Should you ever use the regular shotgun after getting the super shotgun?

[Naarok0fkor]

Of course, especially if it`s stupid...

[PeterMoro]

Yes. Don't want to waste shells on Imps and Former Humans / Former Sergeants. Single shotty is perfect for them. Lost Souls however certainly deserve some SSG treatment :p

[Griffonki]

2 hours ago, Ravendesk said:

This thread is pretty hilarious. Everyone is praising doom game desing for making every weapon useful but pretty much the only example people provide for why shotgun is still useful is basically "uhhh I guess you can snipe enemies off sometimes if they are really far away" which is probably among the least interesting parts of doom gameplay. Trivial in case of low tier snipers and a waste of time in case of mid tier snipers and honestly with rare exceptions is something mapper could have improved by providing opportunities to get closer to the snipers or just giving some rockets.

 

Single shotgun really shines in high pressure situations when you need to hold off a high threat like a revenant in a tight combat but you cannot kill him quickly because you don't have an ssg so you also have to move. It is an interesting weapon on its own, but not  because it has unique niche in doom2 weapon roster, but because it allows very unique encounter situations that other weapons would trivialize.

 

Except for some oddly specific situations single shotgun is completely useless when you have an SSG. But there is nothing wrong with it being completely useless when you have better weapons, it does not make doom combat worse and its up to mapper to create a great experience for the player with the way they handle weapon progression, to make interesting single shotgun combat and then reward a player with a SSG (or with a BFG). 

 

To love single shotgun you don't need to inhale copium and try to remember both maps where you are surrounded by very exact amount of zombies where shotgun will clear them faster due to reload and not ssg due to just killing x2 zombies per shot. Just embrace it for what it is.

 

You are mistaken, the range is the same. Regular shotgun just doesn't have a vertical spread.

 

So basically no reason?

[Black Star]

I find the regular shotgun to be a more balanced / versatile weapon in comparison to the SSG. For me, the SSG is strictly a "close range rocket". Bunch of fodder clumped together? SSG. Pinky demons around? SSG. Revenant? SSG. Hell Knight? Yup, SSG. So on and so forth. How long it can take to reload on a fumbled shot makes it much more of a strategic choice rather than a "workhorse" type of weapon, especially if you are in high pressure situations (Doom 2' The Living End and Plutonia's Onslaught come to mind).

[DJVCardMaster]

Yes, it is better at sniping (contrary to regular games where shotguns are short-distance, and also far from real life), and also wastes less bullets, so you can use it with single low-tier enemies, testing your luck of killing more than one with one shot, imps, sergeants and zombiemen are better handled with the boomstick. If those come in packs, use an SSG.
In terms of sniping, you will be surprised by how effective it is against, let's say, revenants in watchtowers in comparison to SSG's, which will make you waste tons of ammo.

[DoomGuy2077]

The standard shotgun is relevant throughout the whole game. It's my go-to for picking off enemies at long range. Anything up to and including chain gunners. I usually use the chain gun for zombies/gunners at close range. I save the super shotgun for pinkie demons and above. 

[galileo31dos01]

Umm, I would very much prefer the shotgun gone from my inventory nowadays once I got the SSG and CG. 

 

There can be like one or two reasons I may switch back to the shotgun because it's """""""""better""""""""" contextually speaking, out of 10 other reasons not to.. bogs down to:

 

1. So there's a former human, imp or something else that is within autoaim range yet far away, and to kill it I need to snipe it, but my only other options in the whole map are pistol and SG, but also my finger is trained not to press "2" in doom in nearly any circumstance... so, that is going to be an awkward kill, moreso with the SSG (plus something I may comment on feedback if the map is WIP), so that leaves the shotgun to make it less awkward.. or I could also pretend the monster isn't there...

 

Situations like that don't regularly affect my flow when the map or wad has been more slow-paced or old-school since the beginning, if that's what I subscribed to, because many times I look for that in my spare time.. but it might give me the ick if it becomes a recurring pattern, or if the map's been the type of fluent fast-paced no-room-for-interruptions, in which case you wouldn't find a single moment where the mapper actively enticed you to shotgun perched things from afar, since that would be so out of place.. unless memes I suppose. 

 

2. I see a midtex wizard that says that with one gunshot on the midtex book he's holding he can remove the single barreled shotgun in my backpack in exchange of sucking his dick sucking his dick. The shotgun then gets one last shot as a farewell. We're all happy!

 

In conclusion, the shotgun becoming obsolete is completely fine. The days of "SG>SSG when snipe X because less waste ammo" are far gone for me. Nevertheless... okay, add a hypothetical third reason: I fucking can't SSG a lone zombieman, I just can't, I don't want to, NO QUIERO (it just weirds me out lol)

[Murdoch]

2 hours ago, Griffonki said:

So basically no reason?

 

Not at all. The SSG and regular shotgun are perfectly good weapons each with their advantages and disadvantages. The SSG will more handily deal with pinkies, lost souls, and chaingunners and also higher tier enemies if either your footwork or cover is good. You can take out a Revenant with an SSG in two blasts if you get in it's face, forcing it to melee, blasting it and backing off before the punch lands for example. You can't really do that with the regular shotgun, or at least it takes a lot longer giving more chance it's going to end badly. But the regular shotgun is more accurate and ammo friendly for lower tier or more distant enemies.

 

Just play however suits you dude. The only rule in Doom is "shoot it till it dies".

[houston]

11 hours ago, Antkibo said:

ofc, there's no bad weapon in doom.

I dunno, pistol and unberserked fists are rather crap. You can punch Demons to death, but you're not gonna have a fun time of it

[OpenRift]

Any many have already said, the pump-action shotgun's tighter spread makes it good for sniping at medium-longish distances. Though you can also kind of do the same thing by burst-firing the chaingun.

[Xaser]

I'm surprised there's been hardly any mention of the ammo efficiency problem: the SSG does just shy of 3x the damage for only 2x the ammo, which swings the general-usefulness pendulum way over to the SSG's side. There's a lot of situations where _technically_ you can get all your pellets on a target with the SG but not the SSG, but you'd actually be doing the same or less damage per ammo unit since there's less lead flying downrange overall.

 

There's still a handful of niche use cases like small numbers of zombiemen where the SG wins out, but the chaingun is preferable in those situations if it's available.

[Individualised]

The single barrelled shotgun is mainly useful for sniping lower-tier enemies at a distance. A good example of where you'd use it is at the beginning of Canyon, or at the beginning of MAP05 in Doom Zero.

[Gez]

The regular shotgun has a higher rate of fire, a tighter spread, but a lower damage output.

 

This means that the scenario in which it is better than the SSG is when there are many low-tier enemies that are attacking you from all around you, spread far enough apart that you can't possibly get more than one at once with the SSG, and with low enough health that you don't need the extra damage of the SSG to ensure they get killed by a single shot. Basically a gameplay somewhat similar to those shooting gallery games where enemies pop in and out and what matters is your speed and precision.

 

 

It's honestly rather a rather niche scenario, and far from the usual fare. Especially with Doom AI being what it is, so it's rather easy to just go behind a corner and wait a bit and tada, all the enemies are now clumped together, so trying to actually enforce this shooting gallery gameplay is going to be difficult.

[Ravendesk]

7 hours ago, Griffonki said:

So basically no reason?

Yep.

Please read this post for more elaborate explanation why:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2669033

 

Just kill that single imp with SSG (it feels good!) and ignore everyone in this thread who advice you to use SG to save shells or to snipe enemies when you already have SSG/CG. They are trying to make you have less fun.

[MFG38]

My recent replay of Plutonia taught me that the regular SG still has a use case even when you have the SSG: sniping targets that aren't at point-blank range. Granted, the chaingun is arguably the better option, but the shotgun does well in that too if you're out of bullets.

[TasAcri]

There is a mod that allows gibbing low-tier enemies when hit with the SSG up close. I think it's Beautiful DOOM. It looks so satisfying that's worth the extra wasted shell.

[Lucius Wooding]

I made a map where there are barrels placed in the distance after you teleport into the second room, and monsters tend to walk into your line of fire pretty quickly once alerted. In order to chain the barrels and make the fight much easier, you either need to run halfway in and SSG them or hit 2 regular shotgun shots from farther back will also work. 

 

The advantage is that by keeping your distance you're not liable to become food for ambush spectres quite so quickly since the cover pinches in around the sweet spot for the SSG (and it's dark). There's an optional secret SSG in the first room, but I tend to prefer using the single barrel to ensure the barrels go off and most of the pesky hitscan dies immediately. Over many runs I realized the regular SG is very viable for those opening shots, and then you can camp with the SSG or just use good movement near the teleporter since the spectres are there to punish your positioning in a way. The shotgun is a far better barrel-deleting weapon than the SSG at range and since there's no chaingun early on in this case it actually works perfectly. And it gives players who don't find the initial secret a good excuse to use the satisfying barrels.

 

In general, if you're able to exploit good positioning for sniping purposes (Often in Plutonia or maps like Inmost Dens) then it can save you health which is sometimes scarcer than ammo. Usually you're not able to do this with the SSG and still be ammo efficient, often you can eliminate the risk from exposing yourself to enemy fire entirely by finding the right pixel to stand on. If you have to be picky, the single barrel is often going to make more sense since it has much better range and accuracy. The SSG kind of dictates where you have to stand to make efficient use of it, and the habit of conforming to that with your movement is usually not punished in most maps. 

 

There's a later cramped fight with tons of hitscan that was made with the chaingun in mind. If you use the SSG you'll certainly die because while you'll kill groups much faster, the follow up shots are so slow and you won't be able to stun or pick off strays. It's almost better to slow roll the fight a bit since infighting and continuously turning corners behind cover play a bigger role than pure DPS. It made the difference between needing 300HP to live reliably with the SSG and being able to beat it with around 150 with the shotgun pretty comfortably. Surprisingly even the chainsaw was viable here more than the SSG.

 

(And yeah, the whole trend of people nagging others to shotgun single imps annoys the shit out of me too. It has its uses, but honestly most maps just aren't that tight on ammo that it matters.)

[volleyvalley]

I use the regular Shotgun, when I don't have to kill anything beefier than a Pinky. When I recently started doing this, I found out, that not only I save more shells, I also learnt to appreciate the regular Shotgun more, which made the regular Shotgun feel much less redundant. 

[Azure_Horror]

1 hour ago, Ravendesk said:

Yep.

Please read this post for more elaborate explanation why:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2669033

 

Just kill that single imp with SSG (it feels good!) and ignore everyone in this thread who advice you to use SG to save shells or to snipe enemies when you already have SSG/CG. They are trying to make you have less fun. 

If you have enough shells and don't care for longer reload, then yes, single shotgun is not needed. However, not every WAD has a Violence/Valiant resource balance.

 

Regular shotgun has a definitive niche: it is an only long-range weapon with abundant and easy-to-carry ammo type.

- SSG is definitely weaker at long ranges.

- Cells and Rockets are easy to carry, but they may be hard to find. Therefore Plasma/Rockets/BFG all use some kind of high-value ammo.

- On the other hand, it is very hard to carry one big package of bullets to win a big fight. The chaingun indeed has better DPS than normal shotgun, and good range. However, 200 bullets pack notably less of a punch than 50 shells. On top of that, many maps are much more happy to give Doomguy additional shells rather than additional bullets. It relatively rare to see a map which can be completed with "bullets mostly". Your chaingun should be complemented with some other ammo type. At long ranges, this means plasma, rockets or shells. Shells are obviously the 'cheapest' here, and for long range a normal shotgun is preferable to SSG.

 

That said, single shotgun is the second worst Damage Per Second of all guns out there, right after the pistol. So using normal shotgun often meanss slowing down by a lot. Naturally, almost any sort of fast paced combat scenario feels wrong when using the single-shotty.

[baja blast rd.]

6 minutes ago, Azure_Horror said:

...However, not every WAD has a Violence/Valiant resource balance.  

 

I wrote about tighter-balanced wads in the first paragraph. Tbh I can't think of a wad where I can't play this way when it comes to the SSG vs. weaker guns.

[Doomy__Doom]

12 minutes ago, Azure_Horror said:

That said, single shotgun is the second worst Damage Per Second of all guns out there, right after the pistol. So using normal shotgun often meanss slowing down by a lot. Naturally, almost any sort of fast paced combat is antithetical to using the single-shotty.

There's another case for a shotty - when corner-fighting heavy hitscan at mid-range, and doubly so on -fast/Nightmare, shotgun can deliver the best ratio of damage to exposure. Chaingun is better suited for maintaining pace and advancing, but spewing 12 pellets is the most damage you can do while being safe asap from retaliation.

[Ravendesk]

1 minute ago, Azure_Horror said:

If you have enough shells and don't care for longer reload, then yes, single shotgun is not needed. However, not every WAD has a Violence/Valiant resource balance.

As said above, making a single hk-rev pair infight saves at least x8 as much shells as switching to shotgun every time you see a lone imp. Not to mention single shotgun is not 100% consistent at 1-shot killing an imp, and SSG can kill like 3 in one shot if they are grouped nicely. With a chaingunner it's even worse and with shotgunners you risk getting more chip damage because you couldn't kill the whole group in one shot. To kill a zombieman it's even more ammo efficient to use pistol (or fist) but nobody is giving that advice for some reason.

 

Switching to SG every time for low tiers can just be a bad habit that ends up wasting you more ammo and health.

[Griffonki]

6 hours ago, Xaser said:

I'm surprised there's been hardly any mention of the ammo efficiency problem: the SSG does just shy of 3x the damage for only 2x the ammo, which swings the general-usefulness pendulum way over to the SSG's side. There's a lot of situations where _technically_ you can get all your pellets on a target with the SG but not the SSG, but you'd actually be doing the same or less damage per ammo unit since there's less lead flying downrange overall.

 

There's still a handful of niche use cases like small numbers of zombiemen where the SG wins out, but the chaingun is preferable in those situations if it's available.

This is exactly why I started this thread!

[Optimus]

It's up to someone's playstyle. I don't agree when people say "If you grab the SSG, what's the point of the Shotgun". I see people wasting SSG on simple human enemies. I like to switch between the two when possible. But sometimes you can't predict if the next room has individual human enemies at corners or tougher enemies, or combination of zombies, imps and demons. Sometimes it's a disadvantage because I enter a place, somehow decide to switch to simple shotgun, but that makes me too slow, and get blasted buy one shotgun guy. I was going to grab his shotgun anyway and was at 50 shells anyway before that simple shot. So, maybe it's exaggerated at times and will make you waste time (although the slow reloading SSG might also make you waste time in other cases). But anyway, it even feels good to switch from SSG shooting a demon, to SG shooting an imp, while strafing and avoiding everything. In the worse cases, if I single SG shoot an imp but it didn't die, I like to switch to my pistol and give the final shoot, but I don't do that always (Also thinking the Coincident fun Pew Pew :)

[real slush59134]

well. regular shotgun fires and relays damages more further than super shotgun. basically you can "snipe" with regular shotgun. which you can't with super shotgun and huge ammo waste.  

[Azure_Horror]

7 hours ago, Ravendesk said:

As said above, making a single hk-rev pair infight saves at least x8 as much shells as switching to shotgun every time you see a lone imp. Not to mention single shotgun is not 100% consistent at 1-shot killing an imp, and SSG can kill like 3 in one shot if they are grouped nicely. With a chaingunner it's even worse and with shotgunners you risk getting more chip damage because you couldn't kill the whole group in one shot. To kill a zombieman it's even more ammo efficient to use pistol (or fist) but nobody is giving that advice for some reason.

 

Switching to SG every time for low tiers can just be a bad habit that ends up wasting you more ammo and health.

Definitely true, if a mixed group of revs and HKs is there, and there is enough space to move around them somewhat freely.

 

But notice that I never advocated for switching to basic shotgun for any single imp.

By the way, imps are one of the least efficient targets for a single shotty. In many cases, imps are easy to run around, so not shooting imps at all saves even more ammo! And when imps are hard to avoid - then low damage per second of a single shotty can become a real burden.

 

Long range shots from a single shotgun are much more useful either to fight hitscanners, or to finish off an annoying midtier or two when more importnant ammo types are low*.

 

*when midtiers are concerned, I am talking about a situation where luring them closely and blasting with SSG is not an option. Typically, this implies either fliers in big rooms, or monsters on ledges.

 

5 hours ago, 20230821 said:

well. regular shotgun fires and relays damages more further than super shotgun. basically you can "snipe" with regular shotgun. which you can't with super shotgun and huge ammo waste.  

You can definitely snipe with SSG. It just takes more time due to a longer reload.

Edited July 5, 2023 by Azure_Horror

[real slush59134]

1 minute ago, Azure_Horror said:

You can definitely snipe with SSG. It just takes more time due to a longer reload.

takes 1 more round + longer time = not so good to snipe

[kalensar]

I snipe with the SSG because I'm a Lunatic when using freelook GzD specifically. I prefer the SSG for almost everything but that's only under freelook GzD conditions. 

 

Under vanilla type standards I love the shotgun. The only place it fails is versus pinky hordes. It's the second best sniping weapon, and excellent for long-bombing vs cacos, fatso, and arachnotron. Arguably it is a superior sniper than chaingun because of damage per shot value. 

[banjiepixel]

Regular shotgun is my default weapon thati have out in most basic low danger situations. I switch from that to the other weapons when situation demands it and then return to the regular shotgun when the situation is over. This keeps weapon switching skills high and forces to stay more controlled and calm in panic situations. It is also way easier to switch between Doom and Doom II when you use SSG as a extension of the regular shotgun instead of as a replacement.

[calsaintski]

Simply, It's an outclassed weapon.

 

It's common sense to use it if you're low on shells or to kill weak enemies, Besides those two It's useless once you get a Super Shotgun.
You can snipe demons with it but the chaingun does a better job at it.