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Transfailsic: the weapons that can't even, ever.
corinthalas
Member Posts: 2,331 Arc User
What role are they supposed to fill? They're still useless against shields, despite their 'shield penetration' effect. They're far worse against hull. They're terrible at everything. A standard photon torp will do more damage to a ship's hull *through* shields, and then 1.5x damage to unshielded hull. There is literally no situation where transphasic weapons have any advantages or added value over all other torpedo options. Even energy torpedoes have more use.
And there are multiple sets that are ruined by being hogtied to these awful weapons. What the heck was the thought process behind a weapon that excels at nothing and fails at everything??
And there are multiple sets that are ruined by being hogtied to these awful weapons. What the heck was the thought process behind a weapon that excels at nothing and fails at everything??
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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However, for the game, no clue. I've been playing since 2012 and can't recall a time when anyone said transphasic was a good torpedo. All I've ever heard is mediocre at best.
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In theory they are better against ships with hardened shields since even a lot of hardening barely reduces the bleedthrough they do. The thing is, I don't think a lot of mobs have hardened shields, just a lot of hit points so the bleedthrough doesn't mean much, especially when it is faster to just knock the shield down with energy fire and drains and use any other torpedo type for more damage (if the player ship even has torpedoes). It was probably meant for attacking enemy science ships or something like that.
If they actually did a universal shield softening for a second or two instead of just for the torpedo it would be a lot more useful.
those were TRICOBALTS...transphasics were admiral janeway's borg cube vaporizers
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Personally, I'd probably change them so Transphasics reduce shield hardness/increase bleedthrough by 20% and Chronitons remove 1 buff per torp.
I think the Lukari rep torp already does that, and its a photon.
Doesn't Chroniton do Antiproton damage though?
Right! To much lore, not enough sleep. My bad.
Nope. Chroniton Torps are still Kinetic. You're probably thinking of the Chroniton energy weapons from the Temporal Rep.
Possibly. But unless it's an energy type, like polaron. Then you have to look toward the consoles and sets that offer increased torpedo damage or projectile damage. So their damage can be boosted, just not as much as energy torpedoes, since they benefit from both energy increase and torpedo/projectile increase.
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I notice this with most torpedoes, they're just slow. I fire them, and watch them, and it's like, "What are they using for propulsion in these things? A hamster wheel?"
You can blame the movies for that, they were supposed to be the analog to guided missiles or submarine torpedoes which would have been ok had the movie producers not also wanted the ships shown large in the same frame which meant they had to slow them down even more to give them the feel of guided munitions with such a short distance to cover.
In TOS they were fast, moving just like proximity phaser bolts (which they shared SFX with).
So... like Goldeneye's Klobb then.
If they worked like that then they should let us have cube's and sphere's.
That never worked in tests, the way the game engine works it is too easy for the camera to get rotated around the ship and then you cannot tell which direction you are facing for a critical second or so. It just was not practical for combat, and combat is the main purpose of the ships.
90% reduction iirc. If it was just transphasics against other basic torpedoes it would not be so bad, but sci, set, and other specialty torpedoes blow away the basic ones including the transphasic. Even the few special transphasics are not great for later stuff though they hold their own pretty well in earlier content where there is not a lot of better choices.
If they could pierce perfect shields and Borg adaptation (though the latter does not mean much anymore) they would have a good niche roll but apparently they don't.
If you are planning on just letting your torpedoes autofire then I wonder if Transphasics are better for that.
===== Math based on basic torpedoes =====
Let's see what we can figure out. I just bought a pair of common MK XII torpedoes from the exchange; one photon and one transphasic. The stats I see are (note that this is from a ground map, and I have no consoles of either type slotted):
Photon: 2979.9 Damage, 6 Sec recharge
Transphasic: 2155.2 Damage, 10 sec recharge. Ouch... I can see why people liked the rapid fire torpedo.
Okay... so the transphasic does 72.32457465% of the damage that a photon does. We'll just call it 72%.
Now if 90% of the damage a photon does is soaked by shields, the total damage a photon does against shields is 10%.
If 40% of the transphasic torpedo bypasses the shields, then that's 0.2892982986 or 29% of the damage of a photon torpedo. Plus the remaining 0.4339474479 or 43% damage is reduced by 90% like other torpedoes, to become 4.3%. So the net result is that against shields a transphasic torpedo deals 33.3% of the damage of a photon torpedo, while a photon deals 10% against shields.
That wouldn't sound too bad except that the transphasic fires every 10 seconds as opposed to 6. If you multiply the transphasic damage by 6/10ths then you get 19.98 or 20%. Likewise 72% x 0.6 = 43%.
So assuming that you are firing a torpedo at the maximum rate of fire, the transphasic deals about 2x the damage against shielded enemies, and about x0.4 against enemies without shields. Hmm... not a great deal. Unless you expect that opportunities to fire torpedoes will not always be available, such as if you are fighting fast moving ships that are hard to keep your ship pointed at; if you only get the chance to fire once every 10 seconds or more then the transphasic deals 3.3x the damage against shields and 0.72 x the damage against bare hull, which sounds a lot better. If you use torpedo spread a lot then you are probably hitting a lot of enemies that have shields up, so maybe it's a better deal for that.
Of course, if you turn off autofire and wait for shields to drop before firing torpedoes (which is probably a better strategy overall) then transphasics lose every time.
Note for those of you that would want a comparison with quantums... quantum torpedoes have higher damage but lower DPS than photons so a transphasic does a bit better in comparison for the max rate of fire comparison, but less well in the fire every 10 seconds or more competition.
====Advanced Torpedoes====
The problem, as has been pointed out, is that there are lots of different advanced Photon Torpedoes and hardly any transphasics. Just got off STOWiki and it seems like there aren't any transphasics in the reputation system. There's the Breen torpedo of course, and there is the torpedo from the Preserver set which looks like it might be okay (especially for an EPG build), and there's the house Martok transphasic, which I don't have, so I'm not sure if it's any good, but it doesn't really look that great.
So for high-level play it seems like there are just a lot of really good choices for torpedoes other categories, but not much for the transpahsic player. This tells me that transphasics may be workable in lower-level play but not for high-tier play.
I guess you guys already knew that but I had to do the math to see for myself.
And if the ratio of shields to hull on NPCs are anything like players... 20k shields & 100k hull? (Just wild guessing for that) you have to burn though a lot more hull than shields. So raw dps is going to matter more than shield bypassing abilities.
Now if you could tailor a build where you can kill a ship before its shields drop; that'd be cool.
I wonder what shield bypass percentage would be needed to make them viable? 60%? 90%?
At what percentage would they be 'op' and killing ships w/ unbreached shields?
And then probably only viable on a torp boat build, most likely.
Since having a bunch of beams hitting shields while the torps bypass would be somewhat wasted damage.
Not quite. I think Megawell Builds can chew threw hull fast enough to still have some shields up. But the second the warp core breaches start chain reactions if you have a big enough murderball...
Its more effective on larger groups, but a high end Grav Well can do some significant damage.
Well on the point of killing things with shields up, it is entirely possible. I have a couple of very different ships that do that.
First is a ship based on massive shield penetration, grabbing most all the shield penetration I can find, including directed energy modulation and the legendary sovereign trait. I think it still has around 400 shield pen without those, though. It definitely burns through hull while leaving shields up.
Second is a Malem torpedo boat. While it runs heavy on exotic damage with grav well 1, it can still just pound things to death with torpedoes, primarily the Romulan rep hyperplasma torpedo. The ship has nothing special to get through shields against ships not in the grav well, besides plasma fire from the torpedoes, and the infrequent gravimetric torpedo rift. No its not efficient or quick without the grav well, but it still works. I think in part it is due to a high crit chance, because it is a Romulan captain, but also because its firing torpedoes (or a stream of hyperplasmas) every .5 seconds with the Terran rep console and 3 torpedo doffs.
But with how well the torpedo boat works as it is, there isn't really a point to using transphasics. Anything else works fine.
Backed when I used Quantum torps I would take down the shields faster then Transphasic. Even against shields the Quantum would still do more hull damage per shot then Transphasic and then when the shields did drop the Quantum would pull ahead even more. It just made Transphasic completely obsolete. (excluding the Transphasic Cluster Torp which is still great)
Even at 90% they are still useless due to the low raw base damage. My Transphasics mines have a bonus 80% shield pen giving them a total of 90% which you can push further with traits. They are still useless compared to Photon or Quantum.
I used to run Transphasics boats but gave up they are just broken now though not as bad as Tricobalts.
EDIT: Speaking of shield pen which how does the math stack? 80% bonus + 10% bleed in most shields, +10% shield pen from trait. Surly that’s not 100%? What happens if you add in the 2nd shield pen trait and go past 100%?