Factorio Forums

Suggestion:
+ Change Shotgun to Rifle with low fire rate, high damage
+ Rebalance SMG (or nest resistances) as needed to ensure its DPS does not surpass the Rifle against tanky targets.

Reasoning:
+ Shotgun is an unpopular weapon that requires manual aiming and quickly falls behind in damage potential to the SMG.
+ Shotgun main draw is large amount of damage to tanky target (nest), but requires player to get in close range, which is highly dangerous and further unpopularizes the weapon. Rifle could fill that purpose as nest popper.
+ Fulfills reverse niche of SMG (low piercing, high rate of fire, useful against multiple small enemies with little resistance) which would be (high piercing, low rate of fire) which would be useful against large tanky enemies but little value against multiple small ones.
+ Replaces a weapon that becomes obsolete with one that does not become obsolete until Rocket Launchers are researched in late-game.
+ Removes mandatory manual-aiming feature of spreadshot that players find annoying.

Yes. That is the post that inspired me to write this one.
However, that one is mostly discussions on why the weapon is bad and should be removed; I wanted to provide a viable replacement rather than removal, to address both the problem of:

There is an empty niche before rocket launchers are researched.
The current weapon has functionality that is important, but overshadowed by its funcitonal requirements.