STO Academy Forum

Hey Guys,

anyone tried tac skill Distributed targeting? Worth the slot or not?

Thank you

Max

(02-02-2017, 01:39 PM)maxtorman Wrote: [ -> ]Hey Guys,

anyone tried tac skill Distributed targeting? Worth the slot or not?

Thank you

Max

I have read some discussions about it on reddit.
The tool tips can be a bit confusing, but it seems it does what it says: it chains 16.8/23.4/30% of your attacks to up to 3 nearby targets. 
And right there is the problem: 
a) you need nearby targets (as with all AoE)
b) you are chaining your attacks, and on a beam boat that usually means single weapon damage.
On torp boats that would be a bit higher, as torps hit harder (but less frequent).

While the verdict is still out it seems to do less damage i.e. compared to KLW.
On the other side you have the fact that DT is a tactical exotic damage ability, which is very unusual. 
Right off my head I don't recall any other.
And because of that it procs everything that procs off exotic damage abilities, incl. Temporal Cross Wiring from the Temporal Operative Specializations:
"Activating an Exotic Damage Ability grants 5% Firing Cycle Haste for Energy Weapons for 10sec (stacks up to 4 times)"
In that case it can be useful, as i.e. Beam Boats usually have limited exotic damage abilities. And if you count in the haste buff it might come out on top of KLW. KLW depends on having many targets linger in it's AoE as long as the duration is, so it might be hard to compare.

I have read that some players replaced KLW with it, while others added DT otherwise. 

There is another use: I have seen one player change the universal science ensign slot on the T6 Science Oddy into a Tac Ensign with DT.
This way the player was able to add another Romulan Tac with SRO, without losing an exotic ability.

It comes down to this: How much do you value the haste buff? (And do you have the added weapon power to cover the increased power consumption of hasted energy weapons?) And what tactical ability would you drop instead?

Personally I just dropped Hazard Emitters from my Science abilities in favor of another exotic damage ability, for the added damaage and the TCW proc, but I'm still experimenting with that. I don't think I will have room for DT, unless somebody smarter than me finds an ingenious way to boost it's potential.

It looks like the new ability  Distributed Targeting has been changed in one of the last patches.
It is now no longer considered an Exotic Ability, severely reducing it's utility.

I saw Oden did an investigation on it and it does not affect torps in most cases, so it is even less useful than expected.

(02-11-2017, 12:34 AM)robonixon Wrote: [ -> ]I saw Oden did an investigation on it and it does not affect torps in most cases, so it is even less useful than expected.

That pretty much was the last straw for the ability. KLW already showed better results just using beam, not even involving any torp/auto explosion. If you can't trigger it with torps or boosted exotic abilities there is no use for it. I don't understand why they throw out new abilities when they don't have any interesting utility or are on par with other damaging abilities. They whole effort in creating and testing new abilities is just wasted.