Yesterday we got the first big Escape From Tarkov patch of the current wipe, and the biggest new addition was mortars that fall from the sky and kill you almost instantly. Unsurprisingly, they annoyed a lot of players, and it looks like they are already being nerfed a little as a result.
The mortar strike event in Escape From Tarkov was added in the 0.15.2 patch that launched yesterday, and added random mortar strikes to the Customs, Woods, Shoreline, and Reserve maps. Throughout the raid, there was the chance that mortar fire would rain down on some areas of the map, and if you didn’t take cover, chances are you would end up dead.
There are a lot of things that can kill you unfairly in Tarkov, but having to avoid mortar fire in seemingly every raid got tiresome pretty quickly. However, based on a new post from the development team, it looks like the frequency of the mortars might be reduced.
The post on the official Escape From Tarkov social media accounts was simply an image of a note written in Russian. Pretty quickly, the community translated it, revealing that it is a message to the commander of the mortars, suggesting that they should reduce the frequency of the strikes to conserve ammo.
This suggests that the mortar strikes will now be less frequent on these maps, and potentially with less ammo being used when they are. There’s no real data to confirm this is the case, as the image was only released a couple of hours ago, and it’s not an easy thing to track, but the early signs are that mortars are now slightly less frequent in game.
Hopefully that will make these maps a little less annoying to play, while still making the event playable. The actual quests within the event and the random strikes seem pretty fun, but the somewhat buggy implementation and the frequency of them made it feel less fun that it should have been.
Of course, this could just be a bit of lore for the event that is setting up further stories when it comes to the mortar strikes. Having to rely on translations means that we may be missing some key context the Russian community is getting, and that could be crucial in deciphering what this message is all about. It seems a little strange to make a graphic just to announce this change, so my money is on this being something a little more nuanced than just a straight nerf to the mortars.
