Revisiting Exotics

This ongoing series dives deep into the mathematical underpinnings of exotic particle generator (EPG)-focused builds. If you're into space wizardry and want to really know how it all works, this is THE definitive series on exotic mechanics. 

External Links

These are the links to the original reddit posts. Some of these have been removed by Reddit due to unfortunate circumstances. The next section will have STOBETTER pages with the main text of each Revisiting Exotics posts. 

Initial Post in the series; introduces the series and derives equations for secondary deflectors

Finesses Jay's early work to bring to modern calculation standards, and serves as an resurrection of the topic

Corrections to Equations in #2

Temporal, Anomalies, and Everything Else

Release of the New Exotic Calculator, since replaced by TRINITY, and temporal formula derivation

Javascript Exotic Calculator by Tilor, since replaced by TRINITY

Corrections to Equations in #4/5, fixing some weird aux power things

Spore Infused Anomalies vs Electrified Anomalies, as well as VCIS, DOC, Boimler DOff, and Torpedoes

Revolutionary Set and Captain Careers with EPG sources

Isolytic Tears

Fek'ihri Torment Engine, and some of the 5 Magicks before it was the 5 Magicks (Fire, Radiation, Physical, and sometimes Plasma)

Tholian Webspinner (since outdated, see #), By The Book Starship Trait, and some other Misc findings

Ultra High Yield Tricobolts, Unstable Rifts, and blending the calculators (EPG + Projectile)

Genesis Seed and Directed Dilithium Resonance Destabilizer

Charged Particle Burst and Gravity Well Ranges

Intel and Pilot Powers

Micro Dark matter Anomaly Console Evaluations, Tholian Webspinner and Neutronic Eddy Generator Changes

Entangled Quantum Bombardment, Cascading Subatomic Disruptions, and Ionized Deflector

Pilot Power Rework

Digital Compilation

Tholian Crystal Harmonics event Set and Chronogami Console

5 Magicks, Dragonsblood Flame Reactor, Tholian Webspinner again and Exotic Particle Amplifiers

Survivor: Console Edition. Deathmatch in TRINITY and build impact

Unstable Planetoid Detonation, Experimental Power Redirection, Bio-Electrical Wave, Pahvan Proton Superweaponry, Aakar's Vengence, 


Revisiting Exotics Repository

The same content as the external links, but on the STOBETTER site. The latest and most accurate info will be hosted here. While much of the content from the original reddit posts is transcribed here, be aware of a few caveats.

Basic Exotic Mechanics

Reminder that when we talk about +damage / +bonus damage, the same general theory applies:

Total damage = Base damage * (1 + sum(Cat1 boosts)) * (1 + sum(Cat2 boosts))) * Power modifier

Some of you might wonder why we bother doing all of this analysis (there’s a LOT of analysis). Let me answer with an analogy. If you’re tasked with making sandwiches for five people, you might grab some meat, bread, and cheese and slap together a few sandwiches. However, if you’re tasked with making sandwiches for fifty people, you might want to do some rough number-crunching to see how much bread, meat, cheese, condiments, pickles, etc. you’re going to need before you start assembling your sandwiches.

Now, imagine the task then becomes to make as many sandwiches as possible for $50. Or maybe $100. Your budget might vary, but either way, you will want to know how much of each ingredient you’re going to need before you start throwing together sandwiches. This way, you can spend your money effectively and not be bottle-necked because you ran out of meat before everything else. The same holds true for our exotic powers. There are different ingredients that go into getting the most out of your exotic abilities, and some of them have slightly different recipes. Understanding each of those factors (as well as the recipes) is our goal.

If it sounds like I wrote this while I was hungry . . . actually, I wrote it just after I ate (a sandwich). It was delicious.

Anyway…

Our ingredients

To make the most delicious exotic combination, here are our ingredients:

Reminder that when we talk about +damage / +bonus damage, the same general theory applies:

Total damage = Base damage * (1 + Preload + sum(Cat1 boosts)) * (1 + sum(Cat2 boosts))) * Power modifier * (1 + Resistance Modifier)

However, some powers do not scale off of Auxiliary power. Their formula looks like this:

Total damage = Base damage * (1 + Preload + sum(Cat1 boosts)) * (1 + sum(Cat2 boosts))) * (1 + Resistance Modifier)

And then there are a couple of powers that treat EPG as a separate modifier. That formula is this:

Total damage = Base damage * (1 + Preload + sum(Cat1 boosts without EPG)) * (1+sum(EPG*0.005)) *  (1 + sum(Cat2 boosts)) * Power modifier * (1 + Resistance Modifier)

Each power has a Cat1 modifier baked into it from the start that is not based on any player-equipped gear or trait. We're calling that "Preload" or pre-saturated value. We're sure it's NOT the player level scalar, since this value varies per power, whereas the player level scalar is the same across the board. We did extensive tests with both Cat1 and Cat2, and we're confident that these equations will hold true even at the high end. Cat2 showed no variance at high values, even up to 100% total Cat2. At any rate, our average error has dropped to less than 0.2% difference between the formula and tooltip, even at 349 EPG. (It's possible to get much higher EPG values, but many of those ways are hard to sustain, which makes data collection much more difficult). 

Level scaling

Most powers increase with damage as you level thanks to a +Exotic (Cat1) damage boost that increases with level and maxes at level 60. The only one that doesn’t in today’s segment is Subspace Vortex. For the purposes of our research, we were only interested in the level 60+ damage scalar. Based on a testing out a number of different powers, we’ve determined that scalar is approximately 1.75.

Explain EPG to me

Each point of EPG is worth 0.5% Cat1 increase. If you have 500 EPG, you have an increase to your EPG of 250%. However, since most powers scale with level (adding Cat1 bonus), and since EPG is relatively easy to stack absurd amounts, going for the highest possible amount of EPG will not necessarily yield the most damage. Going back to our sandwich analogy, if we load up on EPG to the exclusion of other possibilities like crit, Cat2, or damage resist reduction, we’ve bought too much bread and not enough meat, cheese, or condiments. The goal is maximum sandwiches, not maximum bread.

Aux Power

For powers that scale with Auxiliary power, the Aux power formula is (0.5 + 0.005 * Aux). That means that at 50 Aux, you’re only getting 75% of the usual damage. At 125 Aux, you’re getting 12.5% more damage. If you haven’t cranked your Aux all the way up on your EPG build, you might want to do so -- unless all of your abilities don’t scale with Aux!

The Data Set (Mostly for experts)

If you’re interested in seeing the test results we used to generate these formulas, you can find them here. Unlike our Secondary Deflector research, this time we tried to format/organize these a little bit better for our colleagues in the community who have the chops to wade through a dozen tables of data.

Caveat: The yellow tabs are incomplete / WIP. Anything there is subject to change/additional research.

For each power, we tested a Cadet character with no boosts to get the base damage (as well as check level scaling), then we tested a level 65 character with as close to 0 Cat1/Cat2 boosts as we could get (aside from Personal Endeavors and Accolades), 7 different data points for EPG and Cat1, 2 additional Cat2 data points, and 2 Aux values for each power.

Caveat 2: Our results do not perfectly line up with the tooltip values. That said, they are all within 1% of the tooltip. We think that’s close enough. If you disagree, feel free to redo all 300+ points of analysis and post your results/methodology. We’ll upvote you.

MAXIMUM SCIENCE

Unless otherwise noted in this section, EPG is included in Cat1 and Crit is included in Cat2

There are a couple of other weird formulas that we will talk about individually below, especially once we get out of boff territory.

One quick convention: if you see a curly brace { }, it means the item scales with rank or Mark.

How does resistance work

Based on some research done years ago and summarized here, all NPCs have 0 innate hull resistance and that simplifies the damage resistance formula to:

Resistance = 0.25 + 3 * ((75/ (150 + sum(resistance modifiers)))^2)

Then we multiply our damage by (1 + (1-resistance))

Since all of our effects that we are applying to the NPCs are negative damage resist, we will be increasing our damage by reducing their resistance below 0. Note that some powers also reduce damage resist along with inflicting damage: Destabilizing Resonance Beam, Structural Integrity Collapse, and Photonic Shockwave.

All About That Base (Damage)

Since all of these exotic formulas start with the base damage, it’s worth noting that the base damage has an incredibly large influence on a power’s potential damage. After, 0 times 1000 is still 0, and 1 times 1000 is a lot less impressive than 10 or 50 multiplied by 1000.

Here are the exotic science/engineering powers, sorted by base damage at rank III:

PBAOE

Single Target

Targeted AOE

It’s not really fair comparing the targeted AOEs by sheer base damage, as they all do different things. Tyken’s Rift has the highest base damage AND also procs the all-important secondary deflector, but it’s limited in that it locks out Gravity Well and has no way to extend its radius.

Gravity Well has a lower base damage and doesn’t proc the Secondary Deflector, BUT makes all the other targeted AOEs effective by pulling targets closer, and its damage increases closer to the rift.

Subspace Vortex has high base damage and combos perfectly with Gravity Well, but doesn’t proc the secondary deflector.

DRB has low base damage, but it syncs up with Gravity Well (in that they don’t share a cooldown) and is another AOE secondary deflector proc.

As a reminder, the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector has more base damage than ANY power on this list, so finding good ways to proc that is more important than a few hundred base damage on this list.

Personally, I would slot all four of these on my science vessel, but that’s just me.

But what about….?

Astute minds will note that Feedback Pulse and Eject Warp Plasma are missing from our list of engineering and science abilities that do exotic damage. Feedback Pulse is a bit of a special case, in that typical science builds are not likely users, and it has different scaling. Eject Warp Plasma has some oddities we are still exploring. We will get to Temporal as well . . . later. These posts are long enough as it is.

Conclusions

The strongest powers are generally going to be targeted AOEs because hitting multiple targets with one hard-hitting ability is a fantastic way to boost your damage--unless you’re building specifically for a powerful PBAOE bomb (Photonic Shockwave is pretty good, but hard to hit ALL THE THINGS with). All the targeted AOEs have their unique niches; none of them are bad.

Out of the single-target abilities… I don’t think any of them are optimal for general use. I would only slot Tractor Beam if I was needing an extra mule for Pilfered Power, Checkmate, or Unconventional Systems and didn’t want to use a higher-rank bridge officer slot/have a higher rank seat available.

Powers that scale with Aux are generally going to have a higher ceiling than powers that don’t, assuming similar base damages. As a reminder, Subspace Vortex, Photonic Shockwave, Tractor Beam Repulsors, and all 3 engineering powers do NOT scale with Aux.

Bridge Officer Powers

Science Powers

Charged Particle Burst

I’ve been asked about this several times and decided to take a stab at it. First off, it’s worth noting it does NOT scale off of +Exotic, +Bonus Exotic, or even +All or +Bonus All damage, nor EPG. The only things that Charged Particle Burst appears to scale off of are Drain Expertise and Auxiliary Power.

The formula is as follows:

For a ship at 130 aux and around 150 DrainX, Charged Particle Burst I is going to hit for around 7500 damage to shields in a 5 km radius. Most importantly, it’s going to apply the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector to everything it hits, which is the real reason for using it on an exotic build. At rank 3, it should deal around 12500 damage, which is appreciable but don’t forget: it’s only shield damage. This formula is accurate within 1%.

Against a 250 EPG Very Cold In Space that can crit and benefit from +Exotic, +All, +Bonus Exotic as well as apply Spore-Infused Anomalies, you should see considerably higher DPS. A single burst of Spore-Infused Anomalies will likely out-DPS the raw damage of Charged Particle Burst given a similar number of targets. That said, the draw of Charged Particle Burst is that it’s easy to get and applies the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector.

Destabilizing Resonance Beam

Feedback Pulse

There are so many things that are bad about Feedback Pulse these days. First off, it doesn’t scale off +Exotic or +Bonus Exotic. In fact, it doesn’t scale off of anything but raw EPG and Aux, and it’s capped as to how much it can be buffed. Secondly, it doesn’t crit.

Gravity Well

Gravity Well Radius formula

Speaking of Gravity Well’s radius, I think I have derived the formula for it. I will caveat this by saying that it’s a real bear to test it precisely without using the tooltip, so it’s possible the tooltip is wrong. That said, the radius appears to be linear.

Photonic Shockwave

Subspace Vortex

Tractor Beam

Tractor Beam Repulsors

Tyken’s Rift

Engineering Powers

Aceton Beam

Eject Warp Plasma

Endothermic Inhibitor Beam

Structural Integrity Collapse

Temporal Powers

Channeled Deconstruction

Note: this power’s damage increases over time, with the final tooltip value equal to 3.22x the initial value at all ranks. It is NOT considered a damage-over-time ability for the purposes of Decay Amplification or the Temporal 2-piece set bonus. The value shown here is for the lower end on the tooltip.

Chronometric Inversion Field

Note: this power’s damage increases over time, with the final tooltip value equal to 3.22x the initial value. It is NOT considered a damage-over-time ability for the purposes of Decay Amplification or the Temporal 2-piece set bonus.

Entropic Cascade

Hoo boy. This is a weird one. The primary damage formula is pretty straightforward - 10 second DoT, usual formula. The secondary damage, though, is pretty out there. For one, it DOES NOT SCALE OFF EPG. Nor does it scale off +Exotic or +Bonus Exotic. It only scales off of +All damage and +Bonus All damage (e.g. things like [AMP] or Aux: Config Offense). Moreover, the Cat1 and Cat2 modifiers are in the same category. It’s weird. Also, it doesn’t scale off Aux.

Entropic Redistribution

The secondary formula is also somewhat weird. The secondary damage does not scale off of EPG. Nor does it scale off +Exotic or +Bonus Exotic. It only scales off of +All damage and +Bonus All damage (e.g. things like [AMP] or Aux: Config Offense). The fact that it scales so strongly off of Entropy on the primary target means that it’s pretty bad without Entropy, but if paired with a strong Entropy Builder can do some solid damage in a huge AOE.

Rapid Decay

Note: this power’s duration increases with Entropy. Each Entropy adds +1 second to a base duration of 5 seconds. Neat. It’s still single-target, which means it’s niche at best.

Timeline Collapse

Yes, that auxiliary formula is correct, and yes, it has different aux scaling per rank of the power. This one is very weird. The damage on this power increases with Entropy, but after playing around with the Auxiliary modifier for days, we did not feel like trying to figure that one out ourselves. If you happen to have data supporting those effects, we’re happy to incorporate it, but it was not easily testable. The wording on this implies that the damage increases closer to the center as well, but we are not sure of those effects.

Intelligence

Electromagnetic Pulse Probe

Looking at this from the perspective of exotic damage, we’ve derived the formula for Electromagnetic Pulse Probe’s damage. It does NOT scale off of Auxiliary Power, +Exotic, or +Bonus Exotic, and it deals Electrical damage, so basically you’re only looking at EPG or +All/+Bonus All damage to improve its damage.

The ability has two components, a zap from the probe as it travels and a final explosion that occurs 10 seconds after the probe launches.

Base for the zap is 104.243 / 138.266 / 172.724

Base for the explosion: 1040.101 / 1383.406 / 1726.407

Formula is:

Final (zap) = Base * (1 + sum(Cat1) + 2.75200) * (1 + sum(Cat2)) * resistance modifiers

Final (Kaboom) = Base * (1 + sum(Cat1) + 2.7613) * (1 + sum(Cat2)) * resistance modifiers

If you’re particularly observant, you’ll see that the zap is almost perfectly 1/10 the damage of the final explosion. It also has a disable which scales with CtrlX. Unfortunately, most of the power budget is in that disable. In terms of sheer damage, the power’s lacking.

Very Cold in Space at rank III at about 250 EPG is going to do about 1900 damage per second over 10 seconds (a fairly budget build). Which means 19K damage on a single target / 190K damage on 10 targets. It’s a non-destructible hazard, with a bigger AOE (2km vs 3km) and it’s a hazard for Spore-Infused Anomalies. Electromagnetic Pulse Probe, even assuming the probe zaps the same target 10 times, which requires the probe to survive 10 seconds to deal the bulk of its damage, that's 14K DPS vs 19K from VCIS for a single target and then 140 vs 190K for 10 targets. That's not terrible but given that VCIS is trivially easy to acquire, it’s hard to value Electromagnetic Pulse Probe. That same analysis holds for other powers that would be competing for those slots like Delayed Overload Cascade and Subspace Vortex.

Triggering the Inhibiting Secondary Deflector is a non-sequitur given that those are not good for general use. You could argue that it’d be useful on a niche support build, but given what we’re about to discuss for Ionic Turbulence or Kinetic Magnet, don’t get too excited. Also recall the importance of Command on supports, so even on a support build, that means you’re severely limiting the number of potential ships on an already niche role.

Ultimately, Electromagnetic Pulse Probe is mostly still slotted for the long-duration disable (I was seeing above 10 seconds) and an unreliable one given that it’s based around a destructible probe. It does trigger Spore-Infused Anomalies but is not itself a source for the explosions. It has enough damage to not be terrible, but it’s not competitive for exotic builds against other options in the same seats and other build types will prefer some of the other options we’re outlining below, including…

Ionic Turbulence

Ionic Turbulence was already borderline good/niche, but the developers gave it some buffs that moved it into much better than that.

Projectile now travels to its destination approximately 3x as quickly. Damage Resistance Debuff increased slightly at all ranks, and now scales higher with Auxiliary Power. Speed Debuff now scales with Control Expertise skill. This power is now labeled as a Control Bridge Officer Ability, and can interact with applicable effects and triggers such as Secondary Deflectors. Fixed a series of errors with Rank II and III of this ability, that could cause the cloud to be centered on the user instead of their intended target.

The good news is that we’ve derived the formula for its aux scaling and it’s significant:

Rank I: 0.175*aux  + 17.6

Rank II: 0.225*aux  + 22.7

Rank III: 0.275*aux  + 27.7

We suspect those are actually (0.125 + rank*0.5)aux + 12.5+rank5 but it’s hard to get that precise with fractional power levels. Either way, that ends up being pretty darn good.

At 100 aux, that’s -35 DRR in a 3 km AOE just at rank I (which is better, if not on-hit as Attack Pattern Beta I or Superior Area Denial). All enemies in the anomaly are affected by the -DRR until it ends. WIth a 20 second uptime and 30 second duplicate cooldown, that’s 2/3rds uptime, same as Attack Pattern Beta. That’s solid, but it also counts as a hold for the purposes of the Tholian Webspinner’s passive for exotic damage against held targets AND it procs Unconventional Systems and serves as both a trigger and a source for Spore Infused Anomalies (activating Ionic causes all other anomalies to explode, Ionic itself is an anomaly so other activations of science/intel abilities cause it to explode). It does interact with Secondary Deflector, but the “wrong” (Inhibiting) one.

The only thing Ionic Turbulence has against it is that it doesn’t actually deal damage itself. That said, some testing in the Exotic Calculator shows that if you have the seating for it, this is a very powerful option to enhance your other anomalies.

Bottom line: Ionic Turbulence has a lot of potential if you’re running an Exotic build, a high-aux energy build, or even a projectile build with Gravity Well to cluster enemies. It’s better than a lot of other abilities, even damaging ones like Timeline Collapse or Chronometric Inversion Field at the same rank (using the Calculator and adjusting for uptime, even in a debuff-saturated environment), but there are some things it’s NOT better than:

I see Ionic Turbulence being particularly valuable for support builds BUT since there’s such a strong desire for Command on support ships helping projectile builds, that’s going to be pretty restrictive to just one ship: the Son’a Command Science Vessel if you insist on Commander Science. There’s more options like the Appalachia or Legendary Scimitar that are easier to get if you don’t care about Gravity Well III (and I’d argue the difference is not huge between Gravity Well III and I with enough ControlX). I’m not in the super high-end projectile runs, but if you’re thinking about support builds, Ionic Turbulence just got a lot more attractive, especially if you keep your aux high.

Oh, and it’s also pretty good on energy builds too, but that’s going to be dependent on a couple of things: keeping your aux high and your enemies clustered (or focusing on a single large target). DEWsci builds with Gravity Well will thus especially benefit.

Pilot

Coolant Ignition

We weren’t big on this power back in the day because it takes 10 seconds to ignite.

The formula for the 5 second DOT was:

Plasma DOT Damage = (500 / 625 / 750 base damage) * (1 + 2.261 + sum(Cat1)) + sum(Cat2)) * resistance modifiers to affected enemies per second over 5 seconds for the DOT.

Now it does some initial burst damage as well as scales with Engine Power. It does scale with +Exotic/Bonus Exotic as well as Plasma (the Lukari Piezo-Electric Focuser increased its damage). The new formula is as follows (and it’s formatted slightly differently since we’re using a different toolset than previously).

Initial burst:

Plasma Burst Damage = 3242.28 * (Cat1 + 0.5 * EPG + 2.64 + 1) *(0.005 * Engine Power + 0.5) * (Rank*0.25 + 0.75)

5-second DOT:

Plasma DOT = 750 * (Cat1 + 0.5 * EPG + 2.64 + 1) * (0.005 * Engine Power + 0.5) * (Rank * 0.25 + 0.75)

Subspace Boom

This is still a 3km kinetic damage PBAOE starting at LtCmdr which means you’ll only ever use it at rank 1 outside of theme builds until a Cmdr Uni/Sci ship comes out with another Cmdr seat full-spec’d at Pilot, at which case you’re probably still better off using Fly Her Apart III.

Old formula:

Kinetic damage = 1250/1550/1850 * (1 + 1.8613 + sum(Cat1)) * (1 + sum(Cat2)) * resistance modifiers to affected enemies per second over 5 seconds

New formula:

Kinetic damage = 2000 * (Cat1+0.5*EPG+2.16+1) * (Cat2+1) * (Rank*0.37+0.63) at half throttle

The base damage increases with throttle from 2000 at 50% up to 2500 at max throttle

This doesn’t scale off of Aux, but does scale with Exotic/Bonus Exotic. The new added effect reduces accuracy which I guess is something. Now the other interesting thing is that it scales off of throttle, which means that the higher your throttle, the more damage it does. Since you can only use it at half throttle and above, you really want to be at full throttle to use it.

Analysis

Very Cold in Space III has the highest DPS potential and also triggers/procs Spore Infused Anomalies. Of course, one of the perks of VCIS is that it’s more flexible in that you can slot it at Ensign. Subspace Boom has the second highest DPS potential if you use it at full throttle but is a little tricky to use in that it hits more behind you. It’s hands-down better than Subspace Vortex (which you can also slot at Ensign) assuming you can land the PBAOE hits.

Coolant Ignition is … better on paper than it was before, but the spreadsheet represents the best-case scenario, not what you’ll encounter in the wild. It still requires an unorthodox playstyle where you fly through enemies which throws your main abilities out of arc and they somehow sit obligingly in it for 10 seconds before it blows up in their face. It’s better but not good.

Photonic Shockwave has much lower DPS and a small AOE, but at least it also lowers enemy resistance (not modeled here) and reportedly has some weird interactions with Control-triggered traits like Kick Them While They’re Down as well as triggers Spore-Infused Anomalies. It also has a repel which isn’t ideal.

Pilot Power Summary

Subspace Boom is now pretty good. If you can fit it without sacrificing Very Cold In Space III, it’s probably worth it. Coolant Ignition is still a meme power. Photonic Shockwave is too. I have an update to my Equinox coming on STOBETTER which uses Subspace Boom to good effect.

Bonus Analysis: Fly Her Apart is pretty good now. If you’re going Pilot-Sci and mixing in Synthetic Good Fortune, consider using this over a low-value Exotic ability. The challenge will be fitting in a hull recovery mechanism as both the full-pilot science / scout ships are squishy.

Universal Consoles

Aakar's Vengeance

A recent request was to look into how this console scales, and this is an event reward so you either have it or you don’t. You can get this from Mudd’s Market, but it’s hardly worth the expense. This does an initial blast of electrical damage, and then has a lingering electrical DoT, as well as a non-Shield subsystem disable. Since it doesn’t shut down shields, it doesn’t really factor into any builds we have. It’s also single target, so the damage ceiling is pretty low.

Equation (initial blast):

Electrical Damage = 3997.46*(Cat1+0.5*EPG+5.07+1)*(Cat2+1)

Equation (DoT):

Electrical Damage once per second = 1199.24*(Cat1+0.5*EPG+5.07+1)*(Cat2+1)

The duration scales with DrainX

Duration (seconds) = 0.0588*DrainX+1.8706

For example, at 200 DrainX, the duration would be ~13.6s. Of note, the damage scales with EPG, and the duration scales with DrainX, meaning you would have to balance putting points into both skills with your gear to get the most out of this power. If we compare this to some of the other consoles we have looked at today, if we assume a duration of 10s, we end up with a base damage of ~4,000+12,000 = 16,000. This puts it at ⅔ the base of the Bio-Electric Wave, but only hitting a single target, this is far less effective than Bio-Electric Wave, especially given the weak passives (+5 Max Weapon Power and +Impulse Expertise). Also of note is the extremely high baked-in Cat1, which really just waters down any additional Cat1 you would add, but does increase the starting damage for this console. Since this has a high cost (nearly an entire ship in Zen), poor passives for Exotic builds, and a pretty moderate damage to a single target, this console is not recommended.

Bio-Electric Wave (Connie III console)

Here’s another console that you would often see on an Energy build. However, this time, the clicky scales with EPG, so it’s a really solid add to any Exotic build too, especially given the passive +Electrical to boost Spore-Infused Anomalies. Do note that it does not scale with +Exotic (other than Enlightened personal trait for some reason), so your typical Exotic boosting skills won’t apply. It also can Critically Hit, but it’s all or nothing there. My parses with this either crit all hits or none with each activation.

Equation:

Electrical Damage = 25900.3*(Cat1+0.5*EPG+0.51+1)*(Cat2+0.399+1)*(0.00816*AUX+0.184)

Of note, this has some “baked in” Cat2, which is actually just the 39.9% Bonus Electrical the console comes with. You can’t really remove that, but you shouldn’t count it twice if you are doing the math. Let’s quickly compare the base value (25,900) to Unstable Planetoid’s (697.2). The damage this can put out unbuffed is far and above a lot of other consoles. However, it only hits each target once, and you have to aim it. It shoots out the front of your ship, not at a target so it will go wherever your heading is. It’s also always horizontal, so you can’t aim it up or down. It’s a solid add to any Energy build, but can do 100k+ on a well-built Exotic build. This is a really strong console! Just be aware, this is very expensive being from a Promo ship, but can certainly be a good goal for your Annual Event Campaign reward.

Cascading Subatomic Disruption

This is from the Mirror Engle, which is either an expensive lockbox ship or comes from an expensive bundle. The ship also has the trait Superior Area Denial which might be attractive depending on how much you’re into hangars/tanks/supports. Passively it comes with 14.8 EPG and a smidge of Aux.

The console hits up to 7 targets. The first target takes full damage. The second and third targets take 0.75 the calculated damage. Targets 4, 5, 6, and 7 each take half the original damage. If that sounds like a lot of math, just know that if you’re firing this optimally into groups of enemies, it’s 4.5x the formula shown here for the primary. Note that this deals electrical damage so it’s going to pick up less random buffs than the other two, which benefit from +radiation.

This does NOT Aux scale nor is it a DOT/Hazard. It does scale off of Exotic/Bonus Exotic damage effects. The console also zaps enemies for 10-40 -DRR which is why it’s attractive for supports. Its damage is dealt in a single zap so the higher base damage makes sense since unlike the other two, we’re multiplying by a max of 4.5 across 7 targets, whereas the others are getting multiplied by 11 and 16 first across those 7 targets.

Chronogami

Chronogami is a weird one, and after the 3rd patch on the console, it finally starts to hit the top of our exotics list. It’s a solid set of passives, connected to a weird clicky. Your target’s future self will self-destruct on them. (Yes, it's a time loop) Also, the console will cool down to about 15 seconds remaining (soft cooldown, so you can get below this with some applications of Unconventional Systems) if you destroy a ship of Battleship rank or higher, in theory. In reality, if you use this console on too large of a ship (Gateway, Tactical Cube, Voth city ship, etc) it does nothing. You read that right folks, your typically juicy targets for everything else you fire are poor targets for this clicky. This thing rocks at picking off spheres and then blow up a large target, then pick off another sphere. I found it 3-4x more effective if I was picking my targets. It did a lot of damage! But none of my other powers did so hot since I was picking weird targets, and spending so much time micromanaging this one power. This certainly has a lot of damage potential, but really doesn’t do great in content like ISE or HSE since so many targets cause the clicky to fizzle. I could see this being much better on Tzenkethi Front or similar, with some solid large targets. The Rhas’bej’s will cool down the console and aren’t so large as to cause it to fizzle. One little caveat is that SCM won’t pick up this console in the parse at all due to the combatlog line being “Chronogami Core Breach” and being auto-filtered from the parse. Honestly, with the wide array of consoles out there for exotic builds, and with the finicky nature of this one, it hasn’t and won’t find its way onto any of my builds. It may have top damage potential, but you really have to be careful about its usage.

Equation:

Kinetic Damage

9637.99*(Cat1+0.5*EPG+1.88+1)*(Cat2+1)

Cutting Tractor Beam

The top-end EPG builds have trended towards using the Cutting Borg Tractor Beam (10% Cat2 damage to universal consoles, stacking up to 10x) console and minimizing the amount of stat-stick consoles in their builds. Parsed results show that about 25% of my damage comes from console actives and TRINITY says that I’m at roughly 250% Cat2. It might be closer to 300% on a Tac, so let’s say that we gain a 33% increase to 30% of my damage with the Cutting Tractor Beam at max stacks in the best-case scenario. That’s a 8.25% increase to my damage.

If I took my current build and removed one of the two Exotic Particle Amplifiers, TRINITY says that would be a 6.3% loss in DPS and TRINITY is very good at modeling stat sticks. So why wouldn’t I do that? Well, the problem is that the Cutting Tractor Beam Console has to stack before it applies its full bonus. I’m not getting 100% damage increase to my damage. It used to be there were some consoles that would stack the Cutting Tractor Beam multiple times but that was changed unless there’s some out there that Tilor didn’t check.

As a result, either I have to wait until later in the TFO to see full benefits from it, or I get an average of 62.5% damage, not 100%. That means the result is a 20.83% increase to 25% of my damage or only 5.2% increase, and that’s assuming I’m using a low cooldown console like the Phaser Lance to juice the Cutting Tractor Beam and holding my big damage consoles until the Cutting Tractor Beam ramps. That’s not exactly what you want to do on HSE and while you could see full benefit across a second rotation assuming you can keep stacks active, it’s still going to depends on your consoles. Unless you’re sitting on ALL the meta clickies including a low cooldown console like Phaser Lance/VAQ Launcher, I don’t see it as value-added until your console active DPS exceeds 40% of total output. The Cutting Tractor Beam also does some damage itself but it’s variable and I don’t have it derived. It’s not exactly topping the charts by itself so its contribution is hard to gauge but “low.”

Again, this is something that for best results you should evaluate for yourself based on how much damage your consoles are doing and how much Cat2 you have. If you’re running The Ruin of Our Enemies, your Cat2 is going to be even more heavily-saturated and you’ll see even less relative benefit from the console. For me, it’s not worth it given its limitations and ramp time. Remember that even at only 400 EPG, each Amplifier will be giving roughly over 10% bonus damage to your consoles, no stacking required. You need to be really selling out hard on console actives to justify the Cutting Tractor Beam on a build.

Delphic Tear Generator

This console pulses in a cone-shaped area every 0.5 seconds for 10 seconds (20 ticks!) with a final pulse that is worth 2 of the initial pulses. Its damage is supposed to increase with number of targets, but that’s hard to test on a 2-minute clicky. The formula represents the tooltip damage.

Directed Dilithium Resonance Destabilizer

This console is from the new lockbox. It targets up to 5 foes nearby with a 6 second DOT and a considerable speed boost (for reference, your average T6 ship and MK XV engines is not flying at 50 speed with full throttle without EPtE or Competitive Engines). The affected foes then explode for additional radiation damage in a 5 km AOE. The passive stats are nothing special: turn rate and current/max shield power.

DOT

Formula:

Damage = Base * (1 + 1.86 + sum(Cat1)+EPG*0.05)*(1+sum(Cat2)) * (1 +resistance modifiers))

Kaboom

Formula:

Damage = Base * (1 + 1.8607 + sum(Cat1)+EPG*0.05)*(1+sum(Cat2)) * (1 +resistance modifiers))

Analysis

Just like the other console, this has some potential drawbacks. First, yeeting your enemies 6+ km away (50 speed translates to 0.02 * 50 * 6 seconds km ) per our earlier research is not generally a good idea for AOE builds and while a sufficiently powerful Gravity Well can offset that, it’s definitely a concern. Second, it’s a PBAOE with somewhat random targeting. If you can get the affected enemies corralled back together in 6 seconds, I could see potential for a lot of cascading explosions, but the AOE kaboom at the end has a radius of 5 km, not 6. That’s going to be tricky. When I put this in the calculator, it was not better than a Particle Focuser, even with leaving the Particle Focuser stacks alone, so I’m not particularly convinced on this outside of a budget build setup. The passives don’t do you any favors either so this one is a skip from me but let me know if you can find some awesome uses for it.

Dragonsblood Flame Reactor

This console comes from the summer event Hysperian Intel Battlecruiser. (PC players, you did unlock the weird Ren Faire ship, right?) It’s a doozy, so EPG aficionados rejoice because our good friend power creep is back in a big way.

First, the console has 20% passive Bonus Disruptor, Fire, Cold, Electrical, Radiation and Psionic damage. This means it buffs the (non-comprehensive) following:

Looking at that list, there’s a lot of Exotic staples on it, so yes, the passive damage is very good but we haven’t even gotten to the best part.

The console gives additional engine power when not active, which is sort of superfluous, except that it also lowers its own cooldown based on engine power. And that leads us to the active: it’s a giant cone of fire hitting up to 5 enemies for 10 seconds.

Mr. Tilor was kind enough to derive the equation for it:

Damage = 1000.04*(Cat1+0.5*EPG+2.06+1)*(Cat2+1)*(0.005*AUX+1)*(0.005*ENG+1)

Yes, that is 1000 base damage per tick and yes that is double power-scaling. For reference, Delphic Tear has a base damage of 360 (when you consider it ticks twice per second), and doesn’t double-scale off of two different power settings, nor does it reduce its own cooldown based on damage settings. This has a very high ceiling.

Testing on ISE / HSE has revealed the active is as absolutely nuts as those damage numbers would lead you to expect. We’re seeing numbers around 100K DPS in a properly controlled and supported environment on an otherwise strong EPG build with lots of engine power but not specifically building around this console. Mr. Tilor has an entire build dedicated to squeezing as much as he can out of this console and he’s close to 200K from the active alone. To use it properly, there are three important steps:

Entangled Quantum Bombardment

This console is off of the Edison Temporal Warship. It has passive +15% energy weapon damage for the DEW-Sci fans out there as well as 21.4 EPG. The active is reminiscent of the Delphic Tear Generator in that it bombards random foes in the fore arc 16 times in 8 seconds. We are not sure exactly how many enemies can be hit by it at once.

This does NOT Aux scale nor is it a DOT/Hazard. It does scale off of Exotic/Bonus Exotic damage effects.

Pretty straightforward, but the lack of aux-scaling is too bad. Base damage is low, but it stacks up quickly if you’re hitting enemies with multiple pulses.

Exotic Particle Amplifiers

Apologies to all the people who have been waiting on us to break these down, but it was tricky and basically required me to finish all of my other endeavors and dedicate a couple of afternoons and evenings to helping Jayiie collect over 300 data points and derive the formulas. Long-time fans of the game will be shocked to find out that they don’t work per the tooltip.

The consoles claim to increase the base damage of exotic boff abilities and add bonus exotic damage for non-bridge officer abilities, scaling off of EPG up to 500 (and also Mark/Rarity). It is the first component that is in error. Jayiie and I have derived them, and they are not a base damage increase, but rather Cat2. However, they’re not just straight Cat2 damage to bridge officer abilities, but rather have a scalar applied to the tooltip value.

In other words, let’s say that at 120 EPG, 100 Aux power, and all other sources of +All/+Exotic damage accounted for (i.e. Endeavors, Fleet Combat boost) and NO Cat2 Bonus All/Bonus Exotic damage on the build, the listed tooltip of Gravity Well III is 1196.5 damage. If I then add a Mk XV Epic Exotic Particle Amplifier (that does NOT have [EPG] as its mod, just for sake of keeping the EPG values the same), the console’s tooltip tells me it’s a 1.32% base damage increase on boff abilities. However, the tooltip on Gravity Well III reports 1238.9 damage, which is not a 1.32% increase.

What Jay found was that each point of Mark and each point of Rarity adds 0.000525% bonus damage to the boff damage increase (up to 6 points from rarity for an Epic console so 21 at Mk XV Epic) and 0.0014% bonus damage to the non-boff damage increase. This basically means (Mark + Rarity) x (scalar) x (EPG) is your equation. Furthermore, each boff power has its own separate scalar on it. So, what we did was take final damage values for boff abilities at different EPG values, with and without a non-EPG EPA. This let us compute a slope or a scalar factor using the simple equation from algebra:

M = (y2 - y1) / (x2 - x1)

The final formula is thus the % increase is EPG * Mk/Rarity term / power-specific scalar. There were consistently two different scalars that were used through the strong majority of powers, either 0.269 or 0.375 (or something very close to them), and most powers were consistent across ranks. For example, Gravity Well III’s scalar was 0.375

At 120 EPG, Mk XV Epic EPA, for Gravity Well III, the calculation would thus be:

120 * 0.00000525 * 21 / 0.375 = 0.0353, or a 3.53% Cat2 increase.

Let’s go back to our tooltip values. With the EPA, it’s 1238.9. Without it, it’s 1196.5. Divide the second number into the first, in the absence of any other Cat2, and it’s 1.0354, which within 1/10000th precision is pretty good. That’s a 3.54% increase. The numbers check out.

But what about that tooltip? It said 1.32%. Well, let’s divide that by our calculated 0.375 scalar again. Take the 1.32% and divide it by 0.375 and voila, 3.52% comes out, and again, given the nature of our measurements and the precision of the game’s tooltips, we’re going to run into some rounding errors.

Also worth noting: the secondary damage of Entropic Cascade, Charged Particle Burst, Destabilize Warp Core, and Electromagnetic Pulse Probe see no benefit from these consoles. You’ll excuse us if we did not invest the effort into finding the exact scalars for all ranks of the little-used Engineering Exotic powers; most powers had the same scalar across ranks so we found one and then assumed it was the same for all ranks. Don’t @ me if you’re really invested in Eject Warp Plasma. The non-boff exotic damage works exactly as it says on the tooltip, refreshingly. This is probably way more math than people wanted to read about, but we wanted to 1) thoroughly explain how they work and 2) illustrate why it took so long to derive these.

We could list every single scalar that we found for every boff power, but frankly, that would not serve much purpose unless you intended to calculate the scaling bonus of these consoles by hand for every single boff power and sum them up. If you’re that invested in crunching the numbers, Jay and I have updated TRINITY to calculate that for you.

Exotic Particle Focusers & Restorative Particle Focusers

Since the Exotic Particle Amplifiers are strictly science consoles that serve as stat-sticks, that brings them into direct competition with Research Lab Particle Focusers, which admittedly are much easier to acquire. As a reminder, Particle Focusers have 3 passives. They have a stat bonus, 2/3rds of a stat bonus, and then a 25% chance to add a 6% bonus exotic damage buff that lasts for 30 seconds, stacking up to 5 times. Typically, the preferred mod combo for these is [EPG][CtrlX], so if EPG is the primary stat, it’ll match the EPG given by an Exotic Particle Amplifier Advanced console with [EPG] as its mod. Unlike EPAs, there is no rerolling involved; just buy the mod you want at the Research Lab. Speaking of rerolling, it’s worth noting that there is potentially significant cost to acquiring the appropriate mod on the Particle Amplifiers. For the pure exotic build, EPG is the only good one, and you’re rolling from a very large mod pool after running 10+ Elite TFOs or shelling out EC to acquire the pieces. CtrlX is not a good substitute.

The chance to stack 6% Bonus Exotic damage is rolled in two ways depending on the console. Exotic Particle Focusers roll on the last tick of Exotic boff abilities and a few consoles/other things, while Restorative Particle Focusers roll on the last tick of a hull or shield heal. In my opinion, this makes Restoratives better if you have boff slots to spare for heals, since 1) you can prestack the heals during briefing phase, and 2) most heals are a single burst of healing, so there’s no waiting for the effect to end before you get your stack, unlike how Gravity Well works.

So, what’s better? To determine that, we went down another rabbit hole, which was to compile a list of research lab console triggers. Most of this is courtesy of Mr. Tilor. There’s probably a few things missing, but this is the majority of things you might see “in the wild” on an EPG build. Notably, Plasma Storm, Micro Dark Matter Anomaly, Temporal Vortex Probe, Neutronic Eddy Generator, and Immolating Phaser Lance do NOT stack these.

Exotic BOff Powers

Exotic Consoles

Also, Weaponized Mycelium Emitter is a trigger for Exotic Particle Focusers

Restorative BOff Powers

At max stacks, Particle Focuser consoles offer +30% bonus Exotic damage with full stacks, along with CtrlX. Since most Exotic builds should be closer to 350 or 400 EPG, the Exotic Particle Amplifiers will offer 11.76% Bonus damage to non-boff abilities and either around 11.55% or 16.16% to most boff abilities per console.

I’m going to skip past a fair amount of math and testing, but it’s elementary to say 30% at 5 stacks (plus CtrlX) is better than 11.76-16.16%. The question is can you get to 5 stacks of Particle Focusers? The answer will depend on your build, but we’re going to tabulate what we’ve found are solid conclusions after a bunch of testing. The reason it depends is because the number of short-cooldown triggers and the number of science console slots available for stat sticks are relevant variables, as exotic builds tend to focus very hard on damaging universal consoles and of course if you have the very expensive Exotic Particle Field Exciter [EPG] that competes for a slot too.

The general rule is, take just enough Focusers to stack them. Fill remaining slots with Particle Amplifiers. If you can’t stack Focusers, go straight to Amplifiers.

We found that 1 Focuser, even with 2 triggers, was unacceptably slow to stack it, especially if Exotic Focusers were the choice. 1 Restorative with 2 heals was also painfully slow and unreliable to stack, as was 2 Restoratives with 1 heal. 2 Restoratives with 2 heals was fairly quick to stack. 2 Exotics with plenty of triggers (as you’d expect on an EPG build) was fine but was still somewhat slow to stack since you couldn’t prebuff during briefing phase and you can’t or don’t want to spambar exotic abilities like you can with something like Aux to Structural. Once we realized that 2 x 2 was enough to get us full stacks, there was no point in taking additional Focusers. 1-to-1, EPAs are better once you reach the stack ceiling for Particle Focusers for damage, but you are losing a substantial amount of CtrlX depending on how many Focusers you’re displacing.

If I put on my armchair game designer hat, I really like the balance on these. They’re quite good on an exotic build if you mindlessly grind them and stuff them into your science console slots, but given the loss of Particle Focuser stacks and CtrlX, there are some tradeoffs. If you want to truly optimize, you have to weigh the tradeoffs against Particle Focusers and decide 1) do I miss the CtrlX (or DrainX if you’re a CPB aficionado), 2) can I stack Focusers? Then decide accordingly, which rewards people who pay close attention to the details of their build (which ofc plays into my personal bias). They’re a sidegrade if you don’t optimize console selection and potentially an upgrade if you do. They’re not trash, they’re not must-slot OP, they’re situationally good, and I think that’s good for the game’s health to have more items that are situationally good rather than must-slot bonkers OP.

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating since 5 stacks of Particle Focusers compared very favorably to everything else. You should only slot these if you can stack them reliably and you should slot no more of them than you need to stack them fully or unless budgetary restrictions preclude slotting something better. That means slotting at least 2 of them, and at least 4 triggers if using Exotics, or 2 low cooldown heals. I’ve tried 1 low cooldown heal and even on an Engineer where I could juice it a little with multiple captain powers, it was not reliable. I generally avoid the Exotic ones since the stack only increments when the triggering effect ends, whereas Restoratives can be pre-stacked. Your mileage may vary.

Last note: you want the ones with more EPG than CtrlX.

Experimental Power Redirection (Excelsior II Console)

Now, this one is really not exotic at all, but is relevant for a point later on, so I want to bring it up here. There are a few reasons to slot this console, and it is not a great choice for your typical EPG boat. It has solid passives for any energy build, and the active is pretty good too. However, if you are running a Phaser Beams build, this console really is solid. There are two pieces to the active power: +Cat1 Energy based on Shield/Aux/Engine power, as well as firing its own Beam Overload at Will phasers for a short duration. It really needs another 5s duration to shine, as it ramps up over time, but is fun nonetheless. I will also say, this ship is expensive, so don’t feel like you have to chase the ship for its console, there are way better choices out there, just maybe not as showy.

Equation (Phaser Beams):

For up to 6 targets, Phaser Damage = 150*(Cat1+0.5*EWT+2.93+1)*(Cat2+1)*(0.005*WPN+0.5)

This scales with Energy Weapon Training as well as +Phaser and +Beams. The equation looks very similar to our Exotic damage sources, but instead also uses Weapon Power instead of Aux Power. It’s not a lot of damage on its own, but it will enhance your other Beams as well as shove some Cat1 Energy into your ship, which is the real reason you can slot this.

Equation II (Cat1 Energy Bonus):

Add Shield+Engine+Aux Power:

If total is less than 150, you get 60% Cat1 Energy

If between 150 and 200, you get 0.25% per power + 22.5% constant Cat1 Energy

If total is 200 or more, you get 0.125% per power + 47.5% constant Cat1 Energy

This means at 200 power, you get 72.5% Cat1, and beyond 200 power, you get half as much effectiveness. The nice part is, you never get less than 60% out of the console, so I’d recommend if you are close to the 150 power mark, don’t bother chasing extra power. However, if you are close to 200 power, you can get a few extra percentage out of a little more power, so aim for 200 or don’t try to aim to get more power.

Of note, realize that the beam damage from the console scales with Weapon power, and the Cat1 scales with the other 3 subsystems, so you are honestly better off leaning towards weapons power than dropping weapon power to pick up more from the Cat1 portion. Abilities that give a ton of power, such as EPS Power Transfer, Overload Subsystem Safeties, and the Miracle Worker Liberated Borg duty officer are nice to have, but far from required. This console is pretty fun to use, but is quite expensive and is pretty Average in overall effectiveness. If you have a Phaser FAW build, this is a great choice, but is not at the top of the list for your best choices. It does not belong on an exotic build.

Fek’ihri Torment Engine

Reminder that Exotic means non-weapon offensive damage, and in this context, we're talking about ones that (generally) scale off of the Exotic Particle Generator stat. Now, back to the flames of Gre’thor.

The last couple of years have been extremely lackluster in terms of meaningful mission rewards for space builds. Arguably the last useful mission reward was the Regenerative Crystal Shield, which is still pretty niche, and that was released in 2019. Now, Cryptic has started 2021 with quite the console. The Fek’ihri Torment Engine is extremely intriguing and (unluckily for us) extremely confusing. That said, Mr. Tilor and I have been steadily working through all of the various oddities of this console. Please be kind to him in the comments for he labors tirelessly on all of our behalfs. Here’s what we found:

There are 3 pieces to this console:

A Cat1 boost to non-Hazard Damage Over Time 

A Cat1 boost to Fire, Radiation, Plasma, and Physical Damage 

A 10% chance to trigger shield-penetrating fire damage when dealing non-Hazard DoT damage

Now what the Gre’thor does that mean? (heh)

Part 1: Non-Hazard DOT

A Hazard is when you spawn a thing on the map that has a duration and does damage to enemies near it. The thing might follow enemies around (with Anomaly Leash), but in general, the Hazard is not fixed onto an enemy. Examples of Hazards include Tyken’s Rift, Gravity Well, Subspace Vortex, Very Cold in Space, Isolytic Tears and Chronometric Inversion Field.

A Damage Over Time is when you apply a lingering effect that deals damage to a target over multiple instances / ticks. Examples of DOTs include the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector, Aceton Beam, Channeled Deconstruction, Plasma fires from plasma torpedoes and energy weapons, and the Kentari Missile’s Radiation damage. Note that Destabilizing Resonance Beam and Delphic Tear do NOT count as Damage over Time.

This thing boosts DoTs that are NOT Hazards. Here’s our list of Non-Hazard DoTs that are in the Revisiting Exotics series/Exotic Calculator plus a few others:

Part 1 of the Fek’ihri Toaster will boost all of these by 28 - 39.4% Cat1 depending on mark/rarity of the console.

Editor’s note: Objects in italics will NOT be added to an Exotic Calculator

Part 2: Fire, Radiation, Plasma, and Physical Damage

This is a little more straightforward. Outside of Kinetic and Electrical, these are the other main exotic types. Here’s our non-comprehensive list of what benefits from that:

Science/Engineering powers:

Temporal boff powers:

Misc stuff

Part 2 of the Fek’ihri Toaster will boost all of these by 28 - 39.4% Cat1 depending on mark/rarity of the console.

Science things that gain NO benefit from this console at all:

Note that if something is in BOTH LISTS (ex: the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector), it gains BOTH benefits. Yes, that means nearly 80% Cat1 boost to the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector. Yes, that is an exceptionally powerful boost.

Part 3: Great Balls o’ Fire!

The third part is a 10% chance to proc extra fire damage when a non-Hazard DOT is applied (i.e. stuff in list #1).

Base damage: 60 per second, for 5 seconds. Scales with MK and rarity.

Cat1 Preload: 0.23 (though of course it scales with the console doubly as a Fire DOT). Scales with MK and rarity.

It does not scale with Aux, with +Exotic, or with +Bonus Exotic (though EPG does count). Only +All, +Fire, and of course +DoT count.

Part 4: Conclusions

Now, you might think that 60 damage with questionable scaling is nothing amazing and that Cat1 damage (even 80% of it) isn’t worth giving up a console slot for but that is because you have not read and understood Revisiting Exotics 1 where we make it very clear that the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector slaps harder than a pissed off Captain Kira.

Let’s back up a little bit and do some math. (Ye were warned)

First, the proc. 60 base damage is at a hypothetical Mark 0. Cat1 gains from Mark increase drastically from MK XII to MK XV. Crank the Fek’Ihri Toaster up to Mark XV and start piling on EPG and you’ll see you can pretty easily pick up 1100 damage per second.

Mark XV Cat1 is 2.5638, then 400 EPG is 2.0 Cat1 and the console itself gives up to 0.788% Cat1 to itself. Temporal spec adds another 0.2. Also, the damage itself scales with level (we think it’s around 142 at MK XV), as does its Cat1 preload.

142 * (1 + 2.5638 + 2 + 0.23 + 0.2 + 0.788) = nearly 963 damage per second, and that’s before you add in +All damage in either Cat1/Cat2 flavors. On my high-end science ship, a blue MK XV Fek’Ihri Torment Engine is hitting for 1150 damage per second resting thanks to some +All damage consoles and traits.

As they say in the late-night infomercials, BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Upgrade your Fek’Ihri Toaster during this limited-time-upgrade weekend opportunity to a Gold MK XV Fek’Ihri Toaster and you can deal 2000 damage per second just with its fire proc! Cheesy infomercials aside, the console gains 62 base damage going from blue to gold and a little more Cat1 scaling AND a bunch more Cat1 preload, and that adds up real quick. A MK XV Epic FTE with only 100 EPG and no traits boosting it had more fire damage than the full-build listed above and once I put the build back together, the damage was above 2000 per tick.

Now consider that it lasts 5 seconds per instance and can hit all over the map given how many things on an average science build can proc it. The 10% chance to proc the fire is rolled per tick of the DOT, which means you have a very high chance of proccing it every time you slap a DOT on someone. Note: repeated applications refresh the duration of the Fek’Ihri Torment proc.

Not only that, but we’re talking about the equivalent of adding over 150 EPG to the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector, and 80 EPG to DRB, several of the most powerful Exotic clickies, and basically all the Temporal boff abilities ON TOP of the proc. My personal recommendation is to slot this on every science build out there, but since we’re fans of nuance and giving very precise advice, here’s a slightly more in-depth breakdown:

SLOT THE TORMENT ENGINE ON YOUR SPACE MAGIC BUILDS UNLESS….

Now, as for non-space magic builds, I don’t think that this console will be strictly-speaking meta given that it takes up a valuable tactical console slot. However, if you’re building around Plasma Torpedoes, it’s a little more interesting because the Fek’Ihri procs trigger off plasma weapon DoTs and Plasma Torpedoes have doubled Cat1 scaling on their plasma damage-over-time component from +Plasma. A Vulnerability Locator/Exploiter should yield more damage in most cases, but if you’re really DOT heavy I could see a case for this console being mixed in. Radiation builds or even plasma energy weapon builds might have some intriguing options here as well.

Genesis Seed

This universal console from the T6 Clarke-class has two components on its active, a kinetic and a radiation piece. Thanks to some multiple linear regressions from Mr. Tilor, we were able to derive the formulas for both of them. It also provides a passive 28.5% radiation (Cat1) damage and 28.5 Drain Expertise.

Both pieces do NOT scale off of Exotic (+Exotic/+Bonus Exotic) and also no Aux scaling. EPG is also a separate term on this console. Here's what you get for an equation:

Radiation damage

The active fires a mini-planet 5km straight ahead from your current position that stacks up damage, gaining 1 seed energy per foe per second.

Formula:

Damage = Base * (1 + 1.4 + sum(Cat1))*(1+EPG*0.05)*(1+sum(Cat2)) * (1 +resistance modifiers))

Kinetic damage

After 30 seconds or after 120 seed energy reached, the planet explodes for more damage in a rather large AOE (10 km)

Formula:

   Damage = Base * (1 + 1.4 + sum(Cat1))*(1+EPG*0.05)*(1+sum(Cat2)) * (1 +resistance modifiers))

Analysis

When I plugged this into the Exotic Calculator, it ended up being quite good. Not as powerful as the webspinner, but the passive bonus amps a number of other things like the Secondary Deflector, it’ll proc the Torment Engine, and it’s a giant AOE.

Deceptively, though, the tooltip notes that the ability scales upward as it hits more targets/builds more seed energy over time and the values listed are the maximum values (i.e. “up to”). It needs time and numerous targets to build, which if you’re doing a good job on your AOE shenanigans, might be hard to pull off. Furthermore, it is manually aimed by you pointing your ship rather than auto-tracking (like the Mycelial Rift 3/4-piece). It also has the drawback of shoving enemies away with the giant explosion at the end, so be aware of that. With a sample size of 1 ISE run, I was able to get 17K out of it on a 560K run, so it’s going to underperform the calculated value by a quite a bit (calculated was closer to 90K) unless you land the perfect money shot and can stack it up quickly. I think with some better timing and firing cycles, I could certainly use it better, but it’s not quite as potent as even the Neutronic Eddy Generator. Still, 17K is respectable and bears more testing for sure; the active was better than that of the Vortex Probe or the Delphic Tear in that run even if the stats weren’t quite as awesome.

Ionized Deflector

This is the latest exotic console to reach our hands, courtesy of the Mirror Somerville. The passive is intriguing in that it adds 28.5% Electrical damage, meaning it benefits its own active. It also benefits other Electrical damage sources, including Spore-Infused Anomalies, so that’s fun. The active is a 5 km PBAOE hitting up to 5 targets per second for 15 seconds. It also dumps your shields into EPG for that time, meaning that you’re completely exposed. A shield hot restart like a Shield Capacitor does not bring your shields back online. The EPG conversion on the tooltip is wrong; it maxes out at 125 if you dump shields at 100% capacity. It does scale off of Exotic, Bonus Exotic, as well as +Aux.

The 15 second steroid boost is very nice if a bit nerve-racking as going completely shieldless means even a puny torpedo can probably 1-shot your squishy ship (you DO have Continuity, right?); the Electrical damage passive is not amazing but it does add to Spore-Infused Anomalies. The active damage is honestly not outstanding either; if the calculator is accurate, I expect decent damage out of it, but nothing incredibly OP.

TRINITY undervalues the Ionic Deflector Inversion active in that it is attempting to make an uptime-averaged calculation. That’s not how you should use it. It’s more like Quantum Singularity Manipulation in that you use it first, then unload all your abilities while the +125 EPG is active. I can’t see it displacing any of the top 6 console options and it does required you to both get close and lower your shields for best effect, but I can’t in good conscience put it at the bottom of the list without noting that this is a limitation of the tool and that it’s being undervalued. When I played with some numbers to make it more representative of a bursty scenario, it was closer to the top but as with many things . . . it depends. My instinct is that it’s probably top 10 assuming you’re okay with the risk and use it properly (fly close, use before dumping all your damage things). Else it’s a way to die faster on a squishy build type.

Micro Dark Matter Anomaly

Bottom Line Up Front: This new console from the lockbox is pretty good. It does not appear to be on the same level as pre-nerf Webspinner or Eddies.

The passive stats on this aren’t bad, since it comes with 18.5 EPG and it gives you +3 power whenever you hit an enemy. It does NOT stack with other sources of +Max power, so if you already have a warp core putting you at 130 max aux, this does not get you to 133 when the anomaly is active.

Neutronic Eddy Generator

This still doesn't Aux-scale, it does scale off of +Exotic/+Bonus Exotic so boosts like Particle Generator Amplifiers, Particle Focusers and Improved Photonic Officer affect it. So what did the nerf specifically do?

Neutronic Eddies has been updated so that Eddies no longer stack their damage and drain with each other against the same target, but instead provide +10% damage and drain for each additional eddy; reduced the shield drain.

Neither of these things were items we’d previously derived/accounted for, but Neutronic Eddies summon 4 space tornadoes that apparently could apply their damage separately to the same target, as well as a shield drain that we didn’t calculate. In other words, our formulaic derivation did not cover either of these behaviors. So with that, we have to look at empirical results (parses) to see how the new Neutronic Eddies compare to the previous results.

End result, the active is doing about half the DPS it was in our testing, but it’s still averaging about 13K and maxing out at 30K. This is still usable. Again let me stress this is a ballpark measurement. The dataset is small, has some unavoidable biases, and these are high variance numbers. However, I don't think anyone wants to wait a year for this article.

Plasma Storm Module

We also got our hands on a Plasma Storm Module courtesy of a fleetmate who bought one and helped us fiddle with it. Formula is pretty standard:

It does NOT Aux scale. Solid numbers, giant AOE. Passive is kinda meh, but when it hits that many targets for so long, that doesn't matter as much. The only downside is that it doesn't punch through shields and so it's better at making giant numbers than actually killing things compared to some other consoles. Unlike the Neutronic Eddy Generator, which also does very good damage, you don't have to worry about it tossing enemies all over the place if used at inopportune times.

Downsides: Expensive.

Portal of the Damned

This is the console from the Fek’Ihri Byr’Jai, specifically the Fire Damage explosion in a 5 km radius and the subsequent DOT. The Lost Souls themselves do some additional damage. Mr. Tilor derived the damage as follows for the initial blast:

Fire Damage = 882.28*(Cat1*0.5+0.5*EPG+0.23+1)*(Cat2+1)*(0.005*AUX+0.5)

Dot Damage = 360.85*(Cat1*0.5+0.5*EPG+0.23+1)*(Cat2+1)*(0.005*AUX+0.5)

It does NOT scale with Exotic/Bonus Exotic. This is okay, but hardly amazing given the limits of +Fire and the low base damage (the blast is a 1-time pop as opposed to a hazard-type like Micro Dark Matter Anomaly), we can’t see this seeing use except on budget builds that happen to have the ship. If we tally up 6 seconds of damage and the initial pop, its damage can be modeled as:

3047.38 * (Cat1*0.5+0.5*EPG+0.23+1)*(Cat2+1)*(0.005*AUX+0.5)

In comparison, if I take 6 seconds of the micro dark matter anomaly, it’s

6318 * ( 1 + 1.855 + 0.5*EPG + sum(Cat1)) * (1 + sum(Cat2 only)) * (1 +(resistance modifiers)) * (0.6+0.004 * aux)

Over the double base damage and the Cat1 added in means the Portal of the Damned isn’t really a worthwhile slot for high-end play when we already have better consoles. It’s better than a non-science console with just EPG and no active like the Nukara Particle Converter but I’m not racing to toss out a Plasma Storm or the Fek’Ihri Torment Engine or even a Micro Dark Matter Anomaly for this unless the Lost Souls are putting in a lot of work, and they do not scale with EPG. We think it's pretty good on a budget build for a player who has this ship for free and is struggling to fill out universal consoles but not much beyond that.

Radiation Bombardment Matrix

This console is from the Palatine Multi-Mission Reconnaissance Explorer or its cross-faction equivalents. It comes with 15% exotic damage and 10% turn rate. The ability pulses in a cone of AOE damage to targets in your front arc (noticing a trend here?), dealing damage per pulse 5 times and the 6th pulse up to 6 times more damage as the initial depending on how many previous pulses hit, so you can get up to 11 times the calculated damage per target if you hit them all. It also has a potent -15 and then -25 DRR penalty which is fairly significant.

This does NOT Aux scale nor is it a DOT/Hazard. It does scale off of Exotic/Bonus Exotic damage effects.

Again the lack of aux-scaling is too bad. Base damage is low, but it stacks up quickly if you’re hitting enemies with multiple pulses. The -DRR effect means that it’s going to deal decent damage but the true effect really comes from hitting enemies consistently with the pulse to stack it up.

Tholian Crystaline Interlacer

I am woefully disappointed by this clicky. When slotted next to the Webspinner from a while back, it does less damage to a single target than the Webspinner (in general; you can always choose specific bonuses that push one and not the other). The Webspinner also hits 4 targets. Not off to a great start. You slot this for the set bonuses, which the 2pc is amazing for Tetryon builds. Can’t complain about the price for this console though - free mission reward!

Please note, this equation is at Mark XV:

Tholian Web Cannon

No, I didn’t fall asleep on my keyboard while I wrote this. That formula is as nuts as it looks in terms of scaling. This is basically the reason why we did this entire project (or least why Tilor jumped onboard). That man has a peculiar obsession with building a Planet Killer on his ships. Starfleet Security might want to keep an eye on that, just sayin’. Anyway, this thing does stupendous damage that is only hampered by the fact that it’s a clicky and maxed at ten targets. Even then, it’s highly competitive with Gravity Well III with 10 targets affected and accounting for uptime (caveats: this does not include IGW and does involve aggressive use of Unconventional Systems). The little “4” at the end of that equation also means that it scales less aggressively than other powers, but has a much more stable base damage.

Tholian Webspinner

The Webspinner has been changed twice after its release, and rather than keep the ups and downs of each iteration (OP, Trash, Meh), the final and current state is below. For the purposes of this article, the passive damage to held targets has been found to not apply at all for exotics, only weapon damage. 

It’s decent if you have it already and are on a budget. I would not slot this on a fully-optimized exotic build. Probably better on straight-up Tetryon build since the damage-to-held applies to weapon damage, for all four of you Tetryon enjoyers out there.

Tricobalt Tear Generator

This console passive provides:

The active fires 5 Ultra-High Yield Tricobalt Torpedoes that damage any enemies in a 1.5 km radius and then leaves a rift that disables enemies and deals damage-over-time for 10 seconds in a 3 km radius. Standard 2 minute cooldown, and you can launch it from 3-12 km away.

Ultra-High Yield Tricobalts

Don't be fooled by the big numbers on the tooltip, these are less impressive than you think. They scale off of the following (and as far as we can tell ONLY the following):

These do not scale in any way, shape, or form with anything Exotic. Not EPG, not +Exotic, not +Bonus Exotic, and certainly not Aux power (aside from things like Aux-Config Offense)

Unstable Rifts

This does scale off of Exotic things (but not +Projectile or +Tricobalt), but still no Aux scaling. Here's what you get for an equation:

Formula:

Damage = Base * (1 + 1.9129 + sum(Cat1))+(1+sum(Cat2)) * (1 +resistance modifiers))

Exotic Conclusions

This ends being rather lackluster in the grand scheme of things for exotic builds. The passives are rather useless for exotic as well.

I brought the console along on my Palatine for an ISA and an ISE. The ISA I used it pretty poorly and only ended up with 2.4K DPS out of it. The ISE I had better control and timing, but only yielded 6.3K. In a world of hyper-powered EPG-scaling clickies, this is NOT the next new hotness. However, I think over on the kinetic torpedo side of things, this console would be much more appreciated.

Kinetic Conclusions

Okay, now let's ask how the console benefits torp builds. I ran it through the Torpedo Calculator on my personal torper and the console was 2% better than the Assimilated Module before the active was considered. It's about as good as Hull Image Refractors, remembering that HIR benefits ALL damage, including Isolytic Tears, any mines or energy weapons, etc., whereas Shield Pen only works for weapons. If you're not using a Hangar or destructible torpedoes, this console is straight-up better than a Swarmer-Matrix, but if you're using either the Swarmer Matrix will outclass it (30% extra Cat1 to Targetable torpedoes is a lot). I could make similar remarks about Ordnance Accelerator and mines--if you're using mines, you want the Ordnance Accelerator. If not, the Tricobalt Tear Generator is better.

This seems a solid, if not remarkable console depending on your setup. Given that a torper probably has about 5-6 consoles running free out that aren't given to tactical slots or the Ferrofluid console, the hierarchy outside of ship-specific or Lobi/Lockbox consoles is pretty close to this:

There are many assumptions baked into this, so if you're curious about it, check out the Torpedo Calculator and see what works better for you. I was able to get about 10K out of the active alone on an ISA run on my C-store/Lobi-store torp build. Not earth-shattering, but welcome. If you happen to be running Tricobalt mines and some +Tricobalt, you can probably get even more damage out of it.

Unstable Planetoid Detonation

This console costs lobi, and on the Tooltip, says it scales with EPG. (Spoiler, it does not) Technically, still an Exotic source, it’s very weak, especially given the cost. I picked one up knowing full well it was probably bad, but I have another plan for it still, so it’s ok.

Equation:

Kinetic Damage = 697.2*(Cat1+2.82+1)*(Cat2+1.48+1)*(0.00839*AUX+0.161)

Note the lack of an EPG term here. This means that this really only scales with +All and +Kinetic. It does not scale with Exotic Particle Generators, +Exotic Damage, Exotic Particle Amplifiers, +Torp, or anything like that. I ran a ~200k ISA and got about 500 DPS out of it, which is terrible. Also of note, this has a 10km range, but will light up like it can be activated at 15km+. It will instead just fizzle and go on cooldown if you try to activate it beyond 10km. This one is very much not worth 200 Lobi until something changes like allowing it to scale with EPG, for example. This console is not recommended for any build.

Drivetrain (Deflector/Engine/Core/Shields)

Secondary Deflectors

Now we're ready to discuss secondary deflectors, specifically the deteriorating variety. If you were not already aware, the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector (DSecDef) is one of the most powerful tools available to science ships and is generally essential to Maximum Science. The other two deflectors are, per conventional wisdom, not optimal and were not analyzed. The Inhibiting Secondary Deflector is one shot of damage after 4 seconds, which is 4 seconds the enemy can die in or cleanse the debuff. Resonating enhances healing, so is only for healer builds. As far as we know, all the top science builds are using the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector.

Here are the ways to proc it (per the wiki-AOEs are bolded):

Tilor and I did exhaustive testing on Secondary Deflectors and analyzed over 200 data points to understand how these things work. Unfortunately, Cryptic is very cryptic (hah) on how these scale.

Our findings

Deteriorating Secondary Deflector

We obtained this data by slotting Mk XII - Mk XV secondary deflectors in orbit with varying amounts of EPG/Cat2. Tilor was then able to use a LINEST function to derive the slope of the line as well as the non-scaling portion and match the observed tooltip values with less than 0.05% error. If he wishes to discuss his analytical methods in greater depth if desired in the comments, that's better reserved for him.

When you look at the magnitude of the increases from Mk XII to Mk XV, it's very sharply non-linear. A Mk XV DSecDef has almost double the base damage and the equivalent of 300 more EPG.

Let me put it another way: A ship with 0 EPG and a Mk XV DSecDef outdamages a ship with 500 EPG and Mk XII DSecDef in terms of secondary deflector damage, and it's not close. Given that most mid-to-high end Science ships have this item in their top five damage sources, it's really really hard to undervalue the importance of the deteriorating secondary deflector to an EPG-focused science build.

TL;DR: Upgrading your Deteriorating Secondary Deflector to Mk XV and having good ways to proc it is one of the cheapest, best options you can do to improve your science ship's damage.

Revolutionary Set

I'm going to cut straight to the heart of the matter. We know what you're going to ask: How good is the Revolutionary set? The answer is below. There be math ahead--ye were warned.

Adding the 4-piece increases the base damage to 13614. What does this mean? It means this thing is a scaling oddity. If your Cat1 is low (like 200% or lower), your Cat2 ends up only being about as half as effective as it would be. At higher ends of Cat2 (like 300% before preload), Cat2 is about 75% as effective as it is normally.

This is a very vanilla formula. The rift only lasts 8 seconds (16 with 4-piece) so it's not going to be a major source of damage, but it's worth noting that the base damage is higher than several other clickies like the Temporal Vortex Probe.

Further Analysis: 2-piece

If you'll recall from our last treatise on exotics, we defined an entry level science ship and used it as a point of comparison to analyze a bunch of different things. Here's our basic setup:

Assume 10 targets for the purposes of hazards and AOEs.

Now, let's go back to the 2-piece for a second. The traditional slot for core and shields on exotic build is the Temporal set. Let's toss in a Gravity Well III, Secondary Deflector MK XV, DRB I, both the exotic torps (non-epic), Drain Infection, the Anti-Time Bubble, and Very Cold In Space I as a pretty universal/cheap setup. If I set this up with 10 targets and add the House Mo'Kai 2-piece setup with 120 Starship Weapon Amplification skill, my final, uptime-adjusted damage (DPS) increases by 18%. In comparison, the Temporal 2-piece is only a final boost of 5%.

How about for a higher-end build? I'm going to use my personal ship as an example, which is over 325% Cat1 / 195% Cat2, 92% CrtH, and 250% CrtD without either Temporal or House Mo'Kai 2-piece. It also has a larger number of exotic damage sources. On that ship, the Temporal 2-piece, as good as it is, only adds 2.7% final damage. In contrast, House Mo'Kai 2-piece is over 9% final damage.

Verdict: Hands-down, the House Mo'Kai 2-piece is best-in-slot (and probably includes the core)

Now, let's compare ColCrit from the Colony Deflector versus the Temporal 2-piece, leaving the Mo'Kai 2-piece in place.

Mathematically, I do not believe you can re-engineer the Temporal Deflector, so it will end up with the same EPG as a colony deflector (I have 21.3 on mine). Thus, the Colony Deflector is mathematically superior and also unlocks other options like the Romulan Engines to power the House Mo'Kai 2-piece, the Competitive Engines for speed, or my personal favorite, the Regenerative Crystal Matrix Shield.

Further Analysis: 3-piece

If I am flying a low-budget or starter sci build similar to what I've outlined above, the House Mo'Kai Rift 3-piece clicky with both the radiation cone and the hazard is hitting for about 12.5K DPS in a perfect world where I nail 10 targets with the rift blast. Those who have used it know that it is much better said than done. If I'm hitting only 1 target with the cone, it's obviously only hitting for about 5K DPS and is thus not worth it. Even at 5 targets per blast, I don't see this as valuable.

Now let's talk high-end setups. At this point, remember we're talking about Improved Photonic Officer, a lot more crit and Cat2, and a somewhat higher EPG value. I'll again use my personal ship setup as the point of comparison. At that point, the 3-piece is hitting for about 30K DPS even if you only hit 1 target with the radiation cone (in fact, the 8 second hazard does more work than the radiation cone at that point).

If I drop ColCrit to pick up the 3-piece (knowing they have about the same EPG), I actually lose damage unless I hit multiple targets with the radiation cone or unless I stack more buffs right when I fire it. My potential damage is so high that even adding 30K DPS is a loss compared to a final 5% damage. At the extreme high end, if you're able to hit 100% crit without the Colony Deflector, then sure, go ahead with the House Mo'Kai 3-piece.

If you're looking at picking up the 3-piece and leaving the Colony Deflector on, at the high end, just know that the active is worth about 2% final damage depending on how many targets you hit and you'll have to weigh that against the other options.

Mind you, the actual numbers on the clicky are stupid-high. I could see someone hitting for 2 million damage on it. Unfortunately, 2 million damage divided by 180 (its recharge time) only puts it at 11K DPS overall, and that’s not even counting the 6 second charge time.

Further Analysis: 4-piece

Low-end: Honestly, this is so close that I'd probably go for it, especially if I didn't have access to the colony deflector. Free damage is free.

High-end: Still a net DPS loss by about 1%, though if I can reliable hit more than 5 targets with the Radiation cylinder it's not.

Nucleating Warp Core (Warp Crystals)

Yes, these differ from the warp crystals created from the Omni and from the 3+pc set. They all do the same thing, but all have slightly different damage equations. Mechanically, they require a direct collision with an enemy hitbox to trigger damage. They can be 0.1km from the enemy, and within ~2km of a player and they will float towards the player to splash secondary shielding. If they are not within 2km of a player, they can just sit in space doing nothing.The base damage is the same, but each source has a different amount of baked-in Cat1. Don’t take the specific Cat1 value as absolute truth, it’s hard to extract exactly what skills are and are not affecting this since it’s not your typical exotic power. These are slightly different in that they can Crit (albeit rarely), while the other two warp crystal sources don’t crit.The Warp Core Crystals are Red in color. 

Please note, this equation is at Mark XV:

Radiation Damage

2187.81*(Cat1+4.55+1)*(Cat2+1)

Interlacing Tetryon Beam Array (Warp Crystals)

These are red crystals with a blue glow (like a Rare lootcritter). These are really low occurrence proc, since this is the standard 2.5% proc. It does say on hit, but it is only this one omni that has this power. This will be your lowest source of crystals appearing. 

Once again, equation is at Mark XV:

Radiation Damage

2187.3*(Cat1+4.42+1)*(Cat2+1)

Crystal Harmonics 3pc+ Set (Warp Crystals)

When you have 3 or more pieces of the set, all of your tetryon weapons have a chance to create a crystal on hit. That means you have around 1 in 50 shots (3pc) or 1 in 33 shots (4pc) chance of generating a crystal. With 6 weapons and a normal firing cycle, that's just about one every other firing cycle. After a lot of idle shooting, this certainly holds true. It was about 1-2 firing cycles between crystals generating. In an active combat situation, they would certainly be close enough to trigger damage, but a stationary target just doesn’t trigger them unless they spawn in just the right place. Now, using Fire at Will is a beautiful sight, because now you are firing (6 weapons) 60 shots per cycle! That means with the 4pc, you can quickly generate around 2 crystals per firing cycle. I spent over an hour shooting and generating crystals, and none of them from either the Omni or the set bonus can crit.

This equation doesn’t scale with mark/rarity of anything since it is a set bonus.

Radiation Damage

2187.81*(Cat1+3.58+1)*(Cat2+1)

Crystal damage doesn’t scale with rarity. Crystals don’t crit, however I have seen some parses with <10% critical hits (these are from the warp core). [Dmg] mods on the weapon don’t change the damage either. They do scale up with weapon/core Mark, but that’s it. EPG or Exotic Damage doesn’t affect damage, but +Radiation does. Magnified Firepower affects it (weapon damage), as does Fleet Coordinator (bonus all damage). It’s certainly an unusual set of stats that affect it for our typical Revisiting Exotics.So how do the crystals perform? Actually, pretty well. The more enemies on the map, the more you will see out of the crystals. Be aware that they show up in a few places in SCM, such as pets as well as your own damage. Occasionally, there will be a few that are unassigned, but it's not an appreciable amount. I’ve seen as high as 200k or more (Spencer's CSV build) out of these, but more often in the 25k range (my supported Iktomi Exotic run) is a solid expectation. Doing some isolated testing, the best piece of this is the warp core. It doesn’t require you to be in Tetryon, it's guaranteed when the target dies. The Omni is still a proc, even though it is per shot instead of per cycle and has the least impact on spawning crystals. If you are in Tetryon beams, there is no better “crafted” omni (I know, it isn’t crafted, but it's the same slot as commonly referred to as crafted). Slotting 3 pieces to get more crystals requires a lot of investment, so your mileage may vary. Slotting 4 pieces for the clicky and extra proc chance is totally not worth it. The clicky should really be a passive to be worth it, but instead it lasts about 20 seconds and has a 3 minute irreducible cooldown. At some point, having extra crystals isn’t going to increase your overall damage. I did notice that the crystals spawned by the 3/4pc proc appear a short distance away from the target, and with 0 chase range on enemies and 2km or so on players/NPCs, you’ll find a lot of your proc crystals fizzle and the warp core ones that appear where the enemy died (say, center of a Gravity Well) will hit.

Their performance is highly variable, but I’ve seen anything from 20K up to 100K out of them on an EPG build doing about 1M DPS, so I’d strongly consider at least running the Warp Core. It’s a hard to math out the impact of the loss of whatever other drive train piece you’d have to give up, be it Competitive Engines, Temporal 2-piece, etc, but if you’re not set on all 4 pieces and have Imperial Rift, consider shuffling the Rift Core off in favor of the Tholian one.

Ship Weapons

Both of these torpedoes do not scale with rarity and have weird Mark scalings. At Epic, a mod without [Dmg] (like [Ac/CrtD]) counts as a 1.03 final multiplier (which we put into the base). A mod that does include [Dmg] counts as a 1.06 final multiplier, e.g. [CrtD/Dmg].

Note that we are only interested in the exotic-scaling aftereffects of these weapons, not the initial kinetic kaboom.

The exotic parts of the PEP and Gravy scale with Epic modifiers (not Ultra-Rare), and [X/Dmg] mods are better than ones without damage.

Particle Emission Plasma Torpedo (clouds)

The Particle Emission Plasma Torpedo is a little weird. Only its preloaded Cat1 scales with Mk, and it has that weird final modifier scaling at Epic. Note that the high preloaded Cat1 value means that Cat2 is more influential stat.

Gravimetric Torpedo (anomalies)

The Gravimetric Torpedo is even weirder. Its rifts don’t scale with Mark or rarity at all, except for the Epic mod. Moreover, its duration scales with CtrlX. Yes, we did that math too. Rift Duration = 3 + 0.015 * CtrlX

Pahvan Omni Proc - Resonance Charge

The recent Pahvo-centric event gave us a new Set Omni to play with. This one is great as it mirrors the CRF/CSV as BO/FAW on the beam, so you can even slot it on cannon builds. It is Proton damage, and pretty low at that, so why are we talking about this? The proc it comes with is a 33% chance per hit to trigger and hit 4 targets for some damage, and leave a Resonance Charge for 60 seconds, plenty long enough. The damage scales with Resonance Charges, too. Just firing the beam means you get 4 rolls at 33% per firing cycle. Firing the beam under Fire at Will, even from ETM, means you get 10 rolls per firing cycle! This scales up very quickly due to hitting targets, getting extra damage from stacks, etc. Also of note, if you are hitting a single target, you might get half the rolls from FAW (since it hits only one target 5 times), but every proc still hits 4 times, just the same target.

Please note, this equation is at Mk XV:

Equation:

Proton Damage = 948.48*(Cat1+0.6+1)*(Cat2+1)

This only scales with Proton, Energy, and All damage. This does not scale with Directed Energy or Beams, or even Energy Weapon Training. There are a couple sources of note of Energy damage that apply. Fragment of AI Tech scales with CtrlX, and applies to the Pahvan Omni proc. Bio-Electric Wave and Experimental Power Redirection both have +Energy and apply here, so there’s actually great synergy with both of those consoles and this omni. If you are using ETM+FAW, the Pahvan Omni is a great option. Under single-target modes such as Cannon Rapid Fire and Beam Overload, this omni isn’t so good. This will not replace the Ba’ul Omni for the 2pc Linked Sentry set, or the Altamid Omni for the 3pc Altamid set as those set bonuses are quite strong. However, this omni is worth considering for its proc on any energy build that can spare the build space.

Starship Traits

Subspatial Warheads (Isolytic Tears)

Isolytic Tears are hazards* created by the use of a high-yield torpedo or Torpedo: Transport Warhead with the Subspatial Warheads starship trait (Source: Son'a Intel Battlecruiser, Lobi Store) equipped. The tears deal damage and drain engine power. Concentrate Firepower-created high-yield torpedoes also benefit from this trait.

A meta note: Subspatial Warheads is NOT a commonly used torpedo in scitorp / EPG space magic builds. Both the Particle Emission Plasma and the Gravimetric Torpedo are destructible on high yield, and Command (for Concentrate Firepower) is not as highly-sought after as Temporal (or even Intel). This is much more common on kinetic / projectile builds that are not stacking EPG / +Exotic, BUT since it is still technically** exotic damage, Tilor and I felt it was more appropriate for an exotics post.

*It's a hazard in the sense that it spawns an anomaly that does stuff to nearby enemies. It's NOT a hazard in that the 2-piece Temporal Operative Starship Technologies set bonus does NOT benefit it. It's also not a DoT.

**Sort of. See below.

Formula

It does damage to shields, which is to say the damage doesn't go straight to hull. This is better for making big numbers pile up, but worse at destroying enemies. It is physical damage, so it doesn't suffer from innate penalties to shields.

It does NOT scale off +Exotic or +Bonus Exotic damage nor does it scale off of Aux. We have double-checked this. A +All damage console like Hull Image Refractors or a +Bonus All damage trait like Aux Config Offense does boost the tooltip damage. A +Exotic console like Causal Anchor or a +Bonus Exotic trait like Particle Generator Amplifiers does not. It does scale off of EPG, but with the constant of 2.00 in the term, it's slightly-less effective to scale it up that way. It is not boosted by +Weapon or by +Projectile.

We will check to see if Particle Manipulator allows these to crit -- Tilor is still ranking up his science R&D on the toon that has this trait.

Duration: Variable but averages around 20 seconds.

This is the real reason why we included the Geordi quote. We took 20 high yield shots from various angles with various high yield torpedoes and regardless of torpedo type, high yield rank, angle of attack, presence or absence of shields, or the target being destroyed (or not), the duration of the rift was inconsistent. If anyone is aware of additional mechanics, please let us know, but as of now we believe that these vary from roughly 14-30 seconds, with both the median and average around 21-22 seconds.

At fairly modest EPG / Cat1 +All / Cat2 +All levels (140 / ~27% / ~52%), we were seeing numbers of about 2700 damage per second. This is very close to the numbers for a MK XV Epic Particle Emission Plasma torpedo cloud that lasts 3 times as long. That's strong, especially since the long duration means you can have these up all the time.

There's not really anything groundbreaking here, but given the prevalence of subspatial warheads on high-end torpedo builds, we wanted to do the math on the trait and document how it works. The trait is absurdly strong in the right setups--somebody got 230K from Isolytic Tears alone in the highest-record ISE run (as of 3 December 2020). If you have access to it on your kinetic torpedo build, this is definitely something you want to build around and emphasize. We don't think it's quite as amazing on a scitorp / space magic build due to requiring command seating and/or destructible torpedoes, barring some clever use of a 3rd/4th torpedo that are high-yielded and non-destructible (like dark matter) to trigger it. That said, if you're torping, this is definitely worth looking into.

While we can understand the Romulans, Klingons, and Dominion having no such qualms about using such a device at all, this latest item really makes us scratch our heads about how Starfleet justifies the usage of certain new technologies.

However, this is the same Federation in 2411 that allows subspace weapons, retrofitted assimilation devices, Section 31 technology, and various temporal BS on any-and-all ships flying the flag. If there is a Department of Ethical Technology Use, it’s manned by a single (bored) junior lieutenant Pakled who’s either a Section 31 operative or has forged an identity as a full commander. Lieutenant Pakley’s response to any-and-all reviews of new tech seems to be “Approved, suitable for use.” Even if the device uses technology from the Klingon underworld.

By the Book

Now let’s take that high-end ship, which previously had Improved Gravity Well on it, and add some of those consoles back in. I’m going to pick Delphic Tear, Tholian Webspinner, Neutronic Eddy Generator, Constriction Anchor, and Temporal Vortex Probe. We’ll then compare the results of the new ship trait “By the Book” against Improved Gravity Well.

“By the Book” increases the duration of anomalies (Timeline Collapse, Chronometric Inversion Field, Subspace Vortex, Gravity Well, Very Cold in Space, Tyken’s Rift, Ionic Turbulence) by 2 seconds every time either another anomaly or temporal bridge officer power is used. So now, let’s set up our ship to take advantage of that.

In a perfect world, we’d get at least 5 triggers on each power, but since we don’t live in the real world, let’s assume 4, except for Timeline Collapse, which will get 3 due to its short duration. The tradeoff here is that at 4 triggers, we’re getting only a 28 second Gravity Well instead of 40 seconds. We’ll also assume an averaged-out value of Improved Gravity Well’s -20 DRR penalty to its primary target.

IGW: 

0.55% damage increase, 40/40 second Gravity Well uptime will pull enemies with 100% uptime

By The Book w/ 6 anomalies:

11.4% increase, ~30/40 second Gravity Well uptime will pull enemies with ~75% uptime

By The Book is certainly stronger against clustered enemies; Improved Gravity Well will keep your enemies clustered. If you’re running 6+ anomalies or even 5, I think it’s certainly valuable to rate By the Book much more highly, especially if you’re in a higher-end setup that already has lots of -DRR in it. The main draw (no pun intended) of Improved Gravity Well is single-target -DRR reduction and 100% uptime on Gravity Well. You would need a very strong anomaly chain and/or a lot of Temporal Bridge officer powers to sustain 100% uptime on Gravity Well with By the Book.

Note that I am not convinced Timeline Collapse is the best anomaly for this setup; since it doesn't gain any damage increase by extending its duration, it is likely better to find another Temporal Power with lower cooldown.

Piercing Projectiles

A reminder, the Hull Penetration and Shield Penetration skills only apply to weapons. No immediate benefit to exotic builds so for exotic builds, no benefit.

For energy builds, when I ran this through the energy calculator with a decent amount of Shield Penetration (i.e. Colony deflector, 3 points in skills, Lorcator, Self-Modulating fire uptime-averaged), it wasn't beating out the top C-store traits like Calm Before the Storm, Super Charged Weapons, or even Strike From Shadows with high enough CrtD, much less the best traits out there like Emergency Weapon Cycle. The shield pen is substantially less impactful on an energy weapon build than it is for a kinetic build. I wouldn't buy this just for your energy weapon builds. If you have it, it's not bad.

For kinetic builds, the starship trait was significantly better than Promise of Ferocity, Sniper, or Strike From Shadows.

Nothing exists that can dethrone Ceaseless Momentum from the top of the cheap-ish kinetic trait throne (for feds at least, for now) and Entwined Tactical Matrices is similarly critical. Subspatial Warheads is also too strong of a contributor to drop if your budget includes Lobi ships, so if we're looking at C-store/free ships, this is a very strong contender on the kinetic side of things for "generic damage filler" traits to round out your build until you start getting into the Legendary ship/Lockbox/Promo budget tier . Of course, it doesn't have the placate that Strike From Shadows does, nor is it ALL damage (see again comments about the console), but it compares very favorably over stuff like Checkmate or Sniper. In my limited analysis, Piercing Projectiles was about 4-6% better than Checkmate, Sniper, Promise of Ferocity, or Strike From Shadows (though again, the latter is underrated due to its influence on ALL damage). I'm going to run both Piercing Projectiles and Strike From Shadows on that build.

One note: while A2B torpers are heavily out of favor, the Cold-Hearted trait is significantly stronger than Piercing Projectiles if fully stacked (about 5% in favor of CH), even when considering shields. Let's talk about why A2B torpers are out of favor, then implications. A2B torpers miss out on the Phased Space Membrane from the Grissom (which requires high aux) and with the advent of Boimler Effect, CDR isn't as constrained for high-aux weapon builds. In high-end runs, some dedicated individual--either the tank or a purpose-built buff/debuff build called a "nanny"--will be running this since Cold-hearted is a debuff that only stacks across the team, not per user.

However, IF you have Cold-Hearted and IF you don't have the Phased Space Membrane nor Boimler Effect AND IF you're not into the high-end meta and just want a general-use torper, you're better off running A2B if your ship supports the seating for it. Of course, if you're not a veteran player, Cold-Hearted is rather hard to get and I would never condone the amount of dil required just to fish out an Epic Phoenix token. Just thought it was worth tacking on a note that A2B torping isn't quite dead (while possible to get ships with LtCmdr Command and Pilot, it's expensive/difficult) depending on what you have available to you. It's more like...mostly dead.

Tear Open the Gates

This is the starship trait from the Fek’Ihri Byr’Jai and it was a pleasant surprise, parsing at 50K out of 704K on ISE with a very-anomaly focused ship. It was less impressive on HSE and some Elite patrols we tested it on. We’ve rated it at B-tier on our tier list. Probably won’t rock your socks off, but for the average playerbase, especially on maps with more stationary/slow-moving targets, it’ll do some work. Since there’s not really tooltips on this one, we’ve left it at that unless there are further questions.

Digital Compilation

Anyway, we previously rated Digital Compilation as no good, very bad, never slot. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s the starship trait from the Compiler Dreadnaught in the anniversary event. It was buffed after we did our initial analysis and we’ve been asked to take another look at it, so here goes.

The way the trait works is that whenever an enemy of Frigate rank or higher (so no fighters) is defeated after taking Exotic damage from you, the enemy doesn’t warp core breach and instead turns into an enemy-seeking Digitizer Probe that deals plasma damage to nearby foes within 2.5 km. You can have 5 of these active at a time and each probe lasts 15 seconds.

Here’s the formula for the damage:

Plasma damage = 778.44 * (1 + 0.53 + sum(Cat1)) * (1 + sum(Cat2))

It’s worth noting that this does NOT scale with EPG at all nor Aux. It does scale with +All, generic +Plasma, +Exotic, and +Bonus Exotic. It’s not a DOT so it doesn’t double-dip with the Torment Engine. These are all the same conclusions that u/thisvideoiswrong determined, but we double-checked just to make sure.

The fact that it doesn’t scale off of EPG at all means this will have a hard time scaling up and since you’re relying on the probes to be smart and damage enemies, it’s going to be very much scenario-dependent. That’s also because of one other minor detail . . .

Sharing is Caring

Remember how the trigger condition is defeating a foe that YOU damaged with exotic? The key here is that it’s a foe being defeated, not you defeating them. Due to that, whenever someone else lands the killing blow and the target has been tagged with your exotic damage, the person who gets the kill credit gets the DPS from the subsequently-created Digitizer Probe. That means in teamed content, unless you can guarantee that you’re getting all the kills (and this is hard to do even in supported DPS runs), you’re going to share DPS. If you’re not into numbers chasing, this is perfectly fine and will benefit the team overall. If you’re into selfish numbers chasing, this significantly devalues the trait. For solo play of course that’s not a problem and this trait is perfectly serviceable, especially on maps with high enemy densities. I believe the word on the street is that Cryptic has no plans on changing this.

Field Testing

We ran this in a couple of TFOs to see how it did. First was a 2-man HSA with an EPG build and a tank. Digital Compilation was 17.4K out of 217.4K DPS for the main DPS and 4.2K out of 71.7K for the tank. As you can see, in solo (or even duo) content, this is a strong trait at 8% final DPS increase.

Next we ran it in an ISE with teammates relatively close in DPS, where the results are as follows:

In terms of overall team DPS increase, the trait’s not bad at 32.9K out of teamwide 1554K DPS (2% final) but it’s nothing to write home about, which again goes back to the point that this trait will have much higher value in solo / duo content rather than full 5 man teams. ISE is also more spread out than HSE. You can extrapolate that to other maps as well, i.e. great in Ninth Rule, Counterpoint, or Binary Stars, mediocre in Undine Assault, Days of Doom, etc.

Conclusions

Our final rating on the STOBETTER tier list is that it’s B-tier on the Exotic tier list for solo content and C-tier for teamed content. The trait is okay, but very unreliable depending on how many enemies are nearby when you score the killing blow and whether the probes (or nearby enemies) last long enough to do damage. You also need to have at least some low cooldown AOE exotic damage to trigger the trait so this’ll be of limited value to ships that are just running Gravity Well. There might be some value in slotting it on a support, but it’s not going to displace the most effective support traits at the top of the heap in our estimation.

Five Magicks

This trait (from the same ship) is similar in its bonus to the console and when dealing Damage with any of the Five Magicks (Fire, Cold, Electrical, Radiation and Psionic), apply the following for 15 sec:

This makes it a very good trait for Disruptor builds (at 75 Engine power this is 26.25% Cat2 Disruptor/Radiation/Electrical/Fire/Cold/Psionic damage), especially those running Reroute Reserves to Weapons and an Electrical/Radiation Experimental Weapon that can trigger it, such as the Soliton Wave Impeller, and would you look at that, here’s an example of such a build on a Deimos doing 800K. For exotic builds, this is a solid entry into the starship tier roster, especially since it’s free. Given the number of items listed above, I would expect about 2/3rds of an exotic build to benefit from a strong trait. Two things hold it back from being truly exceptional: 1) It’s only 2/3rds of your damage and 2) Cat2 tends to be very saturated for premium-budget Exotic builds. If you’re in more of the economy or budget build categories which tend to be more Cat1 saturated, then this is a welcome power boost. We rate it as A-tier, kind of in the same vein as Ceaseless Momentum, which only boosts Kinetic damage but also helps with torp reload time and there’s a lot of kinetic floating around on Exotic builds. It won’t displace Spore-Infused/Improved Photonic Officer/Universal Designs (with a good console to trigger it) but is roughly on-par with things like Exotic Modulation. Very solid, especially for the price and its versatility for Disruptor builds as well.

Other

These are various odds and ends that we think are pretty central and significant to exotic builds. Now, before you ask “Can you test x/y console and add it to the tool you’re working on?” the answer is probably no unless it’s easily and widely available and displays tooltip values, or unless you’re going to buy us whatever it is you’re curious about. Our methods are published; feel free to use them and collect your own data.

Most of these do not scale with Aux

Drain Infection

Drain Infection actually ends up looking pretty good with consistent ways to apply it (Tyken’s Rift) considering that anything that applies it probably also applies the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector. The worst part about it is that it can only trigger every 5 seconds.

Anti-Time Entanglement Singularity (T6)

This ends up being decent. Only downside is the 5 minute cooldown (which is a pretty big downside).

Captain Careers

Shout-out to the uninformed folks in DPS-Bronze trying to convince people that captain career makes a big difference for sci builds. I was curious to see if that was actually true, so again I broke out the Exotic Calculator to do some analysis. Again, I used the two setups from earlier: the entry level with House Mo’kai 2-piece and my personal build. I modified the Exotic Calculator to adjust captain abilities for uptime.

A couple of simplifying assumptions:

The percentages will reflect % increase of the uptime-averaged captain abilities compared to not including them.

Eng - Low End: 2%

Eng - High End: 4.1%


Tac - Low End: 12.3%

Tac - High End: 9.3%


Sci - Low End: 6.6%

Sci - High End: 4.6%

When we consider Go Down Fighting and Fire On My Mark, it’s clear that Tacs do have a significant advantage, but the high end, that advantage narrows from 10% to 5%. Sci is closer at the low end, but has a similar gap at the high end to Tac. That said, captain career is at most a 10% difference, so don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do exotic DPS (or any other) type of DPS without being a tac. Tac would be essential for chasing the top of the leaderboard, but unless you’re after that, it’s not necessary. Engineers can certainly do enough DPS to crush any Elite content even if they have the lowest ceiling for exotics. It certainly doesn’t help to have 2 of their offensive abilities barely contributing though.

Aftershocks Duty Officers

Recently I ran across a reddit comment on r/sto saying it was better to use the Gravimetric Scientist for Tyken’s Rift rather than Gravity Well. As a reminder, while the powers do share a cooldown, their duplicate cooldowns are long enough that you can alternate Gravity Well / Tyken’s Rift / Gravity Well with no issue. The shared cooldown is 20 seconds and Gravity Well has a duplicate cooldown of 40.

I decided to investigate the behavior of Aftershock Tyken’s Rifts, which has the exact same chances as the Aftershock Gravity Well, but with some key differences. By default, Tyken’s only lasts 10 seconds, but the Aftershocks start rolling their chances AFTER the base Tyken’s Rift has expired (at 12/14/16/18 seconds depending on rarity). This means that unless you’re using By the Book, the rifts won’t really overlap with the main rift.

However, the most important implication I’ve found is that Aftershock Tyken’s Rifts re-apply the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector once. In other words, no matter how many Aftershock Rifts you generate, you’ll hit all targets with the Deteriorating Secondary Deflector again. As far as I can tell, it’s just once even with multiple aftershock rifts. I might try and test that again to see if it refreshes. EDIT: I have re-tested and multiple aftershock rifts "only count as 1" for the purpose of refreshing the DSD. You get 1 extra shot.

Since it’s relatively easy to extend Gravity Well, either through Improved Gravity Well or By the Book with the right setup, I think the added DSD application of Aftershock Tyken’s Rifts makes it superior to Gravity Well. For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen Aftershock Gravity Wells pull more than 2.5K DPS on my record runs on either exotic build. Since the Aftershock Tyken’s Rift doff is also easy to pull out of the Phoenix Box and ISE has no cooldown now, I did several runs with that doffs and have seen DPS as high as 5K from Aftershock Tyken’s, though it can be a little finicky due to the long delay.

With that in mind, if you’re running Tyken’s Rift alongside your Gravity Well, I concur with the original comment: Aftershock your Tyken’s Rift. The extra DSD procs and repeated ISE testing supports that claim.

A Philosophical Perspective on Nerfs

If you are (or were) parsing above 800K DPS on ISE/HSE, this isn’t really for you. If that's you, then yep, the theoretical ceiling for EPG damage just went down by a fairly sizable chunk and I don't blame you for being salty. Everyone else, I’m going to say some things that will either offer perspective or make you angry. Possibly both.

It’s really easy to look at these nerfs and see what was lost and get mad about it. Yes, the Agony Distributor is truly garbage now. The other three consoles? Hull Image Refractors is more than fine. The two we covered are no longer standout performers on EPG builds but as we’ve shown through in-depth analysis, the Neutronic Eddy Generator is still pretty good. The Webspinner is now basically a starter build console or F2P if you got it through the event. At a fairly pessimistic view of it, slotting the current Webspinner is only a little worse than you would be if you had just put another research lab console on your ship and it's not like those are bad. It's...eh...usable, but certainly dead at the high end. Yes, I know we’ve had a lot of traits and consoles since 2020 that supported leaning into consoles when building exotics whereas before only a couple really stood out. What we’re seeing here is Cryptic rein in two of the worst offenders (though I am surprised they cared enough). They were outliers and arguably are still more than usable, perhaps more situationally than before, but they’re not unsalvageable garbage like Agony Redistributor.

That said, if you were (or are) counting on any 1 gimmick, trait, or console to make your build “OP,” whatever that means for you but at least 15-20% of your DPS, then your build is innately at risk. Some of you (and some of us per the tables above), have shown that's what these were doing. By extension, that means it’s a risk to pay out to get said gimmick (Subspatial Warheads in hiding). I’ve recommended the Webspinner to many. Same with Neutronic Eddies. I didn’t know they were getting nerfed. They were good recommendations at the time and still are decent-to-good consoles depending on what you paid (or didn’t) to get them even if they’re not throwing out stupendously eye-popping numbers from the active. It’s surprising to me that Cryptic cared enough to nerf them, but from a mathematical perspective, these were pretty well outliers. Now they’re more in line with other consoles that aren’t blatantly OP.

Genesis Seed: I’m in danger

Cryptic might not nerf your toy, but they also might, even if it takes them a couple of years to do so. My advice is enjoy it while it lasts. If your build is fundamentally solid, then you’re not going to be affected by OP gimmicks getting nerfed as much because you have a foundation you can fall back on. There’s a chance Cryptic might nerf entire systems or like overhaul Crit or something, but honestly that sounds like a lot of work they’re always claiming they don’t have time to do.

Console Ranking Evaluation

What we’re going to do is similar to what I’ve done in previous installments, which is to provide a mathematical “on-paper” comparison and ranking of exotic consoles. The last time I did this, it was back in Revisiting Exotics 17 about a year and a half ago so it’s time for a refresh. Once again, we’re going to use calculator tools (and TRINITY is now available to help with that), but with some different methods.

First, we’re going to rank the following consoles on a stripped-down build where they are the only console present:

However, unlike Isomag analysis, where consoles basically didn’t impact other consoles and only affected weapons, Exotics are different. Some consoles synergize with each other (for example; Genesis Seed and Fek’Ihri Torment Engine), so just looking at individual impact is not going to tell the true story. After we narrow the field to the top 13-14 consoles, I’ll run through 14 scenarios where we vote 1 off the island at a time to see what the impact is for removing each console. The lower the number, the more impactful the console was to the build. The higher the DPS after the console was removed, the less impact it had to the build. Last note: I’m not looking at the impact on other concerns like Aux Power or cooldown reduction (Temporal Vortex Probe).

I’ll also note that stacking with only 1 Research Lab console is not going to work so I’ll use two for that purpose. For the case where we substitute out the 2 Research Lab consoles, we replace it with another stat stick (Exotic Particle Amplifier Mk XV [EPG]). All consoles that have Mk and Rarity will be assumed to be Mk XV Epic.

Once again, I’ll be using my Dranuur for this for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a fairly optimized Exotic build for general Elite play and second, I have parse data for it that I can compare against our predicted results. Using a lower budget build is an option, but frankly an appreciably lower budget would wipe enough of the options from this list that you could probably slot all of those that are left. I also am posting this as an example of analysis you can do for yourself. TRINITY is readily available from the Tools page on STOBETTER. Simply make a copy and have at it (I know most of you won't but we worked too hard on it not to advertise). If you want to see the exact sheet I'm using or just copy it for your own purposes, it's here but no guarantees it's in the same configuration I used to test.

Round 1: Elimination Stage

Remember, here we're just slotting each console as the only console on the build to narrow the field down.

In this stage, we can see that there are some notable losers that we shouldn’t consider. Temporal Disentanglement Suite is basically only an option if fleet/crafted consoles aren’t available at the extreme low budget. Constriction Anchor has likewise been power-creeped out of viability at the high end and you can apply this same conclusion to the Auxiliary Ejection Assembly since it has a similar passive and also a weak active. Cascading Subatomic Disruptions also falls short–it’s more of a supportive console than something you take for damage. It’s possible the Bio-Electric Wave Capacitor makes it better with a bunch of Cat2 Electrical damage but for this scenario we’re ruling it out. For the cost, Bioneural Infusion Circuits is failing to make much of a splash so it’ll also not make it to the round-robin stage.

I will also leave off the “minimum-case” entries, i.e. Focusers with 1 stack, Exotic Particle Field Exciters without EPG for the next stage. If you're slotting these, I'm assuming you're slotting them optimally. So, here are our contestants for the next stage.

Round 2: Round Robin Stage

Now I’m going to see what happens when I slot all possible scenarios with 13 of the 14 top consoles (with 2 Particle Focusers) and then remove 1 at a time. For the purposes of Particle Focusers, when I remove them, I will substitute another Exotic Particle Amplifier Mk XV [EPG] in for the second removed console.

Console to Remove - DPS Without

Exotic Particle Amplifier [EPG] - 3,881,128.46

Genesis Seed - 3,890,233.40

Exotic Particle Field Exciter [EPG] - 3,899,017.07

2 Research Lab Particle Focusers (5 stacks), sub EPA - 3,918,270.60

Micro Dark Matter Anomaly - 3,981,607.65

Dragonsblood Flame Reactor - 4,015,972.62

Temporal Vortex Probe - 4,025,811.48

Fek’Ihri Torment Engine - 4,026,642.23

Delphic Tear Generator - 4,127,607.40

Entangled Quantum Bombardment - 4,136,335.96

Plasma Storm - 4,158,670.37

Radiation Bombardment Matrix - 4,176,416.60

Ionic Deflector Inversion (maximum boost) - 4,224,799.40

The way to understand this is that the consoles at the top can be predicted to have more impact on the build. Some of you will be surprised by the results here. Let’s break it down and compare to parsed results on this build just to keep ourselves grounded in the reality of how the build actually performs.

You’ll note that the Dragonsblood Flame Reactor is somewhat underrated by TRINITY. That’s because 1) as an engineer in premades with multiple instances of Greater Than The Sum going and EPS Power Transfer, my in-game power levels are higher than TRINITY models based on steady state and 2) Dragonsblood Flame Reactor has a high potential of hitting more targets than TRINITY models due to its low cooldown and persistence. We default TRINITY to 5 targets on average, but Dragonsblood, Plasma Storm, and Genesis Seed are both really big AOEs that last a long time, so the tool will undercount them somewhat. Also, you have to aim/time Genesis Seed for good results and well . . . okay, sometimes I don’t land it well but still get a record result. It happens. All that to say, it’s important to understand the limitations of the tool and align it against actual values.

Honorable Mention

Depending on your budget, you might also want to consider the following consoles, which I will not model directly in the tool since they are heavily build-dependent.

Summary

No TL;DR for you. If I’m going to do this level of analysis, you can read 350 words.