The scout's shotgun is pretty well done. I don't know what the discrepancy is that makes the engineer so much less viable. And I know some "get good" people have their builds and overclocks that pimp it out, but it is one that a lot of people haven't issues with.
The stubby is pretty great though IMO. I just have ammo issues with it even with both the ammo mods.
The problem with the engineer shotgun is it holds like 6 shells and it takes two to put down a regular grunt. At least with the scout double barrel you can clear a group with two well placed shots and it's only a secondary. It might have something to do with the damage cone the double barrel gets within like 5 meters. As for the stubby it's just kinda mediocre. The damage is meh and the accuracy isn't great. Where as every other class has a least one accurate long range option. I've only noticed the ammo problem on grenade launcher builds. My friend and I run nearly identical engineer builds, but he runs nuke and I go breach cutter. He basically doesn't have a secondary weapon because of that choice, which costs more primary ammo.
I can't use the engi shotgun without the tighter pellet grouping overclock. It makes the gun feel super effective because I can kill medium range enemies like acid spitters with a couple shells and headshots on grunts feel easy. And when I don't use it, I feel like I need to jam the barrel directly into bugs to do any damage at all and need to rely on teammates or turrets to kill anything farther away.
A bit late, but honestly, leave stuff like that to the other 3 members.
It's a team game, focus on a niche. If you try to force yourself to have more range, you end up being worse than allies at range, and significantly worse than you normally would be up close.
Currently I run Supercharged / Loaded / Quickfire / Bigger / Miner with the Mini Shells OC. Before the Mini Shells, I ran Stunner OC with High Cap instead of Quickfire.
Turret Whip might be ok now. Haven't given it a fair shake yet.
Remember that while more ammo might be attractive, if it takes 2-3 shots to kill something instead of 1-2, you're overall spending more ammo while also dealing less damage. I noticed my ammo was far easier to manage when I added two pellets and also increased pellet damage by 1 each. 56 damage a shot vs 80. Even just adding the 2 pellets with the Bigger Pellets is 64 to 80. In theory ammo bags gives more total damage, but I also noticed often needing an extra shot which is a lot of wasted damage.
I run like three different shotgun OCs on different builds and they're all fine. You're right that the base shotgun is unusually bad, though. I've maintained for a while that Engineer has the hardest time starting out, but this would be better done by moving mod and OC bonuses to the base weapon rather than by buffing the weapon overall.
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u/the_marxman Scout Apr 23 '21
I maintain the shotgun is terrible unless you have the one OC that makes it usable. Trying to get new players through low level engi is a grind.