Absolver Beam RE-RE-REWORK

One word for our be-un-loved Absolver Beam, mess. Was relatively overpowered, now a pushover. Let’s try to fix it.


First problem, Damage Splitting Equally. (Sorry GgWw) Aside of being unlogical, it carries a bigger flaw. If you shoot mass of targets, it divides the total damage equally to each target. If it hits enough targets, it might not even kill any target. You wasted a lot of time for nothing. “Hey, you can take them ALL with another shot!” And that assuming you’re still alive for another shot. If you’re letting too many enemies on screen alive, they can pose a bigger threat for you.

For these two reasons, I propose to change Damage Splitting to Damage Falloff. The beam will still count how many targets it hits, but also their order. The first target hit will receive full damage, second target will receive less than the first, third less than the second, and so on.

Damage falloff will follow this simple formula

1/sqrt(target number #)

Damage falloff

To make sure that Absolver Beam will kill certain target I made this criteria, with :zap:8 and 100% difficulty for the basis

  • Uncharged onehot chick and two shot metal suited chicken
  • 1/4 charge oneshot metal suited chicken
  • 2/4 charge oneshot ufo chicken
  • 3/4 charge oneshot chickenaut
  • full charge oneshot armored chicken
  • TO REMEMBER, IT ONLY APPLIES TO THE FIRST CONTACT, second and so on target receive LESS damage and might not being oneshot by it

So here’s damage value I propose to fulfill the criteria

Enemy’s hp for reference

HP reference


Second problem and I think it’s crucial, it damages boss very low, especially bosses that have something to block your attack.

It’s a nightmare for damage splitting mechanic, and will still be there with damage falloff mechanic. The solution is very simple. Just let it receive full damage no matter what the number of target is.


So that is, my proposal for Absolver Beam. It may not be perfect, but I’m sure it can solve the problem I addressed.

11 Likes

Could work. However,

No. This will once again make it overperform against bosses that block your attacks (Apple Core, Bossa Nova). We’ve previously seen suggestions to buff the Apple Core solely because it used to get steamrolled by Absolver. Right now its performance against those bosses in particular is fine.
The only boss that gets a huge unjustified buff due to damage sharing is Alien Mothership, but that can be bypassed to some degree by using a partially charged beam.


Damage sharing aside, the two main problems with Absolver are low base damage (therefore bad for bosses) and no overdrive (therefore low versatility). Let’s sort these two out first and then focus on whether or not damage sharing has any merit.

4 Likes

Overdrive does not neceſſarily equate to verſatility. Juſt look at the neutron gun.

Honeſtly I’m of the opiniön that Abſolver was fine pre-damage ſharing, but others ſeemed to think it was OP. I wonder what the weapon uſage data ſays; it could alſo be that it’s hugely OP at a certain difficulty level, but fine elſewhere.

I agree with Traveller on this. By its design, Absolver isn’t meant to be mindlessly used. It requires precise timing to make it useful. I believe it can work properly without overdrive.

I don’t understand why did you become overreliant to overdrive for balancing. I have three reason it won’t work well with Absolver. First, it’s hard to aim, most damage will be wasted. Second, it overheats too fast. Third, it’s different to other weapons. It has very distinct playstyle. You can’t compare it directly with the others. So I conclude overdrive is irrelevant here.

Look at uncharged damage, if you’re willing to spam a bit, you got some damage to kill little craps.

You have a point here.

But it has problem with bosses mainly Crab and UCO, it damages abysmally if it touch the arms with both the damage splitting and damage falloff mechanic. Will think better solution.

OP at certain situation is not good for the game. It gives advantage for who are using it, but punishes who doesn’t use it.

I’m looking for the intermediate between full damage to all targets and equally sharing damage to all targets.

1 Like

I’ll agree that if it’s OP at ſome difficulty levels it ſhould be fixed, but I never did ſee any concrete proof that it’s as OP as advertiſed. I mean, in a few caſes it did really well, like if you had 30 chickenauts carefully lined up (hypothetically), but for the moſt part it was only good for obliterating juſt a couple chickens at a time.

On the other hand, Plasma Rifle should have damage sharing as well as it deals ridiculous dps on clumped enemies, like on Tangled Mess.

4 Likes

This is absolutely something that should be considered. I’ll mention it in the WBP post (for now I’ll just lower the AoE damage from 0.4 to 0.3 in the next version of the WBP excel).

3 Likes

I made an alternative to solve the issue @GgWw1175 addressed.

For bosses, it will be counted as target number # - 2

1/sqrt(target number # - 2)

If it’s counted as target number 1 - 3, it will still receive full damage. If it’s target number 4, it will receive damage like target number 2 gets. And so on.

This is meant to buff absolver against u.c.o and crabs. It also make it slightly better against bossa nova, magnetic manipulator, apple core and such without overkilling them.

@InterAction_studios, how do you think? Sorry for tagging, but Absolver right now sucks.

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