Doom Roguelike Equipment Analysis: Shotguns
Most Shotguns do Shrapnel damage, which on its own is a relatively boring damage type; the only differences of substance between it and Bullet damage is that they're separate resistances and that Shrapnel damage looks at enemy Protection and doubles it before having it reduce damage. (ie a Shrapnel attack into an enemy who has 1 point of Protection will lose 2 points of damage, not 1 point)
The resistance element is itself actually just an advantage in practice; a handful of enemies innately resist Bullet damage but no enemy innately resists Shrapnel damage. A similar point applies to Armors, though not quite the same; there are Armors that resist Shrapnel damage -quite a few of them do, in fact- but absolutely no Armor has its Shrapnel resistance higher than its Bullet resistance. More specifically, most Armors have their Bullet and Shrapnel resistances in lockstep (eg Green Armor has 15% resistance to both), and then a handful of Armors instead have significant Bullet resistance and no Shrapnel resistance. So for one thing don't expect your Bullet-Proof Vest to help much against Former Sergeants!
The Protection doubling aspect might seem like a big disadvantage relative to Bullet damage, but... less so than you might assume. First of all, Protection trends low on enemies; plenty of enemies don't have any Protection at all, and most of the enemies that have any have 1, maybe 2 points. This intersects nicely with the second element: that Shotguns have really high base damage. The lowest per-hit damage you see on a Shotgun is 7d3; that's 7-21 damage. Reminder that a basic Pistol's maximum damage is 8; even the weakest Shotgun doing the lowest damage roll is only 1 point behind that! Between these two points, being hit twice as hard by Protection is often only mildly reining in the strength of Shotguns...
... well, before we get into the third big wrinkle of Shotguns, anyway, which is that after a Shotgun's damage has been rolled against a given target the damage is then reduced by a percentage based on how far away the target is from the shooter and which type of Shotgun made the attack. This occurs before damage resistances and Protection are applied, and is fully multiplicative with damage resistances; if your Shotgun loses 50% of its damage to range drop-off while firing into a target with 50% Shrapnel resistance, you're down to 25% of whatever you rolled on damage. (eg an 8 becoming a 2) And then that doubled Protection gets to lower it further.
As for the specifics...
Shotgun range behaviors
'Normal': 15 tiles of range, spread of 3, loses 7% of damage per tile out
'Focused': 15 tiles of range, spread of 2, loses 5% damage per tile out
'Wide': 8 tiles of range, spread of 3, loses 10% damage per tile out
'Plasma': 15 tiles of range, spread of 3, loses 5% damage per tile out
... the above are the four range/spread profiles available to Shotguns. Range is straightforward: unlike most ranged attacks, Shotguns don't generate a projectile that travels until it hits something, but instead hit everything along their firing path but have an arbitrary maximum range past which they can't hit anything, with this being 15 tiles on most Shotguns (ie slightly over twice normal maximum sight range) and a mere 8 tiles for Double Shotguns. (Which are the only Shotgun type to use the Wide profile) Though of course walls will still block the attack.
Spread works out to a maximum of 10 endpoint tiles for spread 3 and 6 endpoint tiles for spread 2. (That's the most I can get with in-game testing, anyway) The wiki says the following:
To calculate a shotgun's area of effect, first a target square is calculated by extrapolating from the vector pointing at the manually targeted square. The true target will be a tile that is at the shotgun's maximum range with an approximately parallel vector. Then, for each tile in a (2 × spread + 1) side-length square around the target, the game traces out the path of a missile until it hits a wall. (Shotgun blasts go through enemies.) The missile paths are truncated if the distance along one of the axes becomes greater than the shotgun's range. For each tile that was traced out in at least one of the missile paths, damage is applied.
The most relevant point here is the (2*spread+1) part of the formula: that says the square produced has its maximum length be 6 for 2 and 8 for 3 (Spread 3 adds 1 then doubles it: 8. Spread 2 adds 1 then doubles it: 6), so I'm not sure if the wiki's explanation is incorrect, or I'm just misunderstanding what it's trying to say, or what, but there you go.
Anyway, when I say 'Shotguns hit everything in their firing path', I should clarify that they skip Accuracy checks. If a target is in the fire zone, it's hit. Period. This makes Shotguns very reliable and good in general, though it also means they don't benefit from Eagle Eye or Agility Mod Packs, which can be awkward depending on your Mastery and all. It also makes Shotguns king of 'corner shooting', which is a bug/exploit-turned-feature: in short, the game's rules for drawing line of sight and drawing line of fire aren't actually the same, and more specifically they're different such that you can often fire into areas you can't see because terrain is in the way -firing right around corners. (Hence 'corner shooting') Shotguns still suffer performance loss at longer ranges, but instead of suffering an Accuracy penalty they sub in losing some percentage of damage for each tile out a victim is when hit.
So let's talk about that system.
The percent damage drop-off is straightforward in broad terms but there's assorted wrinkles to it. First is the consideration of rounding: these modifiers are rarely going to produce clean whole numbers, and when they fail to do so the group prefers to round to the nearest whole number. (eg 18.7 would round up to 19, while 12.2 would round down to 12) In the event that the result specifically ends in .5 (eg 18.5, or 15.5), the game rounds it to the nearest even whole number. (So 18.5 would round down to 18, whereas 15.5 would round up to 16)
Also, note that range drop-off occurs immediately, even when firing point-blank. Due to the very high maximum damage on literally all Shotguns, this wrinkle completely prevents Shotguns from ever actually doing their theoretically maximum damage; a basic Shotgun's maximum damage is theoretically 24, but point-blank it still loses 7%, resulting in 22.32 which gets rounded down to 22 damage. Combat Shotguns and Assault Shotguns have a lower maximum damage of 21 and only lose 5% per tile -but that's still enough to shave off over a point of damage, resulting in 19.95 that rounds up to 20. In theory a weak enough Shotgun could actually get its maximum damage at point-blank -a base of 10 damage with the Focused range profile would do- but that doesn't exist in the game so in practice you should treat all Shotgun damage as at least 1 point below its 'on-paper' maximum. (Such as if you're playing Angel of Max Carnage and so can count on always getting the highest possible damage roll) Usually 2 points below maximum.
Also, it should be pointed out the consideration of maximum drop-off: a Wide shot will, at its maximum range of 8 tiles, have lost 80% of the original damage roll. A Focused or Plasma shot will, at its maximum range of 15 tiles, have lost 75% of its original damage roll. A Normal Shotgun shot will, at its maximum range of 15 tiles, have lost... 105% of its original damage roll?
... I assume this means a Normal profile always does exactly 1 damage at 15 tiles, given Doom Roguelike's preferences in regards to damage modification, but setting up conditions to test this for absolute sure is a nuisance: it's possible that the damage does get reduced to 0 but provokes enemies anyway. And it is specifically 15 tiles; at 14 tiles, the Normal profile produces 98% damage reduction, which is much more straightforward to understand. (Your shot did 1 damage. Given the numbers involved... it did 1 damage)
I should also explicitly point out a counterintuitive aspect to Shotguns: the damage roll is per target. That is, it's possible to fire your Shotgun at two Imps, one right next to you and the other a few tiles away, and have the one next to you survive and the one in the distance die first because you rolled low against the close-up target and high on the distant target. Doom Roguelike always rolls damage separately per target when hitting multiple targets, but in the context of these being Shotguns it can feel weird to have a point-blank blast not kill a fresh victim while an identical enemy beyond them goes down: you'd expect closer targets to absorb pellets and prevent them from going on past to at least some extent.
Anyway, the final big distinction of Shotguns is they have superior knockback; where the 'default' knockback behavior is that an attack does 1 tile of knockback for every 10 points of damage, Shotguns only require 7 points of damage per tile of knockback. In conjunction with how high their base damage is, Shotguns can easily knock a target back 2 tiles, and some Shotguns can natively get up to 3 tiles of knockback!
That said, I covered the range dropoff before this knockback point because Shotgun range dropoff has the unique distinction of being a damage modifier that affects knockback. The main other percentage modifier -damage resistance- does not do this, where the player's resistance and Protection can knock the final damage way down but the base roll was high enough for 3 tiles of knockback and so 3 tiles of knockback occurs. As such, Shotgun knockback is very much a close-quarters thing: at the edge of line of sight, a basic Shotgun can do at most 12 damage, and so at most gets 1 tile of knockback, even though its raw base damage allows for up to 3 tiles of knockback. Indeed, even at 3 tiles out it becomes impossible for an unmodified basic Shotgun to do 3 tiles of knockback; its best damage is 19 in that condition, not the 21 it needs.
And... that's all the big-picture stuff. On to specifics!
(Basic) Shotgun
Damage: 8d3
Range: Normal
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 1 second
Clip: 1
Alternate Reload: N/A
Alternate Fire: N/A
Minimum floor: 2 (Technically)
The basic Shotgun is your default workhorse weapon. In a standard run the first floor is guaranteed to have a Former Sergeant for you to loot a Shotgun and 30~ shells from, and you really should always take advantage. Indeed, Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 actually have a bit of a death roulette-y start precisely because they don't force you to get a Shotgun before facing more than Former Humans and Former Sergeants; a Shotgun is a drastic increase in performance over a Pistol, between not missing, hitting multiple targets at once, and the huge damage per shot. Even with having to reload after every shot and suffering damage drop-off at a distance, a Shotgun is an enormous damage increase: say you roll 12 damage (ie half your maximum damage) and hit a target at line of sight. That results in 6 damage, ie 75% of a basic Pistol's maximum damage. With no chance of missing! Yes, the Pistol gets to fire 6 times before it needs a reload where the Shotgun has to reload between every shot, but I deliberately picked the Shotgun-unfavorable end of realistic conditions; there are plenty of times you'll be shooting from closer distances, and while the Pistol gets a bit more Accuracy out of being closer the impact on average or expected damage to the Pistol does not remotely approach the gains the Shotgun gets out of being closer.
And that's against a single target, when a Shotgun can blast multiple targets per shot, and in realistic play quite regularly will hit multiple targets. And is far superior at corner-shooting, since it ignores Accuracy checks, including ignoring the extra 50% chance to whiff when firing into the dark!
The Shotgun is also especially helpful at dealing with early pinkie Demons, which can soak a ton of punishment, eat ground so fast that even Running doesn't create space, and regularly show up in groups even quite early in a run thanks in part to Vaults liking to spawn them en mass. A Pistol (If not backed by Son of a Gun) expects to have a pinkie Demon spotted at line of sight successfully get into melee and bite multiple times before actually dying. A Shotgun expects to repeatedly buy time via knockback, do greater damage per target, and where a Pistol is not going to save you from a Vault of 6 pinkies pouring out of a door you foolishly opened, a Shotgun can easily clear out the entire group with minimal harm taken.
In a standard run you'll normally replace the Shotgun eventually (Unless you Assemble an Elephant Gun out of one, which is worth considering due to its excellent ammo efficiency), and even in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs you'll almost always get a Combat Shotgun eventually, but the Shotgun is surprisingly viable, being the only basic weapon that can be a workhorse weapon with zero Trait support for a substantial fraction of the game.
It also is a good introduction to a useful quality of Shotguns: radar shooting!
This is an interesting quirk arising organically from four points: first, Shotguns don't miss, period. Second, except for the Double Shotgun all Shotguns can shoot past line of sight. Third, (most) enemies audibly scream in pain when successfully injured. And fourth, enemies in Doom Roguelike are provoked by Doomguy doing damage to them, temporarily seeking out Doomguy even if Doomguy is not visible to them.
Altogether, the net result is that firing a Shotgun is a useful way to scout with minimal danger. Instead of walking forward and discovering three Barons of Hell and an Archvile are just ahead by virtue of entering their sight and eating a bunch of damage before you can respond, you fire into the dark, hear multiple Baron pain sounds plus an Archvile pain sound, and now you can retreat to a good spot to corner-shoot them all to death while they obligingly charge right into your gun's range.
Just keep in mind that some enemies share pain noises (eg Former Humans, Former Sergeants, and Imps), and many of the game's 'custom' enemies don't use pain noises at all. Late in an Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 run, you might hit a bunch of enemies but get no feedback suggesting this happened, and so when you shrug and walk forward thinking there's no enemies ahead a swarm of Nightmare Arachnotrons pops out of the shadows and immediately shreds you because you provoked them.
I should also point out that the 'provoked' behavior isn't what you're likely to intuit (Unless you're really used to video games, anyway), in that provoked enemies don't go charging where you attacked them from or something, they just magically know your exact current position for a few of their turns. This intersects with the AI pathing being pretty dumb to make it so you can screw yourself over by doing things that don't seem like they should screw you over.
Say you're trying to corner-shoot from the north side of a wall tile. The wall continues to the west for many tiles, and you corner-shoot an enemy that's 1 tile east and up to 15 tiles south: if you hold your position, this enemy will keep advancing due north, letting you keep corner-shooting them in safety...
... but if you walk 1 tile west (To trigger a Shottyman reload, for example), the enemy will sense your new position and want to move west itself to better align with your current position. If you go two tiles west, it will go even further west even though that adds a turn delay before it can get around the corner! Suddenly your corner-shooting stops working: if you don't have Intuition 2 or a Tracking Map effect, you won't have any indication of what went wrong until they take the corner and are in your face. If you were shooting multiple enemies at once, you might not even realize one of them stopped being in your line of fire until they're in melee!
So do be aware that hitting enemies in the dark will draw them to your current position regardless of what it might seem like they should be able to reasonably know.
Now let's talk about ammo!
Shotgun Shells
50 shells at most in a tile or inventory slot. When generated on the floor, spawns in a stack of 16/8/10/12/16. (Difficulty-dependent)
Minimum floor: 2 (technically)
Conversely, if you're committing to Just Shotguns (Such as because you're doing Angel of Shotgunnery), do be aware that this makes you especially susceptible to RNG-based ammo starvation since it doesn't matter how much ammo is on a floor if none of it is Shotgun Shells. The early portion of a run reliably has tons of Shotgun Shells, but the midgame and late game portions of a run can just... go several floors without replacement Shotgun Shells appearing. Shotgun runs can find it worthwhile to abuse late-game Archviles to keep resurrecting a single Former Sergeant to restock on ammo: any (non-melee) run can find this kind of behavior worthwhile, but Shotgun-committed runs are at the overall greatest risk of it being unambiguously necessary.
This was especially so in 0.9.9.7 due to how 'ammo rooms' worked in it: you could only get Shells from such rooms in floors 3-9 (They were guaranteed to give Shells for most of that range if they spawned: floors 3-7), and so once you were past Phobos you were basically relying on enemies and regular floor generation of items for more Shells.
50 Shells to a stack is of course half the amount of 10mm ammo you can store in an inventory slot, but outside Pistol builds Shotgun Shells generally go farther per slot than 10mm ammo stacks because of Shotguns mostly using only 1-2 ammo at a time (Where non-Pistol uses of 10mm ammo tend to start from eating 4 ammo per volley), hitting quite hard per shot, and getting to multiply their efficiency anytime multiple targets are in range to be hit.
But what about the Shotgun version of a 10mm ammo chain?
Shotgun Shell Box
100 shells per box.
Minimum floor: 4
The Shotgun Shell Box is exactly like the 10mm ammo chain, but for Shotguns: if you put it in your Prepared slot, reloading your equipped Shotgun will occur in 20% of the time it normally takes you to reload your Shotgun.
Shotguns are, by default, heavy on reloading, so a Shotgun Shell Box is actually a noticeably bigger increase in performance than a 10mm ammo chain is... with the caveat that Shottyman exists and does not pull ammo from a Shell Box when triggered. (Unless no regular Shells are in your inventory and a Shell Box is in your Prepared slot: in that case, Shottyman will pull from the Shell Box. This does not affect the time taken to move, to be explicit)
This can be useful if you're aware of it, mind, as you can Shottyman-reload in combat conditions if it's not important you hold still and keep firing, thus extending a Shell Box's lifespan and readily reserving it for when you need to just spam shots. That's a nice advantage relative to a 10mm ammo chain, which lacks an equivalent way to conveniently reload from regular ammunition when appropriate. It's especially nice as a quality-of-life thing in that if you kill the last enemy around you, you don't have to put any effort into taking advantage; Doomguy will just automatically reload from regular shells as you direct him to get walking.
With most Shotguns, a Shell Box saves 80 seconds of reloading over its lifetime. Super Shotguns only save 60 seconds, while the Jackhammer saves roughly 22 seconds. Shell Boxes are pretty unambiguously the winner at improving time efficiency: they're not as good as a 10mm Ammo Chain at improving inventory efficiency (Only 2 slots worth of storage for 1 slot, not 2.5 slots worth), but wow do they save time.
This does come with the qualifier that you're more likely to have Reloader 2 if you're focusing on Shotguns than if you're focusing on the weapons that use 10mm ammo: with Reloader 2, suddenly you only actually save 48 seconds with most Shotguns.
On the other hand, since the most common Shotguns have to fire after every single shot, a Shell Box often functions as a significant improvement to ongoing damage output in a fight, where eg using a 10mm Ammo Chain to reload a Chaingun is by default only improving turnaround after every 10th round of firing and so has a much more mild impact on DPS. (Even with Chainguns taking much longer per reload than Shotguns)
And that Shottyman interaction smooths out a lot of the jank with using Shell Boxes in a way that simply can't be replicated with 10mm ammo chains...
... unless you have a specific Unique Shotgun, anyway...
Double Shotgun
Damage: 9d3*2
Range: Wide
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 2 seconds (Loads 2 shells)
Clip: 2
Alternate Reload: Single Reload. Loads only one shell, taking just as long as a standard reload.
Alternate Fire: Single Shot. Fires one shot for one ammo, instead of two shots for two ammo. Firing speed is standard.
Minimum floor: 2
Note that the Double Shotgun mechanically fires its two shots sequentially, and so applies knockback to the target with one shot before calculating the damage of the other shot. As such, unless a victim is unable to be knocked back for some reason, the Double Shotgun's true damage is generally lesser than just crunching the numbers straightforwardly would suggest. To give an example, we'll just assume you're playing Angel of Max Carnage and firing on a target that is 2 tiles away; this takes your base max damage of 27 and reduces it by 20%, which results in 21.6 which then rounds up to 22 damage. So that's 44 damage done, right? You're hitting twice, after all. Well, no, because the first shot hits and knocks the target 3 tiles back, so the second shot has the range penalty rise from 20% to 50% of its damage, resulting in 13.5 which rounds up to 14 damage. That gives us a total of 36 damage instead of our expected 44; about 18% less damage than the Double Shotgun would do in these conditions if its shots calculated their damage simultaneously instead of sequentially.
Protection of course exaggerates the problem; say you're shooting a Baron of Hell, which has 60 HP and 2 Protection. That results in the first shot being lowered from 22 damage to 18 damage, and the second shot lowered from 14 damage to 10 damage; simultaneous resolution would've given us 36 damage, but sequential resolution instead gives us 28 damage, which is about 22% less damage. It also notably crosses a 'magic number'; simultaneous resolution would mean 2 shots performed at range 2 (Such as by virtue of standing at a corner and waiting to fire the second time until they get to range 2 again) would kill the Baron of Hell, but sequential resolution means it instead lives with 4 HP remaining.
An additional bit of jank introduced by the sequential resolution is that your final damage is dependent on what order the game decided to slot the damage rolls in. To give an example, let's say you fire on a target at range 3, and in this particular case we say one shot rolled maximum damage and one rolled minimum damage; that's 19 damage and 6 damage after range drop-off. If the max-damage roll hits first, it knocks the target back 3 tiles, and instead the min-damage roll does 4 damage, so you get a total of 23 damage. (Instead of the 25 damage our initial numbers give) If instead the min-damage roll hits first, no initial knockback occurs and so our initial damage numbers are our actual damage numbers; that's only a couple points of damage different, but it's one more oddity introduced by the shots being sequential rather than simultaneous like you'd expect. (And it should be noted that the game's audio and visual elements point toward 'simultaneous resolution' rather than the actual truth of 'sequential resolution')
All this makes it difficult to get a proper handle on the Double Shotgun's performance, not to mention drags its potential down a fair bit.
It's also worth pointing out that the primary reason it outputs more damage than a basic Shotgun is that it fires two shots at once. Its raw damage per shot is only a little bit higher in the first place (it adds 1 more die, which works out to roughly a 13% increase in damage), and then the Wide range type having more rapid damage drop-off rapidly erodes the difference; at range 2, a basic Shotgun loses 14% of its damage and so its maximum damage drops from 24 to 21. A Double Shotgun instead loses 20%, and so its maximum damage per shot drops from 27 to 22. At range 3 they both have a maximum of 19 damage! And past range 3 the Double Shotgun just plain has worse damage per shot.
So for one thing the Double Shotgun is actually worse when it comes to ammo efficiency unless specifically fired on targets that are 1-2 tiles away.
This point unfortunately leaves the alternate fire and by extension alternate reload in a pretty poor place. I'm having trouble thinking of a situation that is both realistic to occur and a case where using the single shot mode really adds anything over either firing both barrels or switching to a different Shotgun. In theory single-shot mode could be used to improve ammo efficiency against particularly frail targets like Former Humans, but trying to do so would be risky outside Angel of Max Carnage; nothing has less than 10 HP in Doom Roguelike, and a Double Shotgun's minimum damage per shot is actually 9. So even aside damage drop-off, a Double Shotgun can always roll low enough to leave even the frailest targets alive, while single-shot mode has no advantages aside hopefully saving ammo or letting you split fire.
Combat Shotguns exacerbate the issue as they're far superior for splitting fire and pacing out shots for ammo efficiency purposes and are in fact overall superior all-around, while being a common find in general and outright guaranteed from relatively early in the game via Special Levels if dipping into the appropriate Special Levels.
Honestly, in general the Double Shotgun kind of mystifies me. It has some limited utility as a swap for outputting a lot of damage in a pinch (Especially if you have Juggler), and it's somewhat important for the fact that it acts as the basis of Assembling what amounts to a (bad) Super Shotgun, but I don't really get why the benefits of close-quarters shooting with a Double Shotgun are such a mild bump over other Shotguns given it's designed to be such a severe downgrade when not fired in extreme close-quarters.
My best guess is its jank is something of a side effect of how Doom Roguelike evolved -the current design is anchored pretty heavily in the fact that corner shooting exists. My impression is that the baseline concept was much more focused on Dodging as a foundation of combat, where the player was expected to do things like make zig-zag approaches in open terrain; in conjunction with Shottyman, a Double Shotgun probably would be a reasonably good trade compared to a basic Shotgun, since Shottyman reloads don't care about the base reload speed. With corner shooting, though, it often makes sense to stand in one spot and pump damage into targets while they're unable to retaliate, which is a context in which the Double Shotgun's poor reload speed and dubious ammo-to-damage efficiency are very pertinent flaws.
The Double Shotgun can still make sense to keep as a swap, especially if you have Juggler (Even without Juggler, by default a swap with the Prepared slot is faster than reloading a basic Shotgun... though not faster than if you have 2 ranks in Reloader), as suddenly bursting out a lot of damage on a target that's in your face can be a life-saver, whether by killing it or by knocking it away so it can't melee you, but overall it's pretty niche and I suspect tends to be effectively a trap for learning players; the in-game info really looks like its only disadvantage relative to a basic Shotgun is the reload speed issue, and it's easy to notice in playing the game that Shottyman reloads don't care about that, so I imagine a fair few players just swap to the Double Shotgun when they first see it and take multiple runs to figure out that it's absolutely not a straightforward upgrade over a basic Shotgun.
Mostly, though, it's worth considering holding onto an early copy if you intend to get Whizkid 1 and turn it into a Focused Double Shotgun. Personally, I'd rather Assemble a basic Shotgun into an Elephant Gun, which for one thing is just plain more ammo efficient, but a Focused Double Shotgun is superior at killing things quickly.
Combat Shotgun
Damage: 7d3
Range: Focused
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 1 second (Loads 1 shell)
Clip: 5
Alternate Reload: Full reload, taking 0.2 seconds longer than it would take to manually reload all involved shots.
Alternate Fire: N/A
Special: Must be 'pumped' between shots. This happens automatically and for free if you move, but can be initiated while holding still by performing a reload action. Manual pumping takes 0.2 seconds, and is not modified by effects that modify reload speed in particular. Pumping does not need to be performed if the Combat Shotgun's ammo hits zero.
Minimum floor: 6
While the Combat Shotgun has slightly lower base damage than a basic Shotgun, in practice Combat Shotguns are largely a straightforward improvement over a basic Shotgun. Pumping by default is much faster than a normal reload, so a Combat Shotgun rapidly pulls ahead on damage on the basis of getting more shots per second (You need Reloader 3 or a Shell Box for this to stop being true), and it having the Focused range type means it has generally superior performance at longer ranges even on a per-shot basis in addition to a per-second basis.
For example, at range 7 (ie one short of line of sight) a basic Shotgun is suffering a 49% penalty, whereas a Combat Shotgun is only suffering a 35% penalty. Using their respective maximum damage as our starting point, the basic Shotgun starts from 24 damage, reduces that to 12.24, then rounds it to 12 damage, whereas the Combat Shotgun starts from 21 damage, reduces that to 13.65, then rounds it up to 14 damage, thus outright doing 2 more points of damage even though it started 3 points behind. Indeed, the basic Shotgun only expects to do more damage per shot to targets that are within 3 tiles. And while I'm using maximum damage for these numbers, the principles are reasonably general -comparing different exact damage rolls will produce cases where the damage rounds differently, but this is all invisible to the player anyway, not something you can really plan around or respond to when it comes up.
For a standard run, there are multiple early Special Levels with guaranteed Combat Shotguns, so any standard run that makes use of Shotguns in the mid-early game can count on being able to upgrade to Combat Shotguns and should plan appropriately. Among other points, using Mod Packs on a basic Shotgun in the early game is often a dubious choice; if you're not pretty specifically Assembling an Elephant Gun with intent to keep on using it to at least some extent even after you have a Combat Shotgun, Mod Packs into a regular Shotgun are liable to be wasted Mod Packs.
Also, I should explicitly point out that Shottyman triggering and 'pumping' happening for free when moving don't compete or anything; moving with Shottyman pumps the shotgun and reloads it, both at no additional time cost.
Also, a nuisance when playing primarily with a mouse; a convenient element of the game is that right-clicking to fire on a target when out of ammo automatically causes Doomguy to interpret the input as 'reload', and so the player can simply continuously right-click in combat even when needing to reload regularly. (As happens with most Shotguns) Pumping the Combat Shotgun does not count as being out of ammo for this purpose; right-clicking a target when needing to pump will give you an error message about how you need to reload or move to pump the Combat Shotgun, and you'll need to right-click on Doomguy in specific if you want him to pump the shotgun without moving. (Or use the keyboard input; the 'r' key by default) So that's an annoying thing with using a Combat Shotgun.
The Full Reload might seem pointless, and, well, it mostly is. I don't get why it outright adds a time surcharge; I'd expect it to do something like multiply the base time per-shell by 0.8 (ie shave off 20% of the total time) and maybe add 0.2 seconds at the end so it isn't faster than a regular reload at loading a single shell. (Which would result in loading all 5 shells taking 4.2 seconds vs 5 seconds from regular reloading; a modest-but-existent benefit)
Regardless, there is a context in which using it makes actual mechanical sense: when benefitting from a buff, such as Berserk or especially Invulnerable. Buffs in Doom Roguelike run their duration off player actions, not the game's global time tracking, and so manually reloading an empty Combat Shotgun will bring buffs 5 steps closer to ending whereas performing a Full Reload will bring buffs only 1 step closer to ending. Invulnerable in particular makes you, well, invulnerable, and so even doing a Full Reload in combat is basically all upside; the only bad things that can happen is that you might get knocked into an undesirable position, or that enemies might destroy items on the ground and/or terrain in the area that you might've been able to prevent if you'd done a regular reload. If none of that is a concern, though, a Full Reload while Invulnerable is just the superior thing to do.
Anyway, the Combat Shotgun is a very versatile, useful Shotgun, and notably has a unique Assembly -the Tactical Shotgun- to strip out the pumping mechanic and so noticeably improve its ability to just spit out damage, especially toward the beginning of an engagement. (Since pumping doesn't occur when you drop to 0 ammo, and so if you hit that point the Tactical Shotgun stops providing benefits until such time as you perform at least 2 reloads between shots) This is a big boon to corner shooting in particular, and also just a quality-of-life improvement due to the previously-covered jank with pumping not occurring when right-clicking a target.
Notably, the Tactical Shotgun Assembly is a Basic Assembly that only demands a Technical Mod Pack and a Power Mod Pack, which is only modestly 'costly' of a requirement and so can be done early relatively reliably with low odds that it's really taking away or delaying other important Assemblies. Also notable back in 0.9.9.7 was it was very much okay to do this early without waiting for Whizkid 2, as the Tactical Shotgun is essentially guaranteed to be displaced eventually, where it being at slightly less than its theoretical peak wasn't an issue because you very possibly would replace it before you even had Whizkid 2.
All this contributes to the Combat Shotgun being a good staple weapon for a good chunk of many runs, even though there's a fair argument that in the very long haul it's actually one of the worst Shotguns in the game.
Assault Shotgun
Damage: 7d3
Range: Focused
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 1 second (Loads 1 shell)
Clip: 6
Alternate Reload: Full reload, taking 0.2 seconds longer than it would take to manually reload all involved shots.
Alternate Fire: N/A
Minimum floor: 6
The Assault Shotgun graphic is the Combat Shotgun graphic with the Exotic purple glow, for reference.
The Assault Shotgun is of course a straightforward improvement over a Combat Shotgun, eliminating the pump mechanic and adding an extra unit of ammo to the clip with absolutely no tradeoff, and in turn is even more straightforward of an overall improvement over basic Shotguns. Notably, if you're hitting all the Special Levels you'll eventually pick up an Assault Shotgun -this takes a while, though, so you shouldn't necessarily be reluctant to mod a Combat Shotgun. Sure, Assembling a Tactical Shotgun may result in you randomly finding an Assault Shotgun that completely invalidates it almost immediately, but you won't get a guaranteed Assault Shotgun until so late a Tactical Shotgun has had plenty of time to put in work.
Anyway, the Assault Shotgun is in fact a sufficiently straightforward improvement I don't have a lot to say about it in particular. It's a good workhorse Shotgun that you're quite likely to make use of if your run isn't disdaining Shotguns in general by the time you find one, and the nature of its differences from a Combat Shotgun just gives me less to talk about. The Full Reload implications are the same, for example.
Super Shotgun
Damage: 8d4*2
Range: Normal
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 1.5 seconds (Loads 2 shells)
Clip: 2
Alternate Reload: N/A
Alternate Fire: N/A
Minimum floor: 10
Graphically, this is of course the Double Shotgun graphic with the Exotic purple glow.
Like the Double Shotgun, the Super Shotgun resolves its 2 shots sequentially rather than simultaneously, and so will tend to do less damage than you might expect from relatively casual calculations, including the wonkiness where how the damage rolls are ordered is a factor. Its even higher damage and lesser damage loss to range makes the knockback more reliable about coming up, too, though this is partially offset by it losing less damage per tile.
Say you fire at range 2 and roll max damage on both rolls; that's a base damage of 32 reduced by 14% to 27.52, which rounds up to 28. Thus, the first shot hits for 28 damage, knocks the target back by 4 (!) tiles, and the second shot thus occurs at 6 tiles, is reduced by 42% to 18.56 damage that then rounds up to 19 damage, and thus that second shot missed out on 9 points of damage relative to if the shots were resolved simultaneously!
Even with minimum damage on both shots, that's 7 damage, 1 tile of knockback, then 6 damage; this is basically inescapable outside shooting targets that are up against a wall or are innately immune to knockback. Fortunately, the Super Shotgun is so enormously lethal this is only modestly problematic; the max-damage numbers I gave earlier is a total of 47 damage, which will instantly paste a lot of the game's enemies, and most enemies that will survive 47 damage would still survive 56 damage. (Which is the damage that would happen if damage was resolved simultaneously in my earlier example)
Note that unlike a Double Shotgun, you can't single-fire or single-reload a Super Shotgun except through the indirect method of your ammo situation resulting in loading one Shell and in turn firing one shot.
The Super Shotgun is itself by default straightforwardly the overall Best Shotgun if you're lucky enough to find it. Its base damage is so high that it generally outperforms an Assault Shotgun when it comes to ammo efficiency even on pretty long-range shots, in spite of losing more damage percent per tile of distance. (eg the max-roll range 7 comparison gives an Assault Shotgun 14 damage and a Super Shotgun 16 damage: it's not until past range 10 that an Assault Shotgun will usually do more damage per ammo) When it comes to damage per pull of the trigger it's only beaten out by one Unique Shotgun, and the Unique Shotgun in question has worse ammo efficiency and of course can't be modded. The Super Shotgun's damage is in fact so high that even with the need to reload it by default has better DPS than an Assault Shotgun when firing on targets within a few tiles.
It's most obviously The Best Shotgun if you're talking from the perspective of Assembling a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun, where its need to reload a lot with 1.5 second reloads becomes completely irrelevant and its comparatively high susceptibility to Protection becomes a moot issue. Less drastic but still relevant is the Army of the Dead Mastery on the Marine, which once again makes its relative vulnerability to Protection irrelevant.
But even outside those scenarios, it's great! It's probably better than the all of Unique Shotguns, in fact, given you can't mod those if you're not a Technician. (And even a Technician can only limitedly mod them)
But it's appropriately rare: I noted earlier that Assembling a Focused Double Shotgun is worth considering, and while I'm not very fond of doing so it is way more reliable a way to get the core benefits of finding a Super Shotgun than hoping you find an actual Super Shotgun. The majority of runs will never see one. And making a Nano-shrapnel Super Shotgun is even less likely to happen: so far in all my time playing Doom Roguelike, I've had things line up right for that once. (It was completely disgusting when it did happen, mind, as it was a Shottyhead Scout: this was in fact my first complete victory, as my mastery of the game was still low when it happened but a Nano-shrapnel Super Shotgun backed by Shottyhead made my own skills largely moot: just shoot into the darkness until the screams stop, walk forward a bit, repeat until victorious)
Plasma Shotgun
Damage: 7d3
Range: Plasma
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 2 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 30
Alternate Reload: N/A
Alternate Fire: N/A
Special: Damage type is Plasma, ammo type is Power Cell, consumes 3 ammo per shot.
Minimum floor: 12
Note that a Plasma Shotgun is unaffected by Army of the Dead, because its damage type isn't Shrapnel. Similarly, you can apply the Plasmatic Shrapnel Shotgun Assembly to it, but it's just a waste of Mod Packs since it already does Plasma damage.
Also, a non-obvious mechanics point is that the Plasma Shotgun being a Shotgun with the Plasma damage type results in it destroying all corpses in its strike zone when fired, making it shockingly useful when dealing with Archviles. This is particularly significant in the Mortuary and Limbo, of course, and is also particularly worth noting in a Nightmare! and/or Angel of Darkness run, as enemies revive spontaneously on their own in such runs.
Anyway, the fact that the Plasma Shotgun uses Power Cells is, within most runs, a bit of a mixed bag. You can compare a Plasma Shotgun pretty directly to an Assault Shotgun (Or a Combat Shotgun Assembled into a Tactical Shotgun), and they have the same base damage, the same damage drop-off from range, and so before accounting for damage type implications the Plasma Shotgun is much hungrier for ammo relative to inventory slots.
That is, Shells and Power Cells both stack up to 50 units in an inventory slot, but where an Assault Shotgun spends 1 ammo per shot a Plasma Shotgun spends 3; thus, a stack of Power Cells will last a third as long for feeding a Plasma Shotgun than a stack of Shells would feed an Assault Shotgun.
This is complicated by the fact that Power Cells are generally much more common in the late game, as Former Sergeants become rare, Arachnotrons enter rotation and never go away, and in 0.9.9.7 'ammo rooms' would only generate Power Cells if you were deeper than floor 11, but for a Plasma Shotgun looted early (eg spawning in a Vault) this is initially a pretty serious limitation, and crucially it puts the Plasma Shotgun in competition with Plasma Rifles and BFGes regardless. In a 'generic' run, this is a pretty big hurdle; diversifying ammo types you use is a good way to avoid a run terminating by virtue of running out of ammo entirely and so dying, and replacing a Shotgun that uses Shells with a Plasma Shotgun is reducing ammo diversity. It can still be worth considering holding onto for its utility in destroying corpses, at least up through The Mortuary/Limbo, but its damage output advantages over eg a Tactical Shotgun are sketchy.
We'll use a Baron of Hell for our example, which has 2 Protection and so effectively has 4 Protection against a Tactical Shotgun and 1 Protection against a Plasma Shotgun. If we say you fire at range 7 and roll roughly average damage (We'll lowball it and say 10 damage exactly) that results in 7.5 damage after range drop-off, which rounds up to 8, and so Protection reduces the Plasma Shotgun's damage to 7 and the Tactical Shotgun's damage to 4. That's pretty favorable to the Plasma Shotgun, a full 75% damage advantage...
... but if we say you roll max damage instead and fire from, say, range 5, that's 15.75 damage after range drop-off, rounds up to 16 damage, then gets reduced to 15 damage for the Plasma Shotgun and 12 damage for the Tactical Shotgun. That's a much more modest 25% damage advantage for the Plasma Shotgun.
The Plasma Shotgun does generally hit harder than a Tactical Shotgun, and no enemy has 'natural' Plasma resistance to add a qualifier to this, but given it eats ammo-by-inventory-space three times as fast I'd argue it doesn't hit harder by enough for most runs to make it a staple part of their arsenal.
All that said, for an Angel of Shotgunnery run the Plasma Shotgun is incredibly valuable simply because such a run has literally no other way to spend Power Cells and so it diversifies your ammo pool; it still matters that it eats Power Cells faster than other Shotguns eat Shells, but only in the sense that if you're waffling as to whether your last empty inventory slot should go to Shells or Cells it's safer to go with Shells. Indeed, for an Angel of Shotgunnery run the Plasma Shotgun can easily become your default first-use weapon late in the run, only switching to using other weapons for ammo reasons. (Your Power Cells have run out entirely, or are low enough you'd rather save the remaining ones for a more deserving target than whatever you're fighting right now, that sort of thing)
To a much lesser extent, even in a 'generic' run a Scout that went Shottyhead may genuinely prefer using the Plasma Shotgun to using other Power Cell-using weapons, due to Shottyhead letting them output so much damage so rapidly with Shotguns in specific.
(The other class masteries do not contribute here; the Marine's Army of the Dead negates the Plasma Shotgun's damage type-derived damage advantage, leaving its only advantages as 'destroys corpses' and 'has more shots per clip', while the Technician's 'Shotgun Mastery' doesn't actually reward using Shotguns in specific)
Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 unfortunately are overall hard on the Plasma Shotgun, as Assemblies become so much more reliably relevant to such runs and the Plasma Shotgun is actually pretty poorly-supported by Assemblies. A Nano-Shrapnel Shotgun largely prefers a Combat Shotgun as a base since Nano-Shrapnel Shotgun overwrites the base damage type (erasing the Plasma Shotgun's ability to destroy corpses and walls), makes ammo type irrelevant, and as a bonus Nano-shrapnel removes the 'pumping' mechanic on a Combat Shotgun. (Leaving the only advantage to using a Plasma Shotgun as the base that you'll get a slightly wider blast zone: worth remembering if your run gets two Plasma Shotguns, but typically not a good trade to be making) Similarly Plasmatic Shrapnel Assembly lets any Shotgun gain the benefits of the Plasma damage type without the Plasma Shotgun's problems with ammo efficiency; a Plasmatic Shrapnel Assault Shotgun is arguably better than a Plasma Shotgun. The Plasma Shotgun at least has a larger effective clip (10 shots before reloading vs 6), reloads to max instead of loading one shot at a time, and has a larger blast radius, but the significant loss in ammo efficiency tends to overwhelm those advantages.
Such extended runs do admittedly make the ammo type consideration more pertinent; in a standard run, the late game tends to generate more Power Cells than Shotgun Shells, but it's a mild enough tendency it isn't shocking for an individual run to have it not actually hold true, whereas an Angel of 100 or especially an Archangel of 666 run will have dozens to hundreds of floors to work through with these tilted odds and so are much more reliable runs about having Power Cells be more plentiful than Shotgun Shells past the earliest portion of the run. I'd argue that the Assembly point tends to be more significant, but it's not completely straightforward.
If you're not Shotgun-focused, the Plasma Shotgun is still potentially useful for corpse destruction and/or as a decent way to use Power Cells, at least until you get a BFG... but of course for Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666, BFGs are very rare, so this qualifier isn't much of a limiter. This is all especially worth keeping in mind if playing on Nightmare! and/or doing Angel of Darkness, where corpse destruction is much more relevant and harvesting Power Cells by repeatedly killing Arachnotrons and Former Commandos is a viable way to keep Power Cells up later in the run.
Jackhammer
Damage: 8d3*3
Range: Focused
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 2.5 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 9
Alternate Reload: N/A
Alternate Fire: N/A
Minimum floor: 12
The Jackhammer, like the Double Shotgun and Super Shotgun, fires its shots sequentially, and so suffers the same issues they do from that behavior, but more so: say you fire on a target at range 2 and its Angel of Max Carnage so you get max damage on all three hits. First you do 22 damage, knocking them back 3 tiles, then you do 18 damage and knock them back 2 more tiles, and now you do 16 damage, for a total of 56 damage instead of the 66 damage simultaneous resolution would've given you. That's 15% less damage than you'd get if all three shots resolved simultaneously!
Unlike those other Shotguns, the Jackhammer's audio actually sounds like three blasts in a row, so this is at least more intuitive than with Double and Super Shotguns.
A unique side effect of the Jackhammer shooting 3 times at once is that it benefits from Triggerhappy: this is completely unique among Shotguns. It's... not a good thing for it given that it exacerbates the above issues with knockback, but it is interesting that it does benefit. Inconsistently, this does not qualify it for Ammochain: it's one of only three weapons that natively outputs 3 or more shots but Ammochain doesn't benefit. (Though it's at least the most intuitive example of such)
The Jackhammer's actual performance is in an odd place. If you compare it to an Assault Shotgun, it's pretty straightforwardly better at winning a fight, outputting shots three times as fast with the individual shots being slightly more lethal, and the need to reload every 3 pulls of the trigger is directly offset by the fact that the entire clip is reloaded at once: an Assault Shotgun gets to pull the trigger 6 times before needing to reload, but then alternates firing with reloading, spending 3 seconds on reloading for 3 pulls of the trigger vs the Jackhammer spending 2.5 seconds reloading for every 3 pulls of the trigger.
So when you have Shotgun Shells to spare, the Jackhammer is a devastating weapon!
But it's very inefficient with ammo. There's the obvious issue that it completely wastes ammo anytime no enemies survive the first or second shot, but there's also that knockback issue: if we return to my prior example of firing at range 2 in Angel of Max Carnage, an Assault Shotgun would be able to pace its shots so the enemy is at range 2 for each shot, and the result would be 57 damage across three shots. That's 1 more point of damage than the Jackhammer expects to get in those conditions if knockback is a concern. It's a small edge, but it's on top of the ammo wastage from overkill shooting: the point here is that an Assault Shotgun used right will simply have ammo go farther.
It's also hampered by its status as a Unique: the numbers I just gave are assuming your Assault Shotgun is unmodded, which is unlikely to be true for long. An Assault Shotgun with 3 Power Mod Packs and 2 Technical or Bulk Mod packs is much stiffer competition. (eg the 3 shots at range 2 in Angel of Max Carnage scenario results in the modded Assault Shotgun outputting 81 damage) The only good news for the Jackhammer in this regard is that there's no Assembly for making an Assault Shotgun better with zero drawback such that it will leap ahead, and the good-and-relevant Assemblies all require an Exotic Mod Pack: a run that finds the Jackhammer has low odds of being able to actually completely displace it. Even if you do get a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun of some kind online, that makes it easier to justify spending Shotgun Shells on the Jackhammer in a nasty fight: after all, running out of ammo entirely just means you shrug and switch to your Nano-shrapnel weapon until you loot more Shells.
As of 0.9.9.8, a Technician can limitedly mod the Jackhammer. This doesn't do a ton to boost it, as the only Assembly you can apply to it is Plasmatic Shrapnel. If you're lucky enough to get the opportunity to Assemble a Plasmatic Shrapnel Jackhammer, it is a pretty unholy terror, but for one thing it doesn't do away with its issues with ammo efficiency: if you could Assemble a Nano-shrapnel Jackhammer, that would completely negate its flaws and turn into your Technician laughing maniacally as they shred everything forever without effort, but alas, you can't do that. Thus option is mostly a curiosity in practice, at least for the moment.
Frag Shotgun
Damage: 7d3
Range: Focused
Fire Duration: 1.5 seconds
Reload Duration: 2.5 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 16 (2 ammo consumed per shot)
Alternate Reload: N/A
Alternate Fire: N/A
Special: Uses 10mm ammo instead of shotgun shells. (Still does Shrapnel damage, not Bullet damage)
Minimum floor: 15
I have somehow gotten this thing exactly once in all my runs, and only used it enough to confirm points like it using 10mm ammo, doing Shrapnel damage, etc. So what I say here is 'theory-crafting' rather than heavily based on actual experience: if you think I'm speaking nonsense, I very possibly am! (Especially since I got it in 0.9.9.7 in specific)
Also note that 0.9.9.8 buffed it: in 0.9.9.7, it spent 4 units of 10mm ammo per shot. Twice as much!
So first let's point out that this is the same base damage and range profile as the Combat and Assault Shotguns... but for some reason it takes 50% longer to fire? It also takes a lot longer to reload, but that's clearly to account for it reloading the full clip: even in 0.9.9.7, that was 'reload 2.5 seconds every 4 times you shoot' where a Combat or Assault Shotgun reloads 4 seconds for 4 shots. With 0.9.9.8 buffing it, that's 'reload 2.5 seconds every 8 times you shoot' where the competitors would spend 8 seconds reloading. And since Shottyman ignores base reload times anyway, a lot of the time the higher reload duration wouldn't hurt the Frag Shotgun anyway. So in the current state the reload factor is pretty clearly better.
Ammo efficiency has thankfully been corrected by 0.9.9.8: in 0.9.9.7, where it spent 4 10mm ammo per shot, that meant an inventory slot of 10mm ammo only fed it for 25 shots, which is half what a Combat or Assault Shotgun gets out of an inventory slot of Shotgun Shells. With the cost halved, it's now exactly even with its closest competitors on that front, so it no longer relies so heavily on you finding yourself simultaneously having insufficient Shotgun Shells, open inventory space, and 10mm ammo to justify its use.
Unfortunately, that still leaves it with the bizarre slow fire rate to drag down its performance, and on top of that its status as a Unique is still dragging it down by denying it modding. In a standard run, you're probably better off ignoring it even if you're a Shotgun character: you can diversify ammo other ways, after all, such as by carting around a Chaingun.
In an Angel of Shotgunnery run, the Frag Shotgun becomes a meaningfully noteworthy find, since it's your only way to spend 10mm ammo. It still is hampered by its performance issues and will never be your primary weapon, but it might save your run from ammo starvation and so is worth considering committing an inventory slot to if you find it.
0.9.9.8 also added the ability for a Technician to limitedly mod it. This works out the same as with the Jackhammer: the only valid Assembly is Plasmatic Shrapnel. You're... pretty unlikely to care. I guess if you do an Angel of Shotgunnery run and commit to Scavenger as your Mastery you actually have decent odds of having more Sniper packs than you know what to do with, but outside that scenario you're pretty unlikely to have it come up.
Ultimately, I don't get why the Frag Shotgun is a Unique while the vastly more useful (And more common!) Plasma Shotgun is an Exotic. If they were both Uniques, that would be odd but consistent. If they were both Exotics, that would be straightforwardly sensible. If the Plasma Shotgun was Unique and the Frag Shotgun was Exotic that would also be straightforwardly sensible. Instead we have the only configuration that is self-evidently inconsistent and contrary to sense.
It's one of the more bizarre design missteps in Doom Roguelike.
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Next time, we move on to rapid-fire weapons.
See you then.
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