Super shotgun



The super shotgun (also called combat shotgun or double-barreled shotgun, and often abbreviated to SSG) is a sawn-off, break-open, double-barrelled shotgun, in contrast to the original shotgun which is pump-action and single-barreled. The super shotgun appears in Doom II, beginning with MAP02: Underhalls, but is not present in Doom. Similarly, it does not appear in Doom 3 but is part of the expansion pack, Resurrection of Evil.

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 and not the other.

The super shotgun is devastatingly powerful at close range, usually killing multiple humanoids or a single Demon with one shot. It however takes twice the time to reload compared to the standard shotgun, 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 tactics described for the shotgun are even more useful for the super shotgun. The wide spread of the pellets makes it almost impossible to use effectively at longer ranges.

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 therefore more that twice as damaging than the standard shotgun, a good bargain since it only uses double the ammo. This explains whey the super shotgun will almost always kill two Imps or one Demon/Spectre in a well-aimed blast, and often inflicts additional damage to nearby monsters, whereas a standard shotgun burst is less reliable at killing one Imp or dispatching a Demon in with two shots. The super shotgun is about as powerful as the rocket launcher, and is preferred at short ranges (because a short-range rocket blast can harm the player).

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 it lacks the light reflections.

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: