[BoldlyGoing09]

Hey yall! I'm kind of overwhelmed with the learning curve in STO for ship builds. I'm looking to focus and synergize my build to fit a tactical, beam/torp boat with high DPS. Pretty new character, only half way through the main story. Any advice/mentorship would be awesome! Thank you

[miahmagick]

https://sites.google.com/view/stobet.../energy-basics

First off, read this. It may not all make sense to you yet. That's fine. Favorite it. Read it again later. Then play some more and read it again. - and again until you grok it.

Second, if you are available at the times to do so, I highly recommend coming to the STO events on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Especially Sunday, as that's when we discuss builds and whatnot. You'll get a ton of personalized help then; not just general stuff.

Beyond that here's some simple stuff: pick a weapon type and maximize it. Unless you have a reason to do otherwise, pick Phasers. Until you get the gear to support other things, try to get Photonic Officer II, the highest level of Beam: Overload you can on your ship (this means run beams, not cannons, by the way), and Emergency Power to Weapons as high as you can. Speaking of Power, make sure your power is set so Weapons are maxed, Shields and Aux are as low as they can go, and dump the rest into Engines. If you've not been doing this, you'll see a huge spike to your damage right away.

If you tell me the ship and BOff seating you're working with, I can help you with a more detailed build (or someone else can).

Assuming you went Phasers, be on the lookout for Phaser Relays and put those in your tactical slots. Your science consoles aren't super important while leveling, but you might as well equip Nanite-Reinforced Circuitry to help improve any heals you're running while leveling. Finally, for your engineering consoles you might as well equip a Neutronium Alloys. They're not the most efficient things in the world, but the resistances will be the difference between you dying constantly and not when you're starting out.

You'll quickly outgrow a lot of the gearing advice as you max out your character and start building into Mission, Fleet, Crafted, and Reputation Gear. - but there's a lot of resources for that phase of the game, and relatively little for before that.