is the radiation dot worth grinding our withering disruptors?

nixie50

I have spiral wave on my Orions, but I got a purple withering beam with nice mods.. are withering better than spiral? I don't want to pay out for the sensor-linked.

orangenee

Spiral waves are all things being equal, the best disruptors. Hidden extra damage mods and all that.

However if you're allergic to re-rolling and you have something with better mods then use that instead and re-roll the spiral later.

It really doesn't matter that much as long as the overall build is coherent and you aren't averse to different colours firing out. I mean the procs are low enough chance you won't notice much in that regard either.

duasyn

IMO...
The more DPS you do, the more worthless DoTs are.
If you kill a ship in 3 seconds with 500k DPS, a '200/second for 15 seconds' DoT really doesn't do much.
Especially if the DoT is "2.5% Chance to Apply".

At this point in STO, the 2.5% Chance isn't even 'icing on the cake', its the sprinkles on the icing on the cake.

Honestly at this point I use the weapons I like the visual FX of more than what their 2.5% Chance of X is.

tom61sto

Bizarrely, Withering Disruptors aren't actually a DoT for their proc, you get one burst of damage for each stack of Withering Radiation on the target when it procs, so its not counted as a DoT for things like Torment Engine.

The standard Withering Disruptors that you can have multiple of do not challenge the Spiral Wave Disruptors in a meaningful way for DPS. The set part Terran Task Force Beam Array, *does* in most circumstances, but you can only have one beam array of that. It has a special proc that always runs, where you get a scaling damage boost on that weapon as the enemy health goes down. Put in a fore slot and so long as you don't kill most things in a single firing cycle, it'll out parse a Spiral Wave Beam Array pretty well.

tom61sto

Also, Sensor-Linked might not be better than your Spiral Waves anyway. You need a pile of them to get a decent boost from their passive, for one. At the high-end where you have tons of Critical Damage and/or Category 2 'Bonus' damage or at the low end where you don't have enough Critical Hit chance, the 3% final damage of Spiral Waves will out do them. About the only advantage the Sensor-Linked always have is that they have an Omni-Directional Beam option (will cost a *mint* though, as on PC they're almost as much as a Lobi ship, due to their rarity), and that they Bind to Account when equipped, instead of Spiral Wave's Bound to Character, which means they can be moved to an alt if you desire. They also look neat, firing blobs even for the 'beams', but that's opinion.