No gun at all. Shepherd commands up to eight drones that follow your cursor, hunt on their own, or guard you. It's the most different class at tier 3 and it rewards learning it properly.
At 0 stat points. On a drone class the three bullet stats are relabelled Drone Speed, Drone Penetration and Drone Damage, and they drive the drones instead.
| Tier | 3 |
| Unlock level | 30 (12,205 score) |
| Upgrades from | Vantage |
| Upgrades into | Level 45: Hivelord, Steward, Revenant, Dreadnought, Foundry, Snarelord |
| Barrels | 2, on the left and right sides. They spawn drones and never fire bullets |
| Drones | Up to 8 at a time |
| Drone spawn rate | One every 1.80 s (a full swarm from empty in about 12.6 s) |
| Drone speed | 220 px/s (+20 per Drone Speed point) |
| Drone damage | 8 per hit, at most one hit every 0.3 s (+3 per Drone Damage point) |
| Drone penetration | 1 (2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 at 1 to 7 points) |
| Drone health | 25. Bullets deal double damage to drones |
| Drone behaviour | Hold fire: fly to the cursor. Alt-fire (right mouse): flee from the cursor at 1.5× speed. Neither: attack anything within 400 px of the drone, otherwise orbit you at 80 px |
| Recoil | None (nothing is fired) |
| View | 1.125× view multiplier |
| Body | All body multipliers 1.0. Top speed 168 px/s at level 30, 108 max HP at level 30 |
Your drones are your gun. Hold fire and every drone flies to your cursor. Let go and they do their own thing: any drone with a target within 400 px of it goes and attacks it, and the rest come home and circle you at 80 px. Hold right mouse (alt-fire) and they scatter away from your cursor at one and a half times their normal speed. Press V for passive mode and they ignore everything and just orbit you.
At 220 px/s your drones are faster than a level-30 tank with no Movement Speed points (168 px/s), so you can hit things that could run from a gun. Your cursor is effectively your range, and it reaches as far as you can see, and Shepherd sees 12.5% further than a normal tank.
The number that decides whether your drones do anything is Drone Penetration. When a drone hits a tank it loses penetration equal to the tank's body damage divided by 12, and it dies when penetration runs out. A tank with no Body Damage points has 20 body damage, so each hit costs a drone about 1.67 penetration. At 0 points your drones have 1. Each drone gets exactly one hit on a tank and then dies. Eight drones, eight hits of 8, then twelve seconds of rebuilding. That's why a fresh Shepherd feels so weak against players.
Points fix it fast. With 2 points in Drone Penetration each drone survives three hits, and with 4 points it survives five. Bullets are a separate problem. They hit drones for double damage and a drone has 25 health, so a Recruit-strength bullet kills one in two hits.
Drones respawn one at a time from alternating sides. Reload doesn't do anything to bullets on this class, because there aren't any. It speeds up drone respawns instead: each point cuts the gap between drones by about 9%.
Shepherd beats slow gun classes that can't hit eight moving targets at once. Quadrant, Snare and Sledge all struggle, because you hit them from angles they aren't facing. It's strong against snipers at mid range, since drones don't care about bullet range, and it's a very good farmer once it has penetration.
It loses to anything that shreds drones. Volley, Trident and Rattler-line guns spray enough bullets to kill drones as fast as you make them. It loses to players with Body Damage points, because every drone that touches them burns more penetration. And your own body is just a normal tank with no gun, so if something reaches you, your only defence is the swarm.
If you came from Vantage with bullet points spent, those points now count as drone points. Nothing's lost.
Shepherd has six level-45 options, the most in the game. They split into a few directions.