A Few Questions From A REALLY New Player

The energy thing: It caps at 144. So if you let it cap, you are missing out on free energy accumulating.

For really new players, which this player is, it caps at much lower than that. The cap is always Your Level + 59. So at level 1 the cap is 60. At level 85 (the maximum level) the cap is 144.

If I have plenty of regular energy but am stuck waiting for a reset on the character shards I want (i.e., Sabine), should I just wait, or should I continue working on completing light/dark side battles?

Just fight other battles or sim other nodes. At early levels, you need EVERYTHING so there's no point in refreshing a node to accelerate one particular farming goal.

Also make sure you have good allies so that you can easily beat every node that is available at your level.

Finally, if you want to succeed at the game, you have to have a plan for every different kind of energy (Regular - used in light side & dark side battles, Cantina used in Cantina Battles, Mod and Fleet) and for what you do and don't want to buy in every single different store or shipment location.

There's also a website called swgoh.gg where you can register your ally code. If you do that then it will download data from your account and make it available on the webpage. You can then share the webpage address here so that we can see all your characters, ships & equipped mods. When we can see those things, we're in a much better position to help you.

Hope all that helps! And remember the game is a game. It's supposed to be fun. So if anyone (including me!) suggests doing something that makes the game less fun, just forget about it. Even if it makes your characters or ships more powerful, if it's not fun you shouldn't do it.

SO, with all that said, I hope you have all the answers you need right now, but if you want more help making plans for all those different energy types and all the different stores, you should certainly feel free to ask more questions or just ask someone to help creating the basic plan. I've done that many times and so have others here. You're sure to find someone who can help.