I've always disliked Reef and Funnelweb for their ability to apply high perfectly accurate damage from long range while being relatively bulky units. One would expect artillery units to be fragile and snipeable. I also dislike how easy they are to disarm. Here's a solution that would perhaps make drone units like Reef and Funnelweb more exciting.
What if Funnel and Reef drones were single bomb rearmable bombers, not gunships? It would have several effects on gameplay:
1) The effective DPS of drones would depend on how close the mothership unit is willing to get to the target. This would incentivise moving those bulky Funnels or Reefs closer to the front line if they want to deal more damage. That on the other hand would make them more vulnerable -> increases counter play.
You could still sit back with them, but they would have pitiful DPS due to the travel time of your bomber-drones. To ensure that, rearm time would have to be relatively short compared to their average travel time.
2) Drones could be given high amounts of damage for their single bomb and controls to have them depart from the mothership all at the same time, making it hard for the enemy to kill them all before at least some get to their target. Essentially it would make Funnel/Reef harder to completely disarm which I find to be a very good thing. Disarming is boring and just slows the game unnecessarily down.
It would also let players make more exciting plays with drone units, like bursting down high value targets. Obviously their overall DPS should take quite a hit unless they are willing to be very close to their target.
It would be especially cool if drones could enter the Funnel/Reef to be invulnerable while rearming. Would further make drone units harder to disarm so they could be made more killable to compensate. This is a game of killing units, not disarming. The former is just much more fun, which is part of why I feel such a change would be good for the game.
Thoughts? I assume this idea has been brought up before, but I don't recall recent discussion on this topic and the search function is malfunctioning, hence this thread.
