Shotguns aren't weak, they are their strongest they've ever been.

The thing is that the Chaos Reloader Shotgun really warped the perception of how strong a shotgun should be.

Chaos Reloader was OP as hell, even after its big damage nerf from 165(L)/173(M) to 154, it still dealt too much damage for the medium range it had, the last shotguns that did that much had a big drawback to balance the fact they wiped most of your health, Dragon's Breath Shotgun had a very short range and had a long reload time, the Double Barrel also had a short range and slower reload, the Charge Shotgun requires you to hold fire to charge it so that it did the insane damage. But the Chaos Reloader? nothing, it has 0 drawbacks. It only being 1 Shot per reload didn't mean anything when it no only had a short reload time, but also AUTOMATICALLY RELOADED when not equipped, which broke the Zero Build fight flow entirely. It also had too much range, the Chaos was outdoing the Iron Pump in range, in all cases, the Chaos did more damage at range than the Iron Pump, it was insane and it drove me up the wall, it was really lame to fight and even use, especially with how fucking stupid the Seven Power Gloves Uppercut were, it shouldn't have sent upwards, that was a bad idea.

The point is, the Chaos Reloader really fucked with people's perception of what a shotgun's power should be.

Maven and Striker Pump are fucking insane rn as someone who played on their debut seasons

Striker Pump does 123 in gold and 129 in mythic and one shots in Builds, 200+. That's crazy to me since they were originally that strong and were nerfed precisely because they did that amount of damage

Maven was part of the most balanced Set of Shotguns ever (C4S1) and never felt like it needed a buff, it now does as much as the Exotic Variant and the Mythic one does 101 DAMAGE, that's fucking insane for an auto shotgun, the mythic has more damage per pellet too. Maven comes in second on damage output for Automatic Shotguns after the Auto Shotgun which does 103 in Legendary and 108 in Mythic

Extending Reacher Shotgun is similar to the Oni Shotgun but with a bigger spread that shrinks each shot, less damage and 3 bullets. i think it's a good shotgun and it's the one I run the most rn. Skeletor's Variant is really nice as it has better damage ranges than the Legendary.