By Attilio, who is a web developer, has played Star Trek Online since it launched, and builds and maintains STO Academy. Published . Updated .
Energy builds are the most common way to play Star Trek Online, and also the easiest to get subtly wrong. They 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. They also describe a lower ceiling than the best torpedo or exotic builds in long, hard content. This guide is about getting the fundamentals of an energy build right, using the rules as they stand in Season 37 (September 2026).
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. The arcs are the real difference between weapon families:
| 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. A practical rule from experienced builders: pick one main weapon family and build around it, because your consoles, traits, and firing mode are all chosen to match.
There are six energy types (Antiproton, Disruptor, Phaser, Plasma, Polaron, and Tetryon), and all of them are viable in Advanced and Elite content. The advice that matters is to 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. If your weapons are mixed, most of your bonuses only reach part of your loadout.
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. You generally slot one of these at the highest rank your seat allows.
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. Both have a 30 second and 45 second base cooldown, so keeping them available is its own topic, covered in the guides on cooldowns.
Critical hits are where energy builds gain most of their damage. Every player starts with a 2.5% critical chance and a critical severity of +50%, which means a 2.5% chance to deal 150% damage. Everything else is stacked on top:
Taking only the first three items above with the top Precision rank, base 2.5% plus 4% plus 5% plus 3% comes to 14.5% before weapon modifiers and other traits. Real builds go far 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. Do not fill engineering slots with damage consoles you cannot afford. Survivability matters, and 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, which totals the 200 points every ship shares. Auxiliary is not wasted, because 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, and unlocks the Tactical readiness skills, since reaching 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 they depend heavily on the team and the map, so read them as a ceiling and not a promise.
Plan the loadout in the Build Planner, record a run, and read it with the tutorial on the /CombatLog command. Then use Using the Build Planner to Improve Your DPS to decide what to change first. If you are still choosing a hull, see Choosing an Endgame Ship.