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Aux cannon, shield draining minelayer
foxrockssocks
Member Posts: 2,482 Arc User
in The Shipyard
I picked up the T6 multimission explorer pack and am intrigued by the aux cannons. Right now I'm trying to figure out a way to make a shield draining minelayer with aux cannons up front. Weapon power can be set to 0, yet still has potential to do some pretty good energy weapon output. Mines make the obvious choice for rear slots.
So firstly I'm wondering if there are builds for this sort of thing out there already.
Now lacking that, I'm saddling this build on my poor KDF Romulan engineer. That means some doffs are going to be next to impossible to find at affordable prices and the build can't rely on them. It also means I'll be using plasma aux cannons. The big caveat is the build can't use fleet stuff.
Tentatively, I think using the Surhuelh Recon Explorer Warbird ship for its tac LtC would be the best ship as I can then run two tac LtCs to have dispersal pattern beta 2 and CSV 2. Draining builds rely on tachyon beam and charged particle burst for shield drains or energy siphon and tykens rift for power drains. I'm leaning on shield drains because once they go down they don't come back up, however Tykens is usually more reliable with enough drain, and the doff for extra rifts is affordable. Those choices affect my ship traits though.
For ship traits I don't have tons of choices, but I'm thinking the main choices are between withering barrage, reciprocity, tachyon dispersal, heavy tachyon mine, and charged particle reaction. Again, I can only use 4 though. Other possibilities might be all hands on deck and non linear progression.
Equipping the ship I have the issue of balancing plasma energy damage, drain power, EPG power, and mines, and of course survivability and maneuverability. Basically I figure I can pick somewhere between filling my tac consoles with plasma damage consoles and filling them with universal drain consoles (there are an oddly large number of these.) I'm not sure mine consoles are worth it, given the long mine cooldowns unless they also do something else useful. There are also the consoles from the multimission ships themselves.
So again tentatively for ship equipment, I am thinking of using Terran Rep deflector and engines, Temporal rep shields and core, Gamma rep console and mines, Competitive rep mines and deteriorating secondary deflector, but not the console since it gives little of value. The two crafted consoles are a good fit, though what secondary mods to look for are uncertain, but I expect I'll need one of them with armor resistances. The Lukari Rep console is obvious too. I also have the console from the Valdore as an option. The rest is mostly up in the air.
As interesting as it would be to explore the various options and variations of this, that also gets expensive. Final note, I haven't tested any build with this yet, as I still need a lot of marks to buy the reputation pieces.
So firstly I'm wondering if there are builds for this sort of thing out there already.
Now lacking that, I'm saddling this build on my poor KDF Romulan engineer. That means some doffs are going to be next to impossible to find at affordable prices and the build can't rely on them. It also means I'll be using plasma aux cannons. The big caveat is the build can't use fleet stuff.
Tentatively, I think using the Surhuelh Recon Explorer Warbird ship for its tac LtC would be the best ship as I can then run two tac LtCs to have dispersal pattern beta 2 and CSV 2. Draining builds rely on tachyon beam and charged particle burst for shield drains or energy siphon and tykens rift for power drains. I'm leaning on shield drains because once they go down they don't come back up, however Tykens is usually more reliable with enough drain, and the doff for extra rifts is affordable. Those choices affect my ship traits though.
For ship traits I don't have tons of choices, but I'm thinking the main choices are between withering barrage, reciprocity, tachyon dispersal, heavy tachyon mine, and charged particle reaction. Again, I can only use 4 though. Other possibilities might be all hands on deck and non linear progression.
Equipping the ship I have the issue of balancing plasma energy damage, drain power, EPG power, and mines, and of course survivability and maneuverability. Basically I figure I can pick somewhere between filling my tac consoles with plasma damage consoles and filling them with universal drain consoles (there are an oddly large number of these.) I'm not sure mine consoles are worth it, given the long mine cooldowns unless they also do something else useful. There are also the consoles from the multimission ships themselves.
So again tentatively for ship equipment, I am thinking of using Terran Rep deflector and engines, Temporal rep shields and core, Gamma rep console and mines, Competitive rep mines and deteriorating secondary deflector, but not the console since it gives little of value. The two crafted consoles are a good fit, though what secondary mods to look for are uncertain, but I expect I'll need one of them with armor resistances. The Lukari Rep console is obvious too. I also have the console from the Valdore as an option. The rest is mostly up in the air.
As interesting as it would be to explore the various options and variations of this, that also gets expensive. Final note, I haven't tested any build with this yet, as I still need a lot of marks to buy the reputation pieces.
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Comments
For PVE the Multimission ships are VERY powerful and fairly inexpensive to set up..This is my Best ship so far and I have others with more EPG than this and this one clears 100k dps in ISA.
I run the full Alliance Multimission Set as It has 2 AoE abilites, A shield drain/Omnitachyon Console that scales on Drain (lets you sit in between a cluster of borg spheres and not die) and the "OH TRIBBLE" Protomater Regen console. I run EPG/Drain for the sci consoles because thats what I run for the Science Bridge officers.
https://imgur.com/mgm9XEV
For going pure Drain Ive adapted this to my multimission ship and it works well.
Unfortunately, it requires the Fleet Research Particle focusers with the DrainX2 modifiers to get up to 800 Drain X (Bajor Deflector re-engineered for DrainX5, Secondary re-engineered similarly for drain and the Temporal shield for 30 more drainX).
It is a mixture of shield and Subsystem drain. Quantum Phase torpedoes at the high a drain and that Rarity do -50+k all shields damage in one spread,then the torp actually hits with not shields stopping it...Tykens will be at -100 all subsystems per sec..Aceton Assimilator, Esiphon2 ,and Polaron Procs are all right around 80 to 90 all subsystems (However the Assimilator, despite its tool tip is only 1 instance not per tick).. Were you to Transfer this build to your Multimission, you could run Power siphon drones/Shield drone depending on you allegiances for even more drain. I run this on my Eng toon as the lvl 63 Engineering ability ALSO scales with drain. So far..60k ISA dps is pretty easy...Not bad for a support ship
Rouge Sto Wiki Editor.
This will have all the things you'll want on a sci ship for a Full on drain build... It is an old thread so dont comment on it.
Rouge Sto Wiki Editor.
Just make sure you have the Hot Pursuit trait if you are going to use mines.
Well I'm aware that aux cannons drain energy from aux, and I wager its a gross overexaggeration to say they can't be used in any build that is effective. That power drain is understood and accepted as a minor drawback. There are also a few things that reduce weapon firing power drain. I'm not sure whether they affect aux cannons too. I'll have to play around and find out if that isn't already common knowledge.
But, I expect more damage to come from spewing plasma cannon than will be lost by shooting through some bit of shielding. And, as I recall power is only used to calculate sci powers at the moment you fire the ability, so I can fire the drains then start shooting, and wait for the weapon cycle to end if I want to get the most out of the next use of those abilities.
The other problem though is I'm not using fleet gear, so what I do has a much lower cap on its effectiveness. It is these magic fleet consoles that far outperform standard consoles which is why I think it would be more effective to not go all out on drain but work on the cannon damage.
The EPG build is interesting in its own right. Its certainly part of that balance I want to consider. I like the multimission set, but I don't have the temporal ship so I only have 3 consoles.
And while its interesting to go full drain boat, that isn't what I'm shooting for here. I'd rather make the most out of an interesting build that confers a different and interesting playstyle. I get, though, that you're saying there isn't a lot of advice to be gotten for this particular build I'm trying to do because its very off meta, and probably won't perform at levels I don't perform at anyway.
It isn't quite what I'm looking for, but there is still some good info there on where to find drain.
Yes hot pursuit would be great, definitely on the top of the list of what I'd like to get for the build. Its also pretty expensive for my tastes. I might go for it, but not until I get a feel for whether the build functions on a basic level. The lobi stuff, though, I'll definitely have to pass on that, but its good to consider. The heavy tachyon mine is pretty nice too, as I've been playing with it.
With things upgraded to mk 15, I'm right around 400 drain. Between the torpedo and tachyon beam, almost nothing has shields before I am even in mine range, which makes things die remarkably fast. For everything bigger there is Tykens rift and target shields. Up close there is also the heavy tachyon mine and another temporal power that drains shields. Time to kill stuff is remarkably shortened by not having to deal with shields most of the time.
The two big limitations on this build are definitely hot pursuit and mine doffs. I managed to get hot pursuit at a somewhat reasonable price but only one green mine doff. Three purple mine doffs would be quite insane since they can proc after every mine lay, but sadly getting rare doffs on the KDF side is next to impossible.
Also with aux cannons being the only energy weapons, this build has some really big blind spots outside of the cannon arc, however that isn't usually a problem since the turn rate is still pretty good with the captain in pilot spec, and being able to put more power into engines.
Another issue with this setup is that it has a very delayed ability to kill things. In a battlezone like Badlands with a lot of people around, that can hinder the ability to score the damage for rewards, especially if I'm sapping shields for some people who do mega DPS as it is. It isn't insurmountable, it just means I have to be more aggressive with my cannons and make sure I can lay mines over spawn points in those situations.
Other things I found out in testing were that nadion inversion indeed lowers the power cost of aux cannons, as does emergency weapon cycle (which is obvious pointless for this build, but I was curious.) The newest turret dropping console does not though. I haven't been able to test other things that supposedly lower weapon firing power cost, but I never found it to be a problem to be bothered by either, so I don't care much.