Portal Defense vs Attack balance is a joke

NysyrNysyr ✭✭✭✭

Change my mind?

Comments

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    the on who attacks had always an advantage vs the one who sits home and defends a portal with lawsons...

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    So who remembers when common shields had a mitigation of 10, rare had 20 and VR had 30? :-)

    (Of course there were no ultra strikes either, unless you had a Motorola phone.)

  • GuschtelGuschtel ✭✭✭


    There were times where you could defend portals by running around and stealing all the XM from the ground. That was fun.

  • Portal defense is only a joke when you're doing it remotely. If you're on site it's pretty even. Entirely as it should be.

  • jontebulajontebula ✭✭✭✭✭

    I hope @NianticAkshay do Aegis stronger again. Now is to easy to **** down portals.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭


    lol no , they nerfed them so lower lvl players can easier shootdown portals..

  • Having done this on a good few occasions locally, I reckon it's still very heavily stacked in favour of the attacker purely because if the kit used by each side. The attacker's going to burn through a load of bursters and strikes that could easily be replaced in half an hour at a reasonable farm, whereas the defender's going to eat a ton of shields and cubes which, depending on rarity, could take an awfully long time to replace indeed.

  • Kevinsky86Kevinsky86 ✭✭✭
    edited August 2019

    I.m.o. it should always be easier to attack then defend. If you would "balance" that, and I mean really balance it to the degree you could feasibly actually keep people from blowing your stuff up, even remotely, this would have a high potential of creating area's that practically can't be touched.

    And if there's anything that kills gameplay/pace in a city it would be overwhelming faction control... members of the faction get bored because there's nothing to do and opposing players face a task they can't even hope te complete, especially low-level and inexperienced.

    A portal with two axa's and attack mods and a bunch of links that is remotely recharged is plenty hard to take down as a singular player. On-site the balance is different because you can keep deploying against the other players bursters.

  • zqsdzqsd ✭✭

    I like to think that defense less about preventing individual portals to be taken down and more about protecting a whole area.

    In Ingress, the most important resource is time. And the defender is more likely be nearer the attacked portals than the attacker who will have to travel to and from the area. This time can be used by the defender to take back portals and throw protecting guide links.


    I get my area attacked almost daily, I will always take back the portals near my house and their is nothing the opponents can do about this, at some time they will have to forfeit and just come back to their home.

  • For purposes of keeping a fluid playfield and to not lock out lower level (and solo) players, I think the balance is just fine.

  • HydracyanHydracyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    Put 4 aegis and share the keys with all the lv8 agents that contributed and more, and keep them warned about incoming attacks and it will be pretty hard to have you portal taked down.

    As it was said, is far more easier to get it up again tham travel again to the place.

  • NysyrNysyr ✭✭✭✭

    Should a singular agent be able to take out a level 8 portal that 8 agents took time to set up (or fewer took time to flip back and forth), when that portal is being defended by 3 agents charging on a 5-6 linked portal? Not even factoring XMP splash to the other portals.

    Also there's a workaround that guarantees a single agent can do so against infinite chargers, and I'm not even talking about viruses lol.

    As for AXA and other shields, I haven't met one that takes more than 4 US to peel off unless its level 1 US doing stealth stripping on badly set portals.

  • There are many arguments to be made for both sides here. I agree with @Kevinsky86 that it is a good thing for gameplay for agents (including solo agents) to be able to knock down portals. It eliminates fields and links and allows others to throw more fields and links (even if it is the exact same ones that were knocked down). That said, I agree with @Nysyr that the pendulum may have swung too far with the last stickiness nerf on the AXA shields. I have sat and tried to defend portals against solo attackers, and even with the Prime interface it was very hard to keep up replacing shields and recharging (and that is if Prime did not freeze...do not get me started on that...). An attacker who fires up a Lawson and has several hundred XMPs and a few dozen strikes can take down any portal there is. Period. I would favor a solution where if both the attacker and defender are in range of the portal, that the stickiness of mods should double or triple and XM should be 10x as effective (i.e. only drain 10% of the XM from the bar but replenish at 100%). If there is no defender on site...it is what it is.

  • Kevinsky86Kevinsky86 ✭✭✭
    edited August 2019

    Player presence shield boosts could be a nice idea, but then i'd also vouch for some kind of shield health variable instead of that dice roll that currently decides shield stickyness so that weapon level also has a big say in how fast shields go.

    This could also be used to introduce shield/mod decay which could be an interesting mechanic.

  • DSktrDSktr ✭✭✭✭

    Just kick transmutters out of game and the balance will be regained imo. It's pretty easier to farm few hundreds of 7-8 xmp(i even don't mention US's) than pair of Aegis/VR shields.

  • Frankly, the AXA/Aegis tweak didn't affect much (which is good, because I was pretty worried about making portals even flimsier than they already are in regular play). Right now portal defense is certainly possible, but it requires a recharging team and reshielders; this is key to Anomaly play, where the seizing and holding portals is a critical aspect of the game. I think it would be tough to change that balance very much without creating a lot of problems on the field, either by making playbox control impossible (nerfing defense further) or by making it impossible to take portals from a modest defensive force even with overwhelming firepower (strengthening defense further). What I would like to see would be stronger weapons: that way, you'd have a prayer of defending your farm, or at least making the attacker suffer in the process! Right now, turrets and FAs are pretty effective at stymieing low-level players, but after level 11 or so you aren't likely to care much (especially if you are using L8 bursters). Beefing up the attack rates and XM drain a bit, and increasing stickiness, would probably go a long way to giving defenders something they can do without **** the game to a halt.

  • NysyrNysyr ✭✭✭✭


    If the portals are spread out the FA and Turrets can actually be a negative 'cuz for SOME reason they made destroying a mod give 1000xm. The splash damage can easily pop FA and Turrets outside the range of them hitting you. The only reason to use them at farms is because shields are trash anyways and you want to prevent pain hacking easily in your farm.

  • 4 common shields are ultimate defense

  • I feel like with Prime they have balanced out the attack vs defend a lot more.

    it is Faster now for a defender to refill his XM than it was in redacted. and it takes longer for an attacker to actually attack with Prime.

    I have pretty regular portal battles with a specific dense portal area, very few times of day can I actually stand on all the centres to smash off mods, so usually it is 2 hits and my XM bar is drained. with Redacted I can be recharged and re attacking faster, I use about 50 less bursters and 2 less lawsons when I play redacted than when I play Prime for this same cluster. Same 2 players keep it recharged.

    I'm going to win as an attacker. but they'll force me to be ready and loaded with gear to do the attack. as it should be.

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