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HM-38 120mm Mortar Squad is OP

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22 Nov 2021, 13:54 PM
#141
avatar of Klement Pikhtura

Posts: 772

jump backJump back to quoted post22 Nov 2021, 02:17 AMMMX

This is a tricky one and I used to believe it works like this as well until I tested it a while back. As it turns out, no matter how clumped a squad is and how many models eat a mortar shell straight to the face, they'll all live to tell the tale if they've been at full health before. Max damage per shot is indeed capped at the AoE_near damage value, which is 68 for all mortar shells (except things like delayed fuse or heat rounds)..


Ok, now I get it. Still weird, because I might have seen some oneshots with full health. Maybe tripping. Definitely will pay more attention to this with 120mm.

jump backJump back to quoted post22 Nov 2021, 11:41 AMVipper
For those you wish to see a better comparison of the stats of these weapons check here:

https://www.coh2.org/topic/106172/indirect-fire-performance-a-comparison

HM-38 has higher DPS and in second place after pack howitzer.

(if I am not mistaken these graphs do are not updated to buff M1 mortar got.)

the culprit should be first now after pack howie AOE nerf and 120mm barrage reload buff.
22 Nov 2021, 17:51 PM
#142
avatar of NorthWeapon
Donator 11

Posts: 615


Could not agree more.


Given the changes to sovs over the last couple of years, in particular the boost to conscript durability, as well as the fact that sov late game ( in 1v1 ) is universally considered extremely strong almost to the point of being OP, the argument that soviets need high survivability to offset other weakness no longer hold true.

Most people are simply asking for retreat to be removed so pressure can be applied and rewarded though good counter play as opposed to the current situation where the best outcome is to chase the unit off with maybe 1 or 2 model drops.


Doesn't matter what changes, the design of the Soviets is high survivability. Perhaps it doesn't need to be as accurate but survivability must be maintained to preserve design
22 Nov 2021, 20:31 PM
#143
avatar of Klement Pikhtura

Posts: 772



Doesn't matter what changes, the design of the Soviets is high survivability. Perhaps it doesn't need to be as accurate but survivability must be maintained to preserve design

imo if you still remove retreat option, survivability will still be decent. The pack up time is lengthy, but the model count is still be largest. With Leig you need to kill 3 dudes to decrew, 4 with pack howie and 5 with 120mm. And that's only if there is another patch in the making and if balance team actually thinks it is a good idea to nerf 120mm.

Anyways the unit is not a game winning and situational, even some claim it is OP af. Just don't sit on your bottom like a chicken on eggs and you'll be fine + it is easier vs SOV, since they don't have wide arc high suppression HMGs.
22 Nov 2021, 21:17 PM
#144
avatar of Katitof

Posts: 17914 | Subs: 8

I like how vipper actually believes that DPS is a viable thing to talk about when discussing indirect fire.

Indirect weapons are not measured by DPS, because they do NOT provide reliable damage.

You either get hit or not, rarely can your squad stay in combat once its being hit by any indirect, which makes scatter most important stat and RoF second one.

There is no such thing as "DPS" on indirect weapon, unless you're firing at british emplacement or OKW truck.
22 Nov 2021, 23:18 PM
#145
avatar of Hannibal
Senior Moderator Badge

Posts: 3113 | Subs: 2

jump backJump back to quoted post22 Nov 2021, 21:17 PMKatitof
I like how vipper actually believes that DPS is a viable thing to talk about when discussing indirect fire.

Indirect weapons are not measured by DPS, because they do NOT provide reliable damage.

You either get hit or not, rarely can your squad stay in combat once its being hit by any indirect, which makes scatter most important stat and RoF second one.

There is no such thing as "DPS" on indirect weapon, unless you're firing at british emplacement or OKW truck.

The DPS in MMX's analysis serves as a proxy for expected damage per shot and therefore to some degree reliability, although it does not show the variance of the shots.

It's the best "stat" we have for discussing mortar damage, at least way better than AoE values where every argument will be made with anecdotal evidence.
22 Nov 2021, 23:42 PM
#146
avatar of donofsandiego

Posts: 1366

jump backJump back to quoted post21 Nov 2021, 17:07 PMVipper


Do we agree that a 120 mm mortar shell will cause more total HP damage to an infatry in most cases than other mortars will cause?


Look, I don't know how else to say this. The 120mm does not do *more* damage than any other mortar, the AOE is better. Again, thinking about the implications of having a bigger AOE, you can come to the conclusion that it will do more damage over an entire squad.

My point was that the 120mm doesn't have some kind of special damage modifier against units in cover, it's just that the damage is more consistent when it hits units in cover. The important word being when of course. If a 120mm and an 82mm hit a gren behind sandbags right on top of their heads, they will both do similar amounts of damage (leaving a gren squad at roughly 200 health, with 120mm skewing to 190-200 and 82mm skewing to 200-210. I haven't tested volks but I think it's pretty obvious the 120mm will do better there. The 120mm does more damage to the squad compared to the 82mm, but it's still doing the same max damage. It's more consistent when it hits.

For squads out in the open, the 120mm is a different ball game. Of course in this situation the 120mm compared to the 82mm is like comparing a hand grenade to a stick of TNT. Bigger AOE against a spread out squad is a huge advantage. Though squads out in the open tend to be moving around and 120mm struggles against moving targets (save for blobs).

By the way, if you really want to know the reason why I said what I did, it was because I was under that impression myself when I first started playing CoH2. I thought it had some kind of higher base damage. Then when I looked in the stats and found damage all to be the same, and that it was AOE that was the deciding factor, I was surprised. I mentioned it to my friends and they were surprised as well.






120mm is Soviet... its survivability is supposed to be good...


Certainly, but compared to most mortars that can retreat, needing only one model to operate the mortar + run with it is definitely huge. If you get a model drop on other mortars while it's packing up to retreat, you can slow down the retreat a bit, and it can snowball. The 120mm definitely stands out in this regard in that it doesn't need a second man to get the hell out of dodge, so to speak.


I think that the 120mm should be able to retreat, because soviets don't have any kind of FRP. That's a personal opionion, mind you. What about if it moved slower during retreat than normal squads? The thing is heavy as hell after all. That or perhaps it could lose the recieved accuracy bonus that squads get on retreat. Or maybe slower pack-up time to make up for the fact it can't be stunlocked by model drops?

EDIT: No FRP nondoctrinally, no FRP nondoctrinally. That's what I meant.
23 Nov 2021, 01:03 AM
#147
avatar of theekvn

Posts: 307

and again, it is 340 mp mortar with long deloy, depart time with 5 mens squad. Is that enough for this survive feature ?.
beside 340mp, the damage is same with normal mortar, range and firing arc is selling point. By the time it come, WEH mortar has counter barrage in vet 1. ISG with accuracy barrage is biggest 120mm enemies since flare was remove.
MMX
23 Nov 2021, 02:36 AM
#148
avatar of MMX

Posts: 999 | Subs: 1

jump backJump back to quoted post22 Nov 2021, 21:17 PMKatitof
I like how vipper actually believes that DPS is a viable thing to talk about when discussing indirect fire.

Indirect weapons are not measured by DPS, because they do NOT provide reliable damage.

You either get hit or not, rarely can your squad stay in combat once its being hit by any indirect, which makes scatter most important stat and RoF second one.

There is no such thing as "DPS" on indirect weapon, unless you're firing at british emplacement or OKW truck.


just to add to what hannibal already wrote; while dps isn't automatically the most important stat it will always be a viable criterion to judge about any unit that somehow dishes out damage. and this is of course also true for indirect fire pieces, maybe even especially so since dps combines scatter, aoe and rof into an easy-to-compare metric. sure you can take scatter alone as the to-go stat, but then you'd end up with sth like the leig outperforming every other indirect fire unit by a far margin - which you'd probably admit isn't really painting an accurate picture.

it's certainly true that the graphs vipper cited don't really give a good impression about the reliability to hit something, which would absolutely be worthwhile to compare as well. in hindsight, adding error bars to capture the variance or standard deviation of the dps values, as hannibal suggested, would have been a good idea; i decided against it back then since it would have cluttered the graphs even more. but that still doesn't change the fact that the average dps curves vipper cited give a good first impression how well the different mortars perform compared to each other (albeit some of the data may be a bit outdated by now)
23 Nov 2021, 07:21 AM
#149
avatar of Vipper

Posts: 13496 | Subs: 1

jump backJump back to quoted post23 Nov 2021, 01:03 AMtheekvn
and again, it is 340 mp mortar with long deloy, depart time with 5 mens squad. Is that enough for this survive feature ?.
beside 340mp, the damage is same with normal mortar, range and firing arc is selling point. By the time it come, WEH mortar has counter barrage in vet 1. ISG with accuracy barrage is biggest 120mm enemies since flare was remove.

PLS lets leave this myth to rest.

The "max damage" might be the same in all mortars at 80 but that is does not say much about it performance vs an infatry squad (where it does not even do 80 damage).

It is like saying that all AT guns perform the same because the have the same damage ignoring accuracy/penetration/reload.

What is more relevant, is the total damage that all entities of squad will suffer when being hit.

In that case 120mm mortars is simply superior to other mortars, as clearly shown by MMX analysis (great job man).

PLS check this thread https://www.coh2.org/topic/106172/indirect-fire-performance-a-comparison

one can even see how these weapon compare graphically in the DPS chart Fig.3/Fig.5


So no "range and firing arc" are not the only selling points, the 120mm also does more damage to squads than other mortars. (It can even delivery more damage per shot vs hard targets with the vet 1 ability)

Being a with "5 mens squad" again does not same much because it can sustain up to 4 entity casualties like the PM-41 and thus is more casualties than other factions.
23 Nov 2021, 08:17 AM
#150
avatar of Klement Pikhtura

Posts: 772


I think that the 120mm should be able to retreat, because soviets don't have any kind of FRP. That's a personal opionion, mind you. What about if it moved slower during retreat than normal squads? The thing is heavy as hell after all. That or perhaps it could lose the recieved accuracy bonus that squads get on retreat. Or maybe slower pack-up time to make up for the fact it can't be stunlocked by model drops?

EDIT: No FRP nondoctrinally, no FRP nondoctrinally. That's what I meant.

in team games you can reinforce with m5. It is basically an OST 251 HT clone in this regard. And in 2v2 people don't build forward retreat points all that much. In my recent memory I've seen only USF guys do it there
23 Nov 2021, 10:33 AM
#151
avatar of TickTack

Posts: 578

The wermacht mortar half track is OP because it uses the same explosion sound as the 120 nowadays.
23 Nov 2021, 10:51 AM
#152
avatar of donofsandiego

Posts: 1366

jump backJump back to quoted post23 Nov 2021, 07:21 AMVipper

PLS lets leave this myth to rest.

The "max damage" might be the same in all mortars at 80 but that is does not say much about it performance vs an infatry squad (where it does not even do 80 damage).



You can never ever hit a model and deal 80 damage in one hit. Try it in game, I promise you.

And yes, the damage numbers are the same, it's the AOE that's different. You can look at it in serelia.

EDIT: Model, not squad.
23 Nov 2021, 11:01 AM
#153
avatar of Vipper

Posts: 13496 | Subs: 1



You can never ever hit a model and deal 80 damage in one hit. Try it in game, I promise you.

And yes, the damage numbers are the same, it's the AOE that's different. You can look at it in serelia.

EDIT: Model, not squad.

I have not said that it can do 80 damage to entity on the contrary I clearly said it does not.

The damage of these weapons is set 80 and they can do 80 vs hard targets. Now pls move away from this point since it has been cleared.

Point here is that some people use the "nominal damage" as argument that the 120mm shell will have the same affect when it hits an infatry squad and thus do the same total damage to all entities of squad when clearly that is not the case.

120mm mortars is closer to Pack howitzer when it come to damage than to other mortars.
23 Nov 2021, 15:54 PM
#154
avatar of Hannibal
Senior Moderator Badge

Posts: 3113 | Subs: 2


at maps such as Baku pack howie can actually deal solid damage from a very safe distance. But in damage from the same range 120mm is decently better (checked it with Scatter this!).
Howie is also easier to decrew because it needs 1 guy less to kill (4 guys vs 5 guys) and the squad seem to be more clumped on pack howie. I kind of agree with Gachi that it is way easy to get away with stupid stuff with 120mm vs pack howie. But if you do decrew and capture it, it makes it easier to steal as well (which is very rare, because it is that hard to be decrewed)

Yeah, I had MMX's calculations in mind (the same thread that Vipper posted) but forgot that this data is outdated, at least for the Howie (and 120mm?).
I also agree that the 120mm is more survivable by a fair bit. And although autofire is still important, balance team put more value on its barrage, on which it has 20 more range.

Performance is not the point, its merely a reference point. We might aswell bring all mortars and look at them in this context but its rather pointless because closest units to 120mm are Paks\IGs.

Point is being that 120mm mortar surviability is blantly unjutified by anything aside from it being a commander unit, sure its more expensive then regural mortars by so are the closest units, sure it take more pop-cap but so do closest units awell. Sure 120mm might be marginally more expensive and take few additional pop-cap or be marginally weaker in certain situations, but its blantly a mile away when it comes to staying power and being countered.

Even if we forget about other units completly, even in a vacuum, I still cant find a single reason why 120mm actually needs its surviability or what its compensated for, thats the point.

I partially agree.
However, I would not call 1-2 pop more "marginally", at least not when you're below 10 population. The difference between 9 POP (120mm) and 8 POP (Howie) is a 12.5% increase. For every more typical resource, this is quite a lot and we have seen lots of changes on smaller scales. It won't break your strategy, just like a cost change of 20-30 MP would not break the strategy. Yet, paying 360 MP (=320*1,125) would be considered overpriced for the unit.
As I said above, I fully agree that the 120mm is very sturdy. Too sturdy? That's what I would doubt. The 120mm is in usually at least 2 very popular commanders. One of them is Guard Motor, which has been the Soviet favourite for years now. I have only irregularly seen the 120mm being spammed though. This likely also has to do with MP constraints due to Shocks and Guards or other causes of not fitting timings, but it might also hint that the 120mm is not as a strong choice as people are making it out to be.
30 Oct 2022, 05:37 AM
#155
avatar of Operator09

Posts: 80

4 Months delayed COH3, aren't we nerfing this braindead unit who doesn't require any microing but can 1/4 a squad HP in a single shot.
30 Oct 2022, 06:01 AM
#156
avatar of donofsandiego

Posts: 1366

4 Months delayed COH3, aren't we nerfing this braindead unit who doesn't require any microing but can 1/4 a squad HP in a single shot.


It's called start issuing move commands and play offensively. Also holy necro batman.
30 Oct 2022, 08:49 AM
#157
avatar of MassaDerek

Posts: 197



It's called start issuing move commands and play offensively. Also holy necro batman.


How can you expect a wehr player to use half their brain capacity if they don't have to?
120 counters wehr static play hard, which is the unspoken reason for this thread's existence.
30 Oct 2022, 09:06 AM
#158
avatar of OKSpitfire

Posts: 293

Uh oh.... The Bofors thread all over again. No chance of it being locked I suppose?

The HM-38 was OP, but it's been nerfed several times now. Guard Motor on the other hand...
30 Oct 2022, 20:42 PM
#159
avatar of aerafield

Posts: 3029 | Subs: 3

4 Months delayed COH3, aren't we nerfing this braindead unit who doesn't require any microing but can 1/4 a squad HP in a single shot.


Did you just lose a game vs 120mm mortars and got so salty about the loss that you searched for this unit in the forums, just to necro a 13 months old thread?
31 Oct 2022, 17:10 PM
#160
avatar of BasedSecretary

Posts: 1197

4 Months delayed COH3, aren't we nerfing this braindead unit who doesn't require any microing but can 1/4 a squad HP in a single shot.


sorry to ruin your coping but coh2 is not getting another update, not even to fix the fucking keyboard ui lag that for some reason happens 50% of my games nowadays
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