[Fyron]

Actually... shield disruptors are better against ships with heavy crystalline armor when using weapons that can not take out an entire CA component in one shot. Shield depleters and disruptors (at level V of each) do roughly the exact same amount of damage to the defensive capability of your opponent's ship, except when either heavy regeneration or heavy CA is present. Heavy regeneration is either impossible or makes the ship really weak in other areas in stock SE4, so is not an issue. With heavy CA, knocking out their shield generators instead of doing damage to their shielding levels will eliminate their ability to generate shields from damage, which can be much more useful than just sapping their shields, unless you want to place a shield depleter between each and every regular weapon, which might be wasteful. The only problem with shield disruptors is that they are short ranged, so you have to get close to the enemy, and doing so in a WP battle where your ships are all in one big glob gets rather tricky.