Yes, this is exactly what i'm talking about, sometimes the beam just takes a long while to damage many enemies and in the original MMX games the upgraded buster did at least as much damage as the regular one. Although the X3 buster was quite annoying because if you threw the combined shot from far and the smaller sorrounding shots hit the boss before the big shot they would have priority and only do the same 2 damage as the regular lvl2 charged shot instead of the 3 damage of the big lvl4 shot, so you wasted time charging the whole thing where you could have dealt more just by spamming lemons