pick goes wrong
- Choosing the win-more option. Extra damage in a fight you were already winning converts a win into a faster win. A gadget that turns your most common death into a survival changes the scoreboard instead of the replay.
- Ignoring how often it fires. A narrow trigger can be devastating and still sit unused for a whole match, which makes it an empty slot in every fight it never appears in.
- Copying a loadout without the rest of it. Gadgets are chosen alongside a star power and gears, and a good number of them stop making sense on their own. Take the reasoning rather than the icon.
- Picking without a mode in mind. The same two options swap places between a mode where you hold a patch of ground and one where you have to break through a line, and there is no rule saying the choice has to stay fixed across both.
The pattern, in four brawlers
Shelly is the clearest case in the game. Fast Forward is a dash. Clay Pigeons tightens her next shot into something that reaches. If your Shelly matches end with you caught in the open at a range where you cannot answer, the dash is the answer and the extra reach is a consolation prize you collect while dying. If they end with you unable to charge a Super at all against a team that never comes close, it is the other way round. The gadget follows the failure, and the failure is different for different players on the same brawler.
ShellyBoth gadgets, both star powers and the recommended loadouts, with the reasoning attached to each.
Jessie splits along the same line. Spark Plug makes the ground around the turret slow and miserable to stand on. Recoil Spring shoves whatever walked up to it back out again. One of those holds a zone and the other saves a turret from being deleted at point-blank range by the first assassin who arrives. Which you want is a question about how your turrets keep dying, and if you have never noticed how your turrets keep dying then you are not choosing between them, you are guessing.
Poco introduces a third axis, which is what the team needs rather than what you need. Tuning Fork is healing you control the timing of. Protective Tunes is a short window in which the people around you shrug off the stuns and slows that would otherwise pin them in place. The first is better when your team loses fights slowly and gets ground down. The second is better when it loses them instantly to one crowd-control Super. Same brawler, same slot, opposite reads of the same match.
Colt makes the frequency argument on his own. Speedloader answers a situation Colt is in constantly: empty, mid-duel, out of position, with a reload between him and living. Silver Bullet answers a situation he can only sometimes arrange, where a target is sitting behind a wall he otherwise cannot touch. Both are good gadgets. Only one of them is reliably available to be good, and that difference matters more than the size of either effect.
ColtThe full ability list, plus the loadouts we recommend and the situations each one is for.
Pick the gadget that fixes the death you keep having, not the one that decorates the fight you keep winning.
One honest caveat, because it constrains what anybody can tell you about gadgets, this piece included. A match result says who played and how it ended. It says nothing about what anyone had equipped while they played. So a table ranking gadgets against each other by win rate is not a measurement of gadgets, however precise the decimals look, and every gadget recommendation in existence is an argument rather than a finding.
Which sets the test for all of them, this one included: does it come with a reason you can check against your own matches. "This one is stronger" is not a reason. "This one answers the way this brawler dies on open maps" is, and if your matches do not look like that, the recommendation is not for you and you should ignore it.
Written by Brawlest. Last checked against the live game 20 Jul 2026; revised 20 Jul 2026.