Almost every build in Star Trek Online is a set of bridge officer abilities that need to be pressed on a schedule. 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 damage bonuses active. Cooldown reduction, usually shortened to CDR, is the set of tools that shortens those waits. This guide explains the numbers behind it, using the rules as they stand in Season 37 (September 2026).
Each bridge officer ability lists three cooldowns, and they mean different things.
Here are the values for the abilities most builds care about:
| 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 a given 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. Photonic Officer itself cannot be reduced at all.
Photonic Officer is a science ability that 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.
Two details matter in practice. First, 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. Second, the effect is proportional to base recharge, so long cooldowns gain the most seconds. 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 works differently. It 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 Aux2Bat at a 40 second base and a 10 second minimum, and copies allowed, some builds press it repeatedly to drive Technician procs.
The catch is that it drains auxiliary, and some builds need that. Exotic builds scale their damage with auxiliary power, so the community guides steer them toward Photonic Officer instead. Energy and torpedo builds, whose damage does not depend on auxiliary, are the natural users of Aux2Bat.
There is no single best answer, but the reasoning is simple. 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.