Shotgun damage model should be changed.
One of the issues I see stand out so far is that all shotguns are wildly inconstant. Don't get me wrong the peacekeeper and the Mastiff are great, but with a pellet based system it is easy to feel cheated out of a kill when rng is not on your side..
Even Shroud has complained about the peacekeeper being to inconsistent and this is a man with god tier aim.
The peacekeeper and Mastiff are the only shotguns even worth touching while the EVA-8 Auto and the Mozambique are widely viewed as worthless.
Even the Mastiff can be inconstant.. Most of the time it's a 2 shot kill on a fully armored target, but in my own experience I have hit 2 shots on a target from just out of effective range and then another 2 within effective range and still lost the fight due to pellet rng.
I think the simple solution is to switch the damage model from a per per pellet calculation (Pellet Damage x Number of Hits) to a base damage with pellet bonus model which would look like (Base Damage + (Pellet damage x Number of Hits)).
This model has been used in many games and has been proven to increase consistency.
For the Peacekeeper which base pellet damage being 10 and having 11 pellets it has a max potential damage of 110 (not including critical multipliers). If you hit 5 pellets you would do 50 damage. If the damage model was changed, base damage could be set to 55 and pellet damage set to 5 this would keep the max potential damage 110 but it would mean hitting those same 5 pellets would give you 80 damage instead of only 50, and it would raise the minimum damage within effective range to 60 instead of 10.
Other variables would obviously need to be tweaked such as range and critical multiplier to make sure it didn't become over-tuned. As well as possibly weighting more of the damage into the pellets so you still have a bit more reliance on shooting dead center.
