Destiny 2’s Shotguns Make Me Sad

I don’t know why, but shotgun weapons in many video games are all over the damn place. There are a ton of tropes surrounding video game shotguns, and most of them are pretty bad. This annoys me because I want to like shotguns, but I simply can’t. And Destiny 2’s shotguns basically fill a ton of tropes.

Before I even start though, I don’t play much PvP in Destiny 2, so PvP players can safely ignore this article. After all, there are far fewer enemies in Crucible, Iron Banner and Trials of Osiris, and everyone is as mobile and as kill-able as you are, so getting into good shotgun distance is a bit easier. Same applies to hand cannons too, I guess.

Anyway, time for shotguns. In PvE stuff.

That damn falloff trope.

I never really understood the idea of shotguns having short range and their damage falling off. After all, it’s an explosion of metal and pellets, all forced through a metal tube and into your enemies. Anyone standing in front of that should die, or at least be seriously injured. Take a few steps back though, and magically a lot of the death and destruction that should happen, it all just turns into a tickle. The drop off for shotguns is generally abysmal. Of course, you’re not going to do as much damage with, for example, 20% of your pellets hitting a target, but the falloff of damage is pretty extreme.

Sometimes though, I feel like I haven’t shot anything. While I could just assume that I missed (which I do a lot), I kinda wonder why nothing has happened and why there’s still an enemy standing in front of me.

Why do shotguns use special ammo?

I guess, traditionally, shotguns don’t have that much ammo. After all, they mostly shoot a bunch of pellets. But shotguns in Destiny seem like they have pretty much no reserve ammo. Picking up a green block of ammo is always required, and it’s very easy to run out of ammo very quickly.

Now, what confuses me even more is that ammo for shotguns is special ammo, despite being just as good as things like pulse rifles and auto rifles and submachine guns. Shotguns aren’t particularly fancy. Although, that being said, the ammo for shotguns is technically a different shape. All those rifles shoot one bullet at a time (mostly) but shotguns do have different shells and different bullets.

I assume though that the real reason is that they just don’t want shotguns to have infinite backup ammo. Especially in PvP stuff, which is where shotguns are more commonly used. That being said, hand cannons have infinite ammo and work in a pretty similar way.

At the very least though, could we have some more reserve ammo? Sure, having infinite reserve ammo for a shotgun would be kinda silly, but I don’t see any reason why you get so little ammo when you pick up a green brick.

Anyway, I’d love to use shotguns more, but I feel the special ammo is better used on other types of gun.