What's up guys Rogue-9 here. We continue our exploration of the
support class gadgets in battlefield one and today we will be looking at the mortars and the crossbows.
As you all know there are two different types of
mortar in the game, one that shoots a high explosive grenade that explodes on
impact and one that fires a grenade with a timed fuse that explodes about five
meters off the ground showering everyone below in shrapnel.
The basic functionality for both types of mortars is exactly the same. They each come with
five lethal rounds and two extra smoke rounds, you can deploy a new mortar every
45 seconds and reload time in between shots is 2 seconds.
The maximum firing ranges of the two mortars used to be different but as of the current build of
the game (in the Name of the Tsar) both have a range of 100 meters although this
of course can't be significantly longer or shorter if you are shooting down or uphill.
I tested both of these mortars against vehicles and infantry and here are the results.
Against heavy vehicles the HE mortar does between 17 and 22 points of damage,
with most hits causing 21 points in damage and near misses result in 12 to 13 points.
Against the three lighter armoured vehicles the direct hit damage was 32 to 34 points per hit and 16 to 18
points for a near-miss. Drop off against vehicles is decently forgiving, starting
at 2.4 meters and ending at 5 meters. Infantry is also very vulnerable against
HE mortars with a direct hit enough to kill a full health opponent in one shot.
Near misses will cause up to 60 points in damage, with the drop off a little
harsher beginning at 1.5 meters reaching zero at 4 meters from your target.
The air burst mortar on the other hand is designed for use against infantry and
will know more than scratch the paint on a tank. Damage against heavy vehicles
during my tests was normally four to six points and against lighter vehicles it
was six to eight points for direct hits with misses beyond three meters causing
no damage at all. Against infantry the air burst mortar is more
effective especially against larger groups of enemy in the open, since it can
deal a maximum of 65 points of damage up to 2 metres distance, dropping off to 0
at 7 meters. Direct hits do not occur since the grenade always explodes in the air.
Considering that both variants have the same range nowadays, I believe that
the HE mortar is the better choice in almost all situations. It's a super
useful tool against vehicles, you can fire it from behind cover over quite a
considerable distance and with a bit of luck you can use your 5 shots to take
out even a heavy enemy tank, while 3 shots can be enough to dispatch a
lighter armoured vehicle. Against infantry in the open direct HE hits will kill
instantly and you'll only need two near misses to take out a full health opponent.
Sure, the air burst is more forgiving, with a damage radius of up to
7 meters but you will still always need at least two shots to kill and it's
basically useless against vehicles. Another advantage of the HE mortar is
that it can quickly destroy buildings and other forms of cover that might be
sheltering your enemies. And in contrast to this even a thin wooden roof will be
enough to make your air burst shells completely useless. The only map where I
would currently use the air burst mortar is Argonne forest. Infantry will
frequently be bunched up and there are no vehicles or cover to worry about.
On any other map the versatility and effectiveness of the HE mortar makes it
my go-to choice any day. Having said this if we calculate the efficiency ratio
using the battlefieldtracker.com data from the 4th of September 2017 (that's
divide the kill percentage by the time percentage) we can see that even though
the pick rate is 50/50 for this date the air burst motor gets 64% of all the
mortar kills giving it an efficiency ratio of 1.28 over 0.72
for the HE mortar. This would suggest that objectively the air burst
mortar is better but I would caution against this conclusion. A lot of the
time you can fire all of your HE mortars against a single tank and while
deterring or even destroying a tank can be great for your team, it might only
get you one kill. So even though the airburst mortar gets more kills per time
unit on average the HE variant is still my preferred choice.
The grenade crossbow launcher; medieval technology at its finest adapted for the modern age.
Each of the two crossbow launcher variants comes with two grenades, has a
reload time of around two seconds and auto replenishes its ammo every 25 seconds.
In terms of their detonation methods the frag grenades explode after
a hang time of 5 seconds, while the HE variants don't explode until they hit
the ground. In addition to this, the frags have the same delay timer as regular
grenades, around 1.75 seconds after landing on the floor, while HE grenades
are more like impacts and can explode anywhere between almost instantly and up
to 850 milliseconds after touching any surface depending on the prior hang time.
According to these Symthic code dump for Battlefield 1 the crossbow launcher
projectiles are supposed to be exactly the same as those for the rifle grenade
launcher for the medic class. When I tested this in the game though I could
not quite confirm these stats. No matter how close I got the explosion to the
opponent I could never quite get a one-hit kill with the frag grenades 89
points was the maximum damage I managed. Conversely the age a grenade is supposed
to be quite weak but it consistently managed to do 49 points of max damage
instead of the expected 40. It seems as if there is something else at play here.
But whatever the case the takeaway is that you will need two frag grenades
against a full health opponent and even both HE grenades will not be enough.
Against vehicles both variants are pretty useless although with seven to
nine points of damage against heavies and 10 to 11 against light armour the HE
grenades are slightly less useless than the frags which only do about 4 to
5 damage against the three heavy tanks and 7 to 8 damage against light armour.
If you're bringing the HE launcher to give yourself an anti-vehicle capability I
can only recommend that you consider the HE mortar or the limpet charges instead.
For me this makes the frag launcher the better choice of the two and judging
by the user data, most of the players agree. The only saving graces of HE
launcher are that its range is not limited by the five second timer and it
has a shorter fuse. All in all though these minor advantages are not really
important for me personally and I definitely prefer the anti-infantry
capabilities of the frag grenades. Calculating the efficiency ratios for
the two launchers further cements this conclusion. The HE launcher is used
14.5 percent of the combined crossbow launcher time but only
achieves seven percent of the kills, giving it an efficiency ratio of only
0.48 versus the ratio of 1.09 for the frag launcher.
That being said, even the frag launcher is not a great tool. It's only
with map and game-mode combinations where a lot of the combat takes place
indoors, for instance Fort de Vaux or front lines on Monte Grappa that the grenade
launcher wins out over the mortar. On any other map if I'm looking to take an
explosive offensive capability for the support class, the mortar wins out for me every time.
The crossbow grenade launcher is a fun
addition to the game but with only two shots a slow reload and an even slower
resupply its usefulness especially when compared to the mortar is really limited
and at the end of the day given how grenades are already such a dominant
part of the game that's maybe not such a bad thing.
So there you have it, all the secret little stats about the two mortars and grenade launchers in Battlefield 1.
Did any of this info surprise you and which of these gadgets is your favourite?
Let me know in the comments section below and as always, thank you for watching,
I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next episode!
[Music swells]