You can all rest easy

I use them. They are op for the same reason the Scat is better then the other Maxes.

Too many areas of effectiveness. Either redesign the entire game or nerf the guns.

Yeah forgott about that. The RoF of the Pumpgun "feels" only slightly lower than the Semi Auto RoF. The spreadsheet says its 120 vs 250 but it defenitely doesnt feel like that. Might also be because you need 2 Shots with the Semi Auto and only 1 with the Pumpgun. Thats also a good way to overall balance the Shotguns... by decerasing their RoF.

You mean...them actually behaving like real-world shotguns?
For some reason, in games, shotguns seem to be useless past the 5-10 meter mark, while a real shotgun can still blow your guts out way past that range.

Long overdue.

My concern with shotgun rebalancing is that they will render them useless by lowering their damage. They'll be relegated to being worse than fast firing carbines because they aren't useful at 25m+.

They need to just increase the TTK across the board. Simply doubling TTK would require two shots from a pump shotgun to kill (.5 seconds or so) and just under a second for the fastest carbine in the game to kill rather than a click from a pump shotgun and .43 seconds for a carbine.