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Current state of Sci powers
stormangel1
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
I left game for a while last year and have retuened with risa event. I just bought a Vesta pack and was looking for set-ups when in my research I found some mention that many of the great sci powers like Gravity Well are nerfed. Looking for an idea of the current state of these things, as it's a quagmire to find much of this. I was running a shield stripping RSSV torpedo boat and since my return it has certainly felt much weaker. I play a Sci officer Sci ship to debuff, yet I'm worried on what debuff powers are effective these days.
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Short answer first. No the sky has not fallen in, sci is viable in PVP and PVE just like Tact/Engi (just getting that in before the stormcloud forum trolls descend)
Specifically on the powers, and it sounds like your into flow cap builds:
Power Stealing -
ES - Still very good, max aux and 120ish flow caps will get you 40ish power steal for 25ish seconds. 2x ES II is 30ish power if you want to save that T4 slot for GW III or Tyken's Rift III and will keep the bonus power up almost 100% of the time. Remember the power stolen reduced the targets defences, shield regen, energy damage, etc etc so its as good as EPtX abilities.
Tyken's Rift - The word is its not scaling with flow caps right now. I've not used it since I heard this but then I always prefered GW or EWP over TR even in PVP. So no idea
Shield Stripping -
Tachyon Beam - I always laugh when I read someone maligning this ability on the forums. Slotting it once would be enough for anyone to tell they are lying when they describe its drain. With that said its unlikely you'll need Tachyon Beam in the current PVE meta as NPC shields dont survive against the kind of firepower your getting with current weapons and equipment. FYI i was seeing with 100ish in flow caps and max aux about 600 drain per tick, its all 4 facings as well and thats not to bad really.
Tractor Beam - With a Doff this is possibly a replacement for Tachyon Beam only because of its hold but i'll mention it because a thread on shield stripping isn't complete until someone says Tractor Beam beats the drain of Tachyon Beam. Maybe with 3 purp Doffs it does ^^
Charged Particle Burst - Good in PVP, just very situational, very long cooldown considering its strength.
Tachyon and Polaron Weapons -
Procs still scale off aux and flow caps. Polaron with 120ish flow caps and max aux should see about 60 power drain.
Other stuff like GW-
Gravity Well - Still hits as hard as always and unlike whats repeatedly said on these forums its not effected by shields. Perhaps people saying this should actually use the ability before they start talking about its effects
This is not as big an issue as people claim as you can always set yourself up to punt them back in with Photonic Shockwave or fly over them with EWP or hit them with Target Engine Subsystems or... you get the idea. Expect with max aux and 200ish in particle gens got it to hit close to 2k a tick.
Feedback Pulse - Still does awesome damage.
Photonic Shockwave - Good in PVP, just situational, long cooldown for effectiveness.
I think thats it for the damage-centric abilities.
So basically stop reading those threads about the doom and gloom of sci. Its fine. Just dont expect to hit a sci power in a vacum and win the internets. You need to force multiplying abilities to really get anything from them.
But anyway, have fun it is just a game after all
1) have lots of points in particle generator skills. Not just the full 99 skill points, but also try to add a purple Mk XII console or two, the rep pieces that boost particle gens (KHG deflector, tholian console, etc), and so forth
2) can hold the target in the grav well, either by shutting down their engine power, throwing a subnuke and/or tractor beam when they try to EPtE or Evasive out of it, etc
3) can drop a shield facing. It says on the infocard that shields reduce kinetic/exotic damage and they're not lying. Energy weapons drain shields the fastest. CPB and BFaW are good if you get more than one.
Photonic Shockwave is actually bugged, and has been since S7. I believe what may be happening is that a low inertia rating is resisting both the repel and the stun, but I know the result is that Cubes and up are completely immune to that stun (which makes using PSW as a tractor breaker more than a little hopeless). The damage on it is weak but not absolutely terrible, so I guess that's the upside.
Then there's Grav Well, you'll have noticed that everyone who's mentioned it has said to use another control ability to make the control of Grav Well work, and they're pretty much completely right. Player ships can of course fly out of it with ease, but with EPtE the spheres in ISE can ignore it almost entirely as well. The only way to make it actually work is to immobilize your targets in some other way and then give all the credit to the GW, which of course makes it useless as group CC. One more note on it, the damage actually ignores shields entirely and goes straight to the hull, as with TBR and TR, so while it's true that shields have extremely high resistance to kinetic damage, it doesn't matter in this case.
Of course, there are also the sensor powers and Viral Matrix, but not mentioning those was probably a good choice. Viral Matrix may be able to hold its own in PvP, but for PvE all 3 of those are utterly useless.
Feedback Pulse has of course always been nearly useless in PvE, a weakness that is pretty much built in, so that's that. Tractor Beam Repulsors is still potent and dangerous as always. I almost never use it myself, but I've had to back off from my blanket stance of recommending that others not use it as it's one of the few sci abilities that retains any usefulness.
Oh, and no weapon proc has scaled off of any power level since at least S5, and they still don't. Polaron and Tetryon weapons do scale with Flow Capacitors skill, however, just as Phasers scale with Decompiler.
EDIT: POC laptop flipping out on me
Not entirely the same as my experience
Are you saying Tach Beam should completely remove someones shields with you having little to no investment in flow caps?
The resistance skill scales the same as the bonus skill http://home.comcast.net/~amicus/Skill%20Point%20Effects.htm
They do not. I can say without a doubt that NPC's are effected greatly by power drains, doing elites and seeing mobs crawl towards me while doing vastly reduced damage is evidence enough for me it is working.
I can't comment on PSW's effectiveness as a TB break on cubes as I use PH for that on my Brel and don't care on my VoQuv and I agree the damage is to low for its CD.
EPtE's is making mobs immune to GW and that exotic damage is highly resisted by shields.This is said in other threads as fact and it isn't.
Since EPtE is giving bonus movement speed of course the target will escape the GW faster. So invest in Grav gen skill and consoles to make the Well larger, it wont happen as often.
As far as I can recall only PSW is effected by shields and since its mentioned on the tooltip assume it was OP until the dev team did this.
VM in PVE. Yea maybe, tho disabling a boss wit a combo on VM and BP with SS's Doff would mean disabled for the entire fight
FBP in a Sci heavy Aux2Bat build is very good in PVE.
I did not know phasers scaled TY for the info
No, but a 129 skill max Aux Tachyon 3 probably should strip a tac cube in no more than two activations, and right now it can't do that to a probe. And I know that CPB has next to no effect on anything, maybe 5 percent of a probe's shields per activation ever since S7, when I quickly realized it was time to dump it. And I've watched tac cubes keep doing exactly the same damage with their beams after I hit them with my Energy Siphon as before.
You should definitely pay attention, because if it's not breaking Tractor Beams it's not generating any actual stun.
It still happens every single time they use it.
Unless you're purely thinking of it on a cruiser, that's really not the case. FBP only does anything when something is shooting at you with energy weapons. Since NPCs do so much of their damage with torps, and divide their attention between you and your teamates (unless you have a lot of agro generation, which sci ships struggle to produce, let alone handle) it winds up doing next to nothing.
PSW does not take such a small amount of shields... if ur seeing only 5% your missing, get closer.
I believe ES does reduce energy damage. Just my experience running an ES boat.
No you should learn to read I didn't say I was using PSW to break TB's I said I use PH but anyways I dropped into an elite conduit parked myself 3k from a cube and then a tact cube and tried it on both. Guess what, it worked on both. PSW DOES BREAK TB'S. I have said it now.
Not for me, and I only have 6 pts into grav gens.
Yes. The power is not ptless in PVE you just need to build to use it in PVE which means taking damage. Go figure considering it returns damage....
1) Monsters have vastly inflated stats. More shields than players and so on this is why shield stripping is ineffective usually and why that 1,500 dmg a tic GW barely dent's their 200k hulls.
2) 'Boss' Monsters are flat out immune to hard CC. Power drains (and likely shield drains by extension), Stuns, confuses, etc etc will not effect them at all. And if they do it is only 1/100th of the duration or severity.
Woah my fried... Science Captains and their abilities are great but Science powers are not so hot.
Power Drain: Syphon works good to replenish YOUR power but against most enemies the best way to drain power is with lots of Flow Capacitor skill and Polaron Procs. Nothing else is going to drain enemies much especially in PvP where a few points of resistance will all but negate even the strongest drains.
The ultimate power down comes from stacking Polaron Procs, Aceton Assimiltors, Plasmonic Leech, and keeping them in the middle of a Tykens but it takes that level of combined drain to actually accomplish the goal in my experience.
GW can barely hold a Borg Probe and Vs. Players it is an utter laugh fest. Any reasonable player ship can simply waltz out of GW's effective range without a second thought. If you are using target engines on the Borg that will only hit one and even then unless you proc the subsystem it may not be strong enough to actually make GW work on them after EPtE. GW desperately needs a massive boost to the effectiveness of its pull power.
Tachyon Beam is a joke. Why waste time with it? It hardly strips any shields vs. a target with resists even at full power. If you want to strip shields better than Tachyon beam then just... SHOOT the enemy. Your energy weapons and even Torps can easily deal more Shield Damage. Lowering the enemy's power beforehand is even better.
Tractor Beam is still useful and with the DOFF you can make it better than Tachyon Beam if simply because it does more for the cost of the same amount of power slots.
CPB is in the same boat as Tachyon Beam especially in PvE where the amount it strips is really weak. In PvP the best thing about it is that it will keep enemies from cloaking but there are better ways of doing that.
Tractor Repulsors are actually Awesome and I would recommend them far more as they can deal very powerful damage to both Players and NPC's and if you use them correctly they have other great benefits as well. (They attack cloaked ships BTW)
Feedback Pulse... lol... It shares important cooldowns and honestly is not very good for anything that can Hull Tank or anyone who is paying attention to you. Even then it is really only very effective if the enemy is killing you strictly with energy weapons and you are a Tactical Captain that can ramp up its damage significantly. Oh... and it is utterly WORTHLESS in PvE because of how huge enemy HP is and how weak their energy weapons are compared to their massively OP torpedoes.
Shockwave is basically the weak version of Tractor Beam Repulsors. It does stun things which can be handy but that is its only real strength. It does not knock things far enough to be that great, has a long CD, and deals pretty weak damage. You are not likely to kill anything large with it EVER and may even struggle to kill fighters but it will take out mines and high yield torps. TBR's will just do all that far better and can be lethal to other players and even big NPC ships.
What you are not really realizing is even with just the Inertial Dampener skill that gear gives you (not even specific consoles or actual skill points spent) any player ship can fly out of GW from the center without using ANYTHING... Just put throttle to full and casually fly out of it. If they are actually specced into the skill then forget it... Tractor Beams and GW at full power will not even phase them or slow them down at all and Borg Spheres just zip out of it like it was some bad joke.
Target Subsystems Engines is pretty weak so unless you proc you are not getting them to stop. VM is probably one of the only things you mentioned that is very reliable but even then you do not need the GW because VM will stop them and then you can kill them with real firepower.
As for its damage TBR blow it away without any challenge. You attest you kill a lot of folks with GW and I cannot necessarily deny that it may be true but I would say that it is highly unlikely that you ever kill anyone even slightly worthwhile with it. You have to do a lot to make it work for you when if you used the same effort and just could dish out some vicious spike damage from guns or torps you would accomplish the same goal faster, easier, and more often.
I am with the camp who says Sci skills do not need to deal lots of damage they need to be effective Ewar and Crowd Control and as CC GW really fails hard despite having once been a GREAT CC skill if not the best CC skill in the entire game.
1. Really? Checking the hull on a bunch of NPC's gave me values within about 5k of what I and my fleeties have on our ships. Also observing the reduction in shield values after hitting an NPC with Tach Beam/CPB leads me to assume shields are no different. And finally hitting NPC's with a Polaron proc and an ESIII turns it into a kitten.
2. No. There was a thread in PVP with some guys disabling the borg queen for 4 minutes. Boss have reduced duration to hard CC's. I guess from my 6.5sec web mine lasting about 3 secs on the scimitar/cubes/etc its a 50% reduction. You just need to not be an escort taking 1 sci ability with no consoles or skills to buff it before you'll see value in them.
GW and none of the other skills at level 99 are enough to hold enemies in place, they all move around freely even with stacking grav gens on.
Romulans on the other hand have all of the science skills for free from one engine on every ship.
They can create a well that holds enemies in place, confuses, and placates them.
They can summon an extra set of ships.
They can teleport without a console.
They can heal their shields and hull.
They can do a plasma shockwave which is far better than the photonic version.
All of the damaging abilities on Roms are considered exotic damage btw where as all of the standard science shills save for TR FBP are all kinetic damage which is why the standard skills do not benefit from the newest trait they just put into the game that improves exotic damage for science captains in space.
They need a serious redux of the whole system if they want to even come close to being considered balanced right now.
1) Which NPCs? Last time I checked an ESTF sphere has around 200k Hull. And yes against standard basic NPCs while sci does work a simple FAW or CRF makes them dead kittens.
2) Link please. I have not seen a 'boss' type mob being effected by hard cc for quite some time, nor drains. I would wager they were using an ability that was bugged and ignoring it's respective resist skill.
At least the last part is great news! But this misses the point. Gravity Well is not an immobilizer. It is a clumper. You kill engines with something else. I use EWP, Graviton Pulse, Target Subsystem: Engines, Tractor Beam, everything except Chroniton Torpedoes at the moment. Immobilization is also only half a plan. Pulling those stranded ships together, popping at least one (even a small one) leads to cascading warp core breaches. Gravity Well on its own can still clump some things briefly, slow some things briefly, and certainly helps to attract threat, but you still need an end-game. Incidentally I almost never have problems with EPtE spheres since I'm properly built for crowd control.
Nothing is perfect. At my very best I'm still only 2/3 of the DPS of capable escorts. They don't mind if they realise I'm tanking, and sometimes crowd control makes things convenient for them. I really only feel useless if the team has another capable Sci already doing what I do, but with so many Sci builds to choose from that's very rare.
600 drain per tick? Congrats. You just spent a boff station and probably multiple console slots to achieve 2/3 of the effect that a single gun mount on a combat ship with full power to guns can achieve. The enemies that have shields strong enough to care about are barely going to be scratched by even the most hyper-specialized tachyon beam build. The only conceivable use of this ability is if you're running a science torpedo boat. Gravity well... A minute-long cooldown to create a well that MIGHT hold an enemy or two if they let you. Charged particle burst, photonic shockwave, scramble sensors, viral matrix, all terrible. Effects are either minor or outright irrelevant next to the cost in time and slots of deploying them.
The problem here is that science can't do its job in PVE. And the reason it can't do its job is because this game has PVP and PVE playing by the same rule set, but player ships and NPC ships are completely different in how they work. And also in quantity.
But a clumper that doesn't immobilize is useless on its own (unless you set it up to follow the target and immobilize nearby enemies to that target, which isn't what GW does), and EWP and Graviton Pulse aren't available to all scis, while Target Subsystems and Tractor Beam affect only a single target, not the whole group that you're trying to clump. So it's a broken ability, pure and simple. And that's if we accept your premise that GW shouldn't be an immobilizer, and I really don't. If GW is not an immobilizer, then Sci, the primary CC class, has no group immobilizer, while much of the PvE content is focused on preventing enemies from reaching an objective. That's an insane situation which did not exist in this game until the LoR changes.
That's a fair call. I'm relying on Eng (EWP) and lockbox (GravPulse). I could turn to Tac (Chron torp spreads). Perhaps Sci does need a mob-immob.
Have found that even these are less than effective, case in point being ISE.
I am what would be considered well set up for CC, and generally focus on slowing the sphere swarm down once the gens are gone, no probs there. But once the transformer is gone, they all fly off in all directions, like dogs shot in the TRIBBLE, no matter what I throw at them.....GW, Grav pulse, EWP, vent theta, in any combination you like, they just seem shrug it off once that transformer is gone.....or have my beer goggles clouded my vision? Anyone else see this happening?
Nah, that's pretty much what is happening. The reason is that the Spheres (and "Nanite Probes" that are really just more Spheres with a gennie heal) are tooled out to fight somewhat closer to the way players do. They will run away before you can blow them up, or chase you down if you are moving away, all using Emergency Power to Engines. They've had that power for awhile, but now it's actually worth having for everyone... including the bad guys.
A decent chunk of this is that we don't think of the Science abilities the same way we do our weapons payload. Tons of escort pack 4 or 5 consoles built to maximize their damage type, but it is less common for folks to do the same with their Science console setup.
Unfortunately, the other chunk is still the bigger one... Science abilities are something both players and mobs tend to put decent resists into. The resists don't oppose the enhancing consoles at a 1:1 ratio, though, so those decent resists can often heavily mitigate even a solidly spec'd Science setup. Sadly, at this point I pretty much run a Sciscort setup, and even though spec'd for a Control build I get better overall effectiveness as a striker and rapid-response healer than as a proper Controller.
Of course, I could be (probably am) doing it wrong...
Debuffing doesn't win fights. Tanking doesn't win fights. Killing the enemy wins fights. People don't think of science consoles the same way they think of tactical consoles because with a few special exceptions, science doesn't kill anything. Weaponry, i.e. direct firepower, is effective and sustained performance against any kind of enemy. Science abilities, the ones that actually work at all, are momentary and special purpose.
Now, if hyper-specializing into Gravity Well had the same capacity to win that hyper-specializing in cannon weapons did, then people wouldn't look at science consoles as their dump stat.
It's not a problem with "the way we think of it", it's simply a fact of the game's design that firepower is what lets you win and fancy science stuff is merely an occasional side dish to make the firepower taste better.
Which is why the optimal form of CC is a Tac in a defiant simply scatter volleying and torp spreading the spheres do death before they go 'active' while the rest of the team finishes off the transformer. And yes it is not only possible but quite easy to do.
What I have seen in ISE, chroniton spread plus gravwell keeps the probes clumped together and lets gravwell kill them like it used to without the chroniton spread. Hold/pull/slow are cumulative (not sure about sub-types, just speaking in general) so if you add gravwell and the chroniton slow (which is really a slight hold?) then you get a higher total hold than the probes' EPtE can counter. The probes hit EPtE and struggle a bit but then they fall back into it. Gravwell effect is from the center, so you have to combo the pair very rapidly, and before any of the probes have started to muscle out. If you get one that breaks free, hit him with subnuke and his EPtE is gone.
True enough, but that component had already been mentioned by several folks earlier on, so I left it out. Sorry about that. Also, that was the lesser of the two points I was trying to make, with the greater being the common and significant resistances to even the debuff abilities.
By which I mean you are exactly right. Science powers are not as effective as simply killing things, since DPS is high enough that debuffing is unnecessary, and crowd control is very quickly becoming far less useful than simply blowing stuff up in all circumstances rather than merely most circumstances. Thus the Sciscort comment at the end back there.
While that is partially true; I find it funny that many of these abilities work even LESS on Player ships than they do on NPC's.
Thats all well and good, but I do not fly an escort(and never will again), I am a Sci captain in a Sci ship, and while not an RPer, am attempting to use the ship for what would be considered its primary purpose. It may not be optimal, but it IS challanging most of the time (primarly because I only PUG ESTFs), unlike flying something that causes the enemy to spontaneously combust just by looking at them.
The Defiant may well be a good ship, but the number of them(and other escorts) that I have saved from the brink of death(sometimes on multiple occasions in a single mission), is growing rapidly. Sure they are probably all beginners(hate the term 'noob'), unlike yourself, but have no problem with that as it keeps things interesting.;)
Technically speaking, GW and especially TR are both supposed to trap ships in different ways. GW us supposed to do what the romulan ship jump does right now, grab ships and draw them in with a serious amount of engine power needed to escape.
TR is supposed to have more than a 5 second engine drain (It's supposed to be permanent until the anomaly is gone) and it's supposed to drain 100% engine power so movement is impossible even with evasive.
GW should be given the perception bonus because Gravity does cause this in space, it's not like 1 gravity anomaly won't do what another will do in regards to warping space visually.