Combat shotgun needs some serious damage buffs or different variants to make it viable on harder difficulties. A slower firing high damage pump action one ( more akin to the actual arbites pattern shotgun ) would be excellent for 1 tapping big guys while keeping the faster firing semi auto shotgun for hordes and specialists. Some blessings that help with rending for both variants would help and make them more viable for heresy and damnation. Right now the combat shotgun is barely used because of its niche role. The smaller classes need a decent shotgun.
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It’s pretty good damage with no respite, pretty great with full bore as well. Honestly think it just needs a bunch more ammo. Like in the range of +50-+100%
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Haven’t farmed it for perks yet and it definitely feels weak damage wise. I do feel like there is an argument that a weapon should at least be decent before adding blessings, ESPECIALLY since it is the only standard human shotgun in the game rn.
I agree, shotgun isn’t in a great place right now. I don’t think an ammo buff is enough; it has pretty poor /inconistant breakpoints, mid burst DPS, and obviously is pretty awful at anything but close range. It becomes usable (and even strong) with certain blessings but is very underwhelming without them.
Also some of it’s blessings are just terrible, though I guess that’s uncommon for darktide. Regardless, i’d really like to see scattershot looked at in particular. ~5% non stacking crit chance bonus does next to nothing for a weapon like this, which already has low base crit and a pretty poor fire rate. The buff either needs to stack (like fire frenzy) or just be substantial to begin with (~20-25%.)
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Me and lawbringer are doing just fine with 22 shots in a row stomping damnations
Damage seems generally okay:
- 2nd best ranged DPS in game vs. Mauler
- great DPS vs. Flak Maniac/Hound
- good DPS vs. Mutant, Maniac
It’s the ammo that’s a problem, especially if the special on the default variant remains a horde-clear choice. Shotgun does about 22k damage (all shots fired), which is how I measure ammo efficiency, and the average weapon does 44k. Weapons designed to be shot against the horde need better than average ammo (although it can come in the form of piercing shots, and honestly I haven’t checked how much pierce Shotgun special ammo has against hordesit might actually be pretty good?)
But overall the current weapon’s attributes make it really great as a Zealot ranged weapon paired with a Turtolsky, since they only need to bring it out against non-horde targets (which it performs great against) and that means the main weakpoint (ammo) isn’t so bad that the weapon isn’t viable. It does leave you with a build that’s extremely weak vs. Crushers/Bulwarks though, so you just have to aggressively clear everything else so your team can handle those for you (or you can very very slowly handle them yourself).
I do find Braced Autoguns are slightly better at filling the exact same role though, so the full list of things I’d love to see are:
- Shotgun: 25% more ammo reserve
- Shotgun: pick a target type to give it even more DPS increase (so that it’s on the same level as a Braced Autogun)
- New Shotgun Variant: similar to the regular, but with Anti-Armor special ammo
- New Shotgun Type: pump shotgun
- New Shotgun Type: Shotlas. A laser shotgun. We live in the future, people. I brush my hair with lasers; I brush my teeth with lasers, and you can be damn sure I’m going to shotgun some enemies with laser too!
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Would love to run shotgun on my zealot. Still looking for a good use case. It needs to deliver more on a per round basis than it’s currently doing, or just have more rounds period.
I’m also still disappointed that there isn’t a shotgun that can open up a bulwark. I’m tired of always reverting back to the bolter for that, and the shotgun seems like such an obvious candidate for it.
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Doesn’t boltor have the best ranged DPS vs. Mauler? In addition to being able to shoot things at long range, deal damage to carapace armor, crack open bulwarks, aoe stagger…
Maybe the damage is good against hounds on paper, but the slow rof makes missing risky and the heavy stagger pushes them away from your effective range, making follow up shots weaker. Shooting them with a shotgun isn’t BAD, but in my experience it’s really not that good either.
Dps against muties and flak armor is decent. Not bad at all vs muties. It’s okay against maniacs, although zealot has better options.
But the break points are so ass (at least on damnation). Not being able to oneshot headshot gunners at any range hurts this weapon, because the first shot can easily knock them onto their ass, making follow up shots even less consistent and headshots impossible. Hell, even basic shooters can tank bodyshots pretty frequently if you aren’t breathing down their necks.
With a great roll (stacking damage buffs, flat damage increase) it starts to work, but it’s basic performance is really poor without these. And it still can’t kill things well at range.
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Ah yeah, you’re right! I have it recorded at 1500 (non-ADS), and Shotgun 1035. I’ll update the other post.
Sure, which is fairly well-suited to Sharpshooters who tend not to switch weapons as often, but not necessarily great for Zealots (where the equip time alone on Bolter makes me want to avoid it).
I have it at 861 DPS vs. Mutants, which isn’t bad, but I think you have to be 1000+ vs. Mutants to be great (Kantrael IV and XII, and quite a few of the Autoguns hit that; enough different weapons are 1000+ vs. Mutants that I can’t really pretend Shotgun is great at the job. But yes, in many situations it’ll do more DPS than your melee weapon, since there aren’t many melee weapons doing more than 861 vs. mutant.)
I don’t have Gunner DPS recorded for weapons, so not sure where the DPS falls, but it’s definitely more about DPS than Breakpoints on Damnation in terms of actually comparing weapons against each other. I mean it’s not like my Kantrael XIIs are one-shotting Gunners either, right? (Granted because I haven’t recorded DPS I’m still not sure if XII are even a great example here, I just know from using them they seem alright against Gunners. I actually should get around to testing Recon vs. Lasgun DPS vs. Gunners as I’ve always been curious if Recon puts out better DPS (like they do against several other target types). Maybe that should be my next crafting project after the Psyker Combat Axe.)
They can both two tap to head at close range, except the kantreal can also do it at almost any distance while being more ammo efficient. Kantreal can one tap headshot shooters at almost any distance, whereas shotgun cant as soon as they are in midrange. At very close range shotgun can one tap shooters to body, but the distance at which this stops being consistent is so short that it’s barely a significant advantage.
The dps is better but it’s not so good that it makes up for these downsides, in my opinion.
I agree, it feels pretty bad to use. In my opinion the numerous strengths (insanely high burst dps, armor damage, good breakpoints, good ranged damage, etc) completely outweighs the swap speed, but that’s a discussion for a different post, lol. I get where you’re coming from though, I don’t really like using it either.
Sorry, just wanted to add that I think the melee dps comparison can be a bit deceptive (at least on zealot), because zealots crit charge can chunk things like muties so well when using the right setup (hammer, eviscerator, crit knife). To be fair this isn’t a zealot only weapon, and not everybody uses those melees, but it’s worth considering that having ult melee synergy can in some cases mitigate the advantage of shotguns dps against certain targets.
For sure but it’s just not the case for a lot of weapons. Autopistol with god blessings gets +150% power. Heavy Sword, anything with slaughterer etc get mega boosted with the right blessings. Ideally blessings are toned down and base weapon stats are tuned up but for now we kinda have to discuss the weapons in terms of what they can do with good blessings.
The other advantage of more ammo is it would allow you to actually use the horde clear special utility more freely. Though I would also like to see the special load animation sped up a bit so you can get that off a little more fluidly.
Shotgun currently has potentially solid damage and good utility with its high stagger, as well as potential horde clear utility, it just doesn’t have the ammo to really use any of those facets efficiently.
Yeah, if it were buffed substantially I could honestly see it over performing with a really good roll. I think some of the blessings are bugged tbh because the damage increase from stacking fire frenzy seems erroneously high.
At the same time though, you get shoehorned into using it like a snowball weapon because it’s so mid without triggering blessings. Maybe that’s okay, but I wish It were different.
I believe shotgun is one of the weapons that still has a bugged version of Fire Frenzy 3 which gives +80% per stack rather than +8%.
I personally wasn’t considering that when I said it’s good damage with good blessings. I was purely referring to no respite (+20% damage on staggered enemy, stacks 5 times), and full bore (+15% power when all pellets hit one target). Those 2 are multiplicative with each other so can give pretty high output. They also aren’t hard to stack since they happen naturally with what you’re already doing most of the time AKA drilling a single target with consecutive shots.
This… OR there’s a need to lower the ammos of the bolter.
Revolver and shotgun suffer same problem, the lack of ammo.
In the thread about revolver i created, the solution that was proposed is to increase weak spot damages.
For shotgun this would not be a solution. In fact the shotgun does a good damages.
I tend to think that the bolter needs to get 50% of the ammo of revolver/shotgun… To avoid that the bolter has no ammo, the solution is to invert amount of ammo of the bolter and amount of the revolver.
Shotgun should have ammos close to the new amount of the revolver, maybe a little more (not piercing except with the correct blessing but only for critical shots)
I have just tested this gun to achieve deadeye penance, and succeeded to complete it, and I must say that I love this gun.
Especially cause I hate to always play with same weapon (bolter). But by playing with it, several guys asked me why I took the worst gun ever of darktide
I used it after using the braced autogun on zealot for ages.
The shotgun sucks in damnation compared to braced auto flamer bolter and lasguns.
I would increase the stagger so they go flying or just increase damage so it kills something the BAG do great at with way more ammo and range.
Would go with more ammo first and if that’s not enough then mess with damage numbers are bit.
Shotguns also seems to have non existent cleave from what I would call “horde clearing” weapon. So maybe that could also be a good value to tweak.
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Thats what the special shell is for.
Ive used the shotgun exclusively for the last like 20h of gameplay on my zealot and the special shell is WAY unerrated for its horde clear potential. Its the only thing the shotgun does right now that is ammo efficient. 4-8 shells will flatten a horde.
But yeah, it needs more ammo in reserve and more on pickup.
2 Likes
I’m still going to preach about replacing the horizontal special attack with dragon’s breath Wyrmsbreath shells to give us yet another way to set heretics on fire.
Just from trying it out in the meatgrinder it seems to barely do anything for the actual cleaving (aka how many targets your individual bullet will hit). Even the special would be lot better if it could just hit 1 target extra after the initial.