Game Mechanics Revealed: Damage Resistance Consoles

Welcome to Game Mechanics Revealed.  Star Trek Online is filled with vagaries; the devs are not forthcoming with clarification; the forums are a source of confusing and contradictory knowledge; the chats are rife with conjecture and misinformation.  In this series, I will attempt to find the answers and dispel the myths that plague our game.

Game Mechanics Revealed: Damage Resistance from Armour Consoles

We see the + rating of armour consoles.  We put them on our ships and we see the damage resistance ratings that result.  Do we really know what the damage resistance is?  Can we trust the numbers?

Let’s find out.

Experiment

For this test the aggressor is armed with a single turret, 125 weapon power, at point blank range (in this case, less than 2 km for maximum damage rating of a cannon type weapon.  The target is an unshielded cruiser with no hull plating or threat control skills.  The target has an innate 2% phaser damage resistance rating from being shot at with phasers over the course of his career.  Neither ship is using any equipment except for the armour consoles stated.

Results

Armour	diburnium mk xi common	total plus	listed resistance %	dps	reduction of dps	expected dps
bonus resist	32.5
number of consoles	0	0	2	526.5	0
	1	32.5	25.4	393.4	0.252	392.8
	2	65	39.2	323.5	0.386	320.1
	3	97.5	47.9	282.3	0.464	274.3
	4	130	53.8	254.7	0.516	243.2

Analysis

This is a bit table-y.  Let’s put it into a plot to be easier to understand.

Here we see how the damage resistance rating is associated with the total + to damage resistance.  The bonus is fairly steep, not quite a straight line but losses are slow up into at least +60.  The line of best fit shown is not the real formula used by the game, merely an empirical approximation that fits rather well, though slightly underestimating the effect at lower resistances (less than +50) while overestimating the effect at higher resistances (nearing +100, but who is ever going to get way up there?).

To determine (roughly) the damage resistance percentage you would get in a given configuration, plug your total + into x in the formula above.  Y will be your answer.

Threat control skill offers a + to damage resistance of approximately 1/10^th of the skill rating (so +9.9 at max, +5.4 at three ranks, etc.), while hull plating and armour reinforcement are somewhere around double that value.

And here we see the resulting drop in dps vs. the listed damage resistance percentage.  This is actually exactly what it says it is (I’m not used to that in this game).

And here it is with relative dps vs. total plus to resistance, for those who care.

Conclusion

Stacking armour consoles can most certainly work.  You still get good value out of most conventional (i.e. sane) amounts of stacking.  If you want to take it to extremes you can do that too.  With many, many stacked consoles on an engineering oriented cruiser, you could essentially have a whole second ship’s worth of hull to damage.  You may start seeing inefficiencies with your Aux2sif, HE, and PH at higher levels, however, though most enemies worth worrying over will be debuffing you with APB and FOMM to counter this.