Beam Drone 1 just total crap?

[spacecadet13]

I'm pretty sure Engi C only has that beam drone in order to take down Zoltan shields. Otherwise, it's rarely worth using alongside the starting weapons, in my opinion.

You must be using a different Engi C than me! Against something with a shield its doing a maximum of 1 damage per volley without the beam drone deployed, and that's assuming both shots hit. Even the early sectors, dealing damage at that rate is just going to give you hefty repair bills - at best. An early, extra weapon makes all the difference (as with every ship!), but hacking is a great alternative, well worth while with the beam drone (and the Defence Scrambler Augment

And in general, I like the beam drone over the combat drone, which misses too often to reliably take down a shield bubble.

[Twinge]

That doesn't work anymore with AE. When you depower a drone and power it back up, it picks a new place and goes to it no matter what it was doing before you powered it down.

You can do it similarly to how you did it before AE - the timing is just different now. Try depowering it about 1 full second before you would've in the past; it'll drift roughly into position after you power it down, and then fire right when you power it back up.


Fun facts about the advanced drones while we're here: Beam II does about 30% more DPS than Beam I; Combat II does about 70% more DPS than Combat I.