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ftl beam weapons

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 11:35 pm
by robby
Have you guys noticed that a well placed beam (let's take the range of a halberd beam, which I'm pretty sure is the same as the glaive one) can easily hit 4 rooms, and up to 5 rooms on a certain type of ship?

Place just a few pixels to go over one room and you get it to be damaged. So if you carefully place it at the corner of the starting room all the way to the corner of the ending room making sure you go through as many rooms as possible, you end up stacking quite a few damage, making them a bit overpowered.

I remember I once found in the first or second sector a glaive beam. I one hit most of the ships I came across.

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 11:48 pm
by Kieve
Beams are balanced mostly by their charge times and the way they affect shields. A beam might have "partial shield-piercing" in the sense that if it does 3 damage, a two-shield ship will soak off most of that, but they deal no direct damage to the shield itself and anything unable to penetrate it is a wasted shot.

In the right circumstances or with the right weapon combo, they're utterly devastating though. ;)

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 12:36 am
by BKT
Being able to hit lots of room on some enemy ships is certainly by design and not an oversight by the devs. In fact, I think that the design on every enemy ships layout in the game are incredibly clever; some enemy ship are very susceptible to beam while another less so.

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 12:53 am
by UltraMantis
Heck even the Mini Beam can hit 4 rooms if they are close together and you really squeeze it in tight. :D Pike Beams are delicious, and vicious. Of course you still need to get rid of those pesky shields.

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 1:13 am
by Todes_Schnitzel
Well , the Hull Beam is the only Hull weapon who is useful. :lol:

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 1:50 am
by rosesnowm
:D Haha, good posts here.

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 5:52 am
by Number43
There is a ship that starts with the glaive beam.

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 2:08 pm
by robby
Any long load time can easily be countered with weapon pre-ignition ... provided you're lucky enough to find one in a store or in an event. But when you do hit, you don't hit many rooms on *some* enemy ships, in fact you do it on most enemy ships. Except for one type of automated drone, every other ship can be hit 4 or 5 times, 50%-50%. Now, if the enemy AI would be just as smart when deploying their weapons against me, this would be fine. However the AI doesn't show much of the intelligence part when synch-ing its weapons fire or when it chooses which systems of mine to target, and neither when it chooses its beam path.

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2012 3:10 pm
by BKT
'Being lucky' is not an easy thing to achieve though... :roll:

Then again, I'm not really a fan of the ignitor nor the 'per-room' damage dealing beam to start with.

Re: ftl beam weapons

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 1:52 am
by ExtraCheesyPie
BKT wrote:'Being lucky' is not an easy thing to achieve though... :roll:

Then again, I'm not really a fan of the ignitor nor the 'per-room' damage dealing beam to start with.
What's not to like about instant charge? Disable everything before the enemy knows what happened!