Heavy War Drone

The war drone is a boss type flyer based on the vanilla heavy drones.

It is found mostly on certain cyber sphere mini biomes and is guaranteed to spawn in a certain area of the Precursor Ruins mission through a wired lever.

It is a modular part based enemy therefore it will be drastically different every time you encounter it, sometimes being a pushover and at other times destroying you violently.

It is completely immune to poison damage, additionally, it takes no critical extra damage, and recuperates from knockback 80% faster. It also damages the player for 30 base (impact, physical) damage on contact.

Drops
The heavy war drone pulls from the furobotTreasure, ffmetallicbossChest and fuessence pools. Additionally it has a 10% chance to drop either static cells, spare parts, or laser diodes. It also drops a targeting chip 100% of the time.

This means that in addition to the base drops, it may also drop some amount of essence, robot loot, and the specialized loot of metallic bosses, meaning it might drop augments, pet collars, basic FU resources, random weapon loot, FU stimpacks, and most importantly, it can drop an entire variety of precursor loot.

It might be worth it to farm this boss repeatedly, as he is easy to summon, as you need only speedrun the precursor ruins dungeon till the wired switch arena part, and his drops are really good*.

* note that if you hunt it with a bow, it will simply drop space drone loot, so one is advised not to use one.

Because the actual list is far too big to describe here, you can acess them here:

ffmetallicbossChest ; artifactloot ; furobotTreasure

Fighting
Because of the nature of this boss, there is no clear way to fight him, as the variation of attacks differ from each different war drone. For example, one may have a homing assault rifle type attack and an explosive plasma shot type attack, while other may have a wall piercing railgun and a force cage type denial attack.

There are 12 different variations (6 for each arm) of weapons for its attacks, therefore the combinations that result from those may drastically change the effective means of combat against this boss. The player simply has to learn how to act against them on the heat of the moment.

The only generally good strategy is to keep on the move and avoid running into the drone, as 30 physical base damage is a very serious amount of damage. It is also recommended to bring electric weapons to this fight as they deal bonus damage, and perhaps cosmic/shadow weapons, as they provide good debuffs and are not resisted by this boss.