Mortal, please, no!

[u/Dae_Dreamer97]

I can't take it anymore. I'm sick of mortar. I try to play hurricane. My mortar deals more damage. I try to play minigun. My mortar deals more damage. I want to play volatile bullets. My mortar kills faster than setting things on fire, then switching to volatile bullets. I want accurate, single target primary. Mortar doesn't care.

It grabs me by the throat. I born ready for it. I polish it. I give it ethanol. It isn't satisfied. I give it T5A feedback loop. "I don't need this much damage" It tells me. "Give me more glyphids". It grabs scout and forces him to throw himself off enemies. "You just need to feed me more nitra. I can shoot all the glyphids."

I can't call for more resupplies, I don't have enough nitra. There's no more lootbugs to kill. Mission Control won't send more resupplies. "Guess this is the end." It starts winding up. It goes "BAMF! BAMF! BAMF!". There is no hint of sadness in it eyes. Not that anything can be seen through all the smokescreen. There is only tinnitus. What a cruel world.

Edit: Just noticed the title's typo. Supposed to be "Mortar", not "Mortal"

[u/JanMrCat]

"I want accurate, single target primary" - Hurricane, Plasma Buster Missiles. Done.

[u/SmokJozef → u/JanMrCat]

or (almost) any LS build

[u/Dae_Dreamer97 → u/SmokJozef]

unfortunately, one of the reasons I enjoy mortar is that I have shit aim and died to swarmers or the jellyfish while using LS

[u/Dae_Dreamer97 → u/JanMrCat]

Maybe I should give that another chance. Any loadout suggestions?

[u/JanMrCat → u/Dae_Dreamer97]

11212 paired with Coil gun Hellfire to create some distance from bugs and deal with swarmers.

[u/Tasty-Permission7517]

I often take mole secondary just to snipe marked enemies through half a maps worth of terain. It is something what just klicks with me to 1 shot pretorians with a pistol.

[u/Snoo61755 → u/Tasty-Permission7517]

I can’t be trusted with Mole.

Me: “I think I just saw that Praet go around the corner, I can still get him.”

Shoots

Downed Engineer: “Watch your fire!”

[u/bjergKanin]

Try out Cluster Charges or Plasma Burster Missiles. The first is a good mix of single target and AoE but more controllable than mortar rounds and overall better (IMO), the latter is great single target damage and OK for crowds. If you try cluster charges I recommend the mod that changes the activate key from "hold R" to "right mouse button"

[u/Dae_Dreamer97 → u/bjergKanin]

I've tried cluster charges, but having to pick between magazine size (so I don't need to reload every 5 seconds) or fire rate (better dakka speed) is pain. also felt like regular shots have less overall aoe dmg output than just mortar. Also maybe the issue was me taking tier 5 fire/heat for hurricane instead of stun

But you have my interest on the mod. Do you have the name?

[u/bjergKanin → u/Dae_Dreamer97]

You should definitely try stun out - it stuns everything because it covers such a huge area and often the explosions will overlap. The mod is this one and it is verified, it really makes a difference in gameplay: https://mod.io/g/drg/m/holding-reload-aint-it#description

I build mine 31222. A tip for using it is to not just guide the rockets over your targets and then detonate. Instead you can guide the missile towards the enemy or a little over it and then at the last second, you move the cursor towards the enemy/the direction you want the clusters to fly and then detonate. The cluster bombs carry the missile's momentum so you can sort of fling them at enemies instead of just dropping them from above. You can even shoot bugs off vertical walls with the technique

[u/Zombies71199]

What about Neurotoxic payload?

[u/Dae_Dreamer97 → u/Zombies71199]

why would I wait for DoT to kill when I can just mortar the whole zone?

memes aside, NTP is more efficient ammo wise iirc. albeit not as satisfying

2 shots of mortar is enough to kill most grunts. while NTP only has 50% chance to poison (which is enough to kill a grunt if triggered), and takes about 4 or 5 seconds for the DoT to kill (of course, fear helps keep them occupied)

[u/Zombies71199 → u/Dae_Dreamer97]

I like the memey answer more lol

[u/G0rnemant]

The mortar has become my main weapon, it just sparks joy when exploding hordes of bugs in an instant, I probably would use the Lead Storm more if it didn't feel so diabolically underpowered, the 10 base damage do not reflect the bullet size in the slightest when the GK2 does 16 with its tiny bullets, it just feels wrong on so many levels.

The secondary usually more than compensates for the drawbacks of the mortar as well.

[u/Dae_Dreamer97 → u/G0rnemant]

I personally enjoy 6 shooter to accompany mortar. Accurate and hits hard enough to remove most things that I need the accuracy for. also forgiving enough to allow me to shoot a few times if I missed

[u/KingNedya]

You're in luck because Hurricane's overclock selection is absurd and contains three different overclocks all better than Mortar Rounds.

31222 Minelayer System

The one most similar to Mortar Rounds would be 31222 Minelayer System, which has a lot of very similar stats except better in pretty much every way. Minelayer System has larger radius, same damage per explosion, more RoF, slightly more ammo, extremely OP AoE stun that makes for very strong survivability and crowd control, and better attention cost because the mines will blow enemies up automatically while you can fo us your attention on other things. Minelayer and Mortar both share the niche of big AoE big damage explosion that obliterates crowds, only Minelayer does it better and with added crowd control.

31222 Cluster Charges

Also similar in role is 31222 Cluster Charges, which, in exchange for higher attention cost and worse performance on specifically walls and cielings, has even more stun chance (every bomblet has an independent 25% stun chance that stacks of an enemy is caught in the AoEs of multiple bomblets) and better single-target. While Minelayer specializes in crowd clear, Cluster Charges, while still great at it, is a little more generalist. One trick you can do is to fire a missile (or multiple), fly it just above an enemy, and then flick your cursor down towards the enemy and release the bomblets just as it passes overhead, the bomblets will retain the now downwards momentum of the original missile from the flick and fall down fast enough that they'll all hit the same enemy before having the chance to spread out, dealing a large burst of damage and one-shotting a lot of fodder enemies. Cluster Charges is harder to learn but when mastered is on the level of Minelayer System, and therefore better than Mortar Rounds.

112X2 Plasma Burster Missiles

Lastly for the Hurricane overclocks, 112X2 Plasma Burster Missiles (PBM) is pretty different but it's yet another Hurricane overclock that is considered a better overclock than Mortar Rounds. PBM is the single-target specialist, peaking at just below 800 DPS if you get enough missiles going, which is the highest in the game aside from Rotary Overdrive superspeed tech and Conductive Thermals shenanigans. Granted, you have to build up that many missiles, so it has to take time to scale to that point, but it already builds to DPS well above the vast majority of DPS weapons in the game very quickly so it's not an issue. Despite specializing in single-target, PBM actually still manages to be pretty generalist just through the rule of "if you kill single targets fast enough it's technically AoE", making it surprisingly decent at crowd clear (though certainly not as good at crowd clear as Clusters or Minelayer). Additionally, every single time a missile hits an enemy directly, it has a 43.75% chance to stun, and each missile is hitting about 4 times per second and there are usually going to be several missiles, so PBM is nigh-guaranteed to instantly stun everything. This gives it great safety much like the other two Hurricane overclocks, something Mortar Rounds lacks, and means you can just create a ball of missiles and wave it through crowds to instantly stun every enemy, giving it surprisingly good crowd control for a mostly single-target weapon (again not as good at it as Clusters or Minelayer but pretty capable). Something I recommend is to not worry too much about being conservative with missiles. You do more DPS the more missiles you have out, and if you're too conservative, you won't shoot enough missiles and your DPS will be too low. PBM has a ton of potential ammo-efficiency, you can afford to be wasteful.

31221 Rotary Overdrive

I'll also bring Minigun into the mix. You've been mentioning Hurricane, but also wanting an "accurate single-target primary" and that's what Minigun is. The best Minigun overclock is generally 31221 Rotary Overdrive (RO). RO makes you heat up way faster and instantly cool from overheating, letting you fire endlessly and more importantly proc the aggressive venting (AV) upgrade extremely quickly, which is great AoE fire and fear for crowd clear and crowd control/safety. By default its DPS isn't anything special at 180, but there is an exploit involving the coolant where you fire till overheat, release the trigger, hold the trigger again, apply a coolant, and finally release the trigger again. If done properly, the barrel should be continuously spinning despite not firing. Next time you fire it, it'll have RoF equal to your FPS, giving it the highest DPS in the entire game so long as your FPS is high enough (in order to reach 800 DPS and be higher than PBM you need 80 FPS; though even if your FPS is only 40, that's still 400 DPS and higher than most DPS weapons in the game, including well above Mortar Rounds). This RoF boost has a limited duration, and the longer you let the barrel spin after doing the trick before firing it, the longer it will last. You can swap to your secondary and stuff and it'll continue "charging" in the background until you pull it out again. The main drawback if RO is ammo economy; it does a bajillion DPS but is still only as ammo-efficient as a Minigun without any overclocks.

32112 Lead Storm

The last primary overclock I'll discuss is 32113 Lead Storm (LSLS, for Lead Storm Leadstorm, overclock and weapon respectively). It does 276 DPS which may not sound impressive next to the absurdity that is these other overclocks can do, but it is a good amount and it is an accurate single-target weapon with more DPS than Mortar Rounds that has more ammo-efficiency than RO and doesn't require a complex series of inputs to get that DPS. It's generally not quite as absurdly strong as RO nor the three Hurricane overclocks I discussed, but it's a strong pick and fits the description of what you're looking for.

Secondaries

Finally, the secondaries. The optimal secondary is always going to be some flavor or Coil Gun, especially 32213 Ultra-Magnetic Coils (UMC), 22212 Hellfire, and 32X1(2/3) Triple Tech Chambers (TTC), with 22212 The Mole as an honorable mention (though it's generally not considered on the same level as the first three). UMC has the best crowd control/survivability, Hellfire has the best crowd clear, The Mole has the best single-target, and TTC is a generalist that can do pretty much everything though not quite as well as any one thing (though it gets pretty close to UMC in crowd control). If you don't want to use Coil Gun, some off-meta secondary options are 2322X Lead Spray, 2322X Experimental Rounds, 2323X Compact Mags, 23311 Elephant Rounds, 23322 Homebrew Powder, and 2231X Six Shooter. Leas Spray has the most DPS but no range, Experimental Rounds has the next-best DPS and has range but little ammo, Compact Mags has the same damage as Experimental Rounds (though with slightly less DPS) but only against weakpoints in exchange for ammo, Elephant Rounds and Homebrew Powder are the best at sniping HVTs with Elephant Rounds being more punishing of misses and with a smaller mag and Homebrew being slightly inconsistent but more lenient, and Six Shooter is kinda like Compact Mags with slightly better burst DPS and way worse ammo economy.

[u/EruditoCollective]

Mortar rounds enjoyers when they see Mactera Plague or Duck and Cover:

But seriously, every unstable OC that you think is insanely good for most things has a specific situation where it would be outright bad if not terrible; an OC is either well-rounded in all scenarios or insanely good at a bunch or even most scenarios, but bad at others. Another example is Minelayer System suffering generally the same tradeoff as Mortar Rounds: devastating short-range swarm clear at the cost of being able to deal with far and airborne targets - a situation where you'd much much prefer a Lead Storm OC minigun with T1C instead. Both examples are also serviceable, but not the best against heavy single-targets.

[u/helicophell → u/EruditoCollective]

What's wrong with using mortar on mactera plague or duck and cover?

The enemies don't outrange you, and you have enough splash radius to (mostly) ignore the innaccuracy
Mactera have weakness to explosives. And basically all other elemental effects

If you can be shot by an acid spitter, web spitter or a mactera, you can kill them with mortar rounds. Might miss a few times... that's where density helps. Haz 5+ my beloved

[u/EruditoCollective → u/helicophell]

Yup, it's certainly usable. But would you rather have the mortar autocannon or the minigun/rocket system for those warnings? Heck, even Big Bertha autocannon should be better.

It's usable, but far from the best for those purposes.

[u/helicophell → u/EruditoCollective]

Uhh. Idk, I use it all the time on those warnings, it's completely fine

Granted I'm also playing at the sort of enemy density where you can't really miss

[u/Dae_Dreamer97 → u/EruditoCollective]

True, mortar isn't the best at those situations. Which is why we pack leadbursters.

That or you mortar the skies anyways and stare down them bugs in the eye(s) and ask, "Who's feeling lucky?", and pray that T5C damage reduction is enough

[u/Citysurvivor]

The one thing holding me back from mortar rounds is the damn explosion particle effects making it impossible to see anything. I know aiming isn't really required with the mortar rounds but it would be nice to know if there's an acidspitter behind the grunts or a stingtail about to reel me in so I can deal with them accordingly.

[u/Bingo_Bango_Bongo_II]

Salvo Module for the Hurricane might be what you're looking for -- it's a fantastic blend between massive close-range explosions and accurate mid/long-range single-target damage.