Hello Sonatians! There have been many rumors and whispers amongst the playerbase that Drones, and by extension Engineers, would see some sort of adjustment sooner or later. I am here to confirm that Drones and Engineers are definitely being rethought and redesigned in a variety of ways. The first step towards these changes are now available on the Test Server. (You can select the Test Server from the drop down menu within the Beta Client.) It is apparent that there are many drones that are powerful and sought after by the playerbase. This is good, and we don’t want to make these drones useless. Even so, we have to acknowledge that it isn’t good for the overall health of the game to have certain drones far and away outperform other drones. As such, these changes will affect both under performing drones and over performing drones. The overarching plan is to make drones that are not very useful, even more useful. We spent many hours trying to get the math just right so that there is still a strong sense of progression and differentiation between Engineers, but we need your feedback to make sure we make the best decisions possible. 
As such, here are the changes you can expect to see on the test server:
- Drones now have a DPS tag at the top of their tooltip. This shows the DPS you can expect the drone to do with the first weapon in the drone list, prior to any external bonuses (Such as Drone Operations, Engineer class skills, auras, drone controllers, Imperial Seal skills, etc.) This damage is scaled up or down for each weapon, depending on the difference in DPS between each subsequent weapon and the first weapon. Generally, this means that the first weapon will be doing the most damage.
Drones have had all Overloaders, Shield Chargers, and Augmenters removed from their inventory. These items helped to give drones a lot of their power previously, but as a result it made figuring out just how powerful a particular drone was an incredibly mystifying experience. We want to remove this confusion going forward, so most drones will simply have a Shield, Energy, Weapon and Radar while a few exceptions may have things like Super Items, Capacitors, and Diffusers.As a result of the previous change, many drones have had a variety of stats such as Electricity, Shield Bank, Energy Bank, Range, Tracking, Resistances, etc reduced. Things like Electricity and Energy bank are mitigated by the fact that many of the weapons on drones will not consume vast amounts of electricity from multiple Rate of Fire augmenters. The reduction in other stats such as Range and Tracking was intentional, as going forward Drones will have relatively smaller ranges. We intend to spend a good deal of time finding the most optimal final numbers, so please share your thoughts on this.- The above points are no longer true as of December 2nd, 2018. Those changes have been pulled back as a result of player Feedback. There will still be some drones that will not have the same level of Defensive and Utility stats due to us fixing a bug that effected specific drones.
- The highest end of healing drones had their healing output reduced (Twisted Drones/Samgrahaka Bhisajvar’s). Samgrahaka Bhisajvar’s also had their percentage healing aura removed. We understand that, at the moment, people heavily rely on Engineers to provide squad healing. We do not want to make the game unplayable for those who do this, however we do realize that it is neccessary to cut back on the level of healing power Engineers have access to in relation to a Shield Monkey. Expect more changes to Healing and Healing Drones over time. Something to keep in mind is that the adjustment to Shield Regeneration on all shields will increase the amount of self regeneration that drones have. This should help to reduce the negative of drones doing less healing. It will also make Defense Drone Operations a bit more of an interesting choice!
- Transference Facilitator Tractors (as of December 6th, 2018) have massively increased Transference Vulnerability values (from 66% to 100%). This means that any target an Engineer locks onto with this beam will receive substantially more healing. This should minimize the nerf to Engineer’s single target healing while reducing their ability to heal everything around them automatically. This also, interestingly, has the benefit of making a Shield Monkey/Engineer composition more effective than Engineer/Engineer or Shield Monkey/Shield Monkey.
- Last but not least, the Mad Kidd/Mad Kidd+/Hybrid Kidd Drone have had the tracking on their thorax’s reduced, the delay within which their thorax’s are able to do damage increased, and are now immobile (as of December 6th, 2018). These drones had Thorax weapons, which are supposed to be hard to use to justify their high DPE and DPS, that were not hard to use. They may see further changes going forward.
If you have any questions please post in this topic on the forums, and I will do my best to respond to them.