How to make Shot guns effective breaching weapon without being OP at long range.

It had always impressed me that shot guns in this game was effective at more realistic ranges compared to other FPS games out there, yet also have been a pet peev of mine to see shot guns for the BREACHER class be a useless weapon for actual breaching.

I have thought about many ways to balance this weapon, to be more suitable for CQB situation (and breaching) without being overly 'snipy' as it is currently used right now.

Here are my suggestions:

Mechanical Changes

  1. make the aim be slightly thrown off every time the pump action is performed. This would make it difficult to aim targets at long range quick enough for a fast burst of accurate down range fire at longer ranges.

Key Point: the manual pump reload (extra clicking before the automatic pump action takes place) would need to throw off the aim after pumping more significantly compared to the 'automatic' pumping which is slower, but less disruptive to the aim.

This makes a semi-realistic approach to nerfing shot guns at long range, as your handling of the weapon during a pump would shake the weapon a little anyway.

  1. Lower penetration for buck shot - especially heavy drop off for longer distances. (they realistically don't have very good penetration) This will reduce the effectiveness of buck shot for longer range. Note: I do admit, I'm not sure how good the penetration is for buck shots in this game, but armour at long distances should effectively block buck shots.

  2. Now that the shot gun has been nerfed for longer engagements, it needs to be more effective in close quarters by buffing up the pump speed (or decrease the delay). Especially for manual pumping, which means you can dump all 7 to 8 rounds in a quick burst. The current pumping speed for both manual and automatic is pathetically slow. Which makes close quarters engagements all about hitting the first shot quickly, and not expecting to survive when you miss.

  3. Reload speed needs to increase (or at least implement a speed reload). Pretty obvious, it is extremely discouraging factor for close quarter engagement when your reload takes almost 10 seconds. Which is another reason why longer engagements are preferred with this weapon.

  4. Introduce a "damage saturation" for limbs. Which just means that if multiple pellets from a single shot gun blast are hit on the limbs, the damage doesn't multiply for all the pellets and will only damage to a certain amount (saturated damage), which means a person could survive a single hit on the foot or a hand. This might not sound realistic at first, but also consider that the pellets essentially go through very small volume of area, which means the damage is essentially similar to 2 or 3 pellets going through the limbs.
    Game mechanical wise, this will reduce BS one shot to the foot with a shot gun, reducing its potential as a OP weapon.

With these changes in mind, I'd also like to suggest some pricing and minuet balancing changing.

  1. Increase the price of shotguns (I'd say 3 or 4 supply would be enough)

  2. Increase pricing of flechett (2 or 3?) since they are more rare. Also make them more intended for longer range engagements (less damage drop off and more penetration) and armour penetrating, but with less individual damage compared to buck shot, and due to saturation damage as mentioned above, less effective in close quarters.

These changes will effectively change how the shot gun would be played, from slow quick corner peaking shot by shot at long range meta - towards a more close quarter oriented breaching role as it is intended to be.

for reload there should be option for single shell reload or full reload .. speed reload would be just quick single reload.
Also manual pumping could be interesting .. something like manual bolt operation for bolt action rifles in some games ...

last edited by N4thani3l

@n4thani3l The manual pumping is already in the game I believe. You need to press it really fast to notice.

I like the current damage model on shotguns, it’s cool with weapons that don’t feel like water guns. It’s already effective in cqb if you hit your enemies with first shot - and I think the lethality of the gun together with low rpm and long reloading gives good balance.

@io543 press what ? I ment obligatory manual pump .. but perhaps it would be to much pain in the ass .. I wouldnt mind it but most players probably would

last edited by N4thani3l

The moment people start talking about arbitrary ideas of balance, tweak this, tweak that, we want it to be good at this but not that, you are always going to run into problems and create unrealistic scenarios.
The solution to making the shotgun perform the way it's suppose to, with all it's upsides and downsides, is to simply model the shotgun as close to reality as you can.

There's way more going against a shotgun being effective in a game like this than there is going for it, if weapons were just modeled after reality with exacting detail.

There's a reason shotguns are not used in the modern military for anything other than knocking down locked doors.
The guy who keeps it on hand for breaching doors doesn't even have the expectation that he's going to use it as his CQB combat weapon - he'll either want to switch out to an AR or let everyone else go in first with their ARs. Nobody I've ever heard of sees this as desirable or preferable to their AR for clearing houses. It's only necessary for door breaching because the AR doesn't have enough bullet mass to do the job.
Despite popular misconceptions, the shotgun is generally inferior as a room clearing weapon compared with the AR, especially in a military context.

Even fully automatic magazine fed shotguns like the AA12 don't get any traction in this role. There are just too many downsides for the few upsides you have over a fully automatic AR. Most are bulky guns, bulky magazines or drums if you're using them, completely unviable as a weapon platform if you're using a tube fed version, weight of ammo, less reliable ammo, and overall lack of versatility when you're not actually in a house. You can mitigate some of these issues with better designed guns, but ultimately there are certain things you aren't going to get rid of by the nature of the weapon which makes it something not worth developing as a military specific weapon. So they use off the shelf shotguns as door keys and that's it.

About the only upside to the shotgun is that per shot you'll do more damage. Which may not even be an upside unless you have a fully automatic version. But at point blank range a fully automatic 5.56 is probably not leaving you wishing you had a shotgun in your hands anyway. At such short range the 5.56 has enough velocity to deliver it's full stopping potential, even when delivered from a very short barrel.

last edited by GM29

They already are effective close range weapons. They're a one shot kill. If you're manually pumping, the shotgun will be ready to fire at the same time or before you switch your aim to the next target.