What Stats/Effects the Drone is Capable of Using
By Aishea.
The drone has an hp bar. Anything that triggers when >50%, below 50%, or gives a bonus per 1% of missing health works just as you would expect. The only differences are that the drone cannot get hit by enemies (so blood mag comes in handy to reduce the drone’s health, activate bonuses) and the drone can’t die (so being reduced to 33% hp or even 1% is not a problem whatsoever.
The drone also heals just as the character would, assuming it’s not at full health, any regen stats, healing bonus, or heal on kill will take place.
About the other stats, Collection range on drone only matters if you have vacuum attachment ability activated (allows drone pick up xp and bring it to you). Credit drop chance absolutely still applies, since the enemies are dying around you and the drone both. Credit bonus (extra amount of credits after you pick them up) doesn’t apply from drone since that activates on picking it up and the drone doesn’t ever pickup credits.
So the devs had a devlog on this back in the demo and their goal is to eventually make as many stats as possible viable picks for the drone, even if some are better than others.
For each stat, I like to think about whether the drone is able to create the situation where this stat would apply to the calculation:
- Resource drop chance? Yes.
- Resource bonus, no. Same reasoning as credit bonus, in the previous post.
- Armor? No, (unless you have the armor sharing ability activated.) because the drone isn’t getting hit.
- Does the drone still have its armor stat? Yes. Because there are abilities that takes the armor stat and converts it to MaxHP plus another ability that converts MaxHP to additional damage, so drone keeps track of all this in order to calculate its damage.
- Vision range? Kinda. It affects what the drone can shoot at (like drone targeting ‘farthest’) but it won’t give you vision (unless you take the scout vision range ability and then it does).
- Airdrop capacity? No, because the drone isn’t the one picking up the drop pod.
If you have any other specific stat questions, lemme know.
And if any of these feel like they should work and they don’t, we should make bug reports, because from the devlog it was clear to me that they’re supposed to work.