The Pump-Charge Shotgun is just way too good.

[JuggaloAntifa]

And it's for one single reason: The ability to cheese the overload mechanic. As we all know, its explosion is massive and deals a ton of damage, making it incredible at cleaning up fodder and tanks alike, but the fact it's MEANT to deal huge damage to you as well was supposed to pose a major drawback to this power.

Ostensibly it was intended to be a high risk, high reward weapon, where you could utilize its incredible power every so often if you felt bold and had health to spare. But as everyone knows, since you're invincible while dashing, you can fire mid-dash, setting off a nuke point-blank and getting away scot-free. This technique is powerful, spammable and, most importantly, low effort/skill, thanks to the generous invincibility dash frames.

This, coupled with the huge single-target damage/shotgun parry/blast knockback utility make the Pump-Charge Shotgun the best option for just about any combat scenario, to the point where you could quite comfortably disregard most of the other weapons in favor of it; I know I do.

Sure, weapons like the railcannon and the marksman will always have their place, but the pump-charge shotgun has dumbed down combat to a degree I honestly find a little disappointing.

When I first got this game it kicked my ass, and I looked forward to studying and mastering its mechanics in-depth to give myself the best possible chance of beating the hordes of hell. Now I've discovered that "gitting gud" isn't much harder than unlocking a single weapon.

[UNBREAKABLE]

I'll admit I p-ranked everything in violent during my first few hours by just spamming the pump charge and overload. Forgot most of the abilities existed by the time I got to greed, haha, what's the point? Once you got the timing down there isnt much you need to do other than spam reflects to keep style up.

Perhaps I haven't played enough to tell, but is there much reason to use the other attachment over it? Seems like anything you would need the explosive attachment for can be done by just reflecting your primary fire, making it's main use seem to be for swap combos.

[Dan brDorman]

Indeed, Pump shotgun explosion is strong, but isn't an answer to everything,

marksman is good for dealing with weak enemies and such, and Nailgun is good for damaging high health enemies from afar.

thing is, the core Eject shotgun can be a stronger alternative to pump explosion, As shooting the Core eject With the malicious railcannon will create a massive explosion that deletes almost every weak enemies in it's blast radius.

Besides, you ain't styling if you're sticking to just one toy.

[ask me about my accident]

Sure it's powerful, but consider the following:

Shooting coins is fun, so is using other weapons. If they cared about balancing the combat so much they would have removed ♥♥♥♥ like shooting your own core from the blue shotgun to create a super explosion, which takes just as much skill as what you're talking about, or just as much skill as parrying your own shells etc.

Cheating out of the self-damage mid-combat feels amazing because it just makes me feel like a tricked a bunch of dumbasses trying to bite me and now they're all a puddle of blood on the floor.

[AlternateEnding]

There's literally a free win buttons in the menu my man, it's up to you not to push them.