Equipment Drone

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The **Equipment Drone** is a drone. Unlike most drones that cost gold to repair, an Equipment Drone is repaired by having the player give it the equipment they currently hold. The drone automatically activates the provided equipment when it sees an enemy, if its equipment is off cooldown.

Additionally, the Equipment Drone spawns with hidden items that reduce its equipment cooldown to 20.589% of the normal time, allowing it to activate its equipment almost five times as frequently as a player could.

## Skills & Behaviors

The Equipment Drone has no skills and its behaviors are exactly the same as those of the   Gunner Drone, except that when the Gunner Drone uses its primary, the Equipment Drone activates its equipment.

## Notes

* The player cannot exchange the equipped item once it has been used to activate the drone.
* If the drone is destroyed, the equipment it was carrying will be lost. Repairing the drone requires a new equipment item.
* The Equipment Drone can carry and activate any equipment, but has no other items or abilities (aside from its cooldown reduction). Thus, giving it items like , , a consumed , , , or  will have little effect. The Equipment Drone also has no gold, so it cannot use .
	+ If the player has , the Equipment Drone gains its own weapons. This can result in some previously-useless equipment becoming usable for it.

## Tips

* Equipment that does not require timing or much thought to use are typically better to use with the Equipment Drone. Examples include the , , ,  and .
	+ Remember that the Equipment Drone does *not* benefit from the player's items, so giving up a damaging piece of equipment may be a loss depending on how many items the player has.
	+ Similarly, if the player has many cooldown-reducing items (, , or ), it is likely not worth giving up their equipment.
* The Equipment Drone is a good candidate for the , since the drone uses the ambient run level (not the player's level) and the Tincture deals damage based on the holder's maximum health. The drone is always continually leveling up and increasing its health at the same rate as enemies, meaning it will always deal a respectable amount of damage to monsters even as the run progresses. This strategy does have drawbacks, unsurprisingly:
	+ Since the drone is always leveling up and dealing more damage with the Tincture, it will also hurt the player much more, as monster level surpasses player level very rapidly.
	+ The drone will *constantly* be on fire when enemies are nearby (since the Tincture lasts 12 seconds, but the cooldown will be reduced to about 9 seconds), meaning that it will always be at risk of hurting the player. It will also be at extremely low health, since although the Helfire Tincture cannot kill the holder, the drone has no good way to heal and so it will likely be vulnerable to dying to any amount of external damage.
* Another similarly risky but rewarding strategy is giving the Equipment Drone the , which will have its cooldown reduced so much that there will only be 8 seconds of downtime between activations. The caveat about the drone's damage continually increasing applies to this strategy as well, making the drone liable to severely hurt or even kill the player late in a run.
* The Equipment Drone is a very good distraction for a mass of enemies if there are extra equipment that the player does not wish to take. Simply putting a piece of equipment on it, no matter how helpful (or unhelpful), will allow it to draw enemies' attention.
* Elite equipment has varying levels of utility when given to the Equipment Drone. While some provide immediate value like , , or , others require  to be put to good use as the provided chain gun and missile attacks will apply the equipment's on-hit effects.

## Version History

PC Patch v1.0.1.1 (Build ID No.5440050)
* Gameplay Changes
	+ Now recharges equipment much faster, approximately 5x as often. We don’t expect Equipment Drones to suddenly become super strong, but there may be a few cases where it is now worthwhile.
* Bug Fixes
	+ Fix  not working on Equipment Drones

PC Early Access Patch (Build ID No.4233443)
* Bug Fixes
	+ Fix Equipment Drone not firing their equipment

Early Access Scorched Acres Content Update
* Major Content and Changes
	+ Added New Drone: Equipment Drone