Why are mortars so strong in WARDOGS right now?

Because a mortar is cheap, safe and needs no second player. It costs build supplies at a FOB you were building anyway, a camera follows each shell so the gunner can range without a spotter, and players report cancelling that camera to fire three rounds before anyone reacts. Meanwhile an infantry loadout puts around 10,000 dollars at risk every life, so the economy rewards staying in the base.

Is Bulkhead nerfing mortars in WARDOGS?

Bulkhead has not said anything about mortars. No Steam post since Patch 0.11 on 14 September mentions mortar balance, and the most discussed proposals, such as removing the shell camera or capping mortars per FOB, have had no developer reply.

How do you counter mortars in WARDOGS?

Build a cheap counter-battery mortar somewhere nobody is watching and hit their tube, raid the FOB it fires from, or cut the supply line feeding it ammunition. Do not stack a whole team inside a base, because clustered players are what a mortar kills most.

What is the mortar camera in WARDOGS?

A view that follows each mortar shell down to impact, with impacts also shown on the gunner map. It lets one player range a target without a spotter. Players report that pressing C cancels it, which lets you fire again straight away, and removing it is the most requested mortar change.

Why mortars took over WARDOGS in a week

Five days after WARDOGS launched, the loudest argument about the game is not about a gun, a vehicle or the grind. It is about a camera that follows a mortar shell down. Several of the busiest threads on r/WarDogs this week are about mortars, on both sides, and two of them have passed 1,300 comments.

This is what the argument is actually about: what the meta looks like, the mechanic at its centre, the economy underneath it, what each side wants, and what counters it today. Everything here comes from players, labelled as such, because Bulkhead has not said a word about it.

The meta in one list

Players describe the same match again and again, and it goes like this:

Rush a tower at the start.
Build a super FOB around it — walls, gates, anti-air.
Build drills, which players report pull the Hot Zone to the base, so the objective comes to you.
Build mortars, and shell every other tower on the map.
Repeat next match.

The piece that makes it work is the drill. If the Hot Zone comes to the FOB, there is no reason to leave it, and a team that never leaves its base has nothing to do with its time except fire at the teams that do. The towers are the obvious FOB sites, every team knows where they are, and that is where the shells land in the first fifteen minutes. The towers guide explains why a tower is worth building on in the first place.

What the camera actually does

Most shooters make indirect fire a two-person job: someone at the tube, someone who can see the target. WARDOGS gives the gunner that second person for free.

A camera follows each shell down to impact, so the gunner sees where it landed without a spotter.
Impacts show on the gunner's map, and against a target someone has already spotted, the map gives the range outright.
Pressing C cancels the camera, and players report that is what turns one shell a cycle into a three-round burst: fire, cancel, fire, cancel, fire, then ride the last round down and correct while reloading.

The camera follows the round up through the cloud and down onto the target. That view is the spotter the gunner no longer needs.

Put together, one player at a mortar ranges, corrects and fires for effect without anyone else involved, and puts three shells on a target before it can react. That is the mechanic every nerf proposal aims at, and the artillery guide covers using it.

The clearest sign of how central the camera is came from community servers. Admins running Hardcore rulesets have stripped out kill cams and third-person views — and the mortar camera stayed, because server settings cannot turn it off. A request to let them passed 1,000 upvotes.

The real cause is the economy

Read the most upvoted complaints closely and most of them are not about mortars at all. They are about money.

An infantry player in the Hot Zone puts a loadout at risk every life, and players put a standard kit at around $10,000. Getting that back means kills, and one of the most upvoted posts this week reckoned a player needs to hold roughly a 3.0 kill-death ratio just to break even on their gear. A medic's loadout costs about the same and pays back only if the people revived go on to do something.

On the other side of the ledger, building, supply runs and mortars pay steadily and from behind the lines. The title of the post that put it most plainly says the whole thing: the less you play the objective, the more you are rewarded. Mortars are where that logic ends up, because they are the one role that earns from the fight without being in it.

That is why some players argue the fix is not a mortar nerf at all, but a Hot Zone that pays enough to be worth dying in. Progression feeds it too: the counters that would break a FOB — launchers, tanks, attack helicopters — sit a long way up the unlock tracks in Season 1, while a mortar only needs a base and a Large Hammer.

What the nerf side wants

The proposals that come up most, across Reddit and the Steam forum:

Remove the shell camera, or let community servers switch it off.
Hide impacts from the gunner's map, so a spotter matters again.
Cap mortars per FOB.
Gate them behind team points, the way an APC only spawns once a team has 20.
Require a spotter or a loader to operate a tube.
Remove the three-round burst, or add heavy spread when firing that fast.

Alongside those, builders ask for proper overhead cover. The only roof available is a prefabricated bunker, two storeys high and too small for a spawn vehicle, so a FOB has no way to dig in against indirect fire short of knocking bunkers together.

What the other side says

The counter-argument is just as loud, and the thread that made it passed 1,300 comments on its own: WARDOGS is a game where building, logistics, recon and artillery are part of the war, and nerfing them until everyone runs into the Hot Zone would make it a generic shooter.

Its practical case is that mortars already have answers, and that the teams losing to them are not using them:

Counter-battery. A mortar built to kill another mortar is disposable — a base, a hammer, enough ammunition, somewhere out of the way — and it only has to find one tube.
Raid the FOB. Players who attack bases in squads report they fall more easily than their builders expect, and a mortar with no base under it has no ammunition.
Cut the supply line. Every shell comes out of the base's ammunition store, and so does the anti-air emplacement's. A base that is mortaring all match is a base with a truck coming to it.
Stop stacking the base. A third of a team crowded into one FOB is exactly the target a mortar kills best.

There is also a timing argument: the heavier tools — tanks, attack helicopters, and the SPH-2 self- propelled gun at level 90 for $500,000 — are only starting to appear, and players who fought with the SPH-2 in the betas warn that it is a far bigger problem than any mortar.

What Bulkhead has said

About mortars, nothing. No Steam post since Patch 0.11 on 14 September mentions mortar balance, and none of the threads above has a developer reply.

The closest thing on record is from before launch. Asked on X on 29 August how balance plays out, Joe Brammer, Bulkhead's CEO, said "what we've seen across a season is things peak and fall. So something can be OP for a few days but then be useless late season." He was talking about the betas and about shotguns, not mortars, but it is the studio's stated view of an early meta: it passes as the sandbox fills.

Two dates are worth watching. Season 1 is due to end around 10 October, and Bulkhead has said each season changes the order of progression and rotates weapons and vehicles — which is the natural point for a balance change. What the season reset takes →

What to do in the meantime

If you are on the receiving end, the useful moves are the ones above: a cheap counter-battery tube, a squad raid on the base, a hit on the supply truck, and not crowding into your own FOB. The FOB guide covers building a base that survives a shelling, and the vehicle guide covers what it costs to reach the tools that break one.

If you are the one on the tube, the argument cuts the other way too. A mortar that fires all match from one spot is a mortar somebody is already driving towards.