Which Season 3 shotgun reigns supreme?

With the introduction of the new Chapter 4 Season 3: WILDs comes the introduction of an un-vaulted option to compete with the formidable existing weapons. 

In this season, the the Drum Shotgun comes back to battle the Maven, Accelerant, Breacher, and Havoc for load out supremacy. Let’s take a closer look at their performance to find out which ones should make it into your load out!

In order to crown the best weapon, let's evaluate these weapons in a few categories:

1. Damage per Round (DpR) and Rounds per Second (RpS)
2. Reload Time (RT)
3. Time to Kill (our composite metric that takes DpR, RpS, and RT into account)

In a previous article, we crowned the Accelerant Shotgun the best shotgun in the game, let's see if the Drum Shotgun can compete!

1. How do the shotguns compare on Fire Rate?

This chapter shotguns have generally found themselves in one of two categories;

1. High Fire Rate/Light hitting shotguns
2. Low Fire Rate/Hard hitting shotguns

Let's see how the Drum shotgun compares:

 The Drum shotgun has an insane rate of fire. At more than double the speed of the Heisted Accelerant, the noticeably fast firing option from last chapter, the Drum Shotgun is a truly automatic weapon.

2. How do the shotguns compare on Damage per Round?

Given the ridiculous fire rate of the Drum Shotgun we should expect the weapon to record lower damage per round (DpR), let's see how it performed:

Compared to extremely hard hitting options, the Drum shotgun lags. The Havoc Pump shotgun is off the charts with it's single shot lethality. When we add critical hits to the equation the Havoc pump can top out at 210hp in a single shot, a capability no other weapon has. In order to sort out whether the high fire rate can over come the harder hitting competitors we have to consider these weapons on TtK. 

3. How do the shotguns compare on Time to Kill?

In order to truly evaluate a shotgun you have to take fire rate, damage per round, and reload time into account collectively. We do this by summing the amount of time needed to deplete 250hp of an opponents health using the same gun with 100% accuracy and no critical hits. This gives us a benchmark to evaluate these weapons on a similar plane. 

Incredibly, the lowest tiers of the drum shotgun seem to outperform the highest tiers of the Maven, Havoc, and Accelerant. Making it a clear OP weapon, I would be surprised it this weapon isn't nerfed to bring it's lethality down. Generally speaking, similarly classed weapons have some high tiers that exceed the lower tier performance this isn't the case with the drum shotgun. This characteristic alone makes it a must add to your load out. 

4. Is reload time a performance detractor?

All things considered the Drum Shotgun is just incredibly fast and this extends to reload time as well.

The incredible speed that we recognize with the Drum shotgun also extends to the reload time. The Drum shotgun has a clear reload time advantage compared to it's peers and as you level up your Drum shotgun this performance gap grows to over 30%.

In Conclusion

Almost oddly capable, the Drum shotgun is in a class of it's own. If you are looking to carry a shotgun that will materially increase your chances of winning this weapon is it. It's possible that certain situations may warrant other shotgun types but given the performance gap and variability of gameplay its a tough sell given the Drum Shotguns dominance. 

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