Super shotgun



The super shotgun, also called combat shotgun because of the manuals or otherwise simply double-barreled shotgun, is often abbreviated to SSG, and is a sawn-off, break-open, double-barreled shotgun, in contrast to the original shotgun which is pump-action and single-barreled.

In Game
Not featured in Doom, the super shotgun was the only new weapon introduced in Doom II, beginning with MAP02: Underhalls. For some reason, it was not present in Doom 3, but is part of the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil, supposedly being pried from Sergeant Kelly's office after his death.

In vanilla Doom, when a player has both the shotgun and the super shotgun, the "3" key will toggle between the two weapons. However, the number "3" in the ARMS section of the status bar responds only to the original shotgun, and will not light if the player has only the super shotgun.

A super shotgun contains 8 shells when picked up (16 on the I'm Too Young To Die and Nightmare! skill levels).

Unlike the other weapon firing/loading animations which were created from digitizing models, the super shotgun's sequences appear to be drawn instead since they lack the light reflections.

Tactical Analysis
The super shotgun takes the same ammunition as the shotgun, but uses two shells per shot. However, whereas the shotgun fires 7 pellets in each shot, a super shotgun blast has 20 pellets. Each pellet still does 5-15 points of damage. The super shotgun is thus nearly three times as damaging than the standard shotgun, a good bargain since it only uses double the ammo.

Thus, one well-aimed blast from the super shotgun almost always kills two Imps or one Demon/Spectre, and often inflicts additional damage to nearby monsters, whereas a shotgun burst is less reliable at killing one Imp or dispatching a Demon in two shots. The devastating firepower afforded by the super shotgun can enable the player to hold his own against crowds of humanoids or tough monsters (Hell Knights, Arachnotrons, Mancubi). It's often sensible to prefer the super shotgun over the rocket launcher in such situations; the super shotgun is similarly as powerful, shells are more plentiful than rockets, and since a short-range rocket blast can harm the player.

It is even slower to reload than the shotgun (approximately twice the time), meaning that any enemy not killed by the first shot will have plenty of time to retaliate. Some speedrunners, however, take advantage of the reload time by quickly circlestrafing to line up multiple monsters within the "damage cone". The blast-and-dodge and circle strafing tactics described for the shotgun are even more useful for the super shotgun.

The wide spread of the pellets makes the super shotgun ineffective and wasteful at longer ranges. If shells are the only plentiful ammo, or for distance sniping, it is advisable to switch back to the shotgun.

The super shotgun becomes overkill and wasteful for dealing with lone humanoids scattered in mazes. This is usually a problem when starting a level and the super shotgun is picked up before the regular shotgun. A good example of this is in MAP05: The Waste Tunnels, which can cause the player to waste ammo if the monsters enter the starting room one by one. Veteran players however will proactively pop out of the room to (hopefully) try to catch at least two humanoids in a burst.

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all applicable calls to P_Random are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: the monster's pain chance must be handled, as well as possible counterattacks and AI pathfinding, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably most significant for small monsters.
 * 2) Assumes that target is close enough to be hit by every pellet. This is extremely rare in real play, however, especially during speedruns.
 * 3) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.

Appearance statistics
The IWADs contain the following numbers of super shotguns: