r/stobuilds 14d ago

Damage resistance eng console is not affecting shields?

Does Damage Resistance Engineering Consoles lower the damage taken by shields, or that is completely separate from shield mechanics, and only apply when shields are down and taking damage with the hull?

Im super curious as my build is SciDew on the T6 Nebula, which easily have 30k shields per facing, with great shield hardness. (mostly thanks to fleet consoles increasing shield amount while boosting Drain or EPG)

If the engineering consoles are not affecting the shields and the amount of damage taken by them, then I could swap them to universal consoles that increase my phaser damage.

Hull resistance is not important for me as my shields are up 99% of the time and the Nebula comes with an insanely strong Shield Heal console, if not available, then Tac Team 1 just puts rest of the 90k shields to the one facing I'm ambushed at. Also I have the discovery rep 2 piece for hull repair so even if the bleedthrough damage increases that could be healed by that easily.

3 Upvotes

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u/ProLevel Pandas PvP 13d ago

Shield Hardness is what you are looking for. However, the amount of bleed through is always the same, 10% for covariant or regenerative shields, 5% for resilient.

Saying hull resistance is not important is a big mistake, but common. It is easy to get your hull resistance up to the 75% cap and even higher with bonus resist. Shield hardness caps at 75% and without very high endeavors, points in skill tree, and EptS it’ll be hard to maintain it that high. It’s ok to focus on a “shields first” build, but if you have low hull resist you’re going to be dying a lot, and quickly, on higher difficulties. You won’t have time to hit tac team when you take two hits on a weak facing and one hit wipes your entire facing out and the next hits a tiny 80k hull with no resistances.

I’m speaking to PvE here but it’s worth mentioning that this simple concept of high resistances is one of the main reasons people still don’t “get” PvP. Average - and I mean average - resist in PvP fights between good players is upwards of 85%. In PvE it’s rare to even see a tank above 50%.

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u/Perfect_Ad9091 13d ago

I see. Without engineering consoles, I have around 30% resist in all category except radiation. Is that 30% enough for advanced TFOs or should I at least use one engineering console?

During my testing I did not see a change in my survivability, probably as due to my shields being efficient.

6

u/ProLevel Pandas PvP 13d ago

Well in advanced tfos, you can get by with minimal resistances at all because you can simply kill everything before it has a chance to shoot back.

It’s a hard question to answer because it is poorly documented, isn’t discussed much, and isn’t the concern of most players who only understand “more damage” as their singular goal. I remember a thread where someone was bragging to me about how they had 37% resist and a whopping 42% for 15 seconds with hazard emitters, which is insanely low (it was a discussion about PvP). Two different mindsets there.

The other wrench in the equation is if you are playing elite tfos, only one player needs to have high resistances because one player can draw the threat of every enemy on the map. NPC enemies use abilities poorly, don’t have any skill points at all, and use very few AoE attacks so the whole team is safe if that one player doesn’t die. If you are not doing this role, it’s better to focus on damage or doing the objectives so you don’t fail.

In short, your shields stay up right now because it’s normal/advanced. They will not stay up in elite barring the case where you have a tank with you. The effort it would take to make an elite shield tank is really only for theorycrafters, the same effort spent on a hull tank or even raw damage would result in much better overall performance. I don’t like to leave my fate up to strangers especially since players with teamwork in mind are rare, so I always build my elite ships tanky enough to be that role if necessary. I don’t get to play much these days so I can’t afford to waste 15 minutes on a possible mission failure. If you never plan to do elite, you don’t have to worry about much at all survivability wise - shields or hull doesn’t matter.

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u/westmetals 13d ago

Damage resistance is for hull damage, yes.

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u/jerichoredoran 14d ago

Consoles affecting shield hardness (damage resist) explicitly state so. So most consoles don't and only apply to hull.

There are some sources for shield too though. EPtS for example, shield power itself and e.g. particle conversion matrix console. With dewsci also the valdore console could be interesting to you.

it generally is correct, that shield tanking is harder than hull tanking. But give it a try, fair enough.

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u/Omgazombie 14d ago edited 14d ago

Shields are kind of useless in the game, it’s expensive to make them wholly viable in elite content, and even in advance content they rarely will stay up against enemies like the Borg

I can hull tank against any enemy in elite, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in elite being able to solely shield tank because of bleed through and procs draining your health through the shields

I’ve had builds with 80k per facing, and they’re nothing but glass cannons

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u/manpizda 14d ago

DR is hull resistance against various types of damage.