Energy builds are the most common way to play Star Trek Online, and the easiest to get subtly wrong. These are the four mistakes that cost the most damage, and the rest of the page explains how to avoid each one.
Energy builds use beam arrays, beam banks, or cannons, boosted by a firing mode, and they work on almost any ship. The community guides describe them as strong when fights are short or enemies are spread out, because energy weapons do not have to wait for a torpedo to travel or a cooldown to come back, and as having a lower ceiling than the best torpedo or exotic builds in long, hard content.
Every weapon has a firing arc, the angle in front of your ship (or behind it, for aft slots) where a target must sit for the weapon to fire.
| Weapon | Firing arc | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Dual Cannons and Dual Heavy Cannons | 45 degrees | Fore slots |
| Dual Beam Bank | 90 degrees | Fore slots |
| Beam Array | 250 degrees | Fore or aft |
| Omni-Directional Beam Array and Turrets | 360 degrees | Fore or aft |
A beam array fires at the widest range of targets, which is why tanks favor them. Cannons and beam banks hit harder per shot but need you to point your nose at the enemy. Dual Heavy Cannons fire more shots than plain cannons, with higher inherent critical severity, and drain more weapon power to do it. Turrets cover every angle but deal far less damage per hit. Experienced builders pick one main weapon family and build around it, because consoles, traits, and firing mode are all chosen to match.
There are six energy types (Antiproton, Disruptor, Phaser, Plasma, Polaron, and Tetryon), and all are viable in Advanced and Elite content. Pick one and stay with it. Many consoles and set bonuses boost a single type, and the ones that boost every type tend to be expensive.
Your firing mode is the multiplier that defines the build. Fire at Will spreads beam fire across multiple targets, which suits groups and makes a tank. Beam Overload concentrates damage on a single target. Cannon Scatter Volley and Cannon Rapid Fire play the same roles for cannons.
Around it goes a small standard set of bridge officer abilities. Attack Pattern Beta at the highest remaining rank marks targets and reduces their damage resistance, and Emergency Power to Weapons boosts your weapon power for 30 seconds. Their base cooldowns are 30 and 45 seconds, so keeping them available is its own topic, covered in the guides on cooldowns.
Weapon power sets an energy damage multiplier of (power + 100) divided by 200: 100% at 100 power, and 112.5% at the default cap of 125, so reaching the cap adds 12.5%. Haste shortens a weapon's firing cycle to cycle time divided by (1 + haste). The Emergency Weapon Cycle trait gives 20% haste for 30 seconds when you use Emergency Power to Weapons, turning a 2 second cycle into about 1.67 seconds, or 20% more shots. Weapon power affects energy weapons only, never torpedoes.
Every player starts with a 2.5% critical chance and a critical severity of +50%, meaning a 2.5% chance to deal 150% damage. Everything else stacks on top:
The first three alone, with the top Precision rank, take 2.5% to 14.5% before weapon modifiers and other traits. Real builds go much higher: the Arbiter Battlecruiser build published by the STO BETTER community reports weapon critical rates of 60 to 70% with a full setup, which is why every source of chance and severity is worth a slot.
Tactical consoles are your main damage slots. The standard choice is a Vulnerability Locator or Exploiter matched to your energy type, obtained through fleet holdings, or the more expensive plasma manifold consoles. Save one tactical slot for Lorca's Custom Fire Controls, and do not fill engineering slots with damage consoles you cannot afford, because a build that dies mid-run does no damage at all.
The community baseline for a PC energy build is weapons at 100, shields and engines at 15, and auxiliary at 70, totaling the 200 points every ship shares. Auxiliary is not wasted, since it scales several abilities and traits. Console players use presets, and the standard damage preset gives 100 weapons, 50 shields, 25 engines, and 25 auxiliary.
On the skill side, an energy build puts points into Energy Weapon Training, Targeting Expertise, Weapon Specialization, Weapon Amplification, Hull Penetration, and Shield Penetration. It also unlocks the Tactical readiness skills, since roughly 25 to 26 points in the tactical tree opens the Frenzy abilities.
The Arbiter Battlecruiser build is a useful reference because its author explains every choice. It runs phaser weapons with a Fire at Will III firing mode, the Entwined Tactical Matrices, Calm Before the Storm, and Heart of Sol starship traits, Precision and Advanced Targeting Systems as passive reputation traits, and two Technician duty officers for cooldown reduction. The author reports about 270,000 DPS solo on an Infected Space Advanced run and well over 1,000,000 on a coordinated Elite team run. Those figures are the build author's own and depend heavily on the team and the map, so read them as a ceiling, not a promise.
Once the loadout is on paper in the Build Planner, a recorded run is the honest test, and the /CombatLog command tutorial shows how to capture one. Using the Build Planner to Improve Your DPS covers what to change first, and if you are still choosing a hull, see Choosing an Endgame Ship.