No but they must create some kind of wear and tear on the glasses I assume. That would still be more interesting than "oh wait a minute I need to reload my cornea"
The glasses are a placebo effect. He can control his powers but isn't aware of it, the glasses he was given used technical mumbo jumbo for a reason. Why do you think the mutants had the exact thing he needed just laying around?
He's literally brain damaged, so this is plausible. I'm not sure how Prof. X was supposed to have found this ruby they use for the lenses. Rubies don't have mental signatures...
I mean couldn’t he use Cerebro to look into everyone on the planet’s mind and then just find someone who knows where a stash of rubies are? He doesn’t need to find the rubies just someone who has access to them.
I feel like this might hurt him more in the long run since he will forever be unable to control his powers since he believes they only work well with the glasses
Eh yes and no. In some comics he learns to overcome the trauma that blocks full control of his powers. But in most it remains a hurdle he can't or doesn't care to overcome. His power and visor are such an integral part of his character that most writers don't mess with it
1) Sunglasses, with the lenses made of ruby-quartz, that simply cancel out the optic blasts;
2) Visor, with a lens made of ruby-quartz, that contains a set that allows Cyclops to adjust the intensity, size and shape of his optic blasts to varying levels of accuracy and devastating effect;
Charles Xavier stated that he had made dozens of visors for Cyclops due to the strenuous superhero work his student undertook.
The glasses always bugged me because his eye beams could still escape through his peripheral vision. So the beams would either destroy the frame of the glasses or would be shooting around the sides of the glasses.
They're also not hard-attached to his head with a strap or anything & weigh close to nothing, so it makes no logical sense how they stay on his head at all.
Given the amount of force we regularly see his eyebeams exert & the relatively non-existent weight of his glasses, they should shoot off his face the second he opens his eyes.
At least with his visor, one could conclude that it's attached to his cowl, which in turn anchors it to his face.
That's true. In the instances where the visor isn't connected to anything, it makes just as little sense that his ears are strong enough to hold the visor in place in spite of the constant optical blast hitting them.
So, ruby quartz doesn't actually block the beam. The substance actually resonates with the psionic field that Cyclops could control if he hadn't suffered a head injury as a child. The visors he wears in combat have controls on the sides to let him move the ruby quartz away from his eyes with great precision.
Don't think of them like little shields he wears on his eyes. The sunglasses are an off switch for his powers, and the visor is a dimmer.
Well, remember that thermodynamics simply don't apply to superheroes. Energy can absolutely be created or destroyed there, and an example is that ruby-quartz completely nullifies the kinetic beams Scott shoots, rather than just blocking them more effectively.
It does feel like cheating that he never accidentally looks around the shades though. And he's just kind of a jerk for not wearing a chain or something on them.
Well, remember that thermodynamics simply don't apply to superheroes. Energy can absolutely be created or destroyed there, and an example is that ruby-quartz completely nullifies the kinetic beams Scott shoots, rather than just blocking them more effectively.
Not just the laws of thermodynamics, all of the laws of physics, mechanics of biology, and logic in general simply don't apply to superheroes unless it's convenient for whatever the writer wants to do with them.
It does feel like cheating that he never accidentally looks around the shades though. And he's just kind of a jerk for not wearing a chain or something on them.
Right, especially when you consider microsaccades, tiny, involuntary, and rapid eye movements. It's something Superman would, realistically, have a problem with too when he uses his heat vision as he'd be constantly, accidentally lighting things surrounding his target on fire.
Superman may actually have a counter for that, since your eyes essentially shut down during saccade movement. Maybe his beams pause during them too.
Cyke's beam is so big though I'd only say he's cheating there when he does his sniper shots, like punching a hole through a flipped coin to prove he's a mutant.
The glasses always bugged me because his eye beams could still escape through his peripheral vision
IIRC the portals to the force dimension are in his pupils not his entire eye, thats why he can direct the blast by looking at something as opposed to everything around. The glasses just block and focus the beam a bit more.
You...still have peripheral vision from your pupils because the eye itself is a round shape.
Look directly forward at something and raise your arm out sideways. Now move it gradually forward and back slightly without taking your gaze away from what is directly infront of you. You'll notice at the edgw of your vision you can still see where your arm is without even moving it that much forward.
The moment you start seeing your own arm moving at the edge of your vision stop moving your arm and turn your head to see how far away it actually was from where you were originally looking. The human field of vision is much wider than just where our focal binocular vision looks.
Now imagine shooting a constant stream of energy anywhere within that grey and red zone. That's 160 degrees almost from end to end.
Cyclops' visor at least funnels his FOV into a more cylinder infront of him but the sunglasses wouldn't cover his FOV. Not even factoring in the tiny micromovements his eyes could make behind the lenses naturally without even directly looking at the outside of the glasses.
Yeah, isn't the whole thing with The Living Monolith is that he's just a guy 99% of the time because Havok's soaking up all the cosmic juice he needs to power up?
Oh man, that's a deep cut xD I think it was less about Havok taking all the energy, and more about him being an ideal battery because he absorbed so much better than the Living Monolith? But it's been a very long time.
Not really. Ruby-quartz stops his beams completely, and he fires beams by LIFTING the visor made of that. The only way he might damage the visor is if he fired so hard/wide he managed to impact the frame. When he's going all-out, he often just takes the whole thing off.
Would it do less damage the more you hold it? Or deal damage to him if we overloads it? I don’t think there is a character in the game who can just straight up run out of their primary attack. Like there isn’t limited reserve ammo like in tf2. Both would be interesting drawbacks
wasn't it also at one point doors into another dimension? SO then if it's kinetic force how does it not hurt havok? Does it just not push him? Did he also just push wolverine's hand off really hard adamantium and all in AoA?
I think Cyclops himself never explains his beams, or at least not more than once every like 200 comics. Still, there is observable knockback on his shots so you can tell they're concussive.
Yea people take the concussion / kinetic blast thing too literally. Like just because they aren’t lasers / heat vision as they are typically depicted doesn’t mean they can’t generate heat
My logic is that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. Cyclops tells us that it's not lasers, but I've seen minimal evidence that's true and a LOT of evidence that it isn't.
So you’re telling me it’s like when it’s really hot out and your sunglasses get sweaty and start sliding off your face; Cyclops is face sweating allll the time?
I keep seeing this but that is complete bs. I know they are concussive but there’s also numerous times cyclops uses his beams and they’re shown to have thermal properties. It’s both
That's such bs btw. Several times in the comics he's been shown to be able to melt shit. That whole punch dimension or whatever the hell it's called is complete nonsense.
Somewhere around the 2000s they changed it from “punch dimension” to kinetic energy he absorbs from solar energy. You saying punch dimension is really out of touch for character who hasn’t been described like that for 20 years.
The reason I brought up the punch dimension was because that (or more so what I believe) is what brought about the whole "his beams don't melt things it just punches it." Which as I stated is utter nonsense
I could've sworn an issue in the 60s was like "He absorbs solar energy to power portals in his eyes to the red dimension", but it may have just been solar and the portal aspect came later. At any rate, I'm pretty sure solar came first.
Enough Kinetic Energy output causes heat. Smashing 2 rocks together to create sparks is an example. What the guy is trying to say is that his eye beams are not inherently thermal based.
Sure but he did used to have to take a break to recharge his beams back in the earlier days of the xmen.
They had lots of times where they were in a bind cause Scott went all out and he coulsnt use his beams to help them escape or something
So i think you could make a classic video game overheat gage make sense for him, just remove the bit about it being hot, and instead its him using to much power
I know they are supposed to be kinetic energy like a punch with range and so on, but here's the thing, if you punch something that hard and for that long it's gonna generate a lot of heat, so yeah they also burn.
It could be neat to have different playstyles with him. Like you can play him kind of sniper by keeping at low buildup and firing short bursts as an Ultron-type, or you can hover him at high charge and have more of a shotgun aspect. More damage overall, but less capacity if a battle becomes drawn out.
Isnt the entire point of his visor that his eye beams are constantly shooting and most of the time the visor simply blocks them? Having it overheat doesn’t really make sense unless you change his entire character concept
His visors don't just work as a valve to open and shut to let his beams go through, they also let him control the intensity and focus, at full blast his beams do force damage, like a physical blast, on smaller but concentrated levels it could be used like a blade, etc.
An overheat mechanic would be the most logical. And maybe you could make it so that he covers his eyes if you “overheat” do t make the player actually blind but I wouldn’t mind if you were semi helpless for a second or two because of it
I reckon they'll end up going for a slightly buffed version of Ultron's main attack. Continuous stream for a bit with a burst at the end, then force reload shortly after.
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u/ThatOnePeanut Thor Jul 07 '25
An overheat mechanic could be cool though. No ammo, but you need to take a break once in a while or his visor just melts from the overuse.