Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2

[Haste]

From testing in Conn, Mortars only appear to reliably hit within the range that one would use a Razor, which undermines their intended use case, since Razors are better in almost every way at that range.

Long range weapons need to have more projectile speed to be useful, not less. A better limiting factor for long-range weapons is turret traverse speed and/or energy efficiency, which prevents long-range weapons from being used effectively in close quarters, while still allowing them to perform well at their intended range. At the moment, mortars are now useless.

I'm not surprised that they're not stellar, though the intent here is in fact to massively reduce long range hit-rates. The problem never was close range mortar use, and that was not what we set out to fix. The problem was that Battleships were, prior to these changes, capable of - especially in groups - rendering themselves nearly unapproachable to other capital classes as they had guns reaching out a casual kilometer further than everyone else (further exacerbated by poorly-functioning crosshairs on larger Battleships), that also happened to be quick enough to hit smaller targets at those ranges. And said smaller targets had nothing that could fire back. By the time a (Battle)cruiser was in range to reasonably start deshielding a competent, strafing Battleship, you'd would've lost half your health to properly blindfired long-range heavies.

I'll have to see people use them, and I am going with the assumption here that all testing was done exclusively with crosshair snap off. Trying to use capital weapons at range with crosshair snap on has always been a fool's errand and hitrates pretty much approach 0% if you use them that way. Anything that hits at all reliably with crosshair snap on is virtually unmissable with it off, which would be hugely problematic for balance.

Do keep in mind, too, that Razors have a fraction of the efficiency of Mortars, so if you're hitting them at close-ish range then that would in fact make them outperform Razors in the same situation.

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