It seems weird to say, but the effect shown in the image doesn’t line up with gameplay experience. The lightning bolts still struggle to converge onto a single target which is what made the BX’s twin bolts more effective IMO. Perhaps a narrower split between the two bolts could solve the issue.
I’ve decided to figuratively get off of my ass, and start tying up loose ends. I’m covering most of the leftover issues in this post, with the primary focus of the next one being the volley rework for Laser.
Positron Stream
- Damage multiplier: 1 → 0.9
At this point, I don’t really have the bandwidth to try to come up with any full rework or a tweak to the splitting mehcanic, so I’m settling for a simple damage nerf. -10% should be sufficient to tone Positron’s effectiveness down to a more reasonable level.
Plasma Rifle
While I had some ideas for both a mechanical rework of the weapon as well as numerical changes, none of them seem like they’d achieve the effect I was hoping for. As such, I’m leaving Plasma for other people to tinker around with if they so wish. There is, however, one more thing that I would like to bring up, and that is (surprise, surprise) its performance against Coward chickens.
While the change to Coward behaviour when one-shotted has helped to bring the weapon more in line, the way the AoE interacts with Cowards is somewhat problematic as well. Hitting a Coward chicken with the AoE sends it into fleeing mode, and makes it so that it doesn’t retaliate once it gets hit by the beam. While this behaviour is consistent with how other AoE weapons interact with the enemy, it arguably makes Plasma unreasonably good against them, particularly in groups where the AoE can expand to a decent size.
I think it’s worth considering changing this behaviour, and making it so that the AoE doesn’t send Cowards into feeling mode.
Laser Cannon
The full volley overhaul is something I still intend to go over here, but I decided to throw one of the planned changes into this post. It relates to the weapon’s performance against groups of enemies specifically, and was supposed to be a part of the rework alongside the new volleys. While it doesn’t help at all with Laser’s current crap performance at low power, I feel like it’d be a welcome tweak regardless, and it might also help validate the changes I’m going to propose to the volleys.
Currently, every beam that hits an enemy is completely stopped by it. This can easily cause situations where a lot of damage is wasted, as one or two beams may be enough to take out that enemy, with more beams simply overkilling it. This same quirk applies to Riddler, but it’s not a huge issue there—with its high rate of fire, an overkill shot is quickly followed up by another (and naturally, a single volley contributes less to the weapon’s overall damage output the higher the firerate is). With something that fires less frequently, it’s a bit more problematic.
This brings us back to CI2, where Laser didn’t function this way. I’m not familiar with the exact mechanics, but a single shot was capable of killing several enemies in a column if they were weak enough to die to only a part of the volley.
I’d like to propose revising this particular aspect of Laser to allow for this sort of thing. While this is largely because the volley rework would end up lowering Laser’s max hitrate even despite the genereous firerate increase, it’d be of some help with the current setup as well.
Absolver Beam
The Absolver rework I’ve been planning is being put on hold indefinitely. While I do reckon that it’d make the weapon more balanced overall, it’d heavily compromise on its current versatility regarding different enemy types, as the planned rework would make low-charge beams practically useless against columns of weaker enemies—which isn’t the case right now, and players seem decently happy with that in particular. As such, I’m shifting the focus to a couple of more QoL-related matters instead.
Let’s start off with the simpler of the two: per-level overheat. This is something you’ve already tried to get working last time and it apparently didn’t go horribly wrong, so I’d like to see this get implemented into the excel. Ideally, I’d like for it to be tweakable using the overheat time in seconds (simply for consistency with other weapons) and a constant ratio of initial heat cost to heat drain rate (with the current values of 0.1 and 0.08 respectively, it maths out to 1.25), have the game or the excel calculate the final values. If that’s too much work, the two values being editable per level will do just fine, though.
The second matter pertains, of course, to firerate boosters. Giving Absolver compatibility with Overdrive and Accumulator by making them decrease the charge interval would probably be the single best thing that could be done to improve its overall versatility, and usability in general.
The tricky bit is how exactly to make that work. Or rather, which path to take. I have discussed this with @1galbatorix1 previously, and we both had different ideas in regards to that.
My propsal is exactly the same as the “overdrive sustain” I have brought up probably like 5 times in different corners of the forum. Essentially, once a booster is enabled with a double click, it doesn’t turn off as soon as the player lets go of the fire button, but instead only does so after a certain amount of time. In theory, this should allow for using accelerated charged shots continuously. Something like this is necessary because requiring a double click every time the player wants a quicker charge results in both a ton of additional heat being generated, but also the charge rate boost being diminished, since we’re slapping on an additional flat 0.1s to the charge time. And it’d just be annoying in general.
Galbatorix’s proposal sacrifices versatility for simplicity. The idea here is to simply make the weapon autofire once it’s fully charged. This makes the interaction way less complex, but also makes it unviable to use boosters for non-fully charged shots, and prevents you from timing accelerated shots accurately if the situation demands it (for example, for neutralizing enemy attacks).
Naturally, I’m putting this to a vote:
How exactly to make Overdrive/Accumulator on Absolver not suck ass
- Disable Overdrive/Accumulator after a certain period of not firing
- Autofire the beam once it reaches max charge
0 voters
That’s all for now. No excel sheet this time, since there’s only one proposed value change here. Fingers crossed the next post doesn’t take too long to come out.
3 Likes
(I may have misunderstood so correct me anytime).
I am not arguing about this but a note. Some people uses plasma differenty. Where they prefer continous clicking to avoid making the AoE blaze and trigger sensitive enemies like Slobs, Cowards and Ninja Chicks. That way they can kill enemies without much trouble pointed towards them. But I still agree that this behaviour needs changes when other people uses it this way since that would lead into guaranteed deaths in some moments. Specifically by those enemies.
I might say something stupid here and that would be against the point of boosters. but I would like to see some heat produced when consuming the booster. You see. Killing a lot of chickens in the same time instantly recharges the Booster. Which a thing I would see that may overpower the absolver. and be the most targetted weapon to use against biggest threats. I hope you consider my point.
Yup.
Hitting Cowards with an AoE doesn’t cause them to attack, but does send them into fleeing mode. Until they return to formation, they don’t retaliate against attacks, so using Plasma’s AoE can actually trivialise fightning them.
There are probably a few ways of solving this. Making Absolver produce heat when using the Accumulator would make the interaction inconsistent with other weapons, but we do already have exceptions as to what attacks contribute to the charge. Imposing limits on that particular aspect seems like a better idea to me, if it’s actually necessary.
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I’ve implemented this change, but by lowering the splitting damage rather than the base beam damage. Changed in v.118 
Idea
Changed in v.118 Idea
Changed in v.118 Idea
Was it? I can’t recall.
10 Likes
As someone who used laser cannon quite a few times, I can confirm it’s true.
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I feel like plasma overheats way too fast to be a usable weapon. Reducing its overheat time of about 2-3 seconds could be a starting improvement.
I think you mean “increasing its overheat time”
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Yeah lol, sorry
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I absolutely do not believe that it’d be appropriate to increase Plasma’s overheat time by more than half a second (up to where Laser sits at, 6.5 seconds), and even that’s a bit of a stretch. Its damage potential is simply too high for something like this to be reasonable. With +3 seconds it’d have the same overheat time as Hypergun, ignoring the excess heat it generates due to its low rate of fire.
2 Likes
After a way too long period of procrastination, tying up one last loose end: the Laser Cannon.
Current problems
Laser Cannon suffers from a couple of issues which severely limit its effectiveness at low and mid power levels. Due to the way its volleys are designed, it suffers from subpar damage for most of its progression, as well as very poor hitrate/volume of fire for the first 4 levels.
The first issue is linked to the large total damage ratio between 
0 and 20 volleys. The weapon’s 20/0 ratio is 20, by far the highest in the game (for comparison: Neutron Gun, Utensil Poker and Vulcan Chaingun have the second highest ratio of 15). With the way the progression is laid out, the first three upgrades involve upgrading the single beam, while the following ones either add two more or upgrade them. This means that from 4 onward, the rate at which you gain damage is doubled, which is the cause for this gap
The second one is more clear, as Laser only fires a single beam on 0-3, which means that it’s limited to hitting only one enemy per shot at that point.
Overall, for a weapon that was meant to trade overheat time for raw DPS, that description only really fits Laser at 8 and above. Below that, it’s rather underpowered for what it is.
Possible solution
The idea, naturally, is to fully rework Laser’s volleys in a way that eliminates these two issues. Basing the new set off of Neutron Gun’s volleys would get the job done, but we ideally want to avoid making Laser more similar to other weapons. Instead, there is a way to get the exact same damage scaling that Neutron has, while giving it more of a unique identity.
The plan is to essentially recycle the CI2 version of the weapon. This changes the damage scaling such that low power levels become stronger, and nullifies the hitrate issue by making the first two upgrades add a beam instead of increasing its damage. The original 20 volley is moved down to 10 (disregarding the double damage bolts it has, of course), and max power either receives a completely new volley or a rate of fire increase.
There is one thing to consider with this change. Aside from a possible version of 20, the weapon will no longer fire a maximum of 5 bolts per shot, but only 3. While this will lower the weapon’s hitrate on 8-10, it allows us to amp up its firerate beyond Ion’s, and even beyond Hypergun’s starting firerate, making it the fastest firing weapon of its formerly manual kind. IA has previously raised a concern that the changes implemented thus far have brought the firerates of some weapons too close together, so I’d imagine this particular aspect of the rework would be a welcome one.
The beam damage is based directly off of CI2’s values, which means that damage doesn’t increase linearly between different beam levels. Instead, the damage ratios of upgraded beams compared to the B1 beam are 1.5, 2 and 4 for the B2, B3 and B4 beams, respectively.
The proposed values are as follows:
- Damage: 250, 375, 500, 1000
- Firing interval: 0.180 (0.144 on 20 if it doesn’t receive a new volley)
The firing interval is the same as Laser’s automatic fire interval in CI2 remastered, and its interval when using boosters is the same as the manual one. An interval of 0.144 increases the DPS by exactly 25%, so it works perfectly for 20.
Here is a table that shows the overall performance of the weapon after these changes:
While I reckon that implementing the rework in the state above would be an improvement, some redesigning needs to be considered for a few volleys. Let’s take a look at the full set we have so far, taken directly from CI2:
We have a couple of potential issues here. Firstly, 7 briefly lowers the number of beams fired from 3 to 2. This isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but it does lower the weapon’s hitrate at that level, which should ideally be resolved.
Secondly, the B2 beam is only present in one volley, 6. In CI2, this beam used the same sprite as the weak beam, and essentially constituted a stealth buff to the volley’s overall damage. This might make the beam type seem somewhat redundant. There is also no easy way to rework this volley while ditching this beam type and keeping the rest unchanged, so we’re basically stuck with it.
Here’s a version of the set after a couple of revisions:
- The B2 beam is introduced to two other power levels: 4 and 20. The change to 20 matches the DPS increase that the proposed firerate boost would give (+25%), so it can be used as an alternative with no issue.
-
7 is remade from scratch, and now fires 3 beams instead of 2.
Since I can see no real downside to these two changes, I would recommend using this set of volleys as opposed to the fully original one.
Closing thoughts
With this rework finally covered, three smaller issues currently remain on the table:
- Absolver Beam is not compatible with boosters.
- Absolver Beam doesn’t allow for heat values to be set separately for each level.
- Corn Shotgun doesn’t have a weapon group.
All of these issues have been previously brought up in this topic, so unless new developments occur, this will likely be my last major post in this topic.
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Changed in v.130 Idea
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