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Best Beam Weapons ?
spottedfeather
Member Posts: 100 Arc User
What is the best beam weapons ? Comparing, say, phaser damage to polaron damage doesn't help much. Which is the most powerful beam weapon in the game ? Are turrets really weaker than, say, beam arrays ?
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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And yes on their own a turret is weaker than a beam array. However turrets have a 360 arc, and work best with cannon builds as they benefit from cannon BOff abilities.
The best layout for a cannon build is to have dual/dual heavy cannons up front and turrets in the back. If you want to throw a torpedo up front, you can.
Beam type: I pick mine based on the visuals. Mark XIV -any type- beats Mark XIII -any type- and any Mark XIV type is good enough for elite content if the setup for rest of your gear and bridge officer powers is decent.
Don't think you have to only have one captain fly one ship with one gear set. For me a lot of the fun of the game is having different captains fly different themed ships with different setups.
If you haven't created Romulan and KDF captains yet, doing that would let you try different ship types as you level up, and you'll also get to play the faction-specific story episodes.
And yes, Beams are more powerful then Turrets. But regular beams are not omni-directional, there are 'omni beams' but they are restricted on how many you can use. Turrets are usually used in Cannon builds and Cannons are considerably more powerful then beams. As said above, the Cannon style ships are harder to fly but have a higher payoff.
Both build styles are perfectly viable and up to you which one you want to use.
It's a weapon.. they're designed to do damage.
The one that does the most damage is objectively the 'best.' I am not sure how else you would rate the quality of an item who's sole purpose is doing damage.
No one ever said it was essential, the question was just which one was 'best,' and the Terran Task Force is 'best.'
Slow sluggish ships have the tankiness to handle lower defenses from not moving as much and soaking up direct hits.
My heavy ships make use of Aux2Damp, boosting aux before using it, shifting to engine, completing the turn, and maintaining distance from targets. Those with battle cloak like the Valkis have additional turn potential plus decloak ambush bonuses. Evasive maneuvers on low cooldown also very useful to evade or reposition quick.
As much as I try to fit in a projectile, it just adds nothing: on the front you lose a powerful DHC, on rear you rarely have a target in range with drained shields. Even energy projectiles with 4 or 5 tac console slots and THY2 or 3 feel weak even on crits in comparison to sustained cannon fire that melts both shields and hull equally. Same with EPG boosted gravimetric or plasma torps unless it's on a science vessel.
Seaofsorrows' experience sounds spot on from what I heard about recently. That beam may also come in a disruptor variant. I know coalition disruptors were nerfed in some way, but in a team with disruptors I imagine they should still be good, and I do use them. Elachi disruptors are quite old but I enjoy using them (as cannons). The most recent thing I've uncovered assuming it is still valid is different plasma types, if they have a DoT plasma damage, stacks on the same target. So far this has not been all that successful but still need to test it more.
For standard beams the Over mod I find really fun, and unless anything's changed, if you use FAW the BO1 should now apply all at once to all beams at the end of that cycle that also boosts its chances. I know Pen is sought after though I'm not sure how it holds up considering more easy sources of debuffs on targets, and considering shields that beams chew through should have separate resistances (hardness, shield subsystem power levels) than hulls, so unless someone can clarify, I find Over or Rapid mods superior.
That said, don't stress too much over damage type or variant types of them. For most people, as long as you pick a damage type and focus on it, you'll do just fine. Weapon type is also primarily a preference thing(cannons can be a bit harder to use, but are better at concentrating damage); you can do 'good' with almost anything. Elite Difficulty content is a different animal, but it's also beyond most of the playerbase's interest and performance, as a whole.
I would agree with all of this.
Best not to worry too much about the 'best' just go with getting an effective build and you should be more then fine. If you then later want to tweak that build to start getting more performance, then you can start swapping in the expensive consoles, traits and things that are considered 'top tier.' For the vast majority of the player base, it's mostly unnecessary and you can do just fine with a basic build that's well put together.
Unless you are going for the best DPS, it does not matter which type of beam array that you use. Pick one that you like, which one looks and/or sounds the nicest to you.
And yes, Turrets are weaker than other energy weapon types. Do not mistake that for being unusable. You can clear anything in the game using them. If you want to fly a ship that has a Turret in every weapon slot, you can do that and not have a problem. I have done it for fun and I am sure that many others have, too. Just remember that Turrets count as cannons when setting Bridge Officer abilities.
That said, the Terran Task Force Beam Array is the best Array because it becomes more powerful the closer to death your enemy is. You can only equip one of them. The best Beam Weapon might be a Lance or a Lotus, and those are built-in weapons on specific ships (the Galaxy-X/Yamato Dreadnought Cruiser in the Store and the veteran Heavy Destroyer from Lifetime Subs).
The Ba'ul Antiproton Beams are absolutely my new go-to for beams. It is well worth picking up the Ba'ul Lobi set as well as it significantly improves the beam type, essentially quadrupling the overall refraction damage (doubles the refraction from 5% to 10% of damage, and doubles the number of beams that refract). Additionally each beam (initial and 1 or 2 refracted) has an independent chance to proc Kemocite Laced Weapons, which means the per-attack chance goes from 10% to about 27% (again, assuming 3 targets available).
For a FAW beam boat, I'd go so far as to say it's the best possible setup at the moment. Less impressive against a single, heavy target... but that's usually true of beams, and certainly where something like the Terran Task-Force beam shines.
I briefly tried the ba'ul cannons and they didn't seem to do much refracting compared to the beams... at least it didn't seem that each projectile was refracting, while each beam from the beams did. Have you seen different?
Well, actually, default AP beams do more damage than other beams due to the built in critd modifier compared to very rare proc rates for other beams. The more crit you have the bigger the gap, and we can get far more crit chance these days than in 2010.
However, with all the variant flavors, and the different set options, there are more possibilities that have their own advantages that can be leveraged one way or another to the point where I'd still generally agree that it doesn't really make much difference what flavor you use.
While some beam weapon types are clearly superior, there's no shortage of those I'd call inferior if not for the set bonuses and such.
Protonic polaron would be a bad type, useful only against Voth, boosted by obsoleted tactical consoles.
Phaser proc I'd call bad as the disable is so rare and does not help destroy anything except for a very brief indirect defensive bonus.
Another type boosts your own shield hardness which I'd call bad unless you have nothing in shields as I believe there's a stacking limit or bug preventing shields from getting really hard.
There's some subtypes that give some healing but again I'd say it's a bad choice overshadowed by the superior fleet colony types for tanking purposes. I have some elite fleet phasers for shield healing and I can't say they work very well at all even on shield tanks.
Not really sure where plasma sits, but it's kind of an expensive choice given the plasma energy torpedo is locked behind the lobi store character bound, and I believe the plasma omni to place alongside the crafted one is as well.
I heavily disagree with this assessment. If anything, I find protonic polaron to be one of the best polaron weapon types. Yes, proton damage is hard to boost, but protonic polaron weapons deal shield-ignoring damage on proc, and the proc is a) per shot, not per firing cycle and b) more frequent based on your critH (it passes the usual 2.5% at 10% critH).
Plasma is one of the harder energy types to boost as it hasn't been given the console bonus love that most other energy types have. You can completely fill your ship consoles with bonuses to most energy types.. I'm not sure that's possible with plasma.
You can get double-synergy with the Na'kuhl ship consoles, but those are restricted to those ships(which honestly haven't aged very well - Acheros only has 3 tac consoles; Tadaari only has a 4/2 weapon layout). Otherwise, you've got the Standalone Ka'kuhl Uni console on the exchange for Cat1 and a few semi-decent reptuation options. Altamid Lobi Set is pretty nice, but doesn't offer Cat1 or 2 bonuses.
It also looks amazing if you use FAW while surrounded.... I like Pulse phasers, have multiple toons using them but thats mostly because all phasers have the same base damage and Pulse are orange
Doing damage is players' source of fun. But their fun can depend on other things, like visual effects of weapons.
From an in-game perspective, yes, a weapon is meant to deal damage. For the human player of course, more things can matter. Then 'best' thus becomes subjective and more complicated than just 'what does the most damage'?
Granted, the OP did also ask about the most powerful weapon.
> (Quote)
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> Doing damage is players' source of fun. But their fun can depend on other things, like visual effects of weapons.
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> From an in-game perspective, yes, a weapon is meant to deal damage. For the human player of course, more things can matter. Then 'best' thus becomes subjective and more complicated than just 'what does the most damage'?
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> Granted, the OP did also ask about the most powerful weapon.
Think key words like „damage“, „powerful“ and „weaker“ clarified that the OP did not mean visuals. 😏
Here is the guide to beam builds of the league. Well written and comprehensive on the matter OP.
https://www.sto-league.com/beam-ships-in-the-current-century/
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Or don't even worry about boosting the proton damage; focus on boosting the polaron damage and CritH as usual. The protonic damage is part of the additional weapon proc - a portion of the weapon that normally has a roughly 2.5% chance per cycle of happening and rarely does any direct damage, especially with polaron weapons. The per-shot, critH boosted chance for protonics is just extra shield-ignoring damage. It doesn't matter if it isn't huge per-instance damage.
If you're making a build based on DrainX then things like dominion polarons are obviously more useful... but if you're not heavy on the drain, there aren't many superior forms of polaron weapon especially combined with some decent CritH.
True, that's why I had to point out that aesthetics are an important element of what's the best weapon