Feedback on new XM51 shotgun since PR feedback forum isn't used for anything

General Discussion
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Put it to use through 2 rounds, so this is just initial impressions. It COULD be a decent gun and I just haven’t found the right use for it yet.

tl;dr - it’s overtuned and underpowered and doesn’t do anything better than options marines already have (in fact I think it’s worse than alternatives).
Just use an M41 w/masterkey instead.

Here’s a summary of the main points:

  • It doesn’t come with enough spare magazines (only 2)
  • There isn’t enough spare ammo (7.5 magazine reloads per squad)
  • It can only be ordered through Req (and only through purchasing via ASRS it doesn’t come in vendors)
  • Burst fire can only be used with the stock
  • But the gun can’t fit in its scabbard with the stock
  • Damage to xenos is anemic/don’t even bother
  • Doesn’t destroy colony walls (the really tough ones) fast enough
  • You just generally don’t have the opportunity to use it for its job (the biggest issue)
  • Everything it does can be done by a masterkey, c4, breaching charge, or regular firepower just about as quickly if not better

So the idea I had with this was to frontline combat engineer, build cades, run 56D, use the shotgun to breach walls that block Line of Sight. Loadout was 56D (1 spare mag), Pistol Toolbelt (2 mags mod88), XM51 Shotgun (1 spare mag +12 shells couldn’t carry more), and minisentry.

In practice, I never needed to use it to clear walls because I was never frontline enough for that to even matter with 99% of the resinwalls being cleared by guys with knives. In areas where clearing walls might have been useful the walls were unbreakable no matter if I had this shotgun or C4 or nothing. In areas where I could usefully break colony walls, we were breaking them down with CAS, Mortar, OB’s, Regular gunfire, and various explosives anyway.

So to put it simply I never had an actual useful opportunity to use the shotgun for its express purpose. It’s an incredibly niche weapon. Actually the most usage I got out of it was just being in fob clearing a few walls down for cades.

And that’s my biggest issue - the gun is very niche but it’s tuned like it’s a good primary weapon. It’s not a good primary weapon, and it’s not even a good secondary weapon. It’s more akin to having a shovel on you rather than a gun.

To carry a useful amount of ammo (you only get 2 mags total and there are only 7.5 magazine reloads total per squad not per gun per SQUAD) is basically impossible. You’ll burn through it in about 10 or 15 minutes at most. It definitely needs more ammo available and at the moment isn’t good enough to even be a restricted weapon. I was also miffed I couldn’t put the belt in the armor suit slot like I could with a pistol belt (for that matter, ALSO can’t do this with the pistol toolbelt) so I was forced to use a drop pouch for gear instead of a utility pouch which meant my spare slots for mags were taken up by splints/MRE/explosives that I’d have otherwise had storage space for.

The shotgun isn’t dangerous to xenos in any capacity whatsoever, so it’s not usable as a secondary like the mod88 is. You’ll HAVE to carry a primary/secondary weapon in addition to this shotgun. It’s not a weapon, it’s a tool like a shovel or a blowtorch is a tool.

When I was using it, all I was thinking - why am I bothering with this when I could have an M41 - an actual primary weapon, and just put a masterkey on that? I’d have not only more ammo, more reloads, costs less through ASRS, faster switching, more compactness/less inventory pressure, AND the masterkey itself is still actually dangerous to xenos.

Essentially the main competition for this shotgun is an attachment that does 90% of its job already (it’s just not as efficient at busting walls) while simultaneously the attachment is straight up better in every single other way.

 
 
Here’s my suggestions for improving this weapon:

Pick whether it’s going to be a secondary weapon or a primary because that determines what you change.

Primary
If it’s meant to be a primary, it absolutely needs to have a substantial damage increase, as well as more ammo available. The amount of space it takes up (e.g. can’t fit much in the belt nor with stock) in this case is fine, because you’ll be dedicating more of your useful space to it anyway, but it should definitely have more ammo available in general. It will have to be in some capacity, equivalent to using an M41, M37, M4RA, or M39. Especially as it’s a restricted weapon. It’s main competition is an M41 with a masterkey, so if it can’t do relatively the same job as an M41 w/masterkey, so not just utility but also killpower, it’s not good enough.

Secondary
If it’s meant to be a secondary, then it needs to carry a little bit more ammo on the belt and be treated something akin to a pistol in utility (e.g. its an oh shit weapon with low sustain). I think this was the intent of it to begin with. I’d strongly consider adding a stun to it like the M37 has, which will give it a purpose and use in combat besides giving up, and thematically fits since it’s a breaching shotgun for blowing apart walls. It might be best for it to actually still deal serious damage per hit but reduce magazine size to 6 from 12.

Primary/Secondary Mix
Possibly you could go a third direction and turn it into a Primary (competes killpower-wise with other primary weapons) by attaching the stock, and turn it into a Secondary (competes utility-wise with other utility gear) without the stock and fits the belt. I think this would be harder to balance and might require the stock doing things that don’t make much sense (like it gains damage or ammo capacity with a stock somehow) but it would make the gun all around more interesting.

 
 

Conclusion

Overall it’s nice to see a new weapon but it doesn’t do anything better. Even if you were to ignore the advice and suggestions I’ve given, I think the one thing at a minimum that needs to be done is to make it better at its niche than alternatives and right now that doesn’t feel like it’s the case. In my opinion without changes this new shotgun is exclusively a fob tool for clearing walls and not for anything else.

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The fact I can get a underbarrel shotgun for the m41a, and vend infinite buckshot ammo, makes me question the viability of this weapon.

It seems like a cool gun, but it likely needs far more vendable ammo and easier storage

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At least let the stock be foldable so it fits in the scabbard, and maybe let req buy bulk ammo boxes of breaching shells for cheap

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Yeah i agree the shells should be more available. Then it’d be able to compete with masterkey better. This gun should ideally be better then a masterkey overall, as a sort of “Sacrifice inventory space, get helpful utility”. Still, it’s probably better to use this gun on resin walls then c4 or breaching charges. Both are useful, but take time to plant, can’t be used from range, etc.

If the intent of the gun is breaching then it makes sense that it has less available ammo. However, the way this gun is, makes it seem more like a tool for quickly destroying resin structures. I think the latter is more useful to marines anyway.

Another thing. You can sacrifice a shotgun on the frontline as rifleman, and take this gun instead. Or alternatively, just take the holster, a m37, and a m41a. It’s compact enough that you can include it in a normal kit. You probably just aren’t using it right (trying to include it in an engineer kit) since that kit already takes up too much capacity. I think it probably has plenty of niche, but I haven’t tried it enough yet to say whether or not it does.

Still, theres no point in having it have limited ammo. If the ammo is req purchase only, it won’t get used after a bit, since some req just wont buy the ammo, They’ll save for other things. I think it’s important to have the gun be useable, since it’s already in limited supply anyway.

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thanks for the feedback! it’s always nice to see other people talk about balance since it’s pretty hard to gauge if a gun is good in a vacuum by yourself.

the gun is supposed to be a utility item first and foremost. i think i got too clouded by that fact and made it a wee bit underpowered. i made some last second changes that really nerfed the range on that thing, and it might have been too much.

the lack of ammo was something i focused on because i didn’t think builder castes would have a fun time if everything they built got deleted by 3-4 guys constantly spewing breaching shells from a safe distance. req does passively get the ammo through ASRS, including the big 120 shell box and those little 30 shell boxes. it’s the same chance as a xm88 bullet box. i wasn’t around when the TM was happening, so i’m not sure if req was absent or they simply weren’t lucky with the ASRS rolls. i might add 1/2 extra shell boxes to come with the gun kit, akin to the xm88, just so marines have something to work with until requisitions decides to send down more ammo.

a damage value of 50 is pretty horrid honestly, coupled with the fact that it’s one of the few shotguns that has falloff and yeah, i get your point 100%. i’ll probably remove/reduce the armor piercing value and buff the damage up to 85 or so.

one of the main reasons why i made this weapon is that people who wanted to use anything besides the m41a lost one of the few ways they could break through structures. if you wanted to rock with a m39 or m4ra, tough luck. you either sacrifice a suit/back slot for a m41a, or you resort to knifing stuff. that’s why i gave it a holster, so you could reasonably fit it into most loadouts. a loadout consisting of a hmg, pistol and a shotgun that chugs ammo doesn’t sound like something that plays nicely, personally.

i’ll try to get this weapon up to spec soon enough (hopefully).

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I think a weapon with the design of being a support/utility weapon and in this case the purpose of destroying structures and xeno walls quickly is a neat concept. But it can’t be in a position where it’s not the clear frontrunner otherwise it’s basically pointless.

Requisitions getting ammo passively overtime and players not being able to have as much as they want at the start of the operation should equate to meaning it’s very powerful and one of it’s balancing factors is the limited ammunition. Similar to MK1 ammo or MK2 AP ammo. Either low ammo and strong/limited gun or lots of ammo and mediocre gun. I was the ASO during one of the test merge and we had something like 120 players spawn in and only 2 XM51 were stocked with a third one restocking about 20 minutes later, almost zero impact to the entire operation.

Long story short, good concept that can go somewhere but heavy tweaking with numbers required. Keep ammo and limited weapons where it’s at and make the gun stats a lot stronger or add more guns and ammo but make the gun stats a little stronger would be my suggestion.

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I think if you’re worried about marines deleting resin structure too easily, the answer isn’t limiting ammo but instead limiting the total number of shotguns.

I’d play around with having 4-8 available (during testing I’d err towards too many than not enough so you get more feedback), although I honestly just don’t see marines using it that much. For comparison’s sake there’s afaik 4-8 masterkeys available every round and I’ll see maybe 2-3 people with them at most and we definitely aren’t already clearing through huge swathes of resin with masterkeys (that use readily available buckshot).

When discussing it on the server a few people mentioned they wouldn’t use it to clear resin because you can do that with a knife already, and I largely agree: The best use for this wouldn’t be clearing resin in general but clearing a path through resin quickly during an assault.

 

Here’s tentative first step changes I’d make (and then further refine based on feedback):

45 damage (90 burst) - maybe as high as 55 (110) which would be my preference but might be unbalanced, 12 round magazine, pushback flicker stun, low AP, 4 tile range, foldable stock, 4 magazine in belt, normal shotgun slowdown and wield time; Ammo in prep like regular shotgun ammo.

I don’t know the stats on refire rate so I’m not sure if it would have higher or lower DPS/Time-to-kill than an m37.

I prefer 55 (110 burst) because it seems like the best middleground between single shot hits to kill and burst shot hits to kill, where good players who can click well will benefit from the burst fire, while less skilled players can stick to non-burst and still have reasonable (5 hit) shot to kill on a runner and might score a kill before blowing through their entire magazine.

 

a damage value of 50 is pretty horrid honestly, coupled with the fact that it’s one of the few shotguns that has falloff and yeah, i get your point 100%. i’ll probably remove/reduce the armor piercing value and buff the damage up to 85 or so.

Should try and do damage by Shots to Kill thresholds, and overall magazine capacity should assume ~20% hit ratio for average players and ~40% for good players. So for example a runner has 230hp, if you want a 4 shot kill on burst then you’ll want burst damage >57.5 and <76.6 (where it becomes 3-shot kill). Any value in-between only determines how much chip damage the target can take from other sources/how many pellets can RNG miss before degrading to another shot to kill.

Likewise if 3-burst shots to kill (vs runner) is acceptable, then you’ll want damage >76.6 and <115. Similarly with a 20% hit rate your average player will get ~2-3 hits firing normally per magazine and ~1 hit on burst per magazine. Which means this is a weapon that’ll probably only be good in the hands of more skilled players due to the magazine size (6 burst shots vs M37’s 10 regular)

Ideally for balance you’d have a spreadsheet to automatically calculate Shots/Hits to Kill thresholds (with respective TTK accounting for refire rate) for every caste at the same time so you can play around with damage values until you get something you’re satisfied with.

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I saw it once and the audio is badass

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The issue with making the weapon deal decent damage is you increase the chance of people taking it just to use it for combat, which would compromise those who use it for its support purposes as they are now both competing for its ammo. I’d argue someone using it for combat would have a higher ammo consumption rate than otherwise.

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let it be used as a sledgehammer like the synth’s breaching hammer when out of ammo. It could and should be inefficient this way but that way you can continue using it after it runs out of ammo

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I think the weapon is fine, just need more shells available, i don’t really care for the damage. But i don’t want it to become spec only like vilebeggar said

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I think the weapon is fine, just need more shells available, i don’t really care for the damage. But i don’t want it to become spec only like vilebeggar said

i meant up to specifications (aka being good) lol, but yeah i took a couple of suggestions and pushed some changes through:

  • the total damage per shot is 80 now, up from 50.
  • i’ve removed all falloff on the weapon.
  • in exchange, its armor piercing has gone from 30 to 5.
  • the range is increased from 5 to 6.
  • its accuracy and scatter is better now. if you shoot, most of the pellets should hit the target.
  • i’ve added 2 spare shell boxes with the guncase. 60 shells + 3 mags in total should be enough to last you a bit.
  • prep vendors now have double the shell boxes.
  • you can now put the holster rig on your suit slot

i agree with steelpoint’s views. i don’t want this weapon to have much of a combat use, and i really hate stuns in general. i don’t want to add more of them. i might add pushback eventually, but don’t quote me on that.

i do like your suggestions wintermote. i should have probably plotted out something like that beforehand. we’ll see how this first batch of changes goes and then we’ll see what happens from there

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Unironically I wish Synthetics could vend and use one of these.

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The problem with this weapon, in a pure wall/resin removal role, is you are competing with the masterkey that has virtually unlimited ammo and infinite free resupply from req.

The hard ammo limits do put a limit to the weapons effectiveness. I do like Wintermote’s idea of making ammo more common but harshly limiting the amount of breaching shotguns.

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Yeah I agree it’s a shame it’s a weapon whose niche is already filled with masterkey. If you want a masterkey without m41a you probably could just let people put masterkey on m4ra and m39. I like the idea overall though, dealing with walls (not only resin) is always a pain for marines.

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I’d almost argue that without the XM51 getting some bigger boost, that you could literally make a Masterkey be a standalone weapon and it’d be just as good or better than the XM51.

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putting a masterkey on an already kitted m39 would be OP i think. m4ra would be fun though, and would make smartscope more viable

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right now, afaik, the main drawbacks compared to the UBS are a lack of stun and ammo availability. another issue i’ve heard is that it takes a bit too long to take down colony walls (4 shells for a standard one, 8 shells for a reinforced one). i might look into halving or make it 3/4ths of the current amount.

the holster belt should be a little bit more useful. i expanded the ammo slots from 2 to 4.
i might give in and toss the gun a very short stun, even shorter than the ubs, just to see if it performs any better at self defense

putting a masterkey on an already kitted m39 would be OP i think. m4ra would be fun though, and would make smartscope more viable

i did ask morrow a while back whether he would accept such a change since the m4ra can canonically accept the attachment. dunno if the current maintainers have different thoughts

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I’ve used it in another round, the listed damage for it was 55 and the belt held more ammo. So I’m assuming there was some changes made (iirc it was 20 or something before). I got 1 kill with it, which was finishing off a lurker with burstfire who just got stunned by a PB buckshot. Twice I landed a burst on a runner with a PB; first time it forced the runner off so a patient could be treated by a medic, second time I died in the process but put the runner in crit (he lived). Accuracy seemed ok, I never shot much at anything past ~4 tiles. Attachies were stock, magharn, agrip, and bayonet (bayonet single hits resin nodes which is very welcome).

Damage

So as far as damage goes, I think this is in a good place and may even still be on the low side (need more playtesting). The lack of stun I think helps set it apart from the M37 even though it has roughly comparable damage output, which imo actually helps keep it out of the hands of ungas. Wouldn’t be against a sort of flicker stun that’s more for theatrics than actual stunning. Right now I think someone who just wants to kill shit rather than breaching walls is gonna stick with an M37 over this due to the lack of a stun and especially the huge difference in ammo capacity.

Destroying walls

With respect to wall destroying performance - the places you really want to use it tend to be the really tough colony walls, and in those cases it chews through your ammo very quickly. You can clear 3-5 walls and then you’re out and need to resupply at fob. Rather than 8 shells to destroy these walls it’s actually taking the entire magazine, so I’m not sure if there’s just something missing there or what, but I think 8 shots would be appropriate for them, just that’s not what I’m seeing in practice (maybe something to do with using burst fire on the walls). Whatever the case may be it does feel like it needs to be a little faster at destroying walls than it is right now, but I wouldn’t change it too much. Maybe 2 shots fewer at most.

Reloading

I’ve found reloading to be a bit unwieldy. I wound up having 3 half-empty mags in the middle of fights and then having to stop and reload the magazines to then load the magazines into the shotgun, very time consuming, can’t do in battle but you need to because only 3 mags total.

All of that could be easier to deal with if I could just pump the shells into the gun like a regular shotgun while its got a mag inserted.

As far as the belt goes, it’s a neat idea, good that it fits on the suit slot, but I’m just not giving up the stock’s burst fire and accuracy to use the belt, especially when the belt only holds 4 mags and I don’t even have 4 mags but 2+1. Instead I use armor storage for mags, and satchel + helmet for spare shells. Total combat load with full engineer kit + pistol was 3 magazines and 3 mag reloads for the shotgun.

Overall

Better compared to what it was to start with, still suffers on ammo in the field but no longer in fob. Killing power seems ok (mind, only 1 round of playtime at 55 damage). Don’t think ungas will want to take this over other stuff which is good. I don’t think anyone will use this with the belt though - the burst is just way too important for this gun and the belt doesn’t add anything interesting to offset that.

As far as resin wall clearing goes - I actually wouldn’t ever use it for that. The ammo is simply too sparse. Instead I focused on chokepoint walls to widen them for pushing through, or breaking walls to create flanks.

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Edit: This thing fucks super hard, but the stock seems useless at this moment. Why would I ever use it?