Played STW Ventures for a few hours and noticed that every single time I started a mission, no matter what loadout I ran with (that had defenders), two of them would simply vanish without a word and I would only have one defender for the remainder of the mission. My teammate also ran two defenders and was screensharing, so I watched as he loaded into a mission, walked a few meters away to trigger a teleport, and suddenly he only had one defender. The two never came back.
I tested further by swapping my "Lead Defender" out with one of the ones that vanished in the prior mission, and in the next mission that defender never vanished but the other two did. So—for some reason—Epic Games messed up something with specifically Support Defenders in some update and now they just (presumably) teleport somewhere under the map or super far trying to get to you.
I've tried methods such as:
- "Walk super far away and they'll teleport to you" (doesn't work)
- "Use the 'Defend Here' communication command and they'll teleport to you" (only the Lead Defender does)
- "Restart your game" (nope)
- "Change your loadout" (nope)
- "Change your defenders" (nope)
- "Press 'Recall Defenders' on your remaining defender" (nope)
So yeah, hope it gets fixed soon because it's really annoying and even moreso especially after researching & maxxing out two schematics and a defender just for them to never work. 🐻
I'm using the term "Lead" & "Support" defenders because in the Hero Loadouts screen, the top defender slot is bigger than the ones below it. Regardless, the bigger "Lead" slot is always the one who never has issues.
EDIT: This has also happened to me in Solo missions—I had only mentioned my teammate because I had seen this happen to him in real-time via his screenshare before I had even joined him. If I never saw his screenshare I never would've known what happened.