Fire Beam useless?

General discussion about the game.
Drasha
Posts: 85
Joined: Fri Sep 21, 2012 7:08 am

Fire Beam useless?

Postby Drasha » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:43 pm

So the few times I have picked up a fire beam and tried to use it I have been left less then impressed. It generally gives me 1-3 fires and since it takes such a long time to charge and requires shields to be down it doesn't seem worth the work or power when I could just be blasting the hull apart. Its also possibly one of the slowest ways to get a ship kill I have taken out ships with ion lock down on life support faster.
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Mr. Mister
Posts: 494
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Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Mr. Mister » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:47 pm

Here's my counter-argument:

Image
Whale Cancer
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Sep 21, 2012 3:28 pm

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Whale Cancer » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:49 pm

Mr. Mister wrote:Here's my counter-argument:

Image


Haha! I screen-capped that and posted it to Facebook. Hilarious.
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Drasha
Posts: 85
Joined: Fri Sep 21, 2012 7:08 am

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Drasha » Fri Sep 28, 2012 7:52 pm

How long did that take you? I am surprised there was enough air in that ship to have all the fires going at once.
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Tuesday
Posts: 46
Joined: Mon Sep 24, 2012 5:59 pm

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Tuesday » Fri Sep 28, 2012 8:06 pm

Drasha wrote:How long did that take you? I am surprised there was enough air in that ship to have all the fires going at once.


Notice how he has two ion bombs? he could have easily shot the shield and just avoid the O2 room until after he flamed the majority.

Still, the fire beam is a great weapon to use.
Drasha
Posts: 85
Joined: Fri Sep 21, 2012 7:08 am

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Drasha » Fri Sep 28, 2012 8:42 pm

I don't target the o2 room but the fires take so long to start and spread that they some times burn out all the air in a room before the entire ship is on fire.
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Bushman
Posts: 30
Joined: Fri Apr 20, 2012 12:31 pm

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Bushman » Fri Sep 28, 2012 8:51 pm

Doubly awesome if you have a rockman boarding crew.
TheKillerNacho
Posts: 29
Joined: Wed Sep 26, 2012 6:19 pm

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby TheKillerNacho » Fri Sep 28, 2012 9:00 pm

Hah ... that's a great image, and kudos to you for that.

To answer the OP though, I too have found Fire Beams extremely underwhelming and useful for only one purpose... selling to the nearest Shop I can find. They are too underwhelming to use for ship combat and are too dangerous to use when using a boarding party (with the only possible exception being a Rock boarding party, but even then, I'll pass).

Honestly I think the only real purpose to them is to be annoying when opponents use it.
Hissatsu
Posts: 68
Joined: Sun Sep 23, 2012 9:35 pm

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Hissatsu » Fri Sep 28, 2012 9:18 pm

Theoretically, fire beam is much better at dealing with systems than pike beam, because pike beam does 1 damage, while fire beam ignites multiple fires per room hit (if done correclty), which in system rooms will result in more than one damage, plus unability to repair the system.

Also, theoretically, if you have rockmen and fire-inducing weapons, sending them to fight enemies in fire is a huge win.

Problems are, first, you dont frequently have the combination of both fire weapons and 2 rockmen, second, having enemy ship on fire can be dangerous (you can have it lose hull integrity and lose your boarders), third, they deal delayed damage to systems which means usually enemy will still have time to get away / fire one salvo, four, if enemy's medbay is down (and you can down it with another weapon instead of fire beam) you can win without help of fires and requirement of having rock-only boarding party.

So yeah, theoretically awesome, practically not so much. Still, if you get this as your only upgrade, you can use it with profit, its not like its totally "useless".
Derakon
Posts: 111
Joined: Wed Sep 19, 2012 4:05 am

Re: Fire Beam useless?

Postby Derakon » Fri Sep 28, 2012 9:39 pm

Hissatsu has it -- the fire beam is for preventing enemy crew from repairing systems as readily, not for directly damaging them. It slows the enemy down, makes repairs harder, and if you happen to have a Rockman boarding party then it's pretty danged awesome. Otherwise, don't use it unless you have the spare energy kicking around to run the system.

I could see a viable combat approach being to lead with a missile launcher to take their weapons offline, then to follow up with a burst laser (to slowly finish them off) and a fire beam (to keep them from getting their weapons back online, which would necessitate more missiles). Since you wouldn't need both missile and fire beam at the same time, you could save on upgrades by only running one at a time.

All that said, you'd probably get better results by just causing a breach -- breacher missiles and the breach bomb are both much better than the fire beam.