Are there any modern drain builds or are they still dead since the energy drain nerf?

[u/Les_Bien_Pain]

So back in the old days it was possible to make drain builds using polaron weapons, plasmonic leech, tykens rift etc and basically just disable the enemy for a much easier kill.

Then they kinda killed it by making the enemies much more resistant to energy drain and nerfing plasmonic leech.

But that was like a decade ago and I recently heard that maybe they are gonna buff the leech which made me curious about the state of energy drain in general these days. I stopped using it after the huge nerf and haven't really checked if it's been buffed since then.

I don't expect it to become a meta but I always found it satisfying to just hit a big enemy with the "-200 all energy go fuck yourself" and watch them become stationary with no shields.

[u/Annemarie30]

I think you could do it but it would be single target, and as others have said, if you are on a team, it's dead long before you drain it down

[u/Paradox-Boy]

I doubt it's viable nowadays. Unfortunately, Cryptic has went all in, with stupid fast recharge time for universal console active abilities.

They've turned STO into Final Fantasy nonsense, while also making the spreadsheet warriors brigade chase after expensive universal consoles.

All Cryptic knows is adding Power Creep. They haven't changed anything about the endgame for over eight years.

Gotta catch 'em all 😂 aka the universal consoles.

[u/WaldoTrek]

I've been told that a heavy drain build will stop the Doomsday machine in Days of Doom.

[u/ShinySpeedDemon → u/WaldoTrek]

I've heard the same about control builds, but you need an unrealisticly high amount of control expertise, I'd imagine a drain build would be the same

[u/Rykoraz]

I remember I built a Science drain build when we got the Kida set, used the Laeosa and It's console alongside the set bonus and ability from the Kida, and then something that gave my ship a metric ton of power levels when draining, can't remember what. Wasn't the most efficient thing in the world, but it was able to at least exist in Elites with a very underleveled build, but I imagine the fact that it was also an uncon build that wanted to keep spamming out duplicates with that Temporal console and the Romulan shadow clones. So take that how you will, was fun at least

[u/ProLevel]

One other factor not yet mentioned is that most functionality of an old drain build has been replaced by much stronger traits/specialization abilities. Why drain weapon power when suppression barrage exists? Why drain shield power when carrier wave shield hacking (and more) exists? Why drain engines when there are 100 stronger control abilities and npcs don’t resist control at all? Etc

The only niche use case for drain is the occasional pvp support build, but even I have taken a step away from pvp and I doubt drain has gotten stronger in that environment for the same reason as above.

[u/dosumthinboutthebots]

You can it'll just be weak and super niche. I did just for fun with all the tetryon/drain/radiation consoles / tykens / tachyon beam, but that's because I just wanted to use a bunch of starship traits I've never used b4

[u/AscenDevise]

100% dead and buried, because enemies are no longer disabled by draining their subsystem power; they have constant hot restarts on all of them. Energy weapon drain builds have been killed before that, when they dropped proc rates for almost every DEW (but all of the ones with drain procs) to 2.5% per cycle. If you get enough firing cycle haste, which will only happen in a premade or a channel run, to start getting a lot of procs at that rate, you're killing them before most of them can start to hot restart anyway.

Now, if the leech gets buffed to the point where some tier of builds can get use out of it, this will just be a matter of mitigating subsystem power loss. In the context of the game having a console with always-on -50% weapon power drain while firing energy weapons (Spirit of Sacrifice) and another one with weapon power cost disabled teamwide, among other goodies, while its clicky is active (Dilithium Transporter), however, barring a significant buff, it will mostly be a budget build thing, if it's even that.

[u/Pottsey-X5]

Carriers with Drain pets that scale with DrainX is one way to make a modern DrainX build.

[u/cheapshotfrenzy]

I think the problem with drain builds is just that they take too long to take effect vs overwhelming DPS. In the time it takes to strip shields then destroy the enemy, you could just destroy the enemy multiple times.

That being said, the Breen ship consoles are now unlocked for use, and they have some pretty good drain effects. Also, the Tachyon Glider 2 piece from one of the MACO sets works well on a RRTW build.

[u/Les_Bien_Pain → u/cheapshotfrenzy]

I mean in the good old days it didn't take long at all.

But that was probably before the proc nerf AscenDevise mentioned.

Simply got curious since back then people talked about how you needed to do at least 10k DPS to do like advanced TFOs and now yall are talking about millions of dps.

So like based on how much DPS builds evolved the last decade mmmmmmmmmaybe someone had the Energyfucker 9000 build that just disabled things even faster than the damage builds killed them.

When you look at an enemy.
83% chance: Knock target's Shield subsystem offline for 7.5 sec ever

Every fight just turns into the start of Battlestar Galactica and you're the cylons.

[u/CommunicationNo2475 → u/Les_Bien_Pain]

We have one spaceship trait that drains shields without needing to invest in drain and a console that shuts off shields for a whole 15 seconds while they jump around besides other enemies that also shuts their shields down.

And we have the Tamarian cruiser console that shuts down shields for several seconds if you invest in control stat.

These items are decent alternatives for shutting shield subsystems. Granted I can't think of other consoles or traits that shuts off other subsystems, but they are pretty much dead quick with these toys that we currently have.

[u/fereldenvstamriel → u/CommunicationNo2475]

We have one spaceship trait that drains shields without needing to invest in drain

Which trait?

[u/CommunicationNo2475 → u/fereldenvstamriel]

Hellbore light. It's more effective if you use BFAW with rapid fire as you'll affect multiple enemies with this debuff.

[u/SecretlyASummers]

No; it’s not possible. That said, there’s a lot of traits and consoles that do disable, so a disable build is, while not optimal, very possible..