There are two versions of orderBy, one that works with strings and one that works with Column objects (API). Your code is using the first version, which does not allow for changing the sort order. You need to switch to the column version and then call the desc method, e.g., myCol.desc.
Now, we get into API design territory. The advantage of passing Column parameters is that you have a lot more flexibility, e.g., you can use expressions, etc. If you want to maintain an API that takes in a string as opposed to a Column, you need to convert the string to a column. There are a number of ways to do this and the easiest is to use org.apache.spark.sql.functions.col(myColName).
Putting it all together, we get
.orderBy(org.apache.spark.sql.functions.col(top_value).desc)