This may seem messed up, but I prefer the andorian phasers on my tos Connie. I only have the basic Connie, but I'd love a t6 fleet one. That would be splendid.
@@DOGGEDROMAN I have the Tier One Connie, and its Twin Phasers can be upgraded. There is also a mission line, the one with the Devidians around Drozana staion. One of these missions give out the retrofit phaser bank as a story reward. Now your Connie looks even better, but it's nostly that classic sound when they fire. I'm rocking those with Andorian and Discovery on the TOS Akira and it's just glorious.
@@redelephantsdotnl if I Ever get the Connie of my choice, that fleet light thing looks wicked. I guess 8m just carrier biased. The mirror universe klingon vo'quv carrier with advanced raiders started the addiction. Drozna station rocks. "Then and now" styling, and the creepy "where are you, bonnie-kin?". Yup. Those are what I started with on my first character, but I don't get to play more than once or twice a year.
@@DOGGEDROMAN Is that the Disco/SNW Connie? Man, I love that thing I don't have im game, but I recently bought a model of it to glorify my living room. Truth be told, I haven't really found a true carrier I liked to play yet. My Scimitar is among the most fun to play, and it carries two Malem frigates. They do nothing, but look awesome.
But that would mean saving precious thousands in zen on having to quickly upgrade the right gear and consoles that boosts the damage along with them, can't have that 😆
Nice to see a breakdown of something like this. But also shows why most people say it's more important to choose your weapon on what visual effects you prefer versus the weapon proc. 😆
Or audio! The linked phasers, the advanced/covert and TOS phasers make my ears BLEED. I’ll take TWOK phaser sounds before these stupidly high pitched phasers.
Everything I know about Phasers is a lie!😭 The Agony Phaser test is pretty heartbreaking given how much I've invested in them. All because of a poorly formatted tooltip, classic Cryptic. Though Advanced and PEN Phasers coming in at first and second is a bit of a relief; if you have the 10th Anniversary bundle you've got those unlocked on your whole account, and PEN phasers, like you said, are easily crafted. Holy crap, I'm finally going to have a reason to craft something other than Energy Amps and Deuterium Surplus lol. I was surprised at how well PEN Phasers did. I knew it was the best of those special crafted mods, but always figured you'd be better off with the DMG mod it replaces (or CrtD for us non-TACs). It's actually kind of funny that they out performed all the lockbox flavors (and is also good news for all my TNG theme builds lol). With PEN doing so well for phasers, I'm really curious how it would stack up for the other energy weapon damage types. I assume Spiral Wave would still be #1 for disruptors, and after watching this, Advanced Disruptors at #2 and PEN at #3. Antiproton might me awkward to test because of Ba'ul weapons, you'd probably have to spawn in a couple more test dummies to give them something to refract off of.
Thank you for running these tests and putting together such a great presentation on them. I also love that we got to see the visuals in action. Much of how I choose the weapons really does depend on if they match the ship thematically (Advanced for my Connie, Pulse for my Mirandas, Etc) but I've always wondered how much DPS I'm leaving on the table doing that.
Fascinating video. I will definitely rethink some of my phaser builds and see if there is improvement. I'd love to see this same type of tests on disrupter, polaron, and such. I remember a couple of years back when a disruptor beam build was "meta". I'd like to see how much that has changed.
Thanks for the testing & presentation. I'm not surprised by the performances of the Advanced & Crafted (Pen). Crafted (Pen) I think are the overall best value. I'm angry at myself about the Agony since I was still thinking they were performing like the initial Cryptic announcement, but I'm also not surprised by such a misrepresentation & should know better by now. I think Cryptic would serve the players well just to upgrade all weapon modifiers to 5% for niche builds.
I've always heard that the type of weapon matters less than the rarity, and I feel like this gives more proof to that argument. So run whatever you want it, buff it appropriately, and enjoy the Space Barbie!
Thank you for this most excellent video. I’m surprised about the agony phasers since they’ve been so hyped in DPS videos. Guess it’s time to dust off all those sidelined [Pen] phasers
What this tells me, more than anything, is that the difference really isn't worth putting a whole lot of time and/or effort into it. Use what you want. Like the look of normal phasers? Crafted is better, but if you just want to buy fleet copies for the instant ultra-rare, do it! Pulse phasers for a TWOK era ship? Hell yeah, do it! TOS phasers for your Temporal Agent? Go for it! Same for Disco, though I can't fathom why. It's why I switched over from trying to make the best possible builds to the best possible theme builds. Makes things so much easier, and less complicated. For instance, my Odyssey has the wide-angle quantum torpedo launcher, the prolonged engagement beam array, the trilithium-enhanced beam array, and then five advanced fleet phasers, because all of those just look like normal phaser beams and torpedoes.
I've been away from STO for a very long time and I'm considering returning with a nice phaser beam build. This guide has been really helpful. Thanks man 🖖
Only 1 of my Carriers use Agony Phaser beams... One Jem'Hadar Carrier uses the Polaron beam setup. The rest of my Carriers use Corrosive Plasma beams. I may take a peek to see if I can craft some Plasma beams and get Pen. Thanks for the video !
I just built a set of gear (mostly, the AEGIS set was hanging around from waaaaaaay back when you still went to Memory Alpha to craft things) for my Legendary Mirror Dreadnaught (or whatever the Mirror Gal-X is properly called) and I went with [Pen] just because I wanted a crafted mod and that was the best looking one. Super surprised to learn they're actually IN the Meta at all.
What a great video. I am very surprised at the results. Would you please do a similar video for Disruptors, and Polaron beams? Would love to learn how the Cardassian Spiral wave disruptors stack up.
This is one of the things I really do like and appreciate about Star Trek Online. They do bring out new tech / weapons / ships etc on a regular base but they keep some sort of balance throughout even with older ships and weapons. That means in a nutshell a player who is on a 5 or 6 year old build is not completely outgunned from the outset but can still somewhat compete with the newest and latest builds. An older ship that is build well with a player who knows how to fly it and use it can still beat the latest and newest in a combat. I think this is one of the features that keeps the game interesting and playable.
This was a great video! I'm glad to know that I'm not really losing any DPS at all by running my crafted [pen] phasers on my main for thematic reasons. And with all the other variations being within ~5% of the top 2, it's clear that space barbie choices are perfectly valid.
amazing, i was just switching to the clarke , and as a federation ship i wanted some matching weapons , its good to know that stock phasers with pen are the best option while being lore friendly and not making my ears bleed. 9/10, would have loved to also get a quick visual/audio bit with overload and fire at will , but hey it was not the scope of this video.
Great testing! Results surprised me. In rando's I know I am mostly the one debuffing with Att Pattern Beta and the like. I wonder how many of us need to actually debuff to make the difference between advanced and pen. The difference even then though probably is pretty small
pen loses out to a DMG mod at -140 drr. You have -10 from the skilltree, so you need -130 elsehow. five attack pattern beta 1s or 3 attack pattern beta3s are -150. Sad, Cold-hearted and other AOE debuffs add more on top.
Interesting results....I expected the advanced to do well, problem is I don't like to broad side and there are no DBBs or omni for that matter. I have all these weapons and I like my pulse for barbie builds... pretty much everything thing else is agony or pen. In the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter what I run because whatever I shoot at melts lol. I even have a CRF covert build that does well in elite. I was hoping the obliviating weapons would be a bit better, maybe have a reasonable PVP application but I guess not. Thanks for the vid sir.
As a new player I'm delighted to see that regardless of the phaser choice options, they're all kinda close on each other for performance and no one phaser type stands out as hugely superior or over-powered which tends to be the case in a lot of games for that pay2win cashcow ingredient. With me, I'm more about the authentics of this game and grew up watching TNG, so I'll definitely be looking to have orange phaser beams firing from my Galaxy Class etc, but now I'll know that I'll not be at a big disadvantage for doing so and not "But the blue phasers deal twice the damage noob!" situation lol. So thanks for that. Besides, I play this game to escape the hectic PvP demands of other games and to chill, kick back, and PvE, but it's still nice to know standard orange "classic" phasers can slap as hard as the best of them. 👌
In a strange way, the results of this test actually make me very, very happy as someone who plays primarily for RP-ing. I've always been bothered by the idea that Agony Phasers are the best but look most like regular phasers because unless I'm doing a Terran theme, there's no way any of my main Fed ships are going to ever call their weapons "agony weapons" - it just doesn't feel right. It feels weird to me, so knowing that regular phasers with the Pen mod actually perform better but look visually the same gives me a lot more confidence, both as someone who makes theme builds with more interesting setups than just Isomags and Bellums and as someone who wants to perform well with said builds. Thanks for the breakdown! :)
Honestly, without being condescending. I agree with @bcdmasamune. As it appears that there is only like a 2-5% differential between the various phaser sets, it would mean that there is not a large enough amount of damage afflicted by them to choose by using damage as a meter. Instead the “real” difference shown is how they look when firing to what you wanted to have on your ship build. If damage differences were like 20% or more. Then yeah, damage would be more sensible to be used to decide which phaser to use. Not to invalidate this video as if it did not exist, we’d never get to know this. So good work on the comparison!
I used to like them years ago. But now I use a mix that includes the Terran beam and some Sensor Linked and some Omnis and the Immolating Phaser Lance.
Sensor Linked are being under-rated by this test, as that 2% per weapon of CrtD affects not just those weapons, but *all* weapons. Your nice and very powerful Terran Beam Array, as well as whatever torp or set weapon you're running along side it, is also getting an extra 6% CrtD on themselves too, which will move your total weapon DPS higher than just what those beams gain by themselves.
the obiviating phaser proc is good if you use the skills that target multi enemies as its per weapon and thus if you have it built right the proc will apply to each ship without the need to worry about which enemy is hit by it
Nope. I definitely did _not_ expect crafted to top the list. I think I'll go make some now. While I'm thinking of it, my Spirals always seem to do more than my Terran Disruptors even with their scaling ability. Thank you!
To quote Paul Harrell, "not enough difference to make a difference" You might as well just pick between crafted and advanced based on your circumstances. Do you have more money or more time =D or both. You basically can't go wrong. But if you have that critical chance you should absolutely go advanced.
I'm a sucker for a good TOS build and I love the TOS-style phasers from K-13. I also love classic TNG-style phasers with that whine they make. I wish the game would let you change the visuals of your weapons to suit your builds, like you can with vanity shields. Plenty of us would pay real $ to further customize our builds. I also wish they would design more TOS-style ship skins for 24th and 25th century ships. Imagine a 23rd century version of the Galaxy, Sovereign, or Intrepid-classes. I'd be over that like white on rice.
If you want to run an interesting experiment... test a 100% reputation weapon skittle build vs the phaser options. Swap out the phaser dmg consoles for +beam. Load the terran/disco/lukari/romulan/Gamma/Ico... I often run a Reputation skittle with a crafted [pen] omni being the only non rep weapon. 2% bonus dmg on all of them at T6... + you can combo lukari technical overload / Terran / Disco for high dmg... Romulan for a bit more power eff with no real dmg loss, gamma omni for debuff. I have fund it surprisingly viable, the 2% bonus I feel makes up for the slight cat 1 loss going with beam consoles.
Awesome vid, good old Crafted Pen is still near the top. Probably not for every damage type, however could you run this with Disruptors? I honestly thought agony would be a little better. Honestly I am not disappointed, at all this just reinforces my observations since I am way to lazy to do a test like this lol. Thanks for the vid.
IIUC, each time you fire 6 Advanced, you stand a 30% chance in total of 1 of them proccing 60% CritD on all of them for 15 secs. That seems really good.
Interesting test. I would have removed the extra power boosts from tac & other boost consoles, to more accurately represent the phasers themselves, otherwise surely the results are skewed
I'm glad everyone forgotten about this, unless something changed and they were made better at some point and they got buffed, currently selling off some infinity weapon boxes i've had for years after just coming back to the game again, selling the terran weapon boxes for 10-11m each compared to other boxes which are like 6-8m, lol.
My builds are a little more specialized. I have a character with the Fleet Phantom Intel Escort, two with the Section 31 Intel Science Destroyer, and another with the Section 31 Command Heavy Battle Cruiser. For all these builds I prefer the Covert Phaser weapons: beams for the battle cruiser, and cannons and turrets for the escort and destroyers. Given the nature of those ships, covert weapons make sense, and they work very well. Another character I have pilots the Scott Operations Miracle Worker Cruiser as a tank build. For that one I have the Integrity Linked Phaser beam arrays. My final two characters are a torpedo build and a Sci/EPG build with torpedos. Both have one reputation beam array, mostly as a set bonus.
Great test, great results, and lovely recap on the crafting/upgrading. I will watch your crafting video now you mention it. I last played in 2016 when crafting/upgrading was not in the game,.
Well shoot, I threw away so many [Pen] phasers while crafting... This is why I'm glad you're here. I'd be very interested to see a similar comparison for the other damage types, particularly disruptors.
Hey Spencer, I started playing around 8 years ago and this DPS'er told me that mathematically [PEN] was equivalent to [CRTD] x4. I had a hard time believing this, but since they were close to the [CRTD] stacking Advanced Phasers that you tested; it appears to have some truth to it. In that regard, crafted weapons back then was apparently the META, and lock box weapons was bling bling for Barbie and Malibu Stacy captains. Not that there is any problem with that, I am definitely a Space Barbie.
Pen is just 10 armor pen, meaning you get an additional -10 drr on your target with that weapon. -DRR has dminishing returns, cat2 (aka crtD) scales up linearly, and dmg mods are always 3% final increases each. 1 DMG mod overtakes a PEN mod if the drr on the target is below -140, which is reached quite fast in pugs and can be achieved solo as well.
For everybody wondering, a [dmg] mod overtakes [pen] if the -drr on the target exceeds -140. A single Attack Pattern Beta III debuffs by -49.8 and Betas stack between entities applying them. Coldhearted is another -50 and SAD is -30. Skilltree also provides -10. Pen performing better at a low level is expected, not surprising, and they lose their advantage quite fast.
Regardless of what does or does not do well, the covert phasers are my favourite hands down as they are the only beams in the game that are thin enough and solid enough and that fire in a pattern that looks sort of like a continuous beam most of the time, I cannot stress enough how much I do not like the stupid 4 blast sequence phasers have or how fat the beams are on most of them, I wish we just had a normal phaser beam that fired a nice thin but not too thin orange beam as a continuous beam sweeping across the enemy ship rather than pulsing, with the beam overload having our ships arrays do the charge up effect before firing a slightly thicker brighter beam for a longer duration... leave the quick phaser blasts for fire at will.
Thanks for the testing. I heard that Beam Overload is supposed to improve the proc chance, as BO reduces firing speed by half, does the proc chance double so that it would be equal to "normal" firing, or is there a greater than double proc chance during Beam Overload? Wondering how these weapon type would perform under beam overload if the proc change is greater than double. As far as I'm aware Surgical Strike does not increase proc chance per shot, as beam overload has been said to? Would it be worth doing a similar test with Disruptors, particularly spiral wave - as they have a visual that could be passed off a phaser on a fed ship.
I would love a breakdown of the other energy weapon types. I currently use Polaron with on an EPG build because I refuse to just float around with torpedoes only. Find out there is a better energy type for EPG would be nice if it’s not what I’m running.
Yeah, I'd expect things to be much closer with DBB. Crafted [Pen] would have a lead in a low debuff environment, then everything else would be quite comparable.
You’ve always been able to craft weapons in game. If I recall they just weren’t as good as what you could get out of the fleet store. Don’t forget Memory Alpha was a thing. I kept some old beam array and torpedo schematics around just for nostalgia purposes. I still hate the direction they took crafting and I miss Memory Alpha.
Pen have always been the all around best weapons in the game. Been telling everyone that forever and almost no one ever believes me. Sure if you are running content with some strong team debuff they loose the pen sparkle... but then they are basically just even with everything else. Even in those cases it only takes a few hits on less debuffed targets for the pen goodness to do its thing.
I've just come back to STO after 6 years, and Your videos are fantastic. Do we know if they ever updated the agony phasers in the intervening time to proc more? I still hear that they are the best phasers in the game
@Spencer, totally not on the topic of phasers, but along the same line. Now that the game is 14 years old, it would be great for a new examination of old ship sets in the game and how they rank up with newer sets. I'm talking about the old Borg sets (Omega, MACO) the Tholian, Dyson, Romulan and Reman sets, etc. It seems like the meta now is mixing and matching set pieces. Is it even worth hanging onto these old sets or are we better off making space in our inventory for other items.
As a beam boat I found this very useful. Getting the Terran Beam Array now. I do have a question, how do the Targeting-Linked Phasers stack up? Since they give an accuracy and boff buff?
Spencer, I’m wondering what impact beam overload has on proc chance. As it’s 1 shot instead of 4 per cycle do you only get one roll of 2.5% or is it buffed or something?
I have access to Advanced Phasers, but I usually end up using other types (unless I'm doing a theme build on TOS ara ships) because the noise they make annoys me. I might try crafting some again, now that I have several characters with high crafting skills.
If you're on PC, there are ways to mod the sound. Not sure if anyone has made a sound mod for the Advanced Phasers yet, but it should be doable if enough people want it.
