News - Thankfully The Shotgun Meta Is Alive And Well - Warzone 2
you guys have no idea how excited I am that the shotgun meta is back again in Modern Warfare 3. I have been such a huge fan of pump action shotguns and article games; it's sickening, and I'm going to show you very briefly a couple stats from Battlefield, which is where I really started getting into first-person shooters that had actual tracked metrics.
Way back in the day, Battlefield 3 came out, and I amassed 380 kills with a pump shotgun in a game that was all about sniping, range, and utility. Working together as a team, I'm running around like a madman with a pump shotgun on a battlefield. I love it so much that I did it again in Battlefield 4, this time with 760 kills.
I absolutely adore the pump shotgun; it was pretty much the exclusive weapon I used in Counter Strike, dating myself way back to Counter Strike 1.3. That's when I really started getting into it. Obviously, there are a lot of iconic shotguns. I did a article a couple months ago about the Doom shotgun that came over to Modern Warfare 2 at the time with the really low frame rate and that really kind of crackling sound effect and that really pixelized explosion, death effect, and I loved it to use that gun pretty much exclusively once that drops.
And I've always struggled with Modern Warfare 3 and finding a shotgun kit that I liked, but lo and behold, as I continue to watch all the various streamers that I come across, everybody starts to use the shotgun again, so I did a little bit of research. I pretty much copied the build that I saw online.
I made one minor tweak, and I'll show you the build at the end of this article if you want to copy it. I love it, and it does exactly what I think a shotgun should do. It should be a one-shot, kill-risk reward. At pretty close range, you should be able to have the ability to reload it on the fly, so if you just want to put one or two shells in while you're running and strafing, you can.
There really shouldn't be much in the way of aiming Bloom, which you should be able to maintain with relatively the same amount of accuracy. While you're shooting and jumping, your crosshair shouldn't get any bigger or smaller. Now, one thing that I do make a mistake with quite a bit, and it's just a force of habit, is that I love to iron sight.
I'm always pulling down on that left trigger when I shouldn't. It doesn't change the pellet spread, it doesn't change the aiming reticle, or anything like that; it's identical to what you would expect if you were just hip firing, but for some reason, if there's a target that is within a decent range.
I still have that habit of iron sighing. If I could totally get rid of that habit, I would probably be an even more effective shotgun player because, in a shotgun, it really does matter, and those seconds do matter a significant amount. Most of the time, you are going to take damage when you are engaging in a firefight with an enemy.
The only time you're going to get away scot-free is if you shoot him in the back or broadside them and they don't see it coming where three or four of them are all sniping in a row and you're just basically t-boning them and just shooting, you know, shell after shell after shell, but short of that, you're going to find yourself constantly taking damage, and that's why having that extra little bit of time might save you for that next engagement.
With a shotgun, typically. Unless you're playing incredibly defensively, camping, and being very conservative in your play style, you're not going to be getting massive kill streaks. There's a very low chance you're going to call in something like a juggernaut, or some sort of helicopter gun or something like that, maybe five or six kills in quick succession, mostly because the spawning, particularly in shipment, is still so weird where enemies literally spawn right in front of you or right behind you, which makes it difficult to kind of survey the battlefield at all times and know where you're at and where the enemy is to make sure that you're always putting yourself in optimal position.
Engagements that, coupled with the fact that, for some reason, stun grenades seem to be the hot new thing, constantly getting stunned, which slows down your aiming speed, makes it a lot more difficult to acquire a target. I think it kind of speaks for itself that you're going to go through streaks where you're going to do, really well, get four or five kills in a row, and then you're going to hit a rut, and then you're going to go through a couple streaks again, this build in particular.
Every single time I've played, I have ranked in the top two in overall kills. It's great for the triple double right now. Most of my guns are maxed out, the ones I care about, so I don't max out snipers; that's the only gun class I don't have maxed out, but all my ARS BRS SMGs, all that stuff, and of course shotguns.
So the only thing I'm really going for right now is the Battle Pass experience, which I'm going to get by doing everything I possibly can to either get kills, assists, or any kind of point. So it's kind of up to you what you think the best way to do that is. I think the loadout that I have picked constantly gives me some sort of touch point to the battlefield, whether I'm marking enemies or EMP enemies or shooting an enemy at range to just get a couple points for an assist, even if I don't get the kill.
Obviously, a point blank kill nets you a little bit more because you're basically right in their face, if it's something like kill confirmed or whatever. Obviously, you're going to naturally pick up the dog tags when you kill somebody because you're going to be practically standing on top of them.
That's how I play, and I've had really good success. With this particular play style and the fact that shotguns are back again, which is awesome, it just makes me so happy because they're such a fun weapon that I don't think really gets represented well in modern shooters. Call of Duty has always had a problem, in my opinion, with balancing these things.
You look back to some of the older Call of Duties and shotguns were usually a second type weapon that could potentially replace a handgun, sometimes you'd see a saw off shotgun appear in the mix as a secondary type weapon but for the most part shotguns were kind of frowned upon and they weren't really meant to be used as a primary weapon they definitely didn't have a good performance rating in terms of time to kill or how long it took to reload the shells or the damage that it took and there'd be times you would hit an enemy point blank with a shotgun and they wouldn't die and let me tell you that is insanely frustrating, yes you can get cute with the dragon breath rounds or you can get cute with using slug rounds The bolo rounds.
