If you’re looking to optimise your Deep Rock Galactic Gear setup, you’ve come to the right place! This short Shotgun Mods guide will discuss the options for the five tiers of Shotgun upgrades and whether or not they’re worth considering in your own mod build or outright skippable.
Tier 1
- Supercharged Feed Mechanism – Increased rate of fire by 1
- Overstuffed Magazine – Increased clip size by 2
This tier can go either way. Overstuffed Magazine is an exceedingly safe choice as a larger clip will mean less time spent reloading while fighting off ravenous alien swarms, but it is still a small boost on its own – making this tier is a candidate to change with some later choices in mind, as the fire rate from Supercharged Feed Mechanism will combine well with Miner Adjustments in tier 5.
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Tier 2
- Expanded Ammo Bags – An additional 40 maximum ammo
- Loaded Shells – An additional 2 pellets per shot
- Choke – Halves pellet spread per shot
I’m sure some of you can already see where this tier is going just from the upgrade list. The ol’ classic, Expanded Ammo Bags is back again to take over another tier, and let’s explain why on this one. The shotgun has a base 90 maximum ammo. An additional 40 max ammo is an almost 50% increase alone, for one mod. On top of that value, Supply pods resupply half your maximum ammo on all weapons, tools and grenades. Meaning Expanded Ammo Bags also nets you an extra 20 shotgun shells per resupply. Now that is good value and a solid perk choice for any build.
By contrast, Loaded Shell adds 2 extra pellets per shot, increasing the overall effectiveness per shot fired. Another respectable choice as you can’t go wrong with ammo effectiveness upgrades. Choke on the other hand reduces the spread of your pellets by half, which is quite nice – but competes against two other excellent options – and let’s face it – if you wanted precise accuracy, you probably won’t want to be using a shotgun for long anyway.
Tier 3
- Recoil Dampener – Reduces recoil by 60%
- Quickfire Ejector – Reduces reload time by half a second
- High Capacity Magazine – Increases clip size by 3
Recoil Dampener may not sound particularly appealing to most players, but it does combine well with the fully automatic Miner Adjustments in tier 5, so don’t cross it out entirely. Quickfire Ejector helps reduce downtime by knocking a quarter of your total reload time off, while High Capacity Magazine increases your total clip size by 3. If you didn’t take clip size in tier 1, taking it here via High Capacity Magazine is a good idea. Otherwise this tier is fully preference, as all options are good.
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Tier 4
- Tungsten Coated Buckshot – Increases armour break damage by 400%
- Bigger Pellets – Increases damage by 1
Tungsten Coated Buckshot does offer a large amount of additional armour damage – however, as Engineer, your primary weapon is probably your least suited to damage armour. You either have the grenade launcher or breach cutter secondary weapon, which will both shred armour off single targets at a far more rapid pace.
Bigger Pellets will offer you a nice, if small, base damage increase. That’s always useful to have, and while 1 damage may seem very little, Tungsten Coated Buckshot is by and large a trap option. Its likely best to take the reliable bonus damage in the vast majority of scenarios.
Tier 5
- Turret Whip – Shooting a sentry gun creates an overloaded shot that deals 120 Explosive damage
- Miner Adjustments – The shotgun becomes fully automatic, and gains +0.5 fire rate
Honestly, as fun as Turret Whip sounds, and can be – it’s mostly quite bad. The area of effect is quite small at 1.5m, the damage isn’t particularly big at 120 Explosive… the best way to summarise it is imagining it as an unupgraded grenade launcher shot. It’ll cost you a shotgun shell fired into your sentry gun per use, alongside 10 shots from the sentry gun – and you don’t even aim the shot. The turret fires it in the direction it’s facing at the time. Try it if you want, but don’t expect too much. It’s rarely if ever useful.
Miner Adjustments, on the other hand, gives you +0.5 additional fire rate in raw stats and unlocks fully automatic fire for your Shotgun. While that’s one way to burn through all your shells quickly, it can be very useful in some scenarios. Be aware however that if you decide to swap your playstyle to exclusively using the shotgun in full auto, it’ll burn through its ammo pool quite rapidly. It’s definitely solid to have around, just don’t expect to use it constantly.
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You should end up getting something looking vaguely like this, and that’s the end of this Shotgun Mods guide. What did you end up taking? Let me know in the comments.
For those wanting to read up on the Shotgun mods, you can find the wiki page here.
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