Why shotguns were a problem:

Shotguns were pretty gamebreaking, admittedly.

Now a lot of us don't really seem to have any idea why they were, so I will tell it to you:
Weapons thus far have been balanced on DPS, but DPS in a game without weapon windups has a very deep, dark side to it:
Alpha strike.

Your alpha strike is the first two shots you fire... You are firing two shots in a time period of what one shot takes in a DPS calculation, Voodoo Double DPS for two bullets.

If you haven't figured out, this effects guns that have higher damage far more then a peashooter.
What has higher damage then a shotgun?
.....
*Cricket sound*

What had higher DPS then a non-PA shotguns ~2000-2190?
.....
*Cricket sound*

This resulted in ludicrous TTK's springing up, .2-.26 seconds.
While they are still in this ballpark.


Lets look at the above effect in some other situations.
NC6 Gauss Saw/ACX-11/ReaperDMR: ~1660 DPS.
T9-Carv S/T1S/Trac-5 S/HalfTheVanuGuns/Better then half the NC 143 damage guns: 1668 DPS.
GD-22s/Gauss Saw S: 1606 DPS.
Anchor: 1670 DPS.
TAR/Lynx: 1906 DPS.
TR Armistice SMG: 1870 DPS.
AF-4 Cyclone: 1814 DPS.
Old Autoshotguns: 2190 DPS.

Lets look at the TTK of these weapons, Alphastrike predicted, we are not gentlemen who intentionally miss the fist shot for the sake of having static DPS.

Most 143 guns: .51 seconds.
Anchor: .5 seconds.
Most 167 guns: .51 seconds.
Close range rifles and carbines: .45000000000001 seconds.
All 200 damage primary guns. .47 seconds.
Armistice: .47 seconds.
AF-4 Cyclone: .46 seconds.
Old Autoshotguns: .2 seconds.

This isn't saying anything about the balance of the above weapons, its just proof that having more damage on the first bullet vastly improves TTK....
Well, Ok, It also proves that SMG's are really not worth nerfing.
(Also, there should never be a 250 damage automatic weapon.)

TLDR:
Regardless.
Raw damage is far more important then conventional gamer wisdom thinks:
Having it allows a player to beat out an enemy in opening stages of combat given they get the jump on their foe, and having too much damage will force the nerf hammer on you.
Lets not chat about OSK's.

I love number cruncher's, they never take it to account lag or any other factors.

According to this, If I have a shotgun I should win every fight at any range right? Because I mean all you are doing is comparing DPS....

These stupid charts get things nerfed that don't need a nerf.

No it means that in a CQC situation given equally skilled players, the shotgun should always win and it also proves (atlest for auto shotguns) that there is no "risk" involved when missing 1 or 2 shots, because of the TTK advantage.

Why shoguns were a problem:

See any one of the 'OMG NERF NC MAX NAO' threads. Im sure the same people who cried about getting instakilled when rounding a corner just love their new pump action shotties.

Should I compare these TTKs to lag?
Average MS for a planetside user: 220 MS.
Average oldschool shotgun TTK .23, ignoring PA's.


Weapons the shotguns purpose overlaps with:
SMG's.
Close range rifles/Carbines.

To be fair, I hate these threads.
They give people who actually like to rationalize balance a bad name by sweeping up a swarm of allegory evidence and ad hominem.

Yes.

"SHOULD"....There is a lot of factors in the "SHOULD" category including LAG.

I have lost fights with the Shotgun against LMGs and won fights against the shotgun with LMGs.

Also there is a risk involved, it's called mid-long range.

The logic of the tear droppers is so flawed, you say that Shotguns are too powerful in CQC....SOMETHING THEY ARE MEANT FOR... And then knowing this....You bring an LMG to the fight?

Who is stupid here? The idiot that brought a long range weapon to a close quarters fight? Or the guy that brought a Shotgun to a CQC fight?

Battle "AWARENESS" people! WE TALKED ABOUT THIS! L2P!

Sorry, this is the perspective of a laboratory experimenter without reference to real world experience. Did your test include a moving target? Did your target shoot back during or before your "alpha strike?" Who gets an alpha strike on an unsuspecting unmoving target (and in that case if you don't kill with a knife blade, you're wasting ammo)?

Not a particularly useful analysis, in other words.

Shotguns were designed for a particular situation: close-in urban combat. That's how they were (and are) used by real soldiers in real combat. They are essentially useless beyond short range. Working your way into range is the trade-off. So is the small ammo load. Yes, I can kill three targets in quick succession, then I die with an impossibly long reload speed. Rinse, repeat.

Taking lag into account is stupid. If it's server based, it effects both players equally, if it's because your machine sucks, that's no one's fault but your own.

That being said, things like range, accuracy, and recoil are valid points, and analyzing nothing but optimal damage output misses a lot. However, all those factors can be collapsed in to a single metric, effective range, simplifying the comparison significantly while losing very little information. Seeing as how SMGs and shotguns are both meant to be primarily CQC weapons, they should either have similar TTK and effective range, or the one with a shorter TTK should have a greater effective range.

Now, maybe it's just me, but the SMGs don't really seem to have a significantly greater effective range than the shotguns, and certainly not enough to justify the huge gap in TTK.

Learn to play? What about every other advertized CQC weapon?

The game seems to disagree that shotguns are to be the only CQC weapons, they can have an edge, but it doesn't need to be an edge by the factor of four.
Shotguns are much more forgiving to the operator, this is enough to make them viable when balanced.
I too once dreamed of being a planestide shotgunner, but then I realized that that would take the difficulty out of combat, and abandoned the idea.

So why does the Shotgun need to outperform the SMG by half the TTK then?
SMG's are also designed for CQC.
Carbines aswell perform badly at range, infact only the LMG's perform any good at "long range".

And don't even start with "long range", there are hardly any battles worth fighting outside of ~30meters, pretty much all the capture points and objectives in this game are inside rooms 10x10 meters...

Im very farmiliar with "battle awareness", but this doesnt counter the fact that the shotgun kills twice as fast as weapons in the same category. This "skillset" applies to ALL weapons.

If a weapon has a TTK advantage, that means that the user can get caught off guard but still win the engagement purely because of his weapon having faster TTK. (this actually makes them easier to use for people with poor "battle awareness".

In actuality, that is so BS. It entirely depends upon the situation, who surprises whom, etc. Face to face, one on one? Yeah, the edge goes to the shotgun in close range. DUH! That's what they're used for. Outside of that, you're getting into SMG dominance, then carbine dominance, etc.

Not every gun should be equal in CQC, nor any other range increment. In mid-range fights, someone with a carbine, or LMG is going to stomp the ever living guts out of the shotgunner. And long range fights start going to the battle rifles and assault rifles, in very long ranges? There are no other competitors to the bolt action sniper rifles. Are they OP? No, they are not. The are highly specialized weapons for one purpose and excel greatly at it. The shotgun is the same on the other end of the scale.

Please elaborate why that would be BS?

You do realise every game needs balance?

And that for at least BF (not sure about the other games, never played them), it is notoriously unbalanced where there were basicly no "choice" in weapon selection, because of how similiar the weapons behaved? (ie: you could get the BAD gun, or the GOOD gun, same as PS2 for CQC.)

The call for nerfs will go on:
I killed 3 guys in a row with in 10 seconds with one shot each. They will call for a nerf.

The fact that i stood right beneath the door they all ran blindly through and i had a scout-radar near by so knew exactly when they came won't be mentioned.

Yes, balance is not that same as Everything = Everything.

Balance = Downsides and upsides.

Most players here aint skilled or own shotguns

I will admit your statement was mostly allegory.
Had you clarified why missing a shot or two would be forgiving, I think it wouldn't have had backlash.


I would like to point out that there was some truth to what he said: Yes, theoretically, a autoshotgun that missed just one shot would still beat out every other weapon in terms of TTK, a standard one would tie with the CQC weapons, a pump shotgun would tie with the average weapon on a miss.

This raises the question "Is it fair to loose to a shotgunner who missed?"
On two shots, missed, it gets borderline, if you have nanoweave on, technically, the shotgunner still wins at the two shots worth of pellets missed threshold too, EVEN if their enemy also has nanoweave. (.6 ETTK from missing twice VS .6-.7 ETTKs from firing at someone wearing nanoweave with an automatic.)

Should a shotgunner who screws up lose to an enemy who didn't screw up at all?

I did. See the edit, please.

There are two sides too it.

Perfect equality isn't an expectation I have, however, when we talk about margins with other CQC weapons, and the scenarios regarding these weapons, a larger issue does arise.

I agree that not all weapons should be equal, and have their own advantages/disadvantages.
But i disagree that they are not OP, i think they are. They have way to quick of a TTK compared to the other weapons, around half that of the rest.

For example look at the OP's figures he posted:

Most 143 guns: .51 seconds.
Anchor: .5 seconds.
Most 167 guns: .51 seconds.
Close range rifles and carbines: .45000000000001 seconds.
All 200 damage primary guns. .47 seconds.
Armistice: .47 seconds.
AF-4 Cyclone: .46 seconds.
Old Autoshotguns: .2 seconds.

SMG's/Carbines are designed for CQC use, they suck at medium range or long range compared to the LMG's. Now how much TTK advantage do they get at point blank range? about 0.05 seconds.

How much is the advantage that the shotguns get? 0.31 seconds.

If the shotguns "only" had lets say 0.1 seconds advantage in TTK over the other weapons, then i wouldn't call it OP, but now it had 39% or 0.31 seconds advantage, wich i feel is just too much. (it basicly makes all other weapons obsolete once you get into CQC range.)