15.6 Degree shotgun ideal?

TLDR; I have been doing some calculations on shotgun spread.  The number at which I have arrived is 15.6 degrees of spread, which doubles pellet hit probability.
I am curious to hear what your thoughts are on this spread, especially if you are willing to playtest it.

EDIT:  I realize some people may not know how to edit the spread:

Go into the folder /DOOM 3/base and find the archive pak000.pk4.
Open it, but DO NOT EXTRACT IT.
Find the folder 'def' and open it.
Scroll down and find the file 'weapon_shotgun.def' and open it with a standard text editor.
Scroll down and find the line "spread".
Next to it will be a number "22".  Change that to "15.6".
Save the file, and when asked safe the archive.

Let me just clarify, I do not have a problem with the default shotgun; when you work around its spread it is a good weapon that scales well throughout the game.  However, I can understand some people's frustration with it.  What I have noticed is that the frustration is not so much with its damage, but rather the real issue is hit probability and consistency.  I also believe that there is another factor, which is more of a psychological issue with gamers, and that is that we tend to attempt to optimize.  If we notice that the shotgun can do a tremendous amount of damage when all the pellets hit then we attempt to do this every time and become frustrated when we cannot achieve it consistently.

Now the problem with adjusting this shotgun in particular, as many have noticed, is that if you decrease the spread you quickly run into the issue of making it simply overpowered.  This problem leads many to adjust other setting after adjusting the spread, such as number of pellets and damage per pellet.  The problem with this is that it changes the nature of the shotgun and decreases its scaleability against tougher late-game enemies.

Doom 3's weapons are designed for the kind of short-range game that Doom 3 is.  The chaingun has a spread that is equal to most games' shotguns and the plasma gun and BFG have very slow projectiles.  The shotgun is designed to be impractical at long range, but deadly at close range.

So how do we make the shotgun feel natural for Doom 3 while making it act more like what the player would expect?

After crunching some numbers and doing some playtesting, the solution was as simple as adjusting the spread angle to the correct degrees.  No other changes were necessary.
At 15.6 degrees the number of pellets that will strike an enemy is doubled for any given range, but as you can tell from the still considerable spread, it does not significantly increase the range of the shotgun.  It does not suddenly become a medium range weapon, nor does its damage at medium range compare to that of the other weapons.  You will still find yourself switching to those weapons during combat, out of sheer necessity.

But I am curious to hear what you think.  If you would, try setting the spread to 15.6 degress.
Does it work as well for you as I claim?  Is game balance still preserved?

If you feel that 15.6 degrees may cause the base shotgun to overshadow the Supershotgun in Resurrection of Evil, try using a spread of 16.6 degress instead.  This will increase the hit probability by only 75 percent over the normal base.

I played through alpha4, enpro, and some of comms with it. It definitely wasn't as overpowered as I would have expected. It didn't start one-shotting imps and zsecs all over the place, and I think it cut down on the amount of 3-shots. I think it gets a strong buff against trites and lost souls, as it's easier to get 2-for-1 with the tighter spread. Maggots suffer pretty hard against it, as they were already pretty weak to begin with and now they just get obliterated by it.

It's hard to tell how much it affects weapon balance since I was biased towards using the shotgun to test it and I didn't play for very long. There were the obvious places where switching to the machine gun was the right play. I think there's a place somewhere between mid and close range where the machine gun gets a bit of preference from me in the base game, and this change might take that away.

Feel-wise I think there's a definite improvement. It does feel more consistent. Shooting at a wall and looking at the spread, it still looks kind of dumb but doesn't invite nearly as much ridicule as the spread in the base game does.

10 hours ago, GuyMcBrofist said:

I played through alpha4, enpro, and some of comms with it. It definitely wasn't as overpowered as I would have expected. It didn't start one-shotting imps and zsecs all over the place, and I think it cut down on the amount of 3-shots. I think it gets a strong buff against trites and lost souls, as it's easier to get 2-for-1 with the tighter spread. Maggots suffer pretty hard against it, as they were already pretty weak to begin with and now they just get obliterated by it.

 

It's hard to tell how much it affects weapon balance since I was biased towards using the shotgun to test it and I didn't play for very long. There were the obvious places where switching to the machine gun was the right play. I think there's a place somewhere between mid and close range where the machine gun gets a bit of preference from me in the base game, and this change might take that away.

 

Feel-wise I think there's a definite improvement. It does feel more consistent. Shooting at a wall and looking at the spread, it still looks kind of dumb but doesn't invite nearly as much ridicule as the spread in the base game does.

Yes this was my experience with it as well especially with the tiny enemies.  If you get to Recycling Sector I think you may be pleased by how well it now performs against Mancubi.  They were the only large enemy that I never used the shotgun against, but now it becomes a viable option.

Thank you for giving it a try.