Revisiting Exotics 1: Deteriorating Secondary Deflectors

Original post by EPH289 on Reddit

Several years ago, the esteemed u/jayiie did an in-depth look into the underlying mechanics behind exotic damage and built a calculator as well as multiple posts that go into great detail into exotic mechanics. A few things have changed since then, and u/tilorfire27 and myself have decided to stand on the shoulders of giants and go deeper into exotics as well as revisit some old favorites. Deteriorating secondary deflector mechanics are a powerful part of exotic builds and previously unexplored, so we decided to tackle them first.

This is part 1 of a multi-part series.

Basic Exotic Mechanics

All exotic powers/abilities have five main stats they scale with. Not all will scale the same, and some will not use all of these parameters, but these are the possibilities, such as they are:

• "+Exotic" aka Cat1. This includes the Exotic Particle Generators statistic with a conversion factor from EPG to Cat1. Sometimes it includes a bonus based on the player level. From our extensive testing, this also includes Personal Endeavor's +Exotic damage.

• "+Bonus Exotic" aka Cat2

• Auxiliary Power (Not all things scale off auxiliary power!)

• Damage Resist Reduction --which can vary depending on which type of damage is being discussed.

• Mark/rarity/rank: For bridge officer powers, this is the rank of the ability. For equipment, this the mark/rarity.

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

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):

• Charged Particle Burst

• Destabilizing Resonance Beam

• Energy Siphon

• Structural Analysis

• Tachyon Beam

• Tyken's Rift

• Viral Matrix

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

• DSecDefs do NOT scale with Aux power

• DSecDefs do NOT scale with player level

• DSecDefs do NOT scale with rarity (aside from EPG mods)

• DSecDefs have separate equations for their Cat1 scalings at each Mark. We are not exactly sure why, but we have lots of data proving it.

• DSecDefs have both a scaling and non-scaling base damage component when it comes to how Cat1 buffs are applied. This makes our formula:

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

• Both the fixed base and the scaling base scale very, very strongly with Mark, to the point where I would say a ship with only a Mk XII secondary deflector is not part of a finished build (especially since it can be upgraded for free using Romulan or Featured Episode upgrades and going from XII to XV is not hard or expensive).

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 1% 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.

EDIT: Per discoveries in our latest thread that reduced our error to below 0.05%.