Guild Wars 2

One of the things that had me most excited about the patch was Mortar. A Ice Field we’d actually use, a Water Field that lasts longer than 1sec, and GDI Ion Cannon Orbital Strike were all awesome things that I couldn’t wait to play with. But the thing that had me most excited was how Mortar’s 1 skill was going to be a 100% projectile finisher with no cooldown.

My mind was buzzing at the possibilities. Stacking confusion with the Ethereal field from its Streamlined Kit effect. Cleansing conditions like crazy procing the finisher from the light field, and in some cross-profession play, doing an extra 200+ damage per attack thanks to a Necro well. When I thought on how the skill was an AoE, and what could that mean for all of this, it would often send me into evil genius laughing fits.

Then the patch came, I tried out the new mortar, and while everything else was almost as good as I dreamed, on the projectile finisher, I was absolutely crushed.

Here is the thing: in order to trigger a projectile finisher combo with Mortar’s 1 skill, the actual mortar, while in-flight, has to touch a target. Getting hit by the actual AoE attack does nothing, not even for just one target (which was how I realistically expected it to work); only those who got hit by the mortar in-flight are affected. This even applies to targets hit who are not even in the AoE, causing weird scenarios where you can fight past a line of enemies and get the combo effect off of all of them without actually hitting them in any other sense.

Needless to say, reliably hitting someone in this way with a ground-target projectile is next to impossible in PvP, never mind several times in a row, and even in PvE, any fight that has you moving around will be a struggle to consistently aim just behind them so that you can take advantage of this effect while still doing damage with the actual shot.

If having Mortar 1 as a projectile finisher is going to mean anything, something with how the skill and/or projectile finishers work is gonna have to change.

Yeah it really sucks

Seems like someone just checked the “projectile finisher, 100%” flag on the skill entry and called it a day.

Aha so that’s why i couldn’t get it working, well now that i know, I think mortar is practically useless to a condi build.

Slapinator.4196:

Aha so that’s why i couldn’t get it working, well now that i know, I think mortar is practically useless to a condi build.

Which is fine, because Supply Crate has the Flame Turret.

OP: I think the most elegant solution would be to make it a blast finisher and add a cooldown to it. Projectile finishers have always been somewhat wonky to utilize compared to leaps and blasts, and to make a ground-targeted version just further illustrates the finisher’s problems.

I think the mortar kit is optimized for WvW much much more where you can spray and pray confusing death from 1500 range which works impressively until you are spotted;
only to escape with a 900 range overcharged rocket boot leap.

Not only the projectile finisher is hard to use in PvP but so is the velocity of the projectiles.

The poison field is still nice for a condi build, but the kit is much more effective in a power build for now.

Obviously they can’t make the auto attack a blast finisher, but if it could at least apply the projectile finishers effect in the AoE explosion it does, that would be a good but small way to buff it.