Strategy:Super shotgun

The holy grail for shotgun builds; this is a double shotgun, with a normal shotgun spread instead of a wide spread to make it still effective at long range, the individual blasts are each nearly as strong as an Elephant gun, has a base reload speed of 1.5 seconds compared to the 2 and 2.5 seconds reload speed of the Double shotgun and Elephant gun respectively, all on top of it being fully moddable. At its base it's a really powerful weapon, but with modding this weapon can become truly ridiculous; just with basic modding, you could potentially get a Super shotgun with its individual blasts dealing 11d4 damage with a 0.7 second base firing speed. However, provided you can get certain rare mods, there are two assemblies you can use the Super shotgun for.

The first and easier is if you get a Sniper mod, you can make a Plasmatic shrapnel Super Shotgun without needing any Whizkid investment. All it does is change the shotgun's damage type from shrapnel to plasma, but this is really helpful when it means your SSG will be always dealing 6 more damage than normal against all the elite enemies that have an armor rating of 2, while dealing even more guaranteed damage against bosses and nightmare enemies with even greater armor. With this assembly a SSG can feasibly 2-shot an Arch-vile at close ranges. It'll also be able to easily gib corpses, really helpful when dealing with Arch-viles, playing on Nightmare difficulty, or playing Angel of Darkness. It'll additionally destroy walls, though that can be a detriment as it means you can no longer corner shoot with the SSG, when it's obviously extremely effective at that. If you're not investing in Whizkid, this is a fantastic assembly to really boost the power of your SSG efficiently and add some extra utility in gibbing, while you can keep a Tactical shotgun/Assault shotgun for your primary corner shooting (unless you're running Army of the Dead, where the plasma damage doesn't matter). If you are investing in Whizkid, you could potentially get more power out of multiple Power mods and Technical mods against normal enemies, when enemies would need an armor value over 3 to see more average damage with a Plasmatic Super shotgun compared to a SSG with 2 more power mods attached.

If you're lucky enough to find a Nano mod in addition to the Super Shotgun, you can make Nano-shrapnel (unless you're one of those poor sods who chose Army of the Dead). Even if it makes the damage type piercing to completely bypass the armor problem altogether, you might balk first at seeing you lose 3 damage die with this assembly. But when it's the SSG, that you can repeatedly fire over and over with no ammo consumption whatsoever...congratulations, you have won the game. Even with the power reduction the SSG will be strong enough to knock back enemies at your vision range, meaning you could just spam click at where you think enemies might be and just shoot away until they're dead without them ever being able to retaliate. If enemies do get near, it will still average over 20 damage a shot to any enemy, allowing you to do things like 3 shot an entire horde of Barons with a weapon you can repeatedly fire without ever having to reload. Plus if you get Whizkid 2 before making it, you can apply one Power mod to it, to farther ensure you can kill things before they can get a chance. The P-modded Nano-shrapnel Super shotgun is so powerful, any build can "click to win" with it, though getting one as a Shottyhead would utterly break the game; you'll get 4-6 shots a second with a weapon that averages around 30 damage at point blank and won't go below half that in your vision, while being able to hit large groups of enemies in its spread, before they will be able to react. Nothing should ever get in your range as a Shottyhead with this, while you'll boast 150+ DPS to utterly murder anything that gets near you.

For one more note, compared to the Focused double shotgun, it's the same at base statistically, except with a 1.5 second reload speed compared to the Focused's 2.0 seconds reload. However with the full modding capabilities of the Super shotgun as covered above, it completely outclasses the Focused double, so if you find a SSG, you should abandon making the Focused double or drop it if you already have it. The only thing the Focused double has that the SSG doesn't is the ability to altfire with a single shot, but some slight ammo preservation isn't worth giving up the awesome potential of the Super shotgun. Omega Tyrant (talk) 06:22, 17 April 2017 (UTC)