Scattering at physical pion mass is still an exploratory field in lattice QCD. This generally involves the extraction of excited states through multi-particle correlators on systems with resonances. In that context, distillation has been demonstrated to be effective both as a smearing kernel and a computational tool. Motivated by the study of the smearing profile of the distillation operator, we compare stochastic and exact distillation cases for different numbers of Laplacian eigenvectors using a RBC-UKQCD $N_f=2+1$ domain-wall fermion lattice with a physical pion mass.