Many of us are familiar with this situation: you're working a high-level Order of Souls bounty (or an Athena voyage), the skeleton wave spawns beyond the reach of your ship cannons, and they're all using guns (or worse- all metal). The game slows to a crawl as you and your crew run to the site, expend all your ammo/bananas to kill a few, only to die and wait to respawn. Over and over.
It's kinda frustrating.
Rare has made some improvements: pistol skeletons aren't as obnoxiously deadly as they used to be, and gunpowder skeletons can be lured into a crowd and detonated by wily pirates. Even so, the high health of the skeletons (they have more health than the player during high level voyages!) and the limited ammo available to the player make these activities a slog even if you have a full crew.
What if skeletons could drop items usable by the player?
If you kill a skeleton while it's trying to eat a banana, let the player pick up the dropped banana (same as the bananas found on shore and in shipwrecks). If a skeleton with a gun dies, let the player refill their ammo from the fallen gun. To reduce the load on the server, Rare could make dropped items vanish after about 5 seconds (better act fast, or you'll miss it). This change would allow players to engage skeletons for longer, and also introduce more "make or break" moments.
For example: let's say you're out of bananas and low health. Do you retreat to get more, or do you rush the skeleton with a banana in its hand, even though its buddy might kill you before you can finish it off? Maybe you're out of ammo and being chased by a skelebomber- do you lure it into a group and set it off with your sword (killing you along with your foes), or do you avoid it long enough to refill your ammo from a downed pistol, giving you the means to set it off at a distance?
There are other ideas that would make skeletons more manageable (such as having them run out of ammo and swap to melee, or making them take friendly fire), but I think that having them drop items would be more interesting for players, and also easier for Rare to add (meaning we could see it added as part of a regular weekly update rather than having to wait for a big event).
What does the community think?
Edit: I'm not the only one who has posted this idea to the forum.
