Sunday, May 25, 2014

Lets Play Clash of Clans: A Look at Defenses: Mortar

Sorry about the lack of updates everyone.  With a Baby on the way, a wonderful Girlfriend, an Amazing 4 year old and a full time job life has kept me running lately.

Quick Base update.  Few more walls upgraded but most importantly one of the regular Barracks has been upgraded to level 10 and my Spell Factory to level 5.  This finally gives me the PEKKA and Freeze Spell, though I have to admit the level 1 Freeze Spells 4 seconds is not all that impressive to start with.  I have also finished construction on the final XBow that I am planning to use primarily in an AD role.

At the moment in high level game-play it is very common for an attacker to be able to fairly easily 1 star a base, 2 stars is easily achievable with the standard high end army comps and a small amount of skill while 3 stars is considered difficult due to the time constraint and the effectiveness of the high level defenses.

The Main thing I wanted to cover today is the beginning of a series looking at the various Active and Passive Defenses. Lets start with the Mortar

Starting at level 1 the Mortar has a dps of 4, but that only tells part of the story.  The Mortar fires every 5 seconds which in turn gives it a damage of 20 per round.  This means that against lvl 1 Goblins it takes 2 shots to kill them, Barbarians take 3, while Archers can be 1 shotted.  Giants take a whooping 15 rounds to kill which in turn equates to 1 Minute and 15 seconds.

One thing I found particularly interesting, and perhaps it is a reaction to the archers popularity, is the Mortar has the ability to 1 shot Archers of equivalent level up to level 6.  The Mortar however has 2 more levels to hit its max.

The Mortars max out at level 8 with 13 dps and 65 damage per round.  This means at max level vs the standard "farming" troops of Barb/Gob/Archer a Mortar can 2 shot Barbarians and Goblins while retaining the ability to kill Archers in a single shot.  This essentially maintains the balance started at level one while slightly nurfing the effectiveness of Barbarians as they can now be killed 5 seconds faster.

As you steadily Climb the Trophy Ladder the Barbarian Army gives way to BArch, then BAG, followed by BAM.  Though even now in Crystal 2 I find the army I am most often confronted with is BArch with Giants or mass Archers.

Given the Preponderance of Archers I face in my base defenses I have found that against my most common opponent the Level 6 Mortar is actually about as high as you need to go to defend yourself against a run of the mill farming attack.  This gives me the ability to kill maxed Barbs in 4 shots and Goblins in 2, though both troop types can be predamaged for easy killing with careful bomb placement.  I must point out though that typically I rarely find myself facing maxed versions of either Barbs or Goblins.

Against a more determined attacker using Wizards, Witches, Golems or Hogs the Mortar loses some, but of course not all, of its effectiveness.  The most telling and for the Mortar damaging transition is when you move from Giants to Golems for your tank troops.  A Golem takes up 30 spaces, meaning you can fit 6 giants into the same amount of space.  At Max Level those 8 Giants give you 5,640 hp, a Maxed out Golem has 6,300 hp and when it dies creates two Golemites with an additional 1,260hp each for a total of 8,820.

The reason the switch from Giants to Golems is so hard on the Mortar is found in its splash damage.  While the 8 giants 5.6k hp sounds impressive the fact the Mortar is a splash defense means its hitting each of them simultaneously reducing their effective HP to each individual Giants 940. This means instead of the 87 rounds to destroy the giants one at a time it can instead kill them in a mere 14 or roughly 6 times faster.  This is further amplified by the damage of multiple Mortars, Cannons, Infernos etc.  The Golems massive health Pool in affect turns a bases splash defenses into single target ones for the first 6.3k of its hp.  Its not until the "death" of the Golem and the birth of the Golemites that the splash defenses regain some of their prior capacity but even this is muted by the fact there are only two targets (each of which has more health then a giant) to minimize a bases ability to defend itself.

A competent attacker will strive to keep his tanks in front of his dps as well as healers in a serious attempt on your base, against this kind of attack several of the other defenses start to gain importance.  Given all this I think for my own purposes I will only level my Mortars up to level 6 to maximize its abilities vs standard farming troops then focus my upgrades after that on improving the abilities of my other defenses.  For my next Look at Defenses I will focus on the Wizard Tower to see if it suffers at higher levels as much as the Mortar does.

Until Then Rev signing off, and get your Clash On!

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