The current state of Shotguns as a whole are pretty bad due to low damage numbers correlating to the respective shotgun and the spread of shotgun guns being unreliable to kill players due to factors like hit registration being wonky and TTT factors such as Karma reducing your damage output by a percentage the same with body armor. Different shotguns actually shoot a different amount bullets and that is really important due to some shotguns just being outright terrible and unusable. As a whole shotguns could use a small buff to see more play and incentive to pick one up and I will outline why Shotguns feel so bad and are in need of adjustment. This would primary be achieved by tweaking the damage of the guns slightly to better match the feeling of certain shotguns.
This is the most egregious example as shown below. So as seen in the loadout section each dot on the wall is represented in the amount of damage each bullet does. In the picture there's 10 bullet holes. With some quick maths that's 100 damage total because 10x10 equivalent to full health. Enough to kill even if you aim at their torso. But! When you factor in anything from above like karma, body armor, hitreg, the spread making you miss a single pellet. You wont reliably get kills in 1 hit all the time. And that's all fine and dandy but this is the most cherry picked example because in order to kill in 1 hit like a scrub you need perfect conditions to even score a body shot kill with this gun. And you may say aim for the head and problem solved, right? The spread will mostly never actually hit their head and hit their shoulders in almost every case unless you're point blank which is the main use of a shotgun. It can even be disputed shotguns are also bad because during gun fights nobody is expected to have perfect aim but a lot of fights actually involve players jumping and distorting their hitbox by jump crouching or just normal jumping making you hit a players leg which does even less damage than a body shot. But this gun is really really terrible just from numbers alone. Adjusting the damage from even a small number like 1 or 2 would give enough room where in some cases would nullify the karma damage nerf (that is a percentage btw) or be able to fight back against D's or T's without tickling them while they just 1 tap you. From here on the same points still stand but would have to be tested for gameplay but each gun could be adjusted potentially would work like this (Damage from 10 to 11 because 10x11) because then it wouldn't be so oppressive where you have a Double Barrel situation where there feels like theres no counterplay you just die. Theres enough room with tweaks like these to make the gun feel usable instead of just an inferior reskin of other shotguns for example like the ammo capacity in the Winchester. And don't even get me started if you're even apart from your target than more than 7 feet applicable to every shotgun. There is no chance in hell you're gonna kill them even with a headshot in most scenarios. I will display all the rest of the shotguns and potentially proposed changes.


Mossberg: Literally the worst shotgun in the game because the amount of bullets is total of 8. 8x12=96,. Not even a 1 shot if you shoot all the bullets into a persons torso 1000 karma and even worse that it can't 1 shot a player despite how loud this gun is alerting the whole server. Worse spread than most shotguns. Could be brought up to 14 damage to make it 8x14=112. Keep in mind if the damage was 13, it would be 8x13=104 damage total and things like karma and body armor wouldn't be enough of a buff to reliably kill in most cases. Could be brought up to 16 to make it 128 damage total


Bernelli: One of the only usable shotguns in the game where you're able to have that player choice of intentionally aiming at their head of aiming at their torso. The bullets are shown as 8 total so 14x8=112. Proposed changes to make other shotguns match this kind of number. But with stuff like low karma and body armor this gun actually still feels pretty bad to use sometimes because it doesn't 1 shot most of the time even when aiming for the head because the spread is really high. Hypotheticals are like if you have the perfect spread variation, perfect karma, perfect aim and all your bullets hit. But even then you get shitreg and you do 0 damage total. Bringing most shotguns up to 120 damage or up for max amount of bullets may be a good zone due to never having perfect conditions. Could potentially be raised to 15 damage to make it 128 total


Default Shotgun: It's hard to see but trust, lol. 8 bullet holes equalling 8x14=112. Again, sounds fairly high damage for 1 click but not factoring anything. This could be raised from 14 damage to 15 to make it 15x8=120 or any higher to make it128


(And as a final note the Double Barrel is perfectly balanced as a 1 shot close ranged OP gun)
This is the most egregious example as shown below. So as seen in the loadout section each dot on the wall is represented in the amount of damage each bullet does. In the picture there's 10 bullet holes. With some quick maths that's 100 damage total because 10x10 equivalent to full health. Enough to kill even if you aim at their torso. But! When you factor in anything from above like karma, body armor, hitreg, the spread making you miss a single pellet. You wont reliably get kills in 1 hit all the time. And that's all fine and dandy but this is the most cherry picked example because in order to kill in 1 hit like a scrub you need perfect conditions to even score a body shot kill with this gun. And you may say aim for the head and problem solved, right? The spread will mostly never actually hit their head and hit their shoulders in almost every case unless you're point blank which is the main use of a shotgun. It can even be disputed shotguns are also bad because during gun fights nobody is expected to have perfect aim but a lot of fights actually involve players jumping and distorting their hitbox by jump crouching or just normal jumping making you hit a players leg which does even less damage than a body shot. But this gun is really really terrible just from numbers alone. Adjusting the damage from even a small number like 1 or 2 would give enough room where in some cases would nullify the karma damage nerf (that is a percentage btw) or be able to fight back against D's or T's without tickling them while they just 1 tap you. From here on the same points still stand but would have to be tested for gameplay but each gun could be adjusted potentially would work like this (Damage from 10 to 11 because 10x11) because then it wouldn't be so oppressive where you have a Double Barrel situation where there feels like theres no counterplay you just die. Theres enough room with tweaks like these to make the gun feel usable instead of just an inferior reskin of other shotguns for example like the ammo capacity in the Winchester. And don't even get me started if you're even apart from your target than more than 7 feet applicable to every shotgun. There is no chance in hell you're gonna kill them even with a headshot in most scenarios. I will display all the rest of the shotguns and potentially proposed changes.


Mossberg: Literally the worst shotgun in the game because the amount of bullets is total of 8. 8x12=96,. Not even a 1 shot if you shoot all the bullets into a persons torso 1000 karma and even worse that it can't 1 shot a player despite how loud this gun is alerting the whole server. Worse spread than most shotguns. Could be brought up to 14 damage to make it 8x14=112. Keep in mind if the damage was 13, it would be 8x13=104 damage total and things like karma and body armor wouldn't be enough of a buff to reliably kill in most cases. Could be brought up to 16 to make it 128 damage total


Bernelli: One of the only usable shotguns in the game where you're able to have that player choice of intentionally aiming at their head of aiming at their torso. The bullets are shown as 8 total so 14x8=112. Proposed changes to make other shotguns match this kind of number. But with stuff like low karma and body armor this gun actually still feels pretty bad to use sometimes because it doesn't 1 shot most of the time even when aiming for the head because the spread is really high. Hypotheticals are like if you have the perfect spread variation, perfect karma, perfect aim and all your bullets hit. But even then you get shitreg and you do 0 damage total. Bringing most shotguns up to 120 damage or up for max amount of bullets may be a good zone due to never having perfect conditions. Could potentially be raised to 15 damage to make it 128 total


Default Shotgun: It's hard to see but trust, lol. 8 bullet holes equalling 8x14=112. Again, sounds fairly high damage for 1 click but not factoring anything. This could be raised from 14 damage to 15 to make it 15x8=120 or any higher to make it128


(And as a final note the Double Barrel is perfectly balanced as a 1 shot close ranged OP gun)
Last edited: