Since its been a big topic for me and a whole lot of other players since ROI, i wanted to add some experience and Sense to the whole "Shotguns are OP discussion".
How did this happen? Killrange is lower than ever for shottys, so why are they so prevalent and strong right now?
1. With ROI the Matador was made easily available and thus very prevalent.
2. The new Gamemode and the first iron banner supporting it (Supremacy) is just super Shotgun-friendly (if u wanna win at least). Those two things alone would increase the time spent with shotguns and thus increase the overall use of this guntype in other activities, because people have a good Roll and the practice with it.
3. The sniper nerf came JUST before all this happened, so they became a lot less appealing and Snipers (like me!) were thinking: "Uh, Sniping ist harder and less rewarding (no super kills) now, what other secondary could i use in a competitive environment.
4. Titans & Warlocks were buffed some time ago and now have a very strong melee that does not punish u for missing ur attack (like the NS & GS hunter) and ALSO have the fastest moving speed (Titanskating) WITHOUT any exotics (hunters need Bones of EAO to match). The Regen-ability for the Voidwalker now is crazy and the Range of the stormcaller melee rounds a shotgun build out very well. Ofc the buff to the Juggernaut shield did the Rest.
5. To finish it all off, Trials of osiris this and last week had no Radar. As it is well known, Inferno playlists favor shotguns heavily.
-> Result: You see a ton of shotgun usage. What makes this so bad right now, is that at the same time different playstiles have been nerfed.
I believe, that shotguns are almost in a good spot. The Problem comes with the Matador Archetype which just kills from a bit too far. The other shotguns require more skill and better movement and are perfectly balanced.
-> Solution: Decrease the Rangecap by 10-20% and remove Rangefinder from the perk list. Or better: Increase base range for lower impact shottys and decrease it significantly for high impact models. Also a nice idea would be to reduce Range by 30%, but increase the precision multiplier, to bring more Skill to shotgunning. (meaning: you would have to aim more for the head for max killrange).
2nd Solution: Make snipers stronger, but punish hardscoping and too passive Play. How to? Reduce ADS time when scoping IN back to vanilla Destiny values. But increase the time it takes to SCOPE OUT depending on the time spend Scoped in. Meaning: if you hardscope for 10 Seconds, it takes almost a Second to scope out. If you only scope for 2 Secs. the ADS is as quick as usual. Also you should add a small smoketrail to sniper bullets to find cheesy sniper spots of campers more easily. The Flinch changes to snipers where very good in my opinion. But also give snipers the ability to shut down supers again. If im able to land a headshot on a super i should be rewarded, as its hard to do.
3rd Solution: Titans need to get slower, ALL Melees should be less far. There ist simply NO reason that the tankiest Class is the fastest. They Have a Juggernaut shield because they are supposed to be tanky. The hit the hardest, and have arguably the strongest grenade and Super for rushing (Striker Titans). But there is simply no reason, they should be this FAST. Hunters should be squishy but faster & more mobile. Warlocks in the middle and so on. Reduce the speed of titan skating.
4th solution: Make primaries stronger. Just a small Decrease of Time to kill for all primaries would make them a lot more viable. Maybe 10% faster (and 20% for the low ROF Auto-rifles because they are bad right now). Not like crazy faster, but a bit more. To Achieve that but keep the overall Balance intact, i would suggest the following:
- Autorifles: Overall buff to damage, esp. Slow firing ones. Keep the small magazines though!
- Handcannons: Reduce the bloom when firing quickly and allow faster Reticle reset. To compensate (because they would dominate too much if that was the only change) reduce the damagefalloff curve even more, but make them more precise and Quick!
- Pulse rifles: Bring back the 2 Burst-Kill from Year 2 for the hard hitters. Keep their fire rate. Just slightly increase the fire rate for the Nirwens mercy archetype. And it pains me to say it: Reduce max Range for the Grasp of malok archetype. They are too good for long AND short range.
- Scout rifles: Speed up their Fire Rate across the board just by 10%. Increase their Flinch by 30% for headshots to make them more of a sniper counter and reward skillful players for constand precision.
To sum it all up: in my opinion and exp. Shotguns are not op in itself, but in combination with a lot of other things that happened during the last 2 Months. To balance it out, there a different ways to go about it. The Sidearm buff already was a GREAT step. What do u Guys think about this? I will also post a poll about some of the things i just mentioned.
POLL QUESTION:
How do you want the shotguns to be changed?
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Its been a while since this post started. The result of the poll speaks very clearly: over 50% of the playerbase want primaries buffed in Order to combat shotguns more effectively. I was playing shotgun almost exclusively since i made the post to see how it fares, and found, that on the nightstalker Hunter (where you basically have to always land a perfect shot in order to kill, since you lack the follow-up melee) it feels rather balanced, esp. since almost everyone was running the strong clever Dragon. It happened almost everytime that i would die to a clever dragon if i just tried to shotgun-warrior someone to the death. That should be the standard for the primariy weapons of all kinds. Bungie, please listen to this community speaking!