Guild Wars 2

In your opinion in the next big buff to Mortar,
which do you want?

Longer range or more damage?

I actually was also thinking about a way to do both.

What if instead of Mortar having 10 skills instead of 5.

It can keep its current 1400 ranged 5 skills.

But what if the remaining 5 skills had longer range and bigger damage/utility? 1 fire per Mortar from cooldown on these skills.

The 6 skill for example, could be a long range Drain Bomb, that gets planted at location, and explodes, healing nearby ally for the damage done.

and skills 7-9 could be

2000 ranged Barrage of Fire Missiles
2000 Ranged Cow Blast that cripples and poisons enemies and reduce healing effects on enemy.
2000 Ranged Lava Field which places a Torment effect on the enemy

skill 10 can be a Big Healing Area attack that also creates a earthquaking knockdown area on 10 pulses.

“moar skills” don’t contribute to effectiveness, unless the additional skills are more effective than the existing ones. as for this, the existing skills wouldn’t suddently become any better, leaving them subpar to other skills and therefore ignored.

mortar’s currently only use is to outrange stationary targets in areas without roof and in builds without grenadier but with the “Elite Supplies”-trait. i can’t think of an example right now.

I agree with pza that adding new skills will just move the problem elsewhere.

I think the first thing Anet needs to do is add an attack queue to the mortar, just like every other skill in the game has. It’s cumbersome that they lock down the skills for 2 seconds and then you initiate another attack once the skill bar is reactivated. This is something they should be able to fix with ease.

I don’t think more range on the mortar will be effective. The parabolic arc of your mortar shells already provides to much time for the enemy to just walk out of harms way. By increasing the range you will increase the arc and will give all that much more time for the enemy to dodge. However, I do believe that that range limit should not be affected by vertical distance, only horizontal distance. At least this way you can use your mortar on top of a wall and get a true 1500 horizontal range and not something like 800 horizontal range + 700 vertical.

The healing shell is quite useless and should be replaced with a 3 second AOE poison shell or perhaps even confusion, which goes really well with “shell shock”. This and the distance fix above I think would make the mortar viable, at least for defensive purposes and wouldn’t require much effort on Anet’s part. The alternative is they scrap the mortar turret altogether and just give us a single call mortar strike skill and functions equivalent to the current concussion barrage. At least then it could be used in the heat of combat.

I must agree that more skills will not solve the mortars problem. The skills it has are already relatively useful, it’s problem lies in it’s range. The power in a mortar isn’t sufficient enough to to really excuse it’s lack in range. I am not sure if this is because it scales heavily off power or what it is, but for me it lacks enough punch that I can’t make myself use it instead of my combination of other skills. Everytime I use it in normal pve, I find I can dps much easier without it, and in wvw I can barely get enough range even with the trait buff to find a safe spot to use it. When I used the mortar in wvw, I was able to find a safe spot to fire upon the small zerg attacking the tower I was in (with great difficulty), but my attacks were so weak they were actually able to just completely ignore me xD only thing that really ruffled their feathers was the knockback #5 skill.

1. It lacks punch
2. It lacks range
3. it has a long skill cooldown for use on any mortar skill. (not spammable)

Only situation I can come up with that could make use of this skill, is in wvw. If you were defending a tower and had no supplies to make an arrow cart, this is where I got to try out the mortar in the first place. Without an arrow cart, your not stopping anybody, but if you didn’t like the idea of hocking grenades at the door to hit the ppl on the flamerams, then this is the next best thing. All mortar is atm, is really a novelty… frankly a disappointing one. If it lacks punch, it should at least have range.

Mortar should have the following roles:

1. Ability to hit farther than anything else in game that is not siege. (1800-2000 with no elevation penalty).

2. Excellent at taking out enemy siege weapons when you have no supply. (bonus damage to siege).

3. Needs a skill to reduce incoming siege damage (dome effect) that could replace the heal skill and provide a substantial heal per pulse to allies under the dome if you wish.

It would have more of a WvW role really. You could run up and lob mortar shells at enemy siege. Given you only have 2 minutes, you should time it so that 1 heavy siege weapon or 2 light ones could be reduced in that time.

In zerg fights, the extra range would allow you to chill, knock back etc.

One key feature (if doable) would be having the shells knock you away from the explosion. SO, if I land a shell behind your ton’s position, you would be knocked TOWARDS the engineer. That would be amazing for walls and zergs (like an AE pull).

Should have longer (horizontal) range as described above, be more resistant and do more damage. As it is now, it is basically a lackluster destructible weapon you can use while being fixed on a place. As such, if this weapon is weaker than the normal ones, it is useless. And it is so.

Also, imho, they could make it so it also attacks automatically when unmanned (using the autoattack skill, but doing reduced damage compared to when it is manned).

“Oooooo look an engineer mortar I want to use that!!!” said no one ever.

Compare with Ice Bow or Fiery Greatsword…