Dreadnought launches a constant stream of small, fast, short-lived drones from both sides of its hull. It's reachable from two different parents, and it plays like neither of them.
| Tier | 4 |
| Unlock level | 45 |
| Upgrades from | Crossfire or Shepherd |
| Barrels | 4 drone launchers, two on each side (90° and 270°); no guns |
| Drone spawn | one drone from every launcher (4 at once) every 0.8 s at 0 Reload, no cap |
| Drone lifetime | 4 s, so about 20 drones alive at once at 0 Reload |
| Drone stats (0 points) | 12 HP, 5 contact damage, 320 px/s, penetration 1 |
| Drone size | 7.15 px (0.65 of a normal drone) |
| Control | half the swarm follows your cursor while you hold fire, the other half always hunts |
| Reload | shortens the gap between waves, so more drones are alive at once |
| Stat labels | Drone Speed / Drone Penetration / Drone Damage replace the bullet stats |
| Health / movement | ×0.963 / ×1 |
| Body damage | 20 (×1) |
Every number here is at 0 stat points, before the per-level health bonus and the per-level speed penalty that every tank gets. The automatic balancer can nudge a class's damage and health over time, so treat these as the roster's base values.
Every 0.8 seconds, each of your four launchers spits out a drone at the same moment. Each drone lives 4 seconds and then disappears, so the swarm refreshes constantly instead of building up and staying put like a Hivelord's. In steady state that's about 20 drones in the air. There is no cap to fill and no respawn wait after losses: dead drones simply stop existing and the next wave comes on schedule. Reload points shorten that schedule, and because every drone still lives 4 seconds, a shorter gap means a bigger standing swarm.
The control scheme is split down the middle. Drones in odd slots fly to your cursor while you hold fire (or have auto-fire on with E). Drones in even slots ignore the cursor completely and always hunt the nearest target within 400 px of themselves, then orbit you if there's nothing. So holding fire sends half your swarm where you point and leaves the other half free to defend and farm. Letting go puts the whole swarm on auto-hunt. Right-click repels the swarm away from your cursor at 1.5× speed, which you can use to throw it outward as a screen.
Your drones don't push each other apart the way other swarms do. They can stack on the same point, which makes a focused dive on one target very dense.
Each drone is fragile. It has 12 HP and bullets deal double damage to drones, so one bullet from a standard gun kills it outright. At 0 Drone Penetration a drone dies after one hit on a tank with base body damage, because every hit costs it the target's body damage divided by 12 in penetration. The class wins by volume: a dense wave arriving every 0.8 seconds overwhelms tanks that can't clear it fast enough, like snipers (Horizon, Nightveil) and slow single-shot classes (Cataclysm).
It loses to wide bullet coverage. Fanblade, Pentad, Octant and Deluge shred small drones faster than you make them. Rammers are awful for you: Caltrop has 64 body damage at 0 points, so every drone that touches it loses over 5 penetration per hit and dies instantly. Traps block drones physically and damage them, so a Megasnare or Trisnare field eats swarms.
Dreadnought shows Drone Speed, Drone Penetration and Drone Damage in place of the three bullet stats. A 33-point build: Drone Damage 7, Drone Penetration 7, Reload 6, Drone Speed 5, Max Health 4, Movement Speed 4.
From Crossfire, the alternative is Hexfire, which keeps you a six-barrel gun tank. Dreadnought is the stronger pick if you can manage a swarm and don't mind a partial build reset: your Reload points still count, but your Bullet Speed, Penetration and Damage points turn into Drone stats.
From Shepherd, you're choosing among six endings. Hivelord keeps a durable 8-drone swarm you control fully. Steward is the stealth version. Revenant builds drones from squares. Foundry fields four armed mini tanks. Snarelord mixes traps and two drones. Dreadnought is the aggressive one: the most drones in the air, the least durable, and the only one where half the swarm acts on its own. Take it if you like pressure and don't like babysitting.