Wouldn’t that be one 
3 beam and one 2 beam?
(3900+4350=8250)
I’m uploading some footage tomorrow, but it’s pretty depressing.
Testing it, I can say this weapon is much more worth running in a Bomber for the double laser value. The extra damage helps oneshot some things like Armoured Chicken and the Barbequer effect helps Bomber’s slowness.
Now for the overall balance. (I’m talking mostly about harder missions, and daily/weekly challenges).
This weapon SUCKS. It’s way too slow to ever be relevant in terms of damage. The piercing laser sure is satisfying when it works, but when it doesn’t it really doesn’t.
On any hard mission, when you shoot down a UFO, you either don’t have time to charge to kill the falling saucer and the chicken that comes out, or you don’t have enough heating capacity. Oh, did I say this weapon generates TONS of heat? Currently it has the least damage-before-overheat, which is about 50-70k, compared to other weapons which mostly have over 100k. The chargeless shot is way too weak to be relevant at all, and level 2 charge isn’t much better.
For virtually any mission type, except maybe Squawk Block, you just overheat before you can kill anything. The max charge is worth nothing when all it does is split the Supernova Debris once. And of course you overheat before you can clear a path - the supernova splits way too much.
Comet Chase sucks as well - charges too long only to kill one or two comets - absolutely zero reason to run this over Vulcan here.
Against Retro it might seem decent when you destroy the first wave but then you realize you can’t kill **** against “invaders crossing” wave, and that you simply overheat before you can do anything against the wave when they come from above, I don’t remember the name.
Against droids it would seem fine but were droids ever a problem? Again, zero reason to run this over forks or neutron.
Darkness sucks because the fire rate is very slow, so your visibility is literally the lowest most of the time. this feels like that level in PvZ where you can only see things for a moment after a thunder strike
Meteor storm is something I don’t even want to talk about.
Squawk Block seems the only reasonable place for this weapon, because it can oneshot Chickenauts, Slobs, sometimes Armoured and kills those pesky Cowards without making them shoot. But, with limited movement, the UFOs become a problem again. You shoot down several UFOs and then a chain of falling saucers reduce your movement a lot, leaving you open to any attacks. Yes you can charge a full beam to negate the attacks but will you have time and heat to do that? It’s pretty easy to carve a path in the middle but clean sweeping becomes excessively hard, especially when the last row is full of Toxic Chickens - you won’t kill everything in time and they will come into your range very fast, where killing them with a full charge (or killing them at all) is not possible due to the laser being fully straight and thin. I’d record some footage but it’s close to impossible due to having 0 firepower initially - this makes the first shot almost irrelevant and also makes me unable to shoot until I pick the firepower up, until which the chickens already come dangerously low.
While there are some normal waves that this weapon works really well against (cough cough Chicken Rings), a LOT of the waves just absolutely kill this weapon (or simply take way much more time than forks or neutrons). You might think “ooh its good for pulsating greed hurr dur”- NO. It absolutely sucks for Pulsating Grid - if there is a wave of UFOs you die a thousand deaths. “But boggy i can use the full charge to kill the eggs and lasers its clearly op!!1!” Yes, charging to full means you aggresively waste power and precious time on normal chickens and UFOs and you simply heat way too much to keep up with the falling saucers and the chickens spawned from the UFOs. Yes you can full charge to kill a Chickenaut or Armoured but then a new one spawns and you are rotated away from it and you killed a UFO behind it and a saucer is falling at you and you can’t do anything about it except for ramming into it (or the chicken that spawned). Oh, did I forget to say you’ll be triggering that bomb all the time and proccing all the Cowards and Slobs? Good luck dodging all that.
This weapon couldn’t suck more for Daily/Weekly Challenges. While you can kill Bubble Bath faster than any other weapon, you will struggle in most of the other waves where the enemies can go away, causing you to miss clean sweep. Oh, did I mention clean sweep requires destroying all the falling saucers from UFOs as well? Good luck doing that with this weapon. Also good luck clearing waves like High Speed Chase.
And for the biggest mistake while making the weapon: IT CANNOT PECKING ORDER! AAAA this makes me so angry. If you kill two or more enemies in the order with one shot you lose the right to get pecking order bonus for that row. Even if you shoot down the entire row in one shot, you don’t receive the bonus (the same happens when two plasmas in a bomber kill an enemy each - really needs a fix). But this just makes zero sense and makes me never ever want to use this thing in a challenge.
“But boggy i can clear the forcefield of crab and henperor with this, opopop!11!” Yea, as if you ever died to these forcefields. It’s an interesting gimmick that’s almost never relevant because the extra time you get by removing the attacks is wasted on charging the weapon again (who would have guessed you can charge the weapon while dodging other attacks!!!). And no, it’s terrible against Yolk because if it spawns a UFO consider yourself one life and 5 FP short. Yes it can disable lasers but for that you have a 0.25s timespan and it’s almost never relevant because it requires you to be right below the laser (and to have a laser fully charged ofc, for which you don’t have room especially when terminators are up).
For any other boss it’s overall very slow in terms of damage, and never worth running over forks and neutrons. Exceptions are applecore and CI4 mother hen ship - lasers pierce all barriers/shell pieces. Bossa Nova is good too but still slower than anything else.
Space Race. Just don’t.
To conclude - if you want any somewhat serious gameplay, don’t use this weapon and stick to the ol’ reliables instead. I would say it’s almost fun but dying to saucers, terminators and overheat certainly isn’t fun. It’s fun clearing bosses’ forcefields and other attacks but it stops being fun after the 5 minute mark when you realize you’ll be fighting that boss for the next 25 minutes.
That’s all I had to say. I hope you understand now why I voted with “Weapon is bad”. I didn’t say “awful” because it does some very situational things better than other weapons (hence the answer to the second poll).
EDIT: Forgot to add that it always sticks to the 5 levels, instead of being directly dependent on the length of charge. This can cause some depressing things such as holding 1 frame away from the next level and dealing the lower level’s damage. It would feel much better knowing exactly how much to charge for each enemy instead of just knowing the approximate charge level.
7 Likes
Oops, it’s supposed to be the damage for 10.
3 Likes
In addition of increasing its damage on uncharged and low charged phase, one possible thing to improve its performance is by make it charge faster as the firepower increasing, somewhat like Corn Shotgun.
Just because it’s upscaled, doesn’t make it high quality.
4 Likes
But mine still good cuz it’s captured in-game 
Yes, it does fire two beams. And it sucks. Even with a max heat sink (boron arsenide which is the best one) it still overheated quickly, along with the fact that the constant screen shakes are pretty nauseatic. I wasn’t expecting it to suck on SQUAWK BLOCK out of everything.
1 Like
I was testing the weapon a bit more so I have some more stats regarding it (mostly experimental data).
Its charge time is roughly 1.8 seconds. Assuming you fire right after reaching the charge level, here’s the DPS for some power levels (for a single target).
**Maximum DPS (max firerate without cooldown time)**
The format is instant shot (at a firerate of 6.66/s which seems to be the max), 1/4 charge (every 0.45 seconds, 2/4 charge (every 0.9 seconds), 3/4 charge (every 1.35 seconds) and max charge (every 1.8 seconds). Keep in mind that this is the theoretical maximum.
0
666.(6) -> 1531.(1) -> 1520.8(3) -> 1584.(4) -> 1666.(6)
10
1666.(6) -> 3826.(6) -> 3801.(1) -> 3960.(704) -> 4166.(6)
20
2666.(6) -> 6124.(4) -> 6083.(3) -> 6337.(7) -> 6666.(6)
I’m also trying to finally figure out how to get the heat rate data. So far the best heat sink for testing is Aluminum Nitride upgraded twice (unless there are some other better ones with exactly 92 
), as with it, each bar counts as 2 , while the spaces inbetween count as 1 .
Each shot adds roughly 7.5 at first, and the charge will add another 26 for a total of 33.5 .
If you were to count in the time it takes to get rid of the heat (otherwise you’d overheat in seconds), where the rate seems to be -25 per second, the maximum effective DPS would be:
**Effective DPS (max firerate + cooldown time)**
Format: (0.15s + 0.3s = 0.45s) -> (0.45 + 0.56 = 1.01) -> (0.9 + 0.78 = 1.68) -> (1.35 + 1.04 = 2.39) -> (1.8 + 1.34 = 3.14)
0
222.(2) -> 682.(178) -> 814.(285) -> 894.56 -> 955.414
10
555.(5) -> 1704.95 -> 2036.3 -> 2237.238 -> 2388.535
20
888.(8) -> 2728.71 -> 3257.738 -> 3579.5 -> 3821.656
So at best it ends up being in the same place as Positron Stream, where only Moron Railgun is lower than that. If you ranked it with the other weapons, it would start off somewhat normal, almost become the worst by 10 and slightly improve from there on.
The values I provided are for a single target. Theoretically, the DPS for this weapon is unlimited if you cram in enough enemies for it to pierce, but that’s not very useful. Most Chicken enemies usually have below 2000 HP, so it’s only really useful for a line of minibosses or a line of bosses (in waves like Chicken Multiplicity and Show 'em who’s Boss!).
Oh, and the page on the wiki has been edited to include this
7 Likes
I’ve tested the weapon out, it’s useful for waves that have columns of Chickens such as “Three-Stroke Engine”. I’ve even used it against CI4’s Mother-Hen Ship and didn’t lose any lives, all that was required was patience and a look at the heat meter.
(EDIT) Used it again, but against the Party Chicken in Brothers Reunited. A bit slow, but at least patience still got the better hand of me.
Conclusion: I love the weapon, but I can’t use it forever. Its effect reminds me of Astropop.
1 Like
The beam pierce straight through the shells and completely obliterate it
3 Likes
The beam pierce straight through the shells and completely obliterate it
Haha, yes, it can cut through the shells. That’s one good part about this weapon.
1 Like
*cries in Apple Core
1 Like
Great, more ways to cheese apple core.
1 Like
Apple Core: I have SHIELDS!
Hero: My BEAM is unstoppable!
Apple Core:
2 Likes
I’m not gonna lie, this is the only weapon I’ve ever disliked in Chicken Invaders. In its current state, anyway.
As someone who tested it at max power during the High-Speed Chase level, I can comfortably say that the functionality of the weapon is ridiculously situational, and the fast overheat doesn’t help matters. I’d rather take the Plasma Rifle.
Just tapping the fire button with the Absolver Beam produces a really thin, overly precise beam that will barely hit anything. At max power. There’s a problem there.
I think the best way to fix it is to not dictate the thickness based on how long you charge it, but rather the amount of firepower you have, like the Laser Cannon. Then a hit on enemies from tapping the fire button is more guaranteed at max power, but to deal more damage, you still need to charge up.
5 Likes
And kill the bossa nova easily.
I can say that this is the least balanced weapon I have ever seen in a game.
In my opinion it needs some doping (a buff isn’t enought): Double the damage, reduce by 5% (or 7%) the loading time for each charging stage and increase by 1/3 heat capacity.
The weapon actually performs good only in really few situations (manily easy missions) since the weapon is heavily forced in charged shot spaming, wich is unsustainable due to lack of heat capacity.
And is useless aganst bosses due to low dps.
Plus as a solution to the “powerup resets the charge” bug, I suggest to implement an auto fire (you know… when the weapon overheats the shot is auto fired, I think that’s the most logical thing to do is that)
In my opinion the design is cool but the color should be more intense. The actual one doesn’t actually make it feel as the “blast wave of destruction” that it should be
2 Likes
I think a change in rate of fire is more necessary than a change to damage.
This, though…I totally agree. And yes, I feel like it’s a needed change. The bug actually made me die during the alien mothership fight because I charged up the laser to clear up projectiles, but a powerup dropped right onto me and made me die because it reset the charge.
Then again, this doesn’t really solve that, so…uh, actually, nevermind. I honestly don’t know what to do about it
3 Likes
It probably would be the easiest to implement so it’s better than nothing
4 Likes