What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here!
There have been a bunch of rumours flying around that shotguns in Rainbow Six Siege
feel more powerful or more reliable in gunfights recently.
Are these impressions that players are getting based on anything that has changed in the game?
If there is anything making the guns more powerful, what could it be?
Time for a little bit of detective work!
Follow me!
So let’s start out by brainstorming a little: What could be the possible causes for shotguns
performing better as of late.
There was no news of changes in any of the patch notes for Ember Rise (or any season
before, for that matter) so it is unlikely that there was any change to the damage stats
or the damage drop-off curves.
Unlikely doesn’t mean impossibly though.
Besides more damage per pellet at various distances, another factor could be that the
spread has tightened up and now delivers more pellets on target at greater distances.
And when exploring spread, we should of course look at both the hip fire spreads and the
aim down sight spreads for each gun, since they are different of course.
In case you didn’t know: yes aiming down the sights tightens up the shotgun spread
in Rainbow Six Siege.
Why is this thing?
Your guess is as good as mine because of course in real life, raising the gun to your shoulder
will in fact NOT magically change the trajectory of the gun’s pellets.
If there is anything different with the shotguns, it has to be either the damage or the spread
as far as I’m concerned, so let’s look at these topics one at a time.
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Shotgun damage is a complex subject in Rainbow Six Siege.
Damage ranges from 27 hit points for each of the 8 pellets up to 70 HP which makes this
weapon class immensely powerful overall but also means that there is a huge difference
between the weakest and strongest representatives.
Single shot damage starts at the low end from 120 (for the Bailiff) and 216 for the ACS12
and goes all the way to 560 hit points for the ITA12S.
In theory, there are five shotguns in the game that put out enough pain in a single
shot to take down up to four opponents, as long as they are standing close enough together
and you are lucky enough to get 2 of your pellets to hit the upper body or head of each one of them.
Achieving this in any given match is just about as unlikely as falling from 10,160m
altitude without a parachute and surviving.
It’s not impossible but rather unlikely.
The crazy close range power of the shotguns is balanced out with steep and sometimes rather
complex damage drop-off curves that can start as early as two meters distance.
Pretty much every individual shotgun has its own curve, there is no standardisation and
the curves can even include plateaus at certain ranges.
So how do we now make sure that there have not been any changes that have flown under the radar?
The easiest check is to look at the in-game damage stats and none of those have been updated.
Manually testing the damage that individual pellets do at various ranges is super tedious
but I went ahead and spent quite a chunk of time looking into this.
I have to admit, spending hours upon hours on gathering data to see if something has
changed, only to find out that no, everything is still the same, is a little bit of a let-down
but a result is still a result.
I can confirm: No change to the damage stats of the shotguns!
Ok, if they are not more powerful, then surely there has to be some kind of change to the
spread and how do we confirm that?
Well, one way is to look at the hip fire indicators.
Easy process: just take screenshots with each gun and then use a graphics program to count
the circumference of the circles, in pixels.
Once again, there has been no change in the most recent patch but maybe the hip fire cones
are no longer accurate.
This can be tested by hip firing at a wall over and over until the impacts form a perfect
circle that shows us the circumference.
Once again, no obvious change: the impact circles for each gun still perfectly correspond
to the hip fire markings and they are definitely unchanged.
The last possibility I see is that maybe the Aim Down Sight spreads have changed.
Again, the method of testing is to shoot at a perpendicular wall until the impacts from
a nice circle and then compare the diameter to the old date I have from tests in the past.
Yes, once again this is super tedious but I guess someone has to do it, right?
Nevertheless, I’ll give you three guesses what the results were… yep, the least satisfying
outcome of all: nothing has changed.
Urgh… so if it’s not the damage or the damage drop-off or the hip fire spread or
the ADS spread, does that mean that all of these anecdotal reports flying around claiming
that shotguns have become more powerful in gunfights are wrong?
Well, there is one last possibility.
With all the subtle, behind the scenes changes going on in Siege recently, changing how the
animations work maybe, just maybe, there was some kind of shift in how the randomisation
engine works and each individual shot now has more pellets that land towards the centre
of the cone compared to before.
In theory the max spread could still be the same but if the randomisation within the spread
circle is now more reliable, it could allow you to land more pellets in target over greater
distances than before.
The change would be subtle but maybe just enough to give people the feeling that shotguns
are now more reliable.
To confirm this I compared the patterns of individual shots side by side and lo and behold, EURIKA!!
If we compare the shot patterns pre- and post-patch, it becomes evident that there really does
seem to be a difference in the random patterning and that since the launch of Ember Rise, more
pellets will tend to land closer to the centre of the max spread diameter than they did before.
Of course, I can already hear some of you typing in the comments section that this is
not actually proof at all.
The shotgun patterning is meant to be random after all and so it could be possible that
it is just a lucky coincidence that the patterns in the new season are just that little bit
better than they used to be.
It would be amazing if I could go back onto the old Phantom Sight build to run let’s
say 100 or 1000 more trials to see if the patterning improvement occurs in a statistically
significant percentage of these trials but, now that the new season is out, I can no longer do that.
So after all of the testing and analysis I put in, I decided to do something I probably
should have started out with: I reached out to the devs to see if they have any info on
what could have changed with the shotguns and huzzah, my conclusion actually turned out to be correct.
One of the little behind the scenes updates to the game has changed the patterning of
shotguns and even though none of the hard parameters, such as damage or max spread,
have been changed you may find that going forward, shotguns will feel just that little
bit more reliable because more of the pellets will land nearer to your point of aim.
Phew and there we go.
Testing shotguns is always a minor nightmare since their random nature makes it just so
much more tedious to get to the bottom of various facets of their complex nature.
If you appreciate the efforts I put in to get to the bottom of this matter, then do
feel free to leave me a thumbs up and with that as always, I hope you enjoyed the video
and I will see you in the next episode!