A reticle with angular increments is not commonly used to calculate distance in the field anymore. As you said, LRFs are good enough these days that "milling" the target is only ever necessary if your RF fails, and even then with the coarseness of the increments in most reticles, it's an educated guess once you get past about 400-500 meters, at best.

A graduated reticle is most useful for holding wind and for measuring the angular subtension of your misses (holding the correction with the reticle can be handy, too). It can also be useful for measuring target size. Some examples:

- The wind is rarely a fixed, constant speed and direction, so dialing for windage correction is too slow and inelastic. The reticle can be used to hold off for windage correction with much quicker response to changes in wind speed or direction. Sometimes even mid-trigger pull a change in wind hold is needed if you notice the wind gust or let off, or if the direction changes suddenly.

- Now, let's say you take a shot (and you follow through properly so you stay in the scope and on target after the shot is released), and you see that the shot missed a little low and left. You use your reticle as a ruler to measure the necessary elevation and windage correction to get your next shot on target. You can then either hold the correction entirely with the reticle, or you can dial in the elevation correction and hold the additional windage. You could also dial both and use the same hold as on the previous shot, but this is slower and less practical than the other two methods of correction.

- Let's say you are shooting a target of unknown size. It can be useful to use your reticle to find the size of the target (the target is 0.1 MRAD wide by 0.2 MRAD tall, for example). This is practical when shooting rocks at 1000 meters up on a mountain slope, for example. If you are setting up steel targets and shooting them, then using your reticle to measure the size of the steel is totally unnecessary, but can be of interest.

- Finally, if for whatever reason your LRF is not able to give you a range, you can use the reticle to find the angular size of the target, and then you can use the known linear size of the target to calculate the approximate distance to the target.

If you ever shoot at moving targets, using the reticle to lead a mover is also very useful.

Last edited by Jordan Smith; 01/16/20. Reason: Add more detail