Ship Drones

New items, ship drones that each serve a unique purpose. These would be unmanned boats smaller than our boats. I'm thinking one slot items with say a 15 second cooldown. Drone duration increases with item level and cooldown starts when the drone expires.
Red slot drone - stays in the vicinity of your ship and fires at unfriends dealing damage.
Blue slot drone - absorbes incoming damage (less damage threshold than a standard shield but can be redeployed after cooldown)
Yellow slot drone - "scout" drives into enemy ranks (similar to autopilot I suppose) and marks unfriends for your allies.
Green slot drone - follows the lowest health ally and heals them (comparable to duct tape heal rate)

 

Good idea

 

Pretty dope ideas, honestly. I'd also say make just a "drone" slot and let any ship use any drone.

 

True, that would be cool. I originally thought of using drones to replace an item for balancing purposes but if they use the right stats it could work.

 

Yeah, they'd want to try to balance carefully lest one type of drone be undeniably better and just leading to general staleness.

 

I thought that might happen too. I can see shield drone being used way more than scout drone. Maybe each ship class could have a specific drone? But that would also become stale over time. Having an entirely new class for this item might be good in the sense it wouldn't water down the already frustrating RNG pool for existing items. If each ship had a few interchangeable unique drones to choose from it could keep things fresh.

 

I'd rather have these be a blue slot item, having the drones passively follow you around. Defenders could be deployers because they have a lot of blue slots. A shooter could have a mini support, firing while he's reloading or giving him light healing (tbh the healing unit could replace bandages and it makes more sense). Just 2 drone types is good enough: a light healing drone that heals you (or nearby friends below 50% hp) every 5 seconds and a light offensive drone that uses either a standard cannon or a gatling gun.

If they can be shot down, they should have a redeployment period. They should not replace bandages in this case and should actually be a little stronger due to being vulnerable.