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"Your weapon absorbs attacks and then fires it back[...] Would you be able to do it if I fire 1,000 shots at once?"
—Primera Espada,
What's better than having a ? How about ?
Beam spam embodies the idea that . Rather than impressing the audience with a demonstration of just how powerful the
is, you instead break their brains with an insane amount of energy rays spewing out of the same source. The key word here is beam SPAM.
is a frequent way of getting more lasers to fit on screen by allowing them to come out from more places than just the front of the vessel.
This is common in ship-to-ship space combat, but you'll also frequently find this trope in shows with
A subtrope of . Compare
(bullets),
(a genre of game based on avoiding bullets),
(magic), and
(missiles). Contrast ,
&&&&open/close all folders&
&&&&Anime/Manga&
this is basically Hecate's primary form of attack... and her lasers bend and partially home in on the target! She can also spam smaller fireballs.
Gainax's : HOMING LASER!!!!
- Aside from , Magic Missiles also have the tendency to suddenly shoot in straight lines when locked on.
Attenborough Cortitch of , the gunner of the many
throughout the series, lives for this kind of stuff. So much so that his
became Beamspam .
In the final battle, he emptied the Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann's supply of Probability Fluctuation Missiles in a single salvo. The Anti-Spiral counters by using beam-weapons that create explosions the size of fucking galaxies, and those beam-weapons have a faster rate-of-fire than a modern-day machinegun. And it has hundreds, if not thousands, of them. At that point, the show almost manages to achieve Too Much Dakka.
The second movie adaption of the series succeeded. When the Giga Drill Breaker attacks from both the Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Super Granzeboma collide, an ENTIRE UNIVERSE COLLAPSES. Now it's Too Much Dakka!
In , many mecha models spam beams relentlessly.
In , ships don't neccessarily fire that many lasers, but with the sheer amount of ships, space battles turn into disco light shows.
Entire battles in
consist of tactics-infused beamspam. Interestingly, Alliance ships are most prone to beamspam, and one of their most notable commanders is named Attenborough.
Nearly every
series has at least one example:
The Qubeley Mass-Production Type, Quin Mantha, and Geymalk of
each have 30 . The Quin Mantha also mounts 9 beam cannons on its body, while the Geymalk mounts 22 (though the gigantic Quin Mantha's cannons are bigger).
The inspiration for the pose when beam-spamming is the V2 Gundam from .
as well, but not to the same extreme. Using all 24 funnels simultaneously lets it deliver
quite easily, with another 12
mounted across its body. In fact, its pilot's preferred method of dealing with anyone irritatingly difficult to fight is to just surround the annoying fly with funnels and blast away. It works quite well until the
had this in the form of entire walls of beam cannon-equipped armies firing all at once, and the entire space station Libra did this when it wasn't showing off its .
Wing Zero shoots its buster rifle a forwards... then it shoots downwards... then it shoots while spinning around... Needless to say, its two beam sabers don't get much screen-time.
the Harmonica Shield is this to the Gundam X Divider, the shield houses Thirteen beam cannons that when fired retains much of its destructive power even under water.
The Freedom Gundam in
and its upgrade, the Strike Freedom (this page image), in , especially when equipped with the
pack. Combine near-limitless energy with a state-of-the-art targeting system (two luxuries that most mobile suits in the SEED universe don't have) with a
and you get someone who can show up in the middle of battle and proceed to completely disarm both sides in less than a minute. Seriously, Kira Yamato's
could just as easily be Aimbot McBeamSpam. In addition, the Providence and Legend Gundams are capable of
thanks to their , which the Strike Freedom is also .
The same universe gives us the very aptly named Destroy Gundam. It has six
and one in its face in Mobile Suit mode, plus two twin-barrelled high-energy beam cannons in Mobile Armor Mode), twenty thermal-plasma composite cannons, ten beam cannons on its fingers (which detach to become ), 24 missile launchers, and four .
Gundam Zabanya from
(two of which are hand-carried) and 14 Holster Bits. Combined with 'd
and a reactor core and targeting system that puts even the above-mentioned Freedom suits to shame, we get a
of beam spamming action that rapes everything on the screen.
A wakening of the Trailblazer loves doing this. Most of the Gadelaza's scenes involve it just flying through a mass of ELS, and letting its
skewer them via . Every now and then it actually bothers attacking personally, using either its giant , , or the four massive beam guns it has as auxiliary weapons.
Otto and her aptly named Inherent Skill, Ray Storm, which sends powerful beams flying in every direction. Nanoha herself also has a few examples of this, not least is her Blaster System, which functions much like the DRAGOONs mentioned above. And Fate has her Phalanx Shift attack that is a
version of her basic beam attack.
The episode that introduced Fate gave us Bardiche's first spoken words in the franchise. "Photon Lancer. Full Autofire."
: The Battle of Aces makes this the basic ranged attack of both Hayate and her
Material-D. Sure, you could fire only one of the little energy balls, but where's the fun in that?
In the 3rd season, Nanoha even
attack from five different direction against her daughter Vivio.
. Uncountable times. I a single huge beam is almost always depicted more effective.
This is one of Vegeta's signature attacks in .
Krillin used it on Nappa, having no effect.
Piccolo employs this against #17, though every shot he misses with actually stays afloat in the air, which then come together in one big attack.
Buu spammed an entire planet with lasers, using his aptly-named
to wipe out the planet's entire supply of . Tien and Chiaotzu actually outlasted the rest of the Z team because they were down on Earth at the time rather than at Kami's lookout, and therefore only had to survive the beam spam rather than the "" he used on the foes right in front of him.
Seen in various forms on . You have your ship-mounted type, seen in the aerial battle between the Gekko and the Izumo, as well as the Nirvash typeTheEND's personal homing laser array. The latter puts out nearly enough beams to turn the whole screen red and white.
The main weapon of Lelouch's Shinkirō Knightmare in
produces an attack of this sort, via the power of refraction. Later on in the series Suzaku (who is now dangerously close to stealing Kira Yamato's coveted executive beam spammer club trophy) gets a spiffy new upgrade to the Lancelot. It's new energy wings double as a weapon allowing it to deluge targets in energy. You almost have to feel sorry for them...
Hell, Lelouch once . And it works.
Before the Gawain's Hadron Cannons were tweaked by Rakshata, t afterwards, they became .
Two instances in the series . Once, in the first series and never used again, when Vandread Dita bounces a whole lotta energy beams off the other Dreads to wipe out a fast-moving enemy attack in one shot. And, in Vandread: The Second Stage, when
Bart unlocks the 's Main Gun in his . This attack is used in the remainder of the series, and consists of the Nirvana firing hundreds of beams all at once, that not only seek using , they seek their targets while dodging friendlies
The Neuroi in
attack like this.
In , She may not have a big gun, but one of Venus's light and energy based attacks is basically this and its name is .
The bow Uryuu got after regaining his power can fire 1,200 shots simultaneously.
At little more recently,
Starrk's release gives him the ability to rapid-fire multiple ceros at once, fitting with his release's
Also the kidou spell Hyapporankan or "Hundred-Step Rail Parch." Hisagi uses it against Findor Calius, as does Hitsugaya in a movie.
and its follow-on series use this trope (in the forms of turret-spam and ships-with--spam) almost as much as they do the
- and when you have 100+ ships on each side each with 100+ turrets ...
In the first series, most ship-to-ship combat consisted of laser spam when not using the
- and in , approximately 4.8 million Zentradi warships use their
on Earth's surface, with .
In , you don't see pure , but you do see a bullet-hell scenario of turret fire for Isamu to weave through.
has a good lightshow near the finish.
has a bullet-hell scenario of normal turrets between ships, followed up by epic
on the part of the Vajra under Grace O'Connor. Too bad for her it didn't stop the quite-literal
The Vajra Beam Spam fired at Frontier in the
wasn't just just beam spam, it was
with beam weapons.
In the '' (Yes, ,) the Cosmo Nova special attack is depicted as a
Beam Spam.
: The Deucalion gets to do this to a variety of targets.
has some ridiculous beam-spam in the closing chapters, though it does help that the
Zearth can fire beams from any point of its body (remember that thing that Buu from Dragon Ball Z did mentioned earlier in this article? ◊).
Satchii, the anti-hacker device in , uses this as its ultimate attack modus. It only works virtually, but since all of the protagonists spend most of their time in virtual reality it's still very terrifying to them.
Kuki's Dolem from
has this as it's power, making it a nigh unstoppable engine of destruction. In one memorable scene a
was launched against it only to shot to pieces before the missiles could even get halfway.
The original
used this a lot, with their bendy laser beams.
and Haseo face off against one another. After they gain their , Ovan unleashes a massive wave of red beams, countered by a
blue beam from Haseo. They collide making a massive purple .
big sister, the Cosmos, beamspams .
"The ballista shots that numbered a little over a thousand were all fired at once, .
In the same fight, Beato also shot 18900 bolts of lightning at the predecessor Beatrice.
Both this attempt and the one above miss.
Admiral Kizaru of
has his Yasakani no Magatama technique, which can rain down a ridiculous amount of light beams over a wide area.
The Grand Cross in
uses these to devastate enemy ships after zig-zagging to close range.
In the anime adaptation of 6-tailed 's fight against Pain (Ch. 438/Ep. 167), Naruto pelts Pain with a 20-second-long Bijuu-Dama Barrage and, later on, with chakra lasers. This is brought to canon in chapter 610 when Bee and Naruto, both in their full Tailed Beast forms, fire a barrage of Bijuu-Damas at the Juubi, which then retaliates with a massive chakra beam attack.
There's also Darui's signature Jutsu, Storm Release: Laser Circus, which unleashes massive beams of light.
&&&&Fan Fiction&
The first time Kyon is shown using
Gungnir mode in , it shot to one thousand three hundred and thirty-seven different targets.
In the , Gallantmon's new "Takato's Star Storm" technique works by firing a barrage of plasma bolts from the small triangles rimming his shield.
This is how Array approaches his fight with Discord in .
The author of
stated in an author's note that he analyzed the armaments of the Galaxy-class starship from the perspective of what you could do with (according to the
Technical Manual) ten phaser banks if you weren't constrained by such things as a special effects budget. Combine that with forty years of technical advancements since the Enterprise-D was built, and the USS Bajor packs a wallop.
and its , the Trans-Galactic Republic's Star Dreadnaughts (and smaller Star Destroyers) unleash Beam Spam against Reapers. Whose shields are mostly kinetic-blockers and thus cannot withstand a few turbolasers, let alone hundreds. Leads to repeated . .
The Death Blossom mode in . (, eat your heart out.)
For , it combines this with a .
King Ghidorah often does this with his gravity beams, often firing blasts in random directions with his unoccupied heads while the third is busy grappling with an adjacent enemy.
MechaGodzilla in all of its incarnations is practically king of this trope. Each version is armed to the teeth (probably including the teeth themselves) and carries a massive of shitton of firepower that it can unleash from its entire body. This is particularly glaring with the Showa version, which had guns and lasers on practically every part of itself. Godzilla's battles with the Showa MechaGodzilla probably contained a higher explosion-per-second ratio than your average
Death Stars are most famous for their , Rebellion pilots will tell you that the millions of turbolaser turrets and emplacements dotting their surface is the much greater challenge if you want to actually destroy one.
works, ships fire phasers one or two beams at a time (usually because they're only in combat with one other ship), but in
they're capable of firing about a dozen at once while still maintaining precise accuracy as evident when the Enterprise gives cover fire to the futuristic Vulcan vessel Spock is using and destroys Nero's . Even earlier, at the beginning of the film, the crew of the USS Kelvin use this technique first in a failed attempt to defend themselves against the Narada, and then to provide cover fire for their own escaping shuttlecraft.
In , when the Enterprise-E is trying to find the cloaked Scimitar, Picard orders Worf to fire a full spread from all phaser strips in the hope of hitting something, followed by a spread of torpedoes. This works for a while, until they
and deplete the charge in the phaser banks, whereupon they try simply
Shinzon's warship.
USS Vengeance in
. Remarkably, averted for the Enterprise; she doesn't get to fire a shot before the weapons systems are taken out.
&&&&Literature&
Anyone who's read 's
series is quite familiar with Beam Spam. One of the staple weapons in the novels is the vehicle-mounted tribarrel, a weapon with three rotating barrels that shoots energy blasts (called "bolts") so fast that the bolts leaving the weapon appear to be a solid line - not individual bolts. The weapons scale up, too - his tanks in the series have both a tribarrel and a 20cm "main gun" that can literally cook mountainsides with one shot. The tribarrel is based on a cross between the real-life
machine gun and the Gatling gun, both of which have beam-spam-class rates of fire.
. Arrows of fire. Book 11. (Or: How to fully kill a Fade before nightfall)
Rand showed the ability to beamspam in book 11. He essentially generates one thousand beams with his bare hands.
makes it quite clear that if they want to, the bigger Star Destroyers are quite capable of this even without using all their weaponry. The Executor-class (the ones like Vader's ship) is specifically noted as seem to throw up "sheets" or "walls" of energy. This is often used for .
The ◊ is the objectification of this trope, an application of the "maximum battleship" idea, taken to its extreme
universe has an interesting mix. Due to reasonsnote&, all missiles are actually stand-off, nuclear bomb-pumped laser platforms. So when a
reaches attack range and detonates, it has a tendency to turn into a colossal beam spam given that each missile throws between four and eight lasers, and later in the series, even a relatively small engagement will involve a hundred plus missiles per salvo. In one particularly notable battle, the total number of missiles in flight was almost seven hundred thousand.
And that's just the missiles. If one considers the point-defense laser clusters trying to shoot incoming missiles down, it get even worse.
And all of the above disregards the laser/grasernote& broadsides that all warships of the setting carry. Yeah, Weber likes this one.
novel Necropolis, at one point, the Chaos forces have so many lasguns firing at the same time, that nobody can hear the individual shots being fired. Instead, they think that weird sound in the background is the wind blowing.
In Blood Pact, when the Chaos witch bursts into the room to attack Mabbon,
Maggs kills her by simply unloading his lasgun at her, firing over two hundred shots at her and overwhelming her warp-shields. It even freaks him out.
The 'gigawatt lasers' of Joe Haldeman's
count as about one each, given that even the early models are capable of hitting at least 20 targets a second. 300 years later that was up to about 1000 targets a second.
novel Flight of the Old Dog the Ice Fortress anti-ballistic missile system is supposedly able to use X-ray laser spam to destroy dozens to hundreds of missiles or warheads per munition.
In the Empire From the Ashes series by , there is a class of planetoid armed ONLY with heavy energy guns (essentially directed black holes). 4,000km diameter planetoid battleship with pretty much the entire surface covered with them? Just add targets.
They have 16 of these things and STILL nearly get overrun. They have to resort to
Good thing it wasn't Earth, eh?
&&&&Live Action Television&
In , Bizarro,
instantaneously. .
The space station itself is shown to be armed with a number of laser-autocannons stretched along the spine of the station, capable of putting out impressive volumes of fire. In Season 2 this weapons grid is upgraded and in the Season 2 finale is shown to now have several Gatling-laser positions and several massive energy turrets added to it, quite capable of destroying a flagship battlecruiser belonging to a substantially more advanced alien race in a few bursts of concerted fire (aided by fighters strafing it as well).
Similarly, the sturdy Starfury, with two powerful but slow-firing energy cannons, is superseded by the Thunderbolt, which sacrifices power in favor of just having a laser minigun strapped to the front of it.
In the Battle of the Line, humanity brings , which provides ample cannon fodder for the Minbari beams:
Sinclair: ...and the sky was full of stars, and every star was an exploding ship - one of ours.
may do it in the movies more often, but the shows employ it on rare occasions, too:
In , the Enterprise was able to fire multiple rounds when needed—most notably in "Conundrum" and "The Survivor".
"Best of Both Worlds" proves that it was a good idea to stick some phaser strips everywhere they could find room - even on the nacelles.
In the Interactive Technical Manual it's stated that (supposedly) the arrangement of the phaser strips ensures that every point around the ship can be hit by two independent banks.
In an episode of , Tuvok quells a riot by firing his hand phaser in a spread that blankets the bridge. Though beam-spreading like that isn't a new concept, it was never portrayed quite so effectively before.
occurrences include the Defiant itself in every appearance, and the refit Excelsior class they encounter near Earth in one episode (subverted in that it and the Defiant are both duking it out with beam spam trying not to destroy each other and resultingly barely even hitting each other at point blank range).
Also regularly occurs when a battle involves the station itself. When the Klingons attack the station in one episode looking for members of the Cardassian government, Sisko warns them how many photon torpedoes he has waiting for them, then demonstrates with a few rounds of high-tech . When that doesn't back them off, his next order is "fire at will". Insert several minutes of mutual beam-spamming before the Klingons deploy boarding parties and the fight moves inside.
This turns up in
now and again. Usually, the basic finisher is a , but as more and more mecha are added, they have to get snazzier. The third or fourth finisher to be introduced in a series is usually many weapons from all over the components' bodies being fired at once, for some very pretty death rays. Also, many Rangers-weapons-combined finishers are this, including the first.
The first season of
had the Ultrazord, whose only attack was, you guessed it, a beam spam. The third season had another good example in the Shogun MegaFalconzord.
&&&&Manhua&
: The Queen Of Moths uses this as her take on the
on the battle field of Beijing.
&&&&Music&
's live shows embody this trope, save that TSO's lasers are of the non-damaging variety.
&&&&Tabletop Games&
a Wizard or Sorcerer can learn the Magic Missile spell, which grants more and more magic missiles as they gain levels. At the highest level, it becomes the embodiment of this trope.
And by that, we mean that at its highest power, you get a grand total of five missiles. Seriously, Minute Meteors is a better beam spam.
1st Edition has no limits on the number of missiles, so magic missile spamming is possible at high levels. Just one of the reasons why they turned it down to five, tops, too much bang for a first level spell.
The Wizard's Compendium describes the Improved Magic Missile spell, which is a 3rd level spell that ups the limit to 10, but is otherwise identical. Considering that MM never misses and is effective against ghosts and other pesky incorporeal creatures, it has its uses.
Also, collecting splatbook cheese will allow you to fire a staggering 380 missiles in the span of 6 seconds of in-game time.
It's more effect D&D's third edition has a huge number of metamagic feats that can take basic ray spells and multiply the beams. Magic missiles are nothing compared to a Quickened Maximized Energy Admixtured Twinned Split Scorching Ray from an Artificer.
Use the right magic items and feats and it might be possible to fire off six of those at once. That's 72 shots for 48 points of damage each... at a minimum of 27,225 gold pieces cost just for the wand charges.
You forgot Empowered. That's a total of 5184 points of damage - 72x72. Also, the combination of Force Missile Mage (if you DM will allow it), Argent Savant, Incantatrix, and Spellwarp Sniper can be absolutely terrifying for a Magic Missile. Incantatrix to get free metamagics applied, Spellwarp Sniper to turn it into a ray so you can put stuff like Split and Twinned, Argent Savant for further damage, and Force Missile Mage for more damage and more missiles.
Though Magic Missile isn't that hot, its older brother Chain Missile moves the upper limit to ten missiles. Combine that with several castings of Delay Spell (which delays the activation of a spell until a later turn), and you can spend several rounds before firing off sixty or seventy never-miss missiles who then proceed to chase after secondary targets. It's a complete waste of time and higher level spell slots, but damn if it doesn't look cool.
in . Each infantryman is armed with a , and they tend to field a lot of them. For kicks, their vehicles come with "multilasers". .
In the words of 40k fans, "One lasgun does diddly. 50 lasguns, on the other hand, that's a shitload of diddly."
And let us not forget the "First line, Second line" Order from the 5th edition codex. Let us add one more shot to your Lasgun. Now imagine it at half range... With rapid fire... with a combined squad of 40 guardsmen.
The Tau fall along the same lines, though their numbers are fewer. Possibly the worst thing you can do against them (besides using transports) is to put a squad less than a foot away from a Fire Warrior group. The words "Rapid Fire" usually follow. The basic Firewarrior weapon, is a twin barreled plasma projecting Pulse Rifle. It hit's harder than the Space Marine standard .75 caliber (19mm) mini-rocket launcher Bolter, and shoots further than every other race's basic weapon. Additionally, squads of Firewarriors, notably Pathfinders, and Gun Drones, carry Pulse Carbines, which while having less range, are Assault weapons (always able to fire at maximum fire rate, regardless if the unit moved or not), that also mount underslung photon grenade launchers which can cause hit units to become pinned down.
Meanwhile for their elite troops in , the smallest of the suits, the Stealth Suits, carry , which can be replaced with anti-armor/vehicle Fusion Blasters. Their Crisis and Broadside Battlesuits, in addition to the above, have access to the always popular Plasma Riflenote&. Crisis suits also have access to another
weapon in the form of the Cyclic Ion Blastersnote&. And then they went ahead and created the
which by default, mounts a Heavy Burst Cannon that shred squads apart on it's own (in addition to it's Crisis suit sized sub-weapons). Or mount an Ion Accelerator which can be overcharged for some
goodness. Their Vehicles which mount Ion Cannons of various flavors, also join in on this
Unless someone in the squad survives the barrage long enough to
Which is now harder, thanks to recent rules editions added the Overwatch rule, which means a unit being assaulted fires off quick, if somewhat inaccurate, snapshots at their attackers, meaning Assault troops have to overcome this danger with some form of mobility, protection, sheer numbers, or some combination of all. Then the Tau codex got an update, which allows nearby Tau units to use their Overwatch for a turn to assist another unit with their own. If you're playing against a skilled Tau Commander, he's probably quietly hoping you attempt to send a squad or two towards close-combat, while setting up a kill-box that gives him a bunch of free
attacks each turn.
The Eldar, while mostly famous for their monomolecular shuriken launchers and other exotic toys deserve at least a honorary mention for their laser weaponry, and can probably rival the Imperial Guard if they try. Their scatter lasers tend to have higher rate of fire than most Imperial weaponry (including the above multilasers), and their light walkers can come with two of them per piece at a reasonable point price. Oh, and there is also the Sunrifle, arguably the quickest-firing weapon carried by hand, and the Fire Prism, which, well, pretty much embodies this trope. It uses a refraction prism to create enough laser beams to either hit anything in a large radius, or project a "concentrated" beam with enough force to stand a chance of going through the thickest armors in the setting... over a somewhat smaller radius. Yep,
And now, Eldar Jetbikes, which are a Troops choice (the force organization slot with the highest cap), can take Scatter Lasers. On every single model in a squad. That's 40 shots from a full-sized squad. That's as many as four tens. .
Ultra-Tech gives us the "Gatling Laser", a tripod-mounted weapon consisting of four "Dinosaur Lasers" (shoulder-fired
"powerful enough to blow away a dinosaur"), each firing multiple times per second. Higher
versions include gamma-ray and x-ray models.
offers the Gatling Phaser.
has several mechs built for laser spamming, however spamming lasers has the possibility to overload your reactor due to the heat from firing so many lasers at once, then there is the Pulse Laser and the Nova Cat. The pulse laser fires more laser blasts at your foe but it gives off even more heat, the Nova cat on the other hand fires several PPC at your general direction.
The Medium Laser, a
weapon in every sense of the word, is ideally suited for loading up heavily with them. Because of their small size and mass, an absurd number of them can be crammed onto a mech, and their modest damage, relatively (to other energy weapons) low heat/damage ratio, and passable range make firing a lot of them in one turn actually feasible if the mech's heat system is designed for it. Derivatives of the Medium Laser (Extended Range, Pulse, Heavy) don't pull it off quite as well as the original, though.
This (along with
and ) is why they let you link weapons in
Zeta. If you don't mind the expense, you could set up a humanoid mecha, middleweight frame, which simply consists of a cockpit, primary sensors, and 44 individual light beam guns (assuming you haven't installed a pod, which at middleweight would add space for another dozen), all firing at once. If your GM is lenient and has given you a high CP allowance, you could crosslink all of these, so you fire 44 shots directly at your target's face. That's gotta hurt.
In , a 2E Solar can start with a combo containing
and . With sufficient creativity the end result resembles
. Exalted 2.5 has errata'd this away because Blazing Solar Bolt and Peony Blossom Attack can no longer be used together.
: Apoqliphort Towers fires lasers from all of its spikes, as depicted in the artwork of Laser Qlip.
&&&&Video Games&
offers a variant: Combine the Spell
with Improved Alacrity (removes delay between spells)and the "Robe of Vecna (lower casting time). You can then cast ALL your magic missiles, Acid Arrows, Flame Arrows plus a host of other spells (all the way to tenth level Infinity Plus One spells like ), and they will all be fired at the target at the same time once the Timestop ends. .
In the first Baldur's Gate, when you see Gorion battling Sarevok, Gorion unleashes a huge barrage of magic missiles at a time that, due to experience caps, you are unable to in the game. However, in the sequel, you are limited to 5 no matter what level you are. But that still can't stop you from getting a party of 6 rested mages to cast alacrity, then time stop at the same time so that at the end, they simultaneously (one after another with a nanosecond in between) unleash a red wave of doom upon the target. Give each one a spell sequencer (carrying three magic missile spells each) and a spell contingency (also three magic missile spells and set to "attacked"), then during their time stop turn have them each take a corner of a hexagon around the desired enemy and unleash the sequencers and as many memorized magic missiles as possible. Even if you only fire off 10 spells per mage, the target will be obliterated by [(1sequencer+1contingency)(3spells)+(10memorized)](5missiles)(6mages) = 480 missiles!
The Battlecruiser in
outputs a constant stream of laser bolts. Attacking with a dozen takes the beam spam .
Not to mention the Protoss in general. A late-game Protoss "death-ball" will consist of zealots, stalkers, sentries, colossi and void rays. Of these, the zealot is the only one that doesn't shoot lasers.
their enemy instead.
The Vanu Sovereignty in
use lasers and
as often as possible, turning their infantry into walking laser raves. Elevated in Planetside 2 with its day-night cycles, where VS weapons put out an amazing lightshow at night that simultaneously blinds both the target .
arcade shooter
has ALL of its
use this on the player, be they ,
In regular , The Rein Weissritter can use
all by itself with only one gun.
The entire cast of the
series has some form of
at their disposal, with a notable example being Shou Toramaru. Curving lasers. That briefly pause. She also loves lasers that turn into bullets, as does Nue's Danmaku Chimera attack.
Sariel's opening attack from the first game certainly qualifies.
Just... watch it. Shame such artillery gets used on a frigging soccer ball.
What's better than spamming lots of bullets? Spamming your , which Marisa does in her last word,
Special mention goes to Hinanawi Tenshi, who has about half of her attacks based off of either ridiculously huge or a ridiculous amount of lasers.
Anything with 'Diffusion' in the name in an
Also the intro movie for . A
fired from regular fighters.
's charge attack.
can switch between this and a
for its special attack.
Glue a massive amount of Laser L parts onto any
boss and you're done!
The Type-5 Weapon in , which when fully upgraded, fires six beams with each attack.
puts this at the player's disposal, in the form of rapid-fire homing lasers.
count? Moonfire does look like a ...
Aozaki Aoko of
uses both martial arts and
when fighting, as seen in . This ranges from needle-thin shots to beams launched off her fists and her leg when in midair (which sweeps the entire screen with blue fire).
The homing version of these are Jehuty's main method of clearing swarms of
in . Many other Orbital Frames in the series can pull it off as well.
It seems that pretty much any orbital frame designed to actually carry a pilot has one of these, and all of them have that homing principle. Those that the game's main antagonist, Anubis, fires though, take the "homing" part to a whole new level of silly - they move by zigzagging here and there gradually in an angular pattern.
One of the
Japan clan tournaments was composed of nothing but robots with
and Short Boost, an "upgrade" that lets your robots jump rather than dash.
Most powerful characters and Organization XIII members in
can use this.
Xemnas attacks his enemies with nearly infinite number of laser beams from all possible directions to the extent that it appears to be a giant dome of beams
Ansem can also this.
Xigbar also uses this in his , the final part of it assailing you with dozens of lasers from multiple angles.
The version of Ragnarok used in
has Sora and his dream eaters combine into a sphere of light that proceeds to bombard every enemy in the vicinity with countless lasers from every angle.
Approached in Unreal Tournament 2003, where the prequel's Plasma Gun is retooled as the Link Gun, with plenty of
potential. Using alt-fire, the entire team can link-fire their guns at each other, granting the end user with ridiculous power.
adds Link Turrets to the mix. Though they cannot target each other, they play nicely with Link Gun users.
Even with all the possibilities that the Link Gun adds, it just isn't quite like having two full teams of 16 players armed with the Instagib on a small map. It adds a whole new meaning to "Beam Spam" in video games.
Crab Spider Soldiers villain archetype in
have a power similar to , although the number of blasts might not reach the level of spam regularly seen elsewhere.
Masterminds in , if they choose the Robotics powerset, can have dozens of beams spraying all over the screen from their various minions- each of the three lowest-level drones has an attack that fills the screen with laser fire, and if all of them go off at once, well...
Similarly, equip enemies in the Mission Architect with Robots, and you get the same thing, .
Although it's supposedly not her preferred M.O.,
can certainly qualify as , considering the unlimited ammo (the Power Beam in the Prime games can literally fire as fast as you can press A). Combined with the Wave Beam, the Spazer, or the Plasma Beam (especially true in Super Metroid) and... hoo boy.
The Hyper Mode's charge beam in
3 is literally a , firing so fast the blast forms a near-constant stream.
Not to mention many player's reactions to the Metroids. "* skree!* " "KILLITKILLITKILLIT!!!"
The manga also had an example in the form of Kreatz.
certainly qualifies.
His Hyper Mode charge shot qualifies even more especially since you can now unload everything on one target or simply pick who you want to blow up.
If that is all you have then forget it, you haven't seen Ultimate X armor. The minute that comes on, you can not only unload all your ammunition's worth on your opponent but you can also change targets when you are certain you killed your opponent .
In the shooting battle mode of : Battle, 20 rings will give you one of these to unleash on your opponent.
The Egg Wyvern and Solaris both do this in
And in , the Egg Nega Wisp fires laser beams one at a time, but eventually going so fast you barely have time to react inbetween!
has the Judgment and Ray spells, which function like this.
has this as his .
Sekundes from
was designed as a throwback to Dhaos, hence retaining Dhaos Laser (Or Sekundes Laser if you will) as well as having a new arte named Million Assault, a beatdown that ends with a Sekundes Blast, and then three Sekundes Lasers in a row.
Tales Of VS had Dhaos pull this off again, this time not only retaining his aforementioned
but also giving him ' Million Assault.
Guy has Mystic arte of the
variant: Brilliant Overlord
A laser monsoon was seen in the game
when the Sith fleet bombarded Taris.
versions of
shoot off dozens (upon dozens, in the second case) of beams of Holy magic. Alexander VIII shoots them from deployable cannon batteries mounted on its shoulders, whereas Alexander IX releases them from its city-spanning wings. In the latter case, they're also of the homing variety.
Alexander makes a return in , using similar
It's also a favored form of attack for
In , the boss named Proudclad, which is a giant two-form , has a habit of turning the tides in any battle against it... By first using "Limiters Removal", which heals itself to pretty much full HP, and then spamming its
attack against the leader. As long as you have Snow a Sentinel in your active party, things should work out just fine, though.
In , the Aeon Valefor's second Overdrive, Energy Blast, is very much this.
Tidus's Energy Rain Overdrive also counts.
The Holy spell also manifests as this.
series loves this trope. The first game has the Kadeshi Multibeam frigates, tiny little ships that have four titanic ion cannons squeezed in. When firing, they "sweep" space in front of them, making them almost more of a danger to fighter squadrons than capital ships. The sequel has its own version of the Multibeam Frigate, which takes eight beam emitters and plants them all over the ship's hull, making it an unholy terror when diving into fighter swarms (it's named the 'Dervish' for a reason). And Homeworld 2 has Pulsar Gunship squadrons, which are capable of outright swarming enemy ships with tiny little ion beams.
And this isn't even getting into Ion Cannon Frigates or the Progenitor Dreadnought, which edge closer to
(though the Dreadnought also has anti-fighter beam turrets all over its hull) except for the fact that you can have dozens of the frigates all firing at a single target. And then there is , with a Phased Cannon Array even bigger than the dreadnoughts' and
nanite beam cannons for point defense.
Best option: 1) Go into "versus" match. 2) Put unit limit to "maximum". Build pulsar gunships, ion frigates and battlecruisers until your unit cap is full. 3) Enjoy your beam spam. Or even better, make a versus match with 5 friends, and tell them all to do the same thing.
In , KOS-MOS's most popular weapon, the X-Buster, is a spread-beam laser cannon fired from her stomach. A perfect example of this Trope.
As is the Durandal's main cannon.
The super move of Sarara from , where she attacks a target by firing thirteen beams at the same time from her
and mechanical bow.
The Advent in
have a serious love of beam weapons. The Halcyon Carrier capital ship carries up to 7 squadrons of bombers (which are armed with beam weapons) in addition to the 8 heavier beam cannons mounted on the ship itself.
And of course you can mass bombers with the Advent. With the researches and the new pacts system in Diplomacy it's not unreasonable to arrive at an advent planet which has no ships defending it and be set upon by no less than 30 bomber squadrons...each of which has 7-10 bombers beam spamming your ships. Can make for a rather quick death for smaller ships when focused.
However strange it may seem, the final form of the final boss from
The Shake Dimension, aka the Shake King has multiple attacks involving an absolutely gigantic laser beam being fired at Wario, as well as multiple fireballs being sent everywhere at the same time. And another attack involving about five columns of lightning bolts being fired down from the top of the screen.
The Multilock move from
3 has Dante fire multiple shots at a single target with the Artemis demonic energy weapon, if admittedly quite lacking compared to most of the other examples here.
In the first two
games, the BFG9000 is implemented internally as a beam spam weapon. The visual effects do not reflect this.
Technically, when the BFG9000's shot detonates, the game fires forty 2D rays from the player's viewpoint spaced out horizontally across the screen. Anything that one of these hits takes 15d8 damage and has the visual effect show up on it.
The BFG was supposed to act more like this in the beta, where instead of the massive green bolt of plasma it fires now, it fired out dozens of green and red balls that bounced off walls. This was
because the tons of plasma orbs on the screen caused severe framerate drops, and because it "looked like Christmas."
Doom 64 features a weapon called the "Unmaker" (referred to in-game as, "What the $%#@$ is this?!") that, upon finding three artifacts scattered throughout the game, fires three beams in a single shot. Combined with its rapid firing rate, a fully powered Unmaker can quickly take down even the final boss.
The Blaster and Hyperblaster from
normally fired little solid blocks of energy. A very simple mod could change this into a hitscan laser. Even without the mod, the Hyperblaster was basically a . If two people were dueling with them...
version of the BFG (BFG10k) fulfills the trope: It fires a green ball that fires lasers on all targets in the vicinity of its trajectory. When it hits a solid object, it explodes in a similar way to the original Doom BFG: The game checks if a line-of-sight can be drawn from the target to the ball's location of detonation and from the detonation site to the player who fired the weapon in the first place. If both lines of sight are met, the target is going to take a heap of damage and this is applied to all possible targets. Reportedly, it is a good tactic to fire the BFG into the ceiling in a room with a bunch of other players in a deathmatch game.
weapon from the
series probably qualifies (especially the weapon in the third game). It's .
Similarly,
has a laser , which is just a teeny bit overkill when you consider the normal laser rifle already has a high rate of fire.
Similar to the D&D Time Stop combination mentioned above under Tabletop gaming, Ultima Underworld for the PC had a Time Stop spell as well. At the upper levels, this allowed you to fling vast quantities of items, fire arrows, and blast spells at the opponent, limited only by the fact that if they collided with one another before the opponent, most of them would be harmlessly destroyed. More amusingly, running into your own arrows in mid-flight could kill you even before the spell expired.
. The Beam Reflexor. "It's an upgrade to the sniper weapon", you say. "It doesn't have that high a rate of fire", you say. Then you see what happens when a) you're mashing the trigger and b) the blasts are rebounding in all directions. Spammy!
Let's not forget the upgrade that comes after: an
that fires fifty shots in all directions. Sadly, they don't rebound.
The last upgrade is a nice 'fire and forget' weapon. But nothing cleans out a room like the Reflexor. How, you wonder? Like this: jump++triggermashing=
has the RYNO IV. Beam Spam with HOMING LASERS
In , the final boss makes extensive use of this as well a couple other types of projectile spam. There's also the Alpha Strike, which is basically a bunch of alien ships getting together and beamspamming an entire planet to death.
And . Specifically, his supermoves Plasma Rage and Plasma Vortex.
The Amarr in
are very fond of their infidel-purifying lasers, but the Abaddon-class battleship is in particular known for it's ◊. Sansha loves beam spam .
After a certain plot event in
Jos a certain combo finisher has more in common with a
Not to mention the final boss, that beamspams fireballs. Thank God for Neku's dodge ability.
has, for the Empire, an anti-fighter corvette ship called the Tartan. The Tartan has the special ability to fire pretty much every gun at once. Max space unit per side in battle is 20 for the Empire in Galactic Conquest mode. Tartan's are 2 population each. 10 Tartans + special = LASER CANNON .
This counts for any massed unit that uses lasers, really. Tartan's are just the most beam spam/dakka-ish. Even ground units can count if one uses a mod to remove the in-battle population cap, if you can manage to land all of them before the AI rushes your reinforcement point.
The second and third
games allowed you to make rapid-fire versions of some beam weapons, with further research after developing the weapons. Load up the larger ships with such weapons, and it's pretty much "game over" for the other guy if you're anywhere near at parity with their tech levels.
In , Maria (the game's only gunslinger) has an ability that's basically
with lasers. Souping up this ability is a common tactic with . You can see it in action in , where it probably hits 20 times for 20,000HP each.
Tachyon: The Fringe had one particular ship/weapon combo which embodied this - the GalSpan Phoenix heavy bomber, fitted with as many Deimos Heavy Lasers as it could muster. Five of those firing in unison, especially in linked fire, could fry any shield in one shot and breach the hull in three. And you still had your pick of missiles, chatter cannon, railgun etc for the other hardpoints.
is such a master of this trope that she beamspams beamspams. In essence, she takes spells that ought to take at least thirty seconds to cast for a very good magus speed casting and does them instantly. Over and over and over, effortlessly. This is only possible on her home turf though, so normally she fights in a much more subtle manner.
Also, according to outside sources, Beserker's nine lives noble phantasm is essentially "an anti-phantasm beast, dragon-type 9-shot simultaneous homing laser volley." That's right, he can shoot out nine homing dragon lasers with a bow. Too bad that being summoned as a beserker prevents him from using it.
In , when Rika is using a mop as her weapon, she can
cannons of water.
series' playable dragons' Berserk attacks, along with Atolm Dragon's "Ne-rai" move in Saga.
a large battle can have so many beams flying everywhere that it makes the picture at the top of this article look like nothing in comparison.
and then going full Beam Spam with a dozen capital ships.
In , there's a weapon called the Homing Laser. It can shoot out up to four
at once. Typical
can mount two of these.
In , the player's ship maxes out at firing 1,575 bullets per second.
Most weapons in
are relatively slow firing (about one shot per second if you're lucky) and don't get any substantial upgrades to their rate of fire, so the Tiger heavy tank compensates this by mounting two of whatever weapon it's given. Then however you have the Laser and Microwave, which can get a very noticeable speed increase on top of the fastest rate of fire in the game. So if you put either one of them on a Tiger... Yeah.
In , the Omnipotent King Blue uses a Beam Spam as one of his various and obnoxious attacks: he throws out his staff, which lines up with Joe's , and then fires off a beam to each side... while even MORE beams rain down from the heavens. You actually have the
between the beams to avoid the attack, and the staff can only be avoided by tricking it into attacking during a jump, so that you land lower than it.
A viable tactic in , as beam weapons are far more accurate than projectile weapons. Fill up a Freighter Q with phasers, wait for the next pirate raid, and .
Not to mention the titular class of dreadnought for humans whose primary weapons are a dozen heavy laser cannons, all forward-facing. Makes short work of most enemies. The drawback is it can only fire those at a single enemy. The awesomeness of this ship was unrivaled until the addition of railcannons, which are not only more powerful but also have a much longer range, as well as causing the target to fly away and spin uncontrollably.
All over the place in
Brawl: Subspace Emissary, but the most notable one is during the attack on the ship carrying the Subspace Cannon. The heroes have to dodge ridiculous amounts of beam-spam—with lasers bigger than the ships they're flying in, no less—while Kirby closes in on his Dragoon.
Also in Super Smash Bros. Melee, the Master and Crazy Hands can fire lasers from all five fingers at once. It's only dangerous if you get caught in the center of the stage, though, which is unlikely due to the long charge-up time - unless you're fighting both at once and don't notice one of them.
Lavos' main attack in
is a technique called "Destruction Rains from the Heavens". In the Day of Lavos he rises from the underground and use it to
so he can spawn new lavoid forms in the surface of the planet and dispatch them to repeat the process in new worlds.
The Type-5 Weapon in , which when fully upgraded, fires six beams with each attack.
games have the alpha strike, a special emergency action that fires all the guns, regardless of type, guidance or intended range. This can mean , ,
or any combination of the three according to what weapons the given Mech is mounting.
provides fireworks even in , but some stations got lots of turrets, and capships
plus their own mounts, so... if someone shoots at your ship when you're landing at a Starfortress and misses,
may ensue — by the way, all these beams are . And
a close battle involving half a dozen or so capships (which sometimes happens at ) looks like.
loves this trope, although it's best used with some .
are cheap and small in the
games, and are suitable for deploying en masse.
brings us the
and the Repeating Blasters.
4, the Sun God monkeys and the
ARE this trope, especially in later levels when the game starts lagging.
. Got a whole line of regular, Burning, and/or Hellfire temples on each side of the pat? The enemies had better prepare to get PWNED!
example, the level "Trigger Happy" in
(plus its "extra snappy" variant in an expansion pack, which is worse).
Both the player and (eventually) the enemy in . The montrous foe can combine this with .
has the Martians indulging in this whenever they get the
or any large amount of units.
has a race known only as the Ghosts. Their ships are armed with only lasers, which are weapons designed for precision targetting of
in order to disable the enemy and escape. However, the Ghost lasers also do some hull and shield damage, and they have many of those. Several Ghost ships beam-spamming a single target can take it out in short order. The laser flak grids automatically fires at enemy fighters and missiles. It looks like multiple pulsing beams criss-crossing at the target.
has Titano-Machinae Lares and Lemures do this to fend off airships (not that one of them
) and open a rift for Tartaros, then once they are taken over by Elh and Béluga, turn that same attack against Tartaros to open a hole in its shields for Red.
has a race of Not-Beholder monsters that spam laser/light beams out of their tentacles/eyestalks in every direction, giving the dark caves they are encountered in something of a 70s disco feel.
games are fond of , as the only weapon they can mount are lasers. Kha'ak capital ships mount dozens of laser cannons pointing in every direction, leading to Kha'ak sector invasions being a giant laser rave of death.
In , Berserk Asura combines this with
to take out an entire fleet of ships.
Design-wise, this is the
's Falcon Energy Drive combines this with a , firing four rotating lasers. Some bosses, especially the
for the second time, have
beam spam attacks.
In , you first have to overcome the heat factors associated with laser weapons, but once you do, you can equip your Heavy class soldiers with Heavy Lasers, which are basically laser light machine guns. They do a bit more damage than any other laser weapon with the exception of sniper rifles, and are on par with top-tier plasma rifles.
You can achieve an effect like this in
with the right ship and weapons equipped (and you can use the space bar to fire all available weapons at once). And since each kind of attack (Phaser, disruptor, plasma, tetryon, etc) all come in different colors, it can resemble a Care Bear Stare as well....
The ability Beam Fire at Will embodies this trope by firing all of your ship's beam weapons at anything and everything in range... at once.
The Wall of Flesh in
spams lasers when he gets to low health.
The Lock-On Laser in
type. The Bogey boss at the end of the first act has an even more spammy laser attack.
In , an overpowered combination of Brimstone and Chocolate Milk allows you to spam the Brimstone beam free of charge by tapping a fire button.
Getting Quick and Plasma in
will result in this, called Luster Shooter. Getting a third powerup will add more properties to it.
In , Commandos do this with their assault cannons (most of which have multiple barrels and some of which are bigger than they are). The skill Full Auto is the primary damage-dealer for Commandos and gets lots of buffs as you gain levels, too.
In , the Earthling Cruiser's secondary weapon -a - while weak and of slow-fire can fire at any number of targets, but just one beam per target in theory , thanks to a
the point-defense can be nastier to an enemy.
video games tend to have capital ships do this. The
series and the Jump to Lightspeed expansion of
are the most notorious examples (the latter featuring a Star Destroyer with 100 turrets — taking one down was as much a competition against the lag that they produced as anything else).
has this with Conflict Zones in certain systems. They look like giant Rave Parties with more lasers and death.
&&&&Web Comics&
uses it to . If billions of laser pointers don't do the job, then billions of superlasers will.
: Comes with the territory. The Saiyans use this
to overkill Frieza and Zarbon in Universe 3.
&&&&Web Original&
In the first book of , Rob is infamous for using this trope to try to defeat his enemies, and oftentimes failing.
In , there are two spell-cards that qualify for this: the Ultimate Spark, through dint of being formed from four huge lasers, and the Twilight Spark, which is one massive laser ringed by lots and lots of curved ones.
, of , is capable of projecting lasers from any point on his body. He can also make them turn corners.
&&&&Western Animation&
Although we never actually see the effect, in an episode of , Matrix enters an unfriendly bar. When threatened by a lot of bad guys, he simply says "Gun,
Mode". Gun immediately starts spinning in a stationary globe and every single resident of the bar soon finds a red dot on their chest or head. Presumably the prelude to an epically shame we never get to see it.
got a rather funky one when Amazo was making most of the space-capable Leaguers were hovering in low orbit, along with most of their Javelins. Amazo approaches, Green Lantern yells "Light 'im up!", and black space abruptly turns all kinds of pretty colours. Naturally, it doesn't work, Amazo being a
at this point. Sure looks cool, though. . 8:57.
&&&&Real Life&
The Sun is doing this ALL THE TIME.
. Or a reverse beam spam. The tower is actually the target of hundreds of mirrors directing reflected sunlights at a single point.
The , a multi-directional bloom of extremely high-powered x-ray lasers powered by a nuclear bomb that never left the design boards and ended up inspiring several science fiction weapons (including the one mentioned in the
entry, above). Obviously a single-shot weapon, it was intended as a defense against a massive Soviet weapons launch as part of the Star Wars system. Conceived of by Edward Teller, who is also known for the H-bomb and proposals to dig a deep-water harbour with multi-megaton nuclear bombs.
The multi-beam version was meant to be based on specialized Excalibur satellites. The actual test of the basic concept showed that it probably didn't work even as a single beam.note&
Fusion ignition by laser is, however, .
as a means of destroying Improvised Explosive Devices is currently under research by the United States Department of Defense. Judging from the video, that version can switch on and off with little downtime.
Even better: Directed Energy weaponry for the U.S. Navy is being undertaken for ship weaponry. Such as
Behold the , essentially a mounted flashbang this non-lethal laser beams blinding into a target's face leaving them temporarily disabled for a few minutes. Really useful if not outright scary.
once ran an article which, as a thought experiment, calculated how many supermarket pen lasers it would take to build a working anti-missile defense system (and thus explain the technical difficulties behind such a system). The answer was, "." In a , Randall Munroe takes this idea , beginning with "What if everyone on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon?" and upgrading to more powerful light sources (law enforcement spotlights, IMAX projector arrays, megawatt military lasers) until the Moon just .
Alternative Title(s):
Pew Pew Lazors}