soul-leech

Wraith Drone

What it is

A unique kill-triggered artifact. When the ship kills an enemy, the artifact has a chance to spawn one or more homing ghost projectiles that fly to other enemies and damage them. Higher tiers raise the spawn chance to a guaranteed proc, increase the number of ghosts per kill, make the ghosts faster, give them longer flight time, hit harder, and unlock a chain behavior so a ghost can pass on to another target after the first.

Identity

Field	Value
Display name	Wraith Drone
Category	Unique
Icon	👻
Primary color	aaddff
Secondary color	6688cc
Bright/highlight color	ddeeff
Damage tag	None (type-agnostic)

Per-tier values

Tiers are indexed by rarity. The four authored tiers cover uncommon through legendary; the runtime prepends a fifth “common” tier that reuses the uncommon row’s values and only adds a smaller flat passive bonus.

Rarity	Proc chance per kill	Ghosts spawned per proc	Ghost damage (multiplier on base)	Ghost speed	Ghost lifetime (seconds)	Chain to extra target
Common	90%	1	1.00×	600	7.0	No
Uncommon	90%	1	1.00×	600	7.0	No
Rare	95%	2	1.10×	650	8.0	Yes (1 extra)
Epic	100%	2	1.25×	700	9.0	Yes (1 extra)
Legendary	100%	3	1.50×	850	12.0	Yes (1 extra)

Effect

Trigger: any enemy kill signal.

When a kill fires, a random roll is made against the tiered proc chance. On success, the artifact runs:

Action	Effect
Spawn homing ghosts	Spawns the tiered number of homing ghost projectiles at the kill site. Each ghost seeks out a different living enemy, flies at the tiered speed, deals the base attack damage multiplied by the tiered damage value, and despawns after the tiered lifetime if it has not yet hit.
Artifact flash	Flashes the artifact’s HUD icon to signal the proc.
Banner	Shows the artifact’s banner the first time it procs in a run.

From rare tier onward, each ghost is flagged to chain to one additional target after its first hit, so a single ghost can damage two enemies on the same flight before expiring.

Stacking rules

Rule	Behavior
Procs per kill	One proc roll per kill signal. On success, all tiered ghosts spawn together.
Ghost-count stacking	Multiple ghosts from the same proc fly independently and each seek a different target.
Chain stacking	Chain is per-ghost: a chaining ghost passes to one further target after its first hit, regardless of how many other ghosts are in flight.
Lifetime gating	Ghosts that fail to reach a target before their tiered lifetime expires despawn with no damage dealt.
Common vs. uncommon	Common reuses uncommon’s numeric values and differentiates only through the smaller flat passive bonus prepended by the runtime.

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Summary: Wraith Drone is a unique kill-triggered artifact that spawns 1–3 homing ghost projectiles per kill. Common/uncommon proc 90% of the time and spawn 1 non-chaining ghost at 1.00× damage / 600 speed / 7.0 s life. Scaling tiers raise proc chance to 100%, ghost count to 3, damage to 1.50×, speed to 850, lifetime to 12.0 s, and add a one-target chain from rare onward.

EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags:

• The “5th common tier reuses uncommon values and differentiates via flat passive bonus” rule is shared across all artifacts and belongs on the artifacts roll-up page, not duplicated per entity.
• The FLAT_BONUS_PCT_BY_TIER table (10 → 50 across common → legendary) referenced in _types.ts is engine-wide and should live on the artifacts overview / authoring guide.
• The random condition primitive and the signal-trigger / enemy_kill signal are shared effect-engine concepts; canonical reference belongs on a combat or effect-engine page.
• The custom action with handler routing (here: soul_leech_ghosts) plus the flash_artifact action are shared primitives across many artifacts — canonical reference belongs on the artifact authoring guide.
• Color-palette schema (primary / secondary / bright) is shared across all artifacts and belongs on the roll-up, with per-entity pages only listing the values.
• The base “homing ghost projectile” behavior (homing, retarget, lifetime expiry, chain-to-next) is a runtime construct shared with any other ghost-spawning content and belongs on a projectiles / homing-projectile primitive page.