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tbh it was something I had overheard in our sort of "fleet chat" (actually a private channel consisting of all of the fleets in our armada and our KDF armada as well), at the time I didn't have decent enough weapons to really check the prices.Simon_Jester wrote:Er... are we talking about antiproton mag regulators or antiproton weapons?Lord Revan wrote:oh? I heard decent AP ones went for 14 mil EC (aka 4 mil above my cap even if I had reached the EC cap) or so.
Okay, mag regulators are more expensive than the corresponding consoles of other damage types, true- probably because so many people covet antiproton weapons as damage dealers. Here's the catch, though.
Each increase in rarity or mark on a mag regulator increases its damage bonus by roughly 2%. Thus, for instance, a Rare Mk XII mag regulator boosts 28.1%, while an Uncommon Mk XI regulator boosts damage by 24.4%.
So the question you have to ask yourself is, how much is the damage boost worth? If I bought the four cheapest mag regulators on the Exchange at this very moment, I'd spend a total of 185000 EC for two common and two uncommon Mk XII consoles, with total damage boost of 101.2%.
Or I could pay 50k for another two Uncommon Mk XIIs instead of 40k and 45k for two Commons. Total damage boost is now 104.8%, and I paid an extra 15000 energy credits for it. Total cost is 200000 EC. Paying 15000 EC for an extra 3.6% damage seems reasonable.
But to do better than THAT, I need to either buy Rare Mk XIIs, or Uncommon Mk XIIIs.
...
If I swap out a Rare Mk XII for one of the Uncommons, total price of the set of four goes from 200k to 350k EC, while the damage boost only increases from 104.8% to 106.7%. Paying 15k EC for an extra 4% damage sounded good... does paying 150k for another 2%?
Buying four Rare Mk XIIs to replace the four Uncommons will set me back 950k EC. So going from four Uncommon Mk XIIs to one step up from there costs me an extra three quarters of a million EC. And in exchange, my damage bonus from tactical consoles goes from 104.8% to a whopping 112.4%.
Buying four Ultra Rare Mk XIIs would cost me 3590k EC for a damage bonus of 120%. Compared to that relatively cheap set of Uncommons, I've shelled out an additional three point four million EC in exchange for a damage output increase of roughly 15% over my base damage.
And let's not even talk about Mk XIII regulators. As I write this there are two Ultra Rare Mk XIIIs for sale at five million EC apiece. There are also some Rare Mk XIVs on sale for 4.45 to 4.5 million. Either way they provide a damage bonus of a whopping 31.9%...
In other words, they perform about 6.3% better in relative terms than the Ultra Rare Mk XII that costs roughly 85% less. And the Ultra Rare in turn performs about 6.7% better than the Rare Mk XII that costs about 78% less, and the Rare performs 6.8% better than the Uncommon that costs about 75% less.
...
And if we start thinking in terms of dilithium costs, well... the closest way I know to equating EC and dilithium costs is to look at how both convert to Fleet credits, or to assess them in terms of contraband prices (since in effect you can buy 2000 dilithium ore for five units of contraband, and you can buy five contraband on the Exchange). Fleet credit prices indicate that 1 dilithium is worth 100 EC. Contraband prices have been down since they quintupled the cooldown on the Turn In Contraband duty officer mission, and you can get 2000 dilithium for just over 150000 EC at the moment, indicating a market value of 77.5 EC/dilithium.
Being generous, then, the cost of that massive array of Ultra Rare Mk XII mag regulators measured in equivalent dilithium is going to be something like 36000 dil. Almost all of which is spent buying that last extra 8% of damage output.
Clearly, pursuing the highest possible damage bonuses results in you hitting the point of diminishing returns.
...
Now, there are a lot of situations where this makes sense.
Say, if you're a person with leveled-up captains that have good crafting skills who can make up three million EC in a few days of selling Superior upgrade kits.
Or if you're a person who actually spends significant money on the game, in which case that three million EC corresponds to roughly sixty or seventy cents of real money as soon as you start selling keys on the Exchange.
Or if you are desperately struggling to raise your DPS because it's a penis length substitute for you.
...
But by and large, in my honest opinion it is just not worth it to invest in the most powerful possible tactical consoles, unless you are already in a maxed-out endgame condition and are deliberately trying to 'optimize' your damage output beyond the already-formidable levels your ship can probably achieve on its own.
So I say, buy second-best, use a battery of Rare Mk XIIs on the Exchange. It costs so very, very much less and gives you results that are almost as impressive.
I did wonder if they were any good, in particular with regard to the consoles and starship traits, or whether I'd be better off buying either of the T6 battlecruiser packs. My main character is also on the verge of reaching T5 on the temporal rep system, so it looks like I'll be crafting a whole bunch of sponsorship tokens.mr friendly guy wrote:Discount ship time. So I got the 31st century temporal ships, and boy they look beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Narcine I wanted to get. Oh well, don't need to get the Narcine anymore. So far I plan to replay various episodes using all these new ships on harder levels. Some of the ship traits are pretty good, like 15% exotic damage bonus. So now I have pretty much 4 temporal ships including the mirror universe version and 5 if you count the Krenim annorax dreadnought.
The dreadnought has a 15% exotic bonus. Plan to get the ship to full mastery and use that slot for my more science based ones. So far only trying out the dreadnought, but I believe I have slotted 2 consoles into it (one from this ship and one from another 31st century temporal ship).EnterpriseSovereign wrote:I did wonder if they were any good, in particular with regard to the consoles and starship traits, or whether I'd be better off buying either of the T6 battlecruiser packs. My main character is also on the verge of reaching T5 on the temporal rep system, so it looks like I'll be crafting a whole bunch of sponsorship tokens.mr friendly guy wrote:Discount ship time. So I got the 31st century temporal ships, and boy they look beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Narcine I wanted to get. Oh well, don't need to get the Narcine anymore. So far I plan to replay various episodes using all these new ships on harder levels. Some of the ship traits are pretty good, like 15% exotic damage bonus. So now I have pretty much 4 temporal ships including the mirror universe version and 5 if you count the Krenim annorax dreadnought.
As I'm more tactically-focused I've gone for the Command Battlecruiser pack, expending the majority of my Zen. I feel a bit lightheaded nowmr friendly guy wrote:The dreadnought has a 15% exotic bonus. Plan to get the ship to full mastery and use that slot for my more science based ones. So far only trying out the dreadnought, but I believe I have slotted 2 consoles into it (one from this ship and one from another 31st century temporal ship).EnterpriseSovereign wrote:I did wonder if they were any good, in particular with regard to the consoles and starship traits, or whether I'd be better off buying either of the T6 battlecruiser packs. My main character is also on the verge of reaching T5 on the temporal rep system, so it looks like I'll be crafting a whole bunch of sponsorship tokens.mr friendly guy wrote:Discount ship time. So I got the 31st century temporal ships, and boy they look beautiful. They kind of remind me of the Narcine I wanted to get. Oh well, don't need to get the Narcine anymore. So far I plan to replay various episodes using all these new ships on harder levels. Some of the ship traits are pretty good, like 15% exotic damage bonus. So now I have pretty much 4 temporal ships including the mirror universe version and 5 if you count the Krenim annorax dreadnought.
My situation is a bit of a strange one. I started of as a science toon, but since it was my first time playing STO it was easier to build up his tactical skills and play like a tactical. So far I haven't seen the need to play as another toon, although I might try a Romulan build later on. I have since collected lots of ships and can make them competitive at Elite level against the game (maybe not so much against other players). I haven't felt the need to respec everytime I try a different build. So I basically have the command bundles, the pilot ships and now the temporal ships. I have also collected the Dominion ships, all Herald ships and now all Na'khul ships. I haven't played much with ships which are classified as raiders, but oh boy, their flexibility in BOFFs allows me to try different configurations. It certainly is more flexible than the Herald Baltim raider.EnterpriseSovereign wrote: As I'm more tactically-focused I've gone for the Command Battlecruiser pack, expending the majority of my Zen. I feel a bit lightheaded now
I pretty much am stocked up with antiproton boosters from my fleet. My ships that use antiproton beams though aren't the stock standard ones with crit, since I use ones for bonuses. I must say when I first started playing, the advice on this board was either phasers or polarons for the proc to weaken the enemy ships. Now it might be antiproton and I might have to create a dedicated antiproton ship, which is going to cost me shit loads of dilithium for the beam arrays.Simon_Jester wrote:Mag regulators are more expensive because they're in higher demand, because everyone and their cousin is using antiproton weapons for the crit severity boost.
Just crafting them using items I have accumulated over the last year from playing. I have a 70 + percent chance of getting a very rare mark 12, otherwise I get a rare mark 12. I don't bother upgrading them beyond that and just sell it for slightly less than 1 million EC. EC has traditionally been what has limited me getting upgrades, unless one goes to a gold farmer. Dilithium while harder to get in game (at least for me) is easy enough to get if you are willing to expend real money. Several times I just buy zen from cryptic (rather than from steam so you get bonus zen) and then change it for dilithium on the exchange. Yeah I know, grinding as oppose to instant self gratification, but hey, you got the money, why not spend it?Simon_Jester wrote:What I'm getting at is that lots of other people use antiproton weapons, because the increased critical damage results in high DPS (or is believed to result in high DPS). I honestly have no idea if that is or isn't true. But antiproton weapons are arguably the single most popular damage type for space combat, especially at high levels. Which easily explains why high-end mag regulators are even more expensive than comparable damage-boosting consoles for other damage types.
Also, are you buying the parts for those Mk XII mag regulators on the Exchange, or making them from your own dilithium? Because I'm not sure it turns out so amazingly profitable if you use your own dilithium.
It's something like that, but a lot of the strategies for high DPS revolve around maximizing critical hits.Elheru Aran wrote:As noted earlier, while I suppose you can really max out your DPS with AP, the gain from what I understand is only marginal. Sort of like say you can do 100 DPS with an all-phaser setup, but with antiproton you can do... 103!
*shrugs* that might be inaccurate, but that's how I understand it. Recent revamp to a phaser build aside, I don't really care about min-maxing.
]Those are both good and respectable points. You can do high DPS with any damage type- it's simplybilateralrope wrote:I just decided to get semi-serious about my ship build. So I switched to disruptor beam arrays + disruptor induction coil consoles.
Sure, antiproton might give me more DPS. But the disruptor proc would boost the damage of anyone I'm flying with and I like the look of disruptor beams better than antiproton.
- Orbital strike kills. Even while underground or aboard someone else's ship.
- Bridge officer with cover shield who didn't want me shooting enemies. She doesn't get to beam down any more.
!Yeah, that's problematic. Though usually when it's important you can open it again (it doesn't go away until you've read through it), and you can always check your logs (press L) to reread what was said.- NPC dialog that I can't read, either due to speech bubbles off screen or combat forcing me to click through it in a hurry because the enemies started shooting when the text box popped up.
Yes, I could do that. I probably should.Simon_Jester wrote:You do realize you can just train your bridge officers in different skills and set them to do something else; if you want her summoning medical generators or turrets instead of cover shields, you can do that..
Yeah, that's a known thing. It generally goes in alphabetical order for things like that, so if your ship was the Anonymous Waters (for an example) it would more than likely display properly.bilateralrope wrote:Also of note is that Clock of Need is my runabout. My cruiser, the only ship I've flown today, is the Unknown Waters*. Which means that my runabout has a "sickbay".