Attack Pattern Beta, your firing mode, Emergency Power to Weapons, and your control powers all sit on cooldowns, and the fewer seconds each spends waiting, the more of the fight you spend with your bonuses active. Cooldown reduction, usually shortened to CDR, has two main tools, and most of this page is about choosing between them.
| Photonic Officer | Auxiliary Power to the Emergency Battery (Aux2Bat) | |
|---|---|---|
| Seat | Science | Engineering |
| How it helps | Shortens other abilities' recharge directly while active | Gives power; Technician duty officers shorten recharge when it is used |
| Cost | A science seat | -45 auxiliary power at rank III |
| Best for | Exotic builds, which need auxiliary | Energy and torpedo builds, whose damage does not depend on auxiliary |
Each bridge officer ability lists three cooldowns.
| Ability | Base | Minimum | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency Power to Weapons | 45 s | 30 s | 15 s |
| Attack Pattern Beta | 30 s | 15 s | 15 s |
| Beams: Fire at Will | 30 s | 15 s | 15 s |
| Torpedoes: Spread and High Yield | 30 s | 15 s | 15 s |
| Concentrate Firepower | 45 s | 15 s | none |
| Gravity Well | 60 s | 40 s | 15 s |
| Tyken's Rift | 60 s | 30 s | 15 s |
| Reverse Shield Polarity | 120 s | 60 s | 15 s |
| Auxiliary Power to the Emergency Battery | 40 s | 10 s | 15 s |
| Photonic Officer | 30 s | 30 s | none |
The gap between base and minimum tells you how much an ability can benefit. Fire at Will can halve its wait, from 30 seconds to 15. Emergency Power to Weapons can only fall from 45 to 30, and Photonic Officer itself cannot be reduced at all.
Photonic Officer reduces the recharge time of your other bridge officer abilities. At rank I, II, and III (a Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, or Commander seat) it reduces recharge by 2%, 3%, or 4% of each ability's base recharge time for every second, over a 20 second duration. It never reduces its own recharge, and never takes an ability below its minimum.
To see what that means, take Fire at Will, with its 30 second base. A rank III Photonic Officer removes 30 x 0.04 = 1.2 extra seconds every second. Real time also passes, so progress is 2.2 seconds per second and the ability is ready after about 13.6 seconds. That is under the 15 second minimum, so it is ready at exactly 15. Rank II gives about 15.8 seconds and rank I about 18.8, against 30 with no help, so even rank I is a large improvement and rank III reaches the floor.
Two details matter in practice. The buff lasts 20 seconds but Photonic Officer's own cooldown is 30, so on its own it is active about two thirds of the time. The Improved Photonic Officer starship trait adds 10 seconds to the duration, which is why builds that rely on it can keep it running continuously. The effect is also proportional to base recharge, so long cooldowns gain the most: a rank III Photonic Officer removes 48 seconds from a 60 second ability over its full duration, but only 24 from a 30 second one.
Aux2Bat does not shorten cooldowns itself. At rank III it gives +19 power to weapons, shields, and engines for 10 seconds, paid for with -45 auxiliary power. The cooldown benefit comes from Technician duty officers: with one slotted, using Aux2Bat reduces the recharge of your other bridge officer abilities, and you can slot up to three. With a 40 second base, a 10 second minimum, and copies allowed, some builds press it repeatedly to drive Technician procs.
The catch is that it drains auxiliary. Exotic builds scale their damage with auxiliary power, so the community guides steer them toward Photonic Officer instead.
If your damage scales with auxiliary power, protect it and use Photonic Officer. If it does not, weigh Aux2Bat with two Technicians against Photonic Officer, and remember that Photonic Officer needs a science seat while Aux2Bat needs engineering ones. One real Fire at Will build documented by the STO BETTER community uses what it calls a Photonic Storm: Photonic Officer I, the Calm Before the Storm trait, skill points, and two Technician duty officers, instead of committing seats to Aux2Bat.
Cooldowns are easy to reason about and easy to get wrong in play. Record a run with the /CombatLog command, then look at the DPS Over Time chart in the Combat Log Reader: gaps in a repeating pattern often trace back to an ability that was not ready when you pressed it. For the weapon side of the same loop, see The Anatomy of a Meta Energy Build.