Shotgun Shells
Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2026 4:36 pm
So I was having a read of the change log for 2.1.
And I started to have a really hard laugh. Because the balance on the shotgun is ridiculous to try and overcome something that is in the environment.
Listen, if I can damage entities, I can break other peoples entities. There's no amount of high risk, high reward which is going to make it rewarding to deploy something which can get you yelled at. A shotgun is a bit different than a flamethrower because you really don't have time to get out of the way of it and are a lot more likely to use it around turrets.
It's already at the point where I can demonstrate that I would survive fights in 2.0 on my own that I wouldn't, it was already in a fine place for single player use. You really, really don't need to make it more lethal. In 2.0 a single shot is like doing a full mag dump of piercing ammo without paying for it. It's optimized as a risky tool for close quarters assaults already.
Piercing rounds being moved up is fine. Combat shotgun is tricky because it's a bit like uranium ammo: By the time you get it, if you're really paying attention you realize you have cars and tanks. So it is kind of a personal defense weapon for a mechanized infantry rather than assault tool due to the structure of the game.
I feel like this is being balanced to give a weapon a lifetime that it doesn't normally have. But won't necessarily get, because it is a because of factors related to meta-games and the structure of the game itself.
And I started to have a really hard laugh. Because the balance on the shotgun is ridiculous to try and overcome something that is in the environment.
Listen, if I can damage entities, I can break other peoples entities. There's no amount of high risk, high reward which is going to make it rewarding to deploy something which can get you yelled at. A shotgun is a bit different than a flamethrower because you really don't have time to get out of the way of it and are a lot more likely to use it around turrets.
It's already at the point where I can demonstrate that I would survive fights in 2.0 on my own that I wouldn't, it was already in a fine place for single player use. You really, really don't need to make it more lethal. In 2.0 a single shot is like doing a full mag dump of piercing ammo without paying for it. It's optimized as a risky tool for close quarters assaults already.
Piercing rounds being moved up is fine. Combat shotgun is tricky because it's a bit like uranium ammo: By the time you get it, if you're really paying attention you realize you have cars and tanks. So it is kind of a personal defense weapon for a mechanized infantry rather than assault tool due to the structure of the game.
I feel like this is being balanced to give a weapon a lifetime that it doesn't normally have. But won't necessarily get, because it is a because of factors related to meta-games and the structure of the game itself.