Feature Idea: Rare Directional XMP Variant and salvageable resonators.

MantacidTechMantacidTech ✭✭
edited May 2021 in General

About a month ago, I had a really cool idea for a rare item for the game. I drew up a blueprint (because why not), and was interested to hear what the community thought of the concept.

The Concept: A weapon that, rather than creating an Area of Effect to damage resonators, deals damage along a vector defined by 2 portals: one owned by your faction (referred to as an anchor portal), and the other being the portal you’re targeting (target portal). The damage dealt would be inversely proportional to distance. The weapon would also be able to destroy/disable (more on disabling later) resonators if the Portal itself were hit.

Disabled Resonators: instead of destroying resonators, this weapon could disable them instead, allowing them to be salvaged once the target portal is neutralized. Salvaged resonators could be used in kinetic capsule recipes, or could be redeployed to capture the target portal if you are of sufficient level to do so (it should cost a bit more XM to do so, as the resonators need to be repaired).

Anchor portal: the weapon would draw a lot of power, more than any scanner could handle, so the weapon needs to draw XM directly from the portal network. This can be reflected in-game by draining the Anchor Portal’s resonators. Also, by using the portal network to define the weapon’s position and beam direction, it reduces the amount of complex calculations the scanner would perform if the initial point of the vector was defined by the agent’s location.

Link Distortion: Nearby links affect the direction and range of the beam, and have the potential to strengthen or weaken an attack (Not entirely sure how these would work, so I’ll include a concept blueprint I drew to illustrate the Link Distortion feature a bit better). This feature, combined with the need for an anchor portal, forces the agent to think strategically and consider all possible vantage points from which to fire the weapon.

Story Fluff: Rather than using brute force to destroy resonators, the weapon uses glyph codes (which can be entered similar to glyph hacking to deal extra damage) to “infect” the portal with disruptive logic/dissonance/ whatever you want to call it. This leaves the resonators intact, but the portal neutral.

Some notes on Gameplay: Attacking with the weapon wouldn’t send a notification when fired (since the resonators aren't taking damage), but would only notify the owner of the portal when the portal is flipped. This could be useful for operations where stealth plays a key factor.

Glyph codes: could be phrases promoting the ideology of your faction, logical paradoxes in glyph form, or just plain nonsense (the “TOAST” glyph comes to mind). Using them would work identical to a glyph hack, with the maximum range and damage being determined by the speed and accuracy of the glyph hack.

The Blueprint:


Post edited by MantacidTech on

Comments

  • Also, sorry about the resolution of the file, the software i made this in uses a pixel preview, so it was perfectly readable to me. I’ll try to export a better version as soon as I can.

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2021

    First of all, like for the cool blueprint design.

    About the idea: I'd try to keep it simple.

    -I'd just remove the whole resonator salvage thing (and therefore, notifications act normally).

    -The width of the line is to be defined and also maximum range. This would easily turn the Vector Cannon into an extremely unbalanced offensive item. What I suggest instead is to use it as a parabolic cannon that aims to one nearby enemy portal and deals damage to all resonators. Each resonatod would take it as if one US was busted right at its location, being the level of the US the level of the anchor. Also, portal itself would be getting US hits. You can still apply glyph sequence for its activation.

    -Instead of link distortion, it could get somekind of reduction for each link crossed between anchor and target.


    The resonator salvage is not a bad idea, but I'd try to keep it as a separate thing.

    How about this: whenever you neutralize a portal, there is a low chance to get a resonator fragment which you can later combine for a kinetic recipe and create a Dark XM Resonator That can apply some special efect on the portal.

    Post edited by GoblinGranate on
  • GreenVamGreenVam ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2021

    It's too difficult for Nia. Don't give them such ideas, or the comm will get fixed in 2025 or even later.

  • The way the distortion works would be that range would be reduced by links perpendicular to the beam, but BOOSTED if the link goes along the beam. But i see your point about balance issues. That’s why i made an anchor portal a requirement, so that the density of portals in an area affects strategy. All these are just suggestions, and i admit i may have gone a bit overboard. But I didn’t expect to be able to tell the NIA what to implement, so I left these as sort of separate ideas, that could be kept or omitted for the sake of gameplay balance.

  • edited May 2021

    So I can destroy my own teams spam links AND destroy blue fields at the same time? Sign me up!

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