Guild Wars 2

I see a lot of posts on mortar range and people both in favor and leery of making the range longer. My suggestion for a mortar fix is to ignore downhill distance. There’s been many battles where I managed to get to a high spot over the opposing army, set up my turret, and proceeded to do nothing since everyone directly below me was out of range. I could have literally dropped the shells onto their heads.

The problem with the Mortar is the I can take the Grenade Kit and nearly triple the damage output with an extra 100 range. Arguably, the utility on the Grenade Kit is better too.

Also, you can move while chucking grenades and grenade kit only takes up a utility skill spot, allowing you to take supply drop. Grenade kit has no cooldown, you can bust it out whenever you want. Thematically, its stupid that your character can throw grenades as far as your mortar tube can shoot. The mortar just looks silly only being able to shoot a few paces.

But if its a balance issue that keeps Anet from buffing the range on mortar, well first off I think engineers need some big love to catch up to the rest of the professions. I’d say its hard to predict how balance would be affected, so I hope Anet buffs the range to something like 2000 unbuffed and 2500 with both traits, and see how it goes. But if the plan is to keep mortar so underpowered that it is never used, then the real issue was that it was a horribly designed ability in the first place and should just be removed and replaced with something that engineers can actually use.