Kudzu Drones are underpowered.

[SlothJustice]

The Kudzu UI is great and has so many features, but they're all almost impossible to use in a round collaboratively.

Not a single Kudzu round I've ever played resulted in kudzu actually spreading to or preventing the departure of the shuttle. I feel this is largely due to the weakness of the individual kudzu player units, those weaknesses include: 

• Bullets can get lodged in drones, causing passive regen to be outstripped by the damage and leaving drones in permanent crit. 
  
• Certain damage over time conditions persist through suicide and re-assimilation, somehow. I haven't conclusively tested which conditions those are, but I've seen rounds where all kudzu drones are constantly falling in and out of consciousness to the point where they can't operate. 
  
• Kudzu drone health regen by standing on kudzu is, in general, way too slow. From -500 damage, it's going to be a prohibitively long time to get back to a state where you can move effectively, to the point where it's faster to intentionally suicide and be reborn than it is to wait for healing if you're significantly injured. 
  
• While established kudzu is hard to remove and I don't think it needs rebalancing, it is very easy for players to incapacitate kudzu players AND destroy encroaching kudzu simultaneously. This is due to kudzu players needing to be within 1 tile of the spot they want to kudzu, which is often going to be a tight hallway, and how prevalent and easy to acquire flamers and various grenades are. 
  

Imagine a 3 tile wide hallway leading to the escape shuttle, with 3 kudzu players collaborating to spread the kudzu (pretty rare in the current game state, but obviously possible). A thrown grenade will certainly hit all of them, if they don't have time to move to safety. If it's incendiary or does brute damage, which is overwhelmingly likely, its likely going to destroy the kudzu on the spot each player was standing on. 

If all 3 players are incapacitated, they are now rapidly losing health from being off kudzu, and unable to heal each other. 

If 2/3 players are incapacitated, 1 player must choose between retreating to a kudzu tile or first healing the 2 incapacitated players off kudzu tile. The player will likely only have enough time and nutrients to heal one of the 2 downed players, who will also be rapidly losing nutrients. 

The situation becomes more favorable if only 1/3 are incapacitated, but whether those players can heal their teammate or not, in all 3 scenarios, the players can now no longer sustainably grow kudzu in the direction they want, if they want to insure the survival of their teammates. 

These problems combined make it very common for players on non-RP to simply AFK if they die on Kudzu, rather than come back and play the game as a pseudo-antag. By buffing kudzu, obviously you would need to consider how many other antags can cause kudzu in order to not overly sway rounds toward always becoming kudzu. 

It's a shame that all the features designed for kudzu players are almost always overlooked and basically never successful at spreading to the shuttle before launch. It has all the tools needed to be a fun blob-type antag, but it is simply too easy for players to massively incapacitate kudzu drones.

Buffs I would suggest: 

• Make Kudzu drones about to heal themselves with their own nutrients at a reduced efficacy (say half the healing of having it applied by another drone), in the event of a player being the only kudzu drone, or isolated from other drones by space tears, player-made obstacles, great distance or other impediments. 
  

      And

• Make Kudzu drones immune or otherwise resistant to knockdown/unconsciousness while on kudzu tiles.
  

      Or

• Increase the rate of knockdown/unconsciousness recovery and health regeneration on kudzu tiles. 
  

Obviously like many, I'm not a developer or a QA tester, but please let me know what you think.