Buckshot is in a sorry state (The Call of Duty Issue of Shotguns)

Oh shotguns, how I love them. The way they look, the way it feels to chamber them, the way it feels to lean forward and put your cheek to its cold stock.

Ugh, however, it unfortunately seems that as a gun enthusiast and avid gamer, I find shotguns in a lot of semi-realistic presenting first-person shooters often get a certain aspect of shotguns wrong, and it’s universally lethality at range. With the somewhat grounded direction that this game seemingly wants to push with its guns, it seems odd that shotguns probably miss the mark the most of all the weapons, especially after the recent projectile velocity buff that makes most weapons feel pretty good.

A shot from ~10 meters with any of the shotguns should not produce this variation and spread. Often times it will appear that at least 2-3 of my pellets will miss the mass of a human torso just because of pattern spread. The only time all of my pellets land on a target will be a berserker homing in on me, and those are the only enemies that are aggressive about closing the distance. It seems almost always more dangerous to engage someone from further away with a weapon that has quite limited effective range.

The Rampage is the only short-barreled shotgun and yet it has an as expected spread pattern at 10m, though even it shows the same “bloom” issues starting at 20m.

The most common loads like your standard 9 pellet 00 Buck loads don’t often pattern out in real life until around 15-20m. This game doesn’t have any short-barrels (besides the Rampage) or chokes so there generally shouldn’t be any reason (outside of… balance?) for the pellets to land so wide.
7 pellets is an interesting choice for buckshot. Federal FLITECONTROL 00 Buck uses 8 pellets, and is reputed on the market for having some of the tightest shooting loads.

If balance is remotely a concern, I would rather tune down the base damage of individual pellets while guaranteeing that they will land and still be effective up to ~20m at the minimum. Given the number of rather long sightlines, even on the smallest maps and tiles, I doubt that this would give buckshot too much more leverage when I find it hard to have any reason not to go slugs since they are lethal (at practically any range, even ranges where they should not be as accurate as they are (150-200m, it’s hard to find engagement distances like this outside of Airport but still relevant if we are to add more maps with heavy open sightlines or if we add DMRs, don’t want to overstep their role balance-wise.)

Overall, these would be my suggestions for shotguns, buckshot, slugs, and the potential for other rounds:
-Increase pellet count from 7 to at least 8
-Buckshot spread should not exceed ~10 inches until it travels for at least 20m
-More buckshot variants like 1 Buckshot, Flechettes (more pellets :D)
-Slugs require more shots to break open locked doors; buckshot always opens it in one

-Buckshot chambered through the Rampage should have a wider base pellet spread than the long barreled shotguns, but should not spread out further until at least 20m as well

-Feeding rounds could feel better. Things like letting the player ADS as soon as they have at least one round in the chamber, allowing players to reload while ADS’d, lets us continuously feed rounds while empty and staying on target.