So, you have reached level 60 and begun playing all that shiny endgame content.

Well - some hints

You want to be able to do as much dps as possible, so you can kill all those mobs faster, complete bonus objectives, do harder STFs and ♥♥♥♥. Being somewhat survivable is a bonus, unless you have buddies who threat-tank for you.
Your usual player in a casually set up ship will do maybe 3000 to 5000 dps. If you have a good guide you can break 10k without even using any rare gear or spending any (real) money.

I have put some work in and spend a little bit of money and now have two toons that can exceed 30k.

The true elite is way beyond 100k.

But no worries, even 10kish is pretty okay for most people. I recently did a gateway to gre'thor with a group that mostly did like 8k, with one at about 2k and me at about 15k. We didn't do so well with the optional objectives but we completet the mission, saved a fair deal of transports and had some good solid fun.

So, first things first, you will want to do some research and also measure your own dps.

if you go google "sto combat log reader" you should be able to finde a neat little java based application. You can create combat logs ingame by typing "/combatlog 1" to start the log and "/combatlog 0" to stop it again.
You can then use the combat log reader to find out all kinds of stuff about the combat.

Note that dps fluctuates wildly, as it also depends on your team. There are some buffs for your whole team (like, say, tactical fleet). Also some gear buffs the whole team. And it depends on how long the combat goes. Generally, a short combat, where you can use all your overpowered abilities with a long cooldown, nets you a higher dps. I have seen dps as high as 36k on my toons, but other times, like the gateway to gre'thor I mentioned, it's more drawn out, less team synergy etc. and I only get like 15k.
The usual benchmark is a run of infected: the conduit (advanced) - a STF where I noticed to usually get relatively high DPS
This is often called ISA

You also may want to read up on a few subjects.

Usually googling them together with "sto" should net you something.
aux2bat or a2b
drake

There is a quite knowledgeable community on reddit, they even have some beginner's builds which don't use expensive stuff and yet do 10k dps

There are also some excellent videos on youtube, especially one to the tune of "ultimate dps guide" by a mr. valkin
While the good mr. valkin sure shows off some bling in the vid, he explains the basics quite nicely and might give you an idea or two of what to strive for.

- generally speaking you want to stick to one weapon type, but, if you got enough tactical bridge officers, you can mix in a torpedo

- you will want to double up on your main abilities to minimize downtime
- main abilities would, usually, be stuff like weapon augmentation (i.e. beam fire at will, cannon scatter volley, torpedo spread)
- attack patterns add to that nicely (attack pattern beta seems to be a good basic ability)
- emergency power to weapons and directed energy modulation are also good

you can bind all that basic stuff you want up irrespective of the situation to your spacebar (look for something like "sto keybinding" on youtube, the good mr. valkin did a tutorial on that) together with fire all weapons
Then also set your weapons to autofire (just rightclick them) and much of the micromanagement has goone poof and you can care about other stuff while gently nudging the spacebar every so often.

basic builds and hints

beam boat
there are actually two variants
one uses dual beam banks in front and as much omnidirectional beams as possible

the other uses all standard beams.
The first does more dps but the second can attack in any direction at once and also deal heavy dps while broadsiding.

torp boat
the trick is to use different kinds of torps, so that there is no shared cooldown

cannon boat
canons in front, turrets in back
dual heavy cannons are supposed to be best, but have a pretty limited field of fire, so i hope your piloting skills are up for it - guns pointing at nothing but the void don't contribute to dps


Havings lots of energy weapons means lots of energy drain, so any kind of drain resistance is helpful (like those plasmainfused warp cores from fleet or the omega weapon amplifier that comes as a set power from cutting beam + assimilated console from task force omega reputation)

Also, it is helpful to get as much energy transfer rate as possible, to get those weapon energy levels back up after they have been drained. EPS consoles help in that regard
300 or 400% Energy transfer rate is not too much.