Hivelord is the straight continuation of Shepherd: eight drones that follow your cursor, launched from four barrels around the hull. It's for players who already like drones and want to keep playing them the same way.
| Tier | 4 |
| Unlock level | 45 |
| Upgrades from | Shepherd |
| Barrels | 4 drone launchers at 0°, 90°, 180° and 270°; no guns |
| Drones | up to 8 |
| Respawn (0 points) | one drone every 0.9 s until you have 8 |
| Drone stats (0 points) | 25 HP, 8 contact damage, 220 px/s, penetration 1, size 11 |
| Drone hit rate | each drone can land a hit once every 0.3 s |
| Auto-target range | 400 px from each drone, when you're not holding fire |
| Stat labels | Drone Speed / Drone Penetration / Drone Damage replace the bullet stats |
| Health / movement | ×1.047 / ×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.
You don't shoot. You keep up to eight drones and steer them. Hold fire and every drone flies to your cursor. Let go and each drone hunts the nearest target within 400 px of itself, which includes shapes, and with nothing in range it orbits you at 80 px. Right-click pushes the whole swarm away from your cursor at one and a half times drone speed, which is how you throw a screen out in front of you. V (passive mode) parks them in orbit and stops all hunting.
Lost drones come back one at a time, every 0.9 seconds at 0 Reload, cycling through your four launchers. A full swarm is eight drones at 8 damage each, and every drone can hit the same target once every 0.3 seconds. That's the ceiling of the class: eight small hits, repeating, anywhere on your screen.
The thing that decides a Hivelord fight is drone survival. Each time a drone hits a tank it loses penetration equal to the target's body damage divided by 12. A tank with base body damage costs a drone about 1.7 penetration per hit, so at 0 Drone Penetration a drone dies on its first hit. Bullets deal double damage to drones on top of that. A swarm that isn't built to survive melts on contact.
Hivelord beats slow, single-target guns: Horizon, Nightveil, Cataclysm and the missile classes can't kill eight drones coming from different angles fast enough. It controls space well in team modes, since the swarm can guard a lane while you stay out of sight. It farms passively when you let go, because drones auto-target shapes.
It loses to volume. Fanblade, Octant, Deluge and Cascade put out enough bullets to erase drones faster than you replace them. Rammers are brutal: Caltrop has 64 body damage at 0 points, which costs a drone over 5 penetration per hit. Trap fields from Trisnare and Megasnare block drones physically and damage them. And your own body is exposed whenever the swarm is away.
A 33-point build: Drone Damage 7, Drone Penetration 7, Drone Speed 5, Reload 4, Max Health 5, Movement Speed 5.
Shepherd has six endings. Honest take on Hivelord first: it keeps Shepherd's 8 drones with the same drone stats, so your drones don't get stronger at 45. What it changes is upkeep: four launchers, 4.7% more health, and drones that come back twice as fast as Shepherd's, every 0.9 seconds instead of 1.8. It's the right pick if you're happy with Shepherd and want a swarm that recovers from losses quickly.
The others change the class. Steward keeps 8 drones and adds stealth and speed, at a much slower respawn. Revenant builds its swarm from squares, with far more drones possible. Foundry fields four mini tanks that shoot. Dreadnought makes a constant stream of short-lived drones. Snarelord trades most of the swarm for traps. If you want more power, Revenant or Dreadnought. If you want safety, Steward.