• Turn autofire on! There's nothing that even tells you this is an option except a brief prompt during the tutorial. You can right-click your ship's weapons (or ground weapons, though I'd keep the secondary manual), giving them a green outline to show they'll fire automatically. There's no reason not to do this for every weapon, usually.
  
• Max your weapon power! I personally recommend setting the power display to the third option, the four bars, so it's easy to eyeball and adjust your power levels... but 95% of the time there's no reason not to do the default "offense" option of 100 weapon, 50 shield, 25 engine/aux. Weapon power is stupidly important for how much damage your weapons do, and especially in PVE you'll have more than enough Aux and Engine power even with it minimized.
  
• Use the appropriate weapon types for your ship! This usually means beams for cruisers and science vessels, and dual heavy cannons/turrets for escorts. You'll also not want to overload on energy weapons in order to keep from draining too much weapon power; while it doesn't really matter until you hit endgame ships, once you do you'll want no more than seven energy weapons on a cruiser (and there, mostly if you're keeping EptW up constantly) firing simultaneously and six on an escort. The usual thing to put in the free slot is a torpedo, but there's some other potential options depending on the ship. Make sure all your energy weapons are of the same energy type though (all phaser or all disruptor, etc) so you can use the energy-specific tactical consoles for the highest damage.
  
• Dual cannons are straight up inferior to dual heavy cannons, never use them (unless you get some drops while leveling, then whatever, just replace them when you hit endgame). Normal single cannons are almost as useless, but there's a handful of gimmick cruiser builds that can use them. If you don't know how this could work, don't do it.
  
• Where possible, get high-quality bridge officers. White, green, and even blue bridge officers are almost worthless on the exchange, and even very rare officers tend to cost a relative pittance. Try and get a good set early on so you don't get attached to the losers the game throws at you. While it's a little more expensive, try to get a stable of bridge officers with space traits and put them in your active slots. This means Humans (Leadership), Liberated Borg (Efficient, but only a c-store purchase these days), certain Saurian/Letheans (Efficient, make sure they have this since it's not guaranteed), and Romulan (from the fleet Embassy only, a little expensive, two different trait options). Klingons should aim for Nausicaans (Pirate, for extra damage) or Letheans (Efficient, but not guaranteed), while Romulan captains should basically stock up on as many bridge officers with Superior Operative as they can get their hands on.
  
• There are effectively no energy credit sinks in STO. There's no repair fees or anything like that, and most of the big sinks are completely voluntary (fast travel warps, for example). What this means is that if you're patient and smart, you can save up your money and eventually buy anything you want off the exchange, and many things are incredibly undervalued by the people that put them up for sale, up to and including those fancy lockbox ships. The energy credit cap upgrade should be one of the first things you buy off the c-store.
  
• As of this writing, the exchange is horribly broken. Never search the "All" category as it won't show the lowest prices, you'll always want to narrow down the search by category, and preferrably by quality or name too. I have no idea why it's broken like this, but it's been like this for ages and likely won't change anytime soon, so keep it in mind.
  
• All classes are created equal... but some classes are more equal than others. Right now, if you want to mixmax, the best thing to roll is a Tactical officer. Preferably a Romulan too. If you're rolling a new character, I reeeeaaally suggest a tacrom.
  
• Be aware of the cooldowns of various powers. Usually you can keep two copies of a particular power before the shared cooldowns become longer than the power cooldowns, and while there's a few powers that have their own shared cooldowns (such as the Emergency Power to <X> engineering skills, with a 15s cooldown between) it's usually short enough that you can still have multiple versions. One potent example is the classic Cruiser setup, where you have two copies each of EPtS and EPtW and cycle them one after another every 15 seconds to keep both buffs up constantly. Of course, there's more advanced and pricier ways to manipulate cooldowns...
  

Asimo fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Apr 23, 2014

Asimo fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Apr 25, 2014

Asimo fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Apr 28, 2014

Asimo fucked around with this message at 10:23 on May 3, 2014

Asimo fucked around with this message at 21:33 on May 7, 2014