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Phaser Array Fleet Console Stacking
calamar017
Member Posts: 42 Arc User
I have read a series of posts regarding the concept of stacking consoles and diminishing returns, and have received contradictory information regarding it.
I am looking at consoles for fleet Vulnerability Locators and Vulnerability Exploiters. Traditionally, I've used two two Locators and one Exploiter. Is it worth stacking two of the same console? How does that work, precisely?
I am looking at consoles for fleet Vulnerability Locators and Vulnerability Exploiters. Traditionally, I've used two two Locators and one Exploiter. Is it worth stacking two of the same console? How does that work, precisely?
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This is applied so that players can't reach 100% resistance which would make them invincible.
Diminishing returns does not apply to Tactical Consoles. The accepted common practice, or the 'meta,' if you will.. is to stack your Tactical Consoles with as many Locators or Exploiters as you possibly can.
If you run a build based on an ability like Surgical Strikes that pushes your Critical Chance to insane levels, then it's recommend that you run all Exploiter consoles. For pretty much anything else, you'll get best results by running all Locator Consoles.
The returns do not diminish, put in as many Locators or Exploiters as you can. You should never put things like Universal consoles in your Tactical Slots, they should always be used for the best +Damage consoles you can afford.
I hope that helps you.
Read more here: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1077191
As for critical chance / severity, there are calculations that make a certain amount of one or the other yield better results. Here's one calculator for this: http://comatoes.github.io/sto-crit-calc/
STO Screenshot Archive
What contradictory information?! How old are these threads where ignorant people are claiming Diminishing Returns!? This hasn't been debated in ages!
Let's say you deal 100 base damage with a weapon and you can equip tactical consoles that increase that base damage by 10% (for simple numbers). The first console brings your damage to 110, second to 120, third to 130, and so on. We can see that each tactical console adds the same amount of damage. However the first increase to your TOTAL damage is 10%, the second is a bit over 9%, the third a little over 8%, etc. This means with only one tactical console you can kill a target 10% faster than with none, with 2 you can kill a target 9% faster than with only one, etc.
The question then is if the reduced benefit to total damage means there are better choices than that fourth or fifth tactical console. Unfortunately, given the state of the game, the answer seems to be that it's best to stack those tac consoles and any other source of damage you can get above anything else.
Regarding armor consoles, technically they don't suffer direct diminishing returns. When an armor console says it adds 30 to your damage resistance rating, it always adds 30 to that rating. The rating itself suffers from continuous diminishing returns however.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
The fact that damage is the be-all, end-all purpose of stat stacking for so many people is why I said it's an unfortunate fact of the current state of the game. People feel they can replace Engineering and Science consoles with those universal consoles all the time, why are Tactical consoles the exception? There's something fundamentally wrong when damage stacking takes priority over everything else.
As to armor ratings, http://sto.gamepedia.com/Damage_resistance says otherwise. Granted it's a wiki and therefore could be wrong, but it matches information I've seen elsewhere on the forums as well. +30 resistance rating isn't 30% damage reduction, that's where the confusion tends to arise. An armor console that grants +30 to a resistance rating is being added to that resistance rating value total, which is then used to compute the actual damage reduction.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
There is no reduced benefit to damage, in your example each console still does 10 damage, each still offers 10% over the base rate. Each console offers the exact SAME benefit as the one before (10 dmg).
Lets change some of the word you use to see the real values. You have a job that pays $100/day. Every sale you make that day earns you a $10 commission. You make 5 sales ($10 each commision). Do you get any less benefit from the 5th sale than you did the 1st?
You missed the point. I explicitly said each console adds the same amount of damage. But if you could keep adding tactical consoles indefinitely, there comes a time when it really doesn't serve much benefit because you're only killing things a fraction of a percent faster.
Extreme example: 100% tactical consoles. Let's say with 0 tactical consoles you can kill a target in 1 minute. With a single tactical console, you can kill that same target in 30 seconds, a difference of 30 seconds, pretty significant. With 2 tactical consoles you can kill the target in 20 seconds, a difference of only 10 seconds from killing things with only 1 console. With 3 consoles, you can kill the target in 15 seconds, a difference of only 5 seconds from killing with 2 consoles.
This obviously is way out of scale with current equipment, doesn't factor in other source of damage boosts, and other factors such as enemy healing and positioning. But it does show that there's a sort of upper limit to how much you can boost your damage before it becomes redundant.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
We put Universal consoles in the Engineering slots because the vast majority are either worthless or redundant. It has nothing to do with the state of the game, unless you're trying to do something specific like hull-tank, they're just (usually) TRIBBLE.
The power consoles do jack-all, RCS usually just means you're fighting against your ship, and armor consoles are redundant with the many other sources of damage resistance. Most of the universal consoles replicate some of those things anyway. A Tachyokinetic Converter is basically superior to a plain RCS in every way.
I'm going to take a stab at where this all comes from..
Zone Chat.
Seriously, you ever listen to the 'advice' that people give in Zone Chat? It's unreal. Just yesterday I listened to two guys telling a new player that anything that wasn't build around Aux2Bat was wrong and was a 'non optimal waste.' There is so much bad advice given in Zone Chat that it's unreal. You get a bunch of 5k A2B Rainbow Boat flying idiots who think they know everything telling other people how to play.
I sent the guy a tell and pointed him to the forum to ask his question. This place is actually a pretty solid source for information. As a rule, people should refrain from asking any type of build advice using in game zone chat. It's full of people that have no idea what they're talking about.
If a standard piece of game equipment is considered "worthless or redundant" then that's a problem with the state of the game. All pieces of equipment should be able to be considered to be of some value, and simply traded out based on intended role. Engineering and to a lesser extent Science consoles are more or less in this position, frequently swapped out with Universal consoles to reinforce the way you want to fly your ship. But there's really no benefit to replacing Tactical consoles in this game currently. If you want to tank, you need to be able to do damage, so you need Tactical consoles and you feel compelled to replace your standard Science consoles with Fleet [Pla] consoles rather than [ShH] or [HuH]. If you want to CC, there's not much you can throw into Tactical slots that would benefit you, and you still need to be able to inflict some amount of damage and the obvious choice is to improve your weapons which you have regardless of role. If you want to play Advanced and especially Elite content, you need as much damage as possible, other roles becoming secondary (varying by mission).
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
There must be some point where the max-fill of Tac console slots fail?
I run a beam boat with Phased Biomatter weapons all at Epic Mk XIV with at least [CritDx3] mods, a single KCB and a neutronic torpedo for canon build purposes.
More likely if you toss a Universal for the 4th Locator you'd get even more. Universals do not automatically mean win or suck. Switching out a Locator for a BIC could be an increase, switching out a Locator for a ZPEC probably wouldn't be.
IIRC you have 5 Engineering slots in an FDC. One of those 6 Universals is unlikely to be better than another Locator.
This last may be true:
Engineering
1- Assimilated Console
2- Bioneural Infusion Circuit
3- Conducive RCS Accelerator [EPS] (+100 to my EPS, its 365%, and EPS is DPS!)
4- Plasmonic Leech
5- Molecular Cohesion Nullifier Field (one of few things to raise max power of Subsystems +5, so I have max of 130 across the board... and reach it with Leech and Supremacy).
Science:
1- Two [Thr+] Flow consoles that give me the Plasma Explosion procs
Tactical:
1- Saucer Separation (yes, it is lame, but I get the two piece Enhanced Structural Systems bonus, and the wide beam lance has allowed me to score 300K hits in ISA when someone can grav well a bunch of spheres... of course, compared to FAW, its not much in terms of total DPS, but it is exciting... lol).
2- Phaser Vulnerability Locators (Spire)
ALL of the above consoles, are Epic.
So, I'm sure Saucer Separation is not as much a win as the 4th Vuln Locator, but it may not be that much a loss??
You should test it and see.
I understood your point. I am saying that your math was off. Its not that the first gives you a 10% boost, the second 9.X%, etc. They are a cumulative boost of 50 points over base, and therefore a 50% boost over base.
Just ran a scatterplot for this. The problem with this theory is that you are looking at it with the 0 console boost datapoint incorrect and forces an intial skew. Also there isnt as enough datapoints to get a trend-line, but taking the date you have, in this case, if there is same about of "boost" for each tactical console (100 or 100%) then:
0 Consoles shoud be 40 second kill
1 Console =100 boost 30 second kill
2 console =200 boost 20 second kill
3 consoles =300 boost 10 second kill
4 consoles =400 boost for lack of better terms. instantaneous kill
The damage is linear @ y = -0.1x + 40 with R² = 1
The only reason there could be any argument towards upper limit of the boosts is that the particular target is too soft. A harder target that 0 consoles needs to kill in 540 seconds:
0 Consoles should be 540 second kill
1 Console =100 boost 450 second kill
2 console =200 boost 360 second kill
3 consoles =300 boost 270 second kill
4 consoles =400 boost 180 second kill
5 console = 500 boost 90 second kill
6 console = 600 boost instantaneous kill
console damage is: y = -0.9x + 540 with R² = 1
Not sure how you reach this. If the consoles each add the same amount of damage then you can take a few specific numbers and find a specific result.
To continue the same example as before, let's say my base damage is 100 and I can equip consoles that increase my base damage by 100%. Let's also say I'm shooting at a target with 1 million HP.
0 consoles, 100 damage per shot, takes 10k shots to kill the target (100 * 10000 = 1,000,000).
1 consoles, 200 damage per shot, takes 5k shots to kill the target ((100 * 2) * 5000 = 1,000,000).
2 consoles, 300 damage per shot, takes a bit over 3k shots to kill the target ((100 * 3) * 3333.333 ~ 1,000,000)
3 consoles, 400 damage per shot, takes 2.5k shots to kill the target ((100 * 4) * 2500 = 1,000,000)
Since each shot takes the same amount of time, there's a clear drop in efficiency in terms of kill time for each console added. If we say that those 10k shots take 1 minute of time, then 5k shots takes 30 seconds, 3.333k shots takes 20 seconds, 2.5k shots takes 15 seconds. The required number of shots to kill the target drops by 50% for the first console over none, then by about 33% from the second console over only one, etc.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
1. Bonus damage on crit is worthless, if you don't crit hit in the first place.
2. I would rather crit hit A LOT, and do less 'bonus' damage each time, than to not crit hit as much and do massive damage WHEN I do.
3. Boosting damage is always a good thing, especially if you get it with something else included like increased crit chance.
For these reasons I slot 3-4 Tactical Vulnerability Locators (depends on ship and available console slots) with the energy mod of preference, Fed's get +Pha, Klingon gets +Dis and Rom gets +Pla,... adjust to suit your weapon type.
Also, all of my ships weapons, or as many as possible, also have [CrtH] at least once, and all of my ground weapons have [CrtX] which is both [CrtH] and [CrtD].
tl;dr, crit more/less everity > crit less/more severity. Always go with the increased crit hit chance.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
After a weekend of parsing 10+ ISA (Conduit-Advanced), I consistently get about 2.5K (minimum) more DPS with the second Sci Console generating Plasma explosion when I remove one of the 4 Phaser Vulnerability Locators (to accommodate a Universal console being displaced from that second science slot).
From what I understand, each Plasma Exploding console is about 2500-3000 dps for decent builds, less at the highest DPS levels (I do about 35-45K). Maybe the Vulnerability Locators/Exploiters are not absolute must-haves?
You have completely misunderstood me, and I have absolutely no idea how.
That highlighted portion was the exact opposite of what I was telling you to test. The test was to get rid of the 6th Universal and see how much DPS you're losing from having Saucer Sep as opposed to a 4th Tac Locator.
There are not enough consoles on star ships in this game to make it where a tac console will becoming obsolete do to instant killing targets. On elite ships are massive health sponges.
So as of right now there is no reason not to stack as many of the same type of damage consoles on a ship. in the end that's all that matters.
Of course, I was using an extreme example to show that stacking Tactical consoles does provide diminishing returns in kill times. I also pointed out in one of my earlier posts that because of the state of the game there's not really any reason to use anything other than a Tactical console for that slot, which I think is unfortunate.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
I believe thats where the flaw in your logic occurs. It's not about boosting or lowering kill times. That's not what consoles do. Consoles boost a % over base damage for the weapon.
If your weapon, Mk XII Common, does 200 damage base, then a 25% console would add 25 points of damage. Your weapon would now do 225 damage. Adding another console would add an additional 25 points now dealing 250 points etc,.... this is all after your skills, set bonuses or specializations are figured.
Consoles boost a % of base damage, no matter what other bonuses or extras you may have. You could have enough skills/bonuses/wonder widgets to make your beam array do 5000 damage per shot and two 25% consoles would still only add 50 points to the damage total. Because they boost base, not adjusted damage amounts.
Whether that small boost in dmg output is enough to lower the kill times,... is still open to a multitude of variables.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
And again, I've said all this already. The original question for this thread was the results of stacking tactical consoles, and I provided my own take on the situation. I did point out that what examples I provided were there simply to exist as examples of what tactical consoles do in a vacuum, and that they did not reflect the reality of the game.
My problem, as I've already stated, is that almost nobody thinks it's worth replacing a true Tactical console with a universal because every bit of damage is important. But people are willing to replace Engineering and to a lesser extent Science consoles for those same universals. And the Science consoles that keep coming up in this thread are consoles that directly impact your energy weapon output via the [Pla] modifier. Damage has become TOO important to the game that everything else becomes secondary.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
I cant speak to normal damage consoles, been to long since I used them, but I hesitate to replace my Fleet Tac consoles NOT because of the damage boost, though it would have to be some special uni console, to replace a ~35% damage boost, I keep them because of the ~2% per console, crit chance bonus (Mk XIV UR Fleet Tac Vulnerability Locators). Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but those are my primary reasons.
An embassy console that infuses a small amount of plasma damage into non plasma weapons, is not in the same category as a Vulnerability Locator. Also as been noted on the forum repeatedly, armor. resistance and shield enhancing consoles suffer from diminishing returns, tac consoles do not.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
They are in the same category, but not for the Plasma Damage.
The reason those consoles are so popular is because of the +Flow bonus they give. This really helps buff the Plasmonic Leech console. Stacking a couple of these consoles keeps all 4 of your power levels at 75+ Easily. This grants you bonus defense from Engine Power and bonus Damage from your Aux bonus from Amp Core and Nukara Traits. Not to mention the buff to Science abilities.
On my characters that don't have a Leech console, I don't bother with them at all. If you're not buffing a Plasmonic Leech, the Embassy Plasma Consoles are noting special at all, I replace them with Field Generators.
Of course, resistances need a cap in order to prevent full invulnerability or all premise of challenge goes out the door. I know quite a few people don't bother with armor consoles at all (myself included) because there are so many other passive sources of resistances that using an armor console is of low to moderate help in any event. But why aren't survivability click-consoles ever used to replace Tactical consoles, especially for people trying to build tanks? Because tanks still need damage to draw aggro because the aggro system is almost entirely reliant on it. The mostly highly preferred universal consoles are the ones that boost damage output, usually through crit chance and/or crit severity. The generally preferred Specialization, as I understand it, is Intel because it can boost your damage output more than Command or Pilot. Even on Sci-heavy ships built entirely around the premise of using things other than weapons, Vulnerability Tac consoles are still generally the most highly preferred consoles for their slots. Everything else takes a back seat to damage, even if that damage is of small consequence such as the output of a single extra Tac console.
It's sort of a two-fold problem, and one that I doubt will ever really be resolved. NPCs lack intelligence to truly be challenging, so they tend to rely on delaying tactics, cheap powers, or massive one-shot-kill abilities to overcome the large quantity of potential damage resistances found through passives and other sources. And to make up for the lack of intelligence, they have enormous HP pools that make killing them a chore if you don't put as much into firepower as you can. The end result is people more or less forgoing defense other than some basic Boff abilities and powerful passives and instead focusing on the old adage "The best defense is a good offense" which has the circuitous result of Cryptic increasing enemy HP even further so that they don't get steamrolled while not actually increasing challenge beyond making it harder to get through those optional timers.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.