I used to play a lot with a single mandrake build back in the day and did pretty well with it, but back then crossout was not so rush heavy and fast paced. I had to get rid of my Mandrake when it could no longer work that well with everything from cannon builds to light machine gun builds that kept wedging and now later on just rushing and pushing you.
I like that Mandrakes and Mandrake-like gameplay is making a comeback, but even with Heather being a more “fast paced” Mandrake where you can actually shoot and also keep moving rather than being forced to sit still if you want to hit anything, I don’t see them sticking around once the novelty wears off.
I might buy back a mandra to play some hybrid mandra/hearther artillery gameplay at higher ps once I unlock the Mandrake 2.0 missile boogaloo but at the same time already having much first hand experience at how lacking Mandrakes are in this day and age I am a bit frightful that Heathers will suffer the same fate eventually. Especially in lower ps battles where you’d use only one of them instead of running two, I don’t think that even as good as Heathers are they can perform that well in general that they’d stick around for the majority of players