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Scryer build for Exotic damage ...
dykeras
Member Posts: 326 Arc User
I main a Tac so building a Sci captain is a bit of a challenge (as in I have no clue) :P
I have been advised to go full Exotic damage on my new Scryer but not sure about the build so I am looking for advice...
I am thinking the CC deflector + Tholian shield/Impulde engine + Fleet Warp core (one with some Exotig boost)
Not sure what to stick in the Eng/sci/tac slots
All advice appreciated
I have been advised to go full Exotic damage on my new Scryer but not sure about the build so I am looking for advice...
I am thinking the CC deflector + Tholian shield/Impulde engine + Fleet Warp core (one with some Exotig boost)
Not sure what to stick in the Eng/sci/tac slots
All advice appreciated
Post edited by dykeras on
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The best deflector in this role, hands down, is the Solanae Deflector. The default mid 30-something PGen bonus is the highest in the game. If you can upgrade the rarity, it goes as far as 50 PGen. The regular Mk XII version is attained for free.
If you haven't started already, I highly recommend getting to Lv15 Science R&D. The "Particle Manipulator" trait at Lv15 is one of the key factors in an effective PGen build. The trait gives a Critical Hit boost to Exotic attacks at about 25% of your total PGen skill of your build. It's that important.
A long term consideration, unless you have connections, is the crafted SCI Consoles. Forget the name of the console, but do a search for SCI Consoles with "[PGen]" and you'll see. The ideal ones for PGen builds are the ultra expensive ones that give a total of 70 something of that skill. Again, it's very expensive but something to aim for later.
For Exotic / PGen based builds, you need to stack as much Particle Generator. Just as DPS builds stack crit related and damage consoles where ever they can be thrown on you must do the same with PGen.
- Regular Particle Generator Science Consoles can be upgraded cheaply to Mk XII. Crafted ones are account bound.
- Rom Embassy Science Consoles are a good source but character bound and have some additional bonus. A key thing to mention is the +/- Threat mods on them. If you intend to use Feedback Pulse, which requires you getting shot at, you want + Threat, not - Threat.
- Universal Console from Nukara Rep gives a moderate boost to PGen
- Dyson Grav Torp in Torp Spread fire alongside Grav Well is a terrific addition to these kind of builds.
Weapons aren't really as big a factor on Science Vessels. Specifically Energy Weapons since power is diverted usually to Aux Power and then Shield Power, in that priority. So Energy Weapons typically are too low powered to make them matter much. But Torps however are a different story since their performance is not tied to Weapons Power (just as long as there is power in that system, no matter how little, they'll function just fine).
As a TAC Captain, your Attack Pattern Alpha will play an absolutely critical role. When you have your abilities charged up, Aux Power going, etc, pop APA and let it rip. The key thing with certain Attack Patterns are the ones that boost ALL damage. Unlike SCI Captains with their "Conservation of Energy" trait, they require to be shot at to benefit from the trait. Sometimes that's hard to do when you're teamed with teammates that can do quite a bit of DPS. But a TAC Captain? He's not restrained by that. Pop APA and you dictate when you want to begin your PGen-based attacks. It may not sound like much, but a TAC Captain in a Science Vessel dictates when he wants to do things offensively, unlike SCI Captains.
The key PGen-based Science BOFF abilities are the following:
- Gravity Well - Awesome CC (stuff a bit of Gravity Well Generator Skill to make it worthwhile) and damage it does is determined by PGen. Damage bypasses shields.
- Tractor Beam Repulsor - Bypass shields and can do terrific damage. By default, TBR pushes targets away. There are Voth Tractor Beam Officer DOFFs to change the push effect to a pull one. This is what you want to happen. DOFFed TBR is typically the centerpiece PGen attack for a number of players, but it's not the only one.
- Feedback Pulse - Ships that use Energy Weapon attacks on you with this ability on will be damaged in return. This has mostly been a PVP-oriented one that can literally allow an attacker to Alpha Strike hiimself to death in seconds. In PVE however, the impact isn't as high. You need tremendous threat to get NPCs to shoot at you to make this work. Kind of tricky to do if you have teammates that do good damage. However, I have found that doing CC then AOE damage abilities on bunched up NPCs tends to guarantee their aggro going to you no matter what. So if you use FBP, pop it after you get this attention. Doing something like Grav Well + Dyson Grav Torp with Torp Spread + Flying in the middle of it and using DOFFed TBR guarantees NPC aggro going towards you. Once they do this, pop FBP.
- Photonic Shockwave - Not as much attention paid to this ability. It can do pretty decent damage but the effect is heavily lowered by shields being up. There's also a DOFF that gives chances to cause PSW aftershocks on targets hit by it. A major thing to consider is that PSW has a knockback effect. This is NOT what you want early on, nor is it what you want if your team has targets bunched up in a perfect killing zone. PSW can be very powerful but it takes greater care to use than unDOFFed TBR.
Also, Flanking damage benefits PGen attacks also. If you have the Flanking bonus from Intel Specialization, this works. A little tactic, for example, is popping Grav Well on the NPCs, seeing their general forward orientation, approach them in a way that you are behind most of them, then pop something like DOFFed TBR for extra damage.
Take a look at the DOFFs for different effects.
Lastly, because I'm sure this confusion will set in sooner or later, here is a dev post on what counts as Exotic Damage. And FYI, Plasma DOTs do not get boosted by Particle Generator Skill. I was mistaken on that for a while until somewhat recently.
Edit: Here are some other bonus and Universal Consoles that benefit from high PGen Skill.
- Isometric Charge - If you can cram this in with a high PGen build, it wreaks havok on bunched up enemies. Highly, highly recommended.
- Delta Weapon Set - 3 piece bonus "Isokinetic Cannon" - If you have very high PGen Skill, this ability is awesome. Also on a 1 minute CD. One of the shortest CDs for a bonus in STO
There's far more out there if you dig enough, some forgotten about ingame.
But what about crtd?
There are universal consoles that give crtd and those spire consoles.
Would that make sense with exotic dmg and r&d science trait? (400 part gens is kinda easy to reach meaning 100% crit on exotic with this trait).
Or does exotic crit dmg not get boosted by normal crtd?
These days, I fly science vessels exclusively (Wells, Palisade and Dauntless). So I figure I'd throw in my 2 cents as well
As an alternate to the Solanae Deflector, the Counter-Command Deflector array is pretty nice as well. It's not too far off from the Solanae Deflector at ~26 PartGens at MkXII. I like using that and the Counter Command engines for a nice boost in defense (+5% from engines, +5% from 2 piece bonus). More defense makes it a bit easier to use the +Th Science consoles warmaker001b mentioned. I also use the Solanae Shields for more damage reduction (Reslient and 10% reduction of damage to shields). Solanae core for more AUX power of course, as it raises the AUX cap by 5.
I do fly with power in both AUX and Weapons, instead of AUX and Shields like suggested above, and I find I still can keep up great power levels, usually capped weapons and aux, 100 shields, and around 70 engines (give or take). Use a plasmonic leech.
I also use plasma weapons, just for the normal reason of getting a little more +Plasma from the Science Embassy consoles. With 4 science consoles with +Plasma, that essentially gives me +1 tactical slot.
I also use the Conductive RCS Accelerator engineering console with +PartGen (so essentially +1 Science console slot), and an Exotic Particle Field Exciter with +PartGen (so another +1 Science console effectively).
OSS is awesome (if you have a ship that can slot Intel powers), getting AUX to insane levels = more damage.
I'll just leave you with my current Dauntless build that's been working well for me. Ideally everything would be MKXIV Epic, but I'm on a spending strike right now
http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skillplanner/index.php?build=sardocpartgendauntless_1328
I actually use 2 +Th consoles and 2 -Th consoles. Too many +Th consoles, and the Borg kill me in STFs. Too little, and I don't get the nice science trait and reciprocity trait bonus that occur when being shot at.. so it's good to balance it
Regarding crtd, I don't believe it impacts exotic damage, but I wouldn't swear to that. I'm kind of curious now as well..
How much did you pay for the Conductive and Exotic Particle consoles? :eek:
Conductive, it cost a lot (kind of), but... well.. The Exotic Particle console I crafted myself... I probably crafted ~50 of those things before finally getting the PartGen one, but the good thing is that I sold the rest of the consoles for a profit, and that profit is what bought me the Conductive console. So net cost to me for both of those, nothing
Unless you mean the cost to get them to Epic MkXIV... the science one I crafted my own upgrade tech. The Engineer one though, that cost quite a bit of EC, as I'm not level 15 crafting in engineering yet...
ah, thanks. I should have started with the Sci School it seems. you level them up more than 15?
Yeah, but only because I was mass producing Exotic Particle Field Exciters looking for a PartGen one... I bought a few of the Xindi R&D DOffs for science when they were first released and relatively cheap compared to now, so had multiple of those consoles being produced at a time... no real benefit past 15, other then Ultra Rare chances. I won't be doing that for any of the other schools though, once they are also at lv15. Just no benefit.
I went for science first because of the trait... it's an amazing trait, I don't see how you can make a science build without it anymore
A strong science vessel build will be quite expensive, but it is worth it. Take your time though and experiment with different abilities and gear to find out what is best for your playstyle.
Science vessel are not escorts. That means you don't do damage with beams. Run full aux and use some torpedoes. Combine that with the T4 Nukara rep traits. For highest aux: obelisk warp core. Override subsytem safety protocols should work too to get ~160 aux for a short time (not sure though).
Combine exotic damage with some drain. Grav well is not that good, if your targets escapes it. Use polaron beam for example and plasmonic leech/acetons , if you have. As abilities add energy siphon and tykens rift to your list. Tykens and Grav well share 15 second cooldown, so use them as combo with energy siphon, subsystem targeting (engine) and other stuff in between. Tykens rift also deals good damage buffed by particle generators. Grav well, tykens and energy siphon each have a chance to trigger deflector doffs -->
As doffs: 2 deflector officers are very useful. If you can afford, look at the Xindi doffs. There are two useful ones (Mizuab and Amsoti). One disables engines with grav well, the other has a chance to increase exotic damage when using EP2Aux. EP2Aux also gives you some particle/graviton generators (and subspace decompiler).
I'm working up the mission chains at the moment and haven't reached the Solane missions yet for the equipment, but as mentioned - the cc equipment may work just as well :-)
If that's true (I do not own that weapon) then things have changed a bit. Note the date of the dev post. Everything else I've seen though still follows that general rule.
The information in this thread has been an enormous help to me, even though I'm working with a Vesta t5u rather than a Scryer. Thanks so much to all who contributed.
But I can't figure what "emission torpedo" we are talking about. Can someone help me out here, please?
Excellent! Thank you so much.
I do have a toon with Projectiles 15. I just lack the DOFF. Ugh.
Hell, I have all the R&D skills at 15, on one toon or another. The problem is that I decided which toon would research what before I knew about the traits received at level 15, and I did a very poor job of distributing things.
Failing to plan is planning to fail, as my stepfather used to tell me, and for all his uncountable a-hole qualities, he had an annoying habit of being right about such things...
It's not boosted by aux but apparently it is boosted by part. gens.
The DoT is decent; but the near hold/hold power of the PEP's cloud is nice.
I just built myself one of these PEP torpedoes, slapped it on my trusty Vesta t5u in place of the Dual AP Beam Banks, swapped BO2 for TS2, and took it out to Borg Disconnected. I did have the PEP Torp on autofire.
Looking at the stats afterward in CLR, I was surprised to note that while the damage from the actual PEP Torp was only 2.5% of total damage table, the "Plasma Particle Emission" was a bit over 12% of total table.
(edit: slight correction. I missed the separate line for TS2. Total actual damage for torp itself was about 6%)
I also noticed that the trait Omega Kinetic Shearing did more damage than usual.
For the record, my Particle Generator skill is in the 250-275 range, before QSM.
The linked thread was started by me. I'm glad to see it has been of use
To clarify, the Particle Emission Plasma Cloud damage (6 second AoE DoT in 3km radius sphere):
I have parsed 9.6K DPS in an ISA PUG with the Particle Emission Plasma Torpedo (Pathfinder), with over 7K DPS from the cloud itself.
I find that result outstanding for one weapon slot on a Science ship. I have yet to match it with a different torpedo in that build, for that situation.
In this thread are some parse breakouts with the PEP Torpedo in 38K DPS ISA PUG, with 20K (over 50%) as Exotic damage.
One analysis from that thread with Exotic Damage breakout, while also showing the Torpedo damage (which is parsed as 5 different parts that need to be added together).
My PartGens is only at 236 in this build as well, which means higher PartGens would boost the damage further!
_______________
I have done extensive testing on the PEP Torpedo. I find it to be an excellent torpedo that has been under-utilized and undervalued by the build community to date - which is understandable since there was previously a lack of accurate data about how it works and performs.
To that end I have made several posts here and in /r/STOBuilds laying out what the torpedo is capable of and how it works.
Whether the Torpedo is useful or not for a particular build is up to the individual to decide, of course - but hopefully the additional information helps all captains make more informed choices on the options available.
Cheers!
I have never used the special plasma R&D torps before, but if that's true that PGens improve the Plasma Burns, that goes everything Cryptic had done with Plasma DOTs before. Originally, Plasma DOTs from weapons were PGen based but that got nerfed long, long ago. Now this weapon has PGen based Plasma AOE DOTs. Interesting. Not that I'm complaining, because my dedicated Science oriented ships need the extra firepower one way or another.
My own theory, based on other things I've read on forums, is that the game mechanic of the cloud from the Particle Emissions Plasma Torpedo was constructed very similar to Eject Warp Plasma. So perhaps it's "bypassing" the usual rules due to how it was constructed.
Purely conjecture on my part though.
I too like how it is and am not complaining
That's a fair guess considering how EWP works.