World War Doomsday

I didn't get the feeling he was significantly weakened when he unleashed the HMR blast, because:
a.) We know each of those canisters contained pure cosmic energy collected from multiple planets the A-Wave had destroyed--and Galactus appeared to have absorbed ALL of them.
b.) Prior to Galactus absorbing the canisters, quite a bit of physical damage to his person could be seen--but when he was absorbing the canisters, said damage was nonexistent.

srug

Question because I'm not as familiar with cosmics as most are here (seems boring to me, except Surfer, Thanos, etc...), when you say Annihilation Waves, are you referencing the army of bugs or the entirety of the wave, including the bugs, ships, or are you talking about another Awave...

Typically it refers to the A-Wave as a whole: ie. Tenebrous, Aegis, The Galactus Gun, Thanos, Annihilus, ships, tech, bugs, etc. etc. etc.

In this case, however, most of the energy in those canisters was collected from the planets Galactus destroyed after Thanos weaponized him.

👆

Collateral damage only proves what level the characters were operating at. It doesn't erase their high end feats. Make no mistake though, if a character is shown fighting near or at the top of their might and a planet isn't destroyed or large collateral damage didn't happen then clearly they were not operating at galaxy busting power or even solar system busting power.

So collateral damage proves what level a character is at in a particular scene but not what level they operate at in a forum fight.