CursedPh4nt0m The pattern is each prism takes an input of 2 equal powered beams, more beams into one prism mean greater power loss.
With such pattern you can calculate power loss (not accounting for distance falloff) with this formula:
(2*0.875)N
Where N is the number of combination stages (each time beam merges into a prism)
With 4 ions combined (2 stages) you get an output of 3.0625 beams, with 8 it's 5.35, with 32 beams you get just 16 out of them. The more beams you combine, even with the most optimal setup, the more power you lose. I'd say it's not worth it combining anything above 4 beams into one, maybe sometimes 8.
To see how much more beams into one is worse, let's take 3->1 as an example, the formula would be (3*0.77)N.
With just 2 stages (9 ions) you get an output of 4.62, worse than 8 ion output of the previous combination method, note that it's always worse combining non-equal beams together because the larger beam gets reduced damage first, to the point that if the power difference is too severe the smaller beam doesn't add any power to the chain.
Generally I prefer to just focus prisms without combining them at all, or combining just 2.
