Suggestion: Sometimes beam pierce shields

[Nox]

so, let me respond to this with my limited grasp of the balance done here.

Most weapons are supremely good at whatever niche they fill. Stacking your ship with them will ensure that you dominate a particular situation - however they are situational, and the wrong situation will defeat you.

In my game I tend to have a backup/alternate weapon in my hold and a couple of drones for swapping in and out.

In mantis space, I usually have an antipersonnel drone to tie the enemy up while I gas them.

in most other spaces I am sporting 2+ anti ship drones

My spare weapon is sometimes a beam weapon - specifically the halberd. The halberd is a situation weapon that does more damage than just about any other single weapon in the game but it does so conditionally. If you can get someone's shields down, you can do a lot of crew damage to crowded rooms and a tremendous amount of hull damage. It is a fantastic weapon to follow up from taking down enemy shields with. It's situational however, and much less useful on things with 4 shields. Know this, and use it accordingly.

On ships with more shields, you need things that bypass shields. missiles/ teleport bombs / boarders.

Remember that when you are evaluating weapons you have several competing factors :

slot expense
power expense
time expense
opportunity expense

you have a finite amount of slots, power and time and within all of that, some weapons are more 'generally applicable' than others and some weapons are extremely opportunistic. The fire beam is an example of extremely opportunistic weapons. In the right circumstances, it's super effective. In most, it's not effective at all.

Instead of thinking in terms of how a weapon is weak in general, think about what circumstance makes that particular weapon strong, and play to it.

[temporal]

I don't typically go for beam weapons.

Like the post above me states, they are extremely opportunistic weapons. I think the term here is "win-more".

If you've got the enemy's shields down you are already doing damage with whatever kind of weapon you've got. Sure it's great to cut a swath of destruction across their hull. But is it worth having a dead weapons slot while their shields are up? Making it that much more difficult to get them down in the first place?

This is especially true late game when you start seeing ships with 3-4 shields.

Plus they are a pain to power. The solution here might be to make them charge very fast so that you can take enemy shields down with your first 2 weapon slots and then power them down to use your beam for damage.

I do love the beam drones, though, because they are so much more flexible.

I like running 3 drones but only having 1 powered up at a time:

1. Defense drone goes on when I see a missile coming
2. Anti-Ship drone goes on to help wear down the shields
3. Beam drone goes on when their shields fail

Anti-Personnel drone can be swapped for any of them if you haven't found a manti.
Too cool.