Tips on the Fire Beam

[Drasha]

At first I felt like the fire beam was pretty lack luster and it can be. However after playing with it on a run where I had double fire beams and an ion weapon it can actually be pretty devastating if you exploit it.

Tips
Always cut in a straight line. For some reason you get many more fires this way then if you do a slanted line trying to hit lots of rooms.
Only use a single fire weapon at a time. They seem to effect each other and cap the number of possible fires that could start. (2 beams going at the same time can get max 6 ish fires where as one after the other will get more then that if you are lucky.)
If you have rockman teleport them into a room to prevent them from repairing/putting out the fire.

[samjones]

Probably this is assumed, but upgraded sensors are really important with a fire beam.

If you use a fire beam with boarders (and that's where it really shines), try to get shields burning and down, medical down and weapons no longer a threat (no missiles and not enough pew pew to overcome your shields) and then get out and finish the ship off with fire beams.

[UberFubarius]

If you use a fire beam with boarders (and that's where it really shines), try to get shields burning and down, medical down and weapons no longer a threat (no missiles and not enough pew pew to overcome your shields) and then get out and finish the ship off with fire beams.

Note that it only really shines with rockman boarder. With any other boarder you run a high risk of accidentally burning your boarders to death (since they're not immune to fire).
Another advantage with fire beam + boarder, fire bomb will damage your boarder, fire beam won't.

IF I have dual ion 2 and a fire beam (8 weapon energy exactly), I just focus fire the ions on shield and weapon and just slowly and deliberately burn the whole ship down without bothering with boarding (ironically, I mostly use my boarder against drone ships to knock down their shield/weapon, or helm if it's a runner before using my beam drone to kill it).

[samjones]

It works with any boarder. If you set a fire and keep your boarders a room or two away, fire isn't a worry for your boarders. You can't completely stop firefighting like you can with rock men, but you can force the enemy to make a choice between fighting your boarders and stopping the fire.

It's way better with rockmen, certainly.

[Neoviper]

Had an excellent red-tail run the other day, I'd been lucky with store spawns and gotten two burst laser one's and a burst two. 7 lasers plus a firebeam, throw in a pair of rock boarders and you can just set the weapons room on fire, have your rocks chill in their until it's completely on fire. Once it's entirely aflame, the AI seems to stop trying to put it out, even if they have enough people with enough health. At that point you're free to pick them apart at your leisure, made it much easier than previous times to take out the final bosses crew. Just got set up in the shield room, once that was on fire I could just use the firebeam every time it was off cooldown.

[Kenshkrix]

The fire beam is more effective if you start it on the back edge of a tile, instead of the front edge. Hitting more tiles doesn't help with the fire beam since it periodically has a chance to light tiles under it, so maximizing time per tile has a higher chance. The reason a straight line is effective is that it minimizes time between rooms where the beam has no chance of lighting anything.
This means that a diagonal is sometimes better if your goal is to burn a specific room rather than just lighting the entire thing on fire.