I take out most FNIX big guys I come across, but they almost never drop anything weapon related.
I always disable their weapons first when I attack them. Could that lower the chance of them dropping weapons as well? I’m wondering because when you destroy fuel tanks, sensors or comm arrays on smaller machines, you can’t loot those components from the wreck. Could the same apply to weapons in some way? I mean, could the drop rate of weapons be higher if you take out the enemy without disabling his guns?
I’m not actually sure. I do know that the droprate of parts like Vision Modules and the like tend to lower if you hit them, but I’m not sure about weapons. You don’t aquire the Machine’s weapons usually, only the ones they seem to lug around for some reason. Harvesters make the most sense, they’re there to gather resources and useful stuff.
But it’s an interesting theory… Taking out a Tank without first disabling it’s weapons sounds really hard
Up until the recent patch, that’s actually how I fought them usually since dropping the weapons doesn’t seem (to me at least) to do much to their overall health pool. The trick is to (ab)use terrain to maintain cover and learn to shoot just barely around obstacles.
That said, I’ve never seen any significant difference in drop rate whether I destroy the weapons or not. I have, however, noticed better drop rates of everything (not just weapons) from harvesters if you don’t destroy the crates on the back before killing them (MLRS pods and tick pods are OK though), but that may just be confirmation bias speaking.
Before august update I counted how many tanks I had to destroy before I got a weapon drop. Approx every 10th tanks I destroyed dropped a weapon regardless of tier.
Now I’m on a new save and medium lvl and don’t take down a lot of tanks yet, so I don’t know if this applies to after august update. But something have changed, more prototype tanks up north, less enemies in certain missions and a lot more enemies in other missions then my first run through.
