Richard III is a weird shotgun

[R4-D10]

its like its trying to fill three different roles at once, its both the high ammo shotgun, the high range shotgun, and the pierce shotgun, all at once. and uh due to it only having 3 damage i dont think its very good.

[lolstar64]

There was a time where Richard III didn't have the piercing damage so I think the devs wanted to be the "High Ammo, Spray and Pray" gun. This was sadly pretty bad since once it ran out of ammo, which would happen at higher difficulties, it basically had nothing. The piercing is cool because it gave it the highest damage potential of any gun and thanks to it's range it was really good at using all the 2 damage cards and becuase of that I Ranked Richard as the 3rd best (and 3rd worst) gun previously. Sadly the most recent update was very unkind to Richard and has knocked it down to either the worst or second worst gun (Makeda is the other candidate). I wrote the following for another thread about the performance of all the guns at Rank15 but it's relevant here too.

Originally posted by lolstar64:

Richard III: Okay now we're getting into the real heart of the issue and there's a lot to say here. You were probably surprised to see Richard not rock bottom and at the lower ranks Richard is probably is the worst gun. But, you know that meme where the guy has the noose around his neck asking "First time?" That is literally Richard once you hit R15. The other guns are basically like "Waaaaah, nothing is dying in one hit, waaaaah I can't hit all my shots" and Richard is like "Oh boo hoo, let me play a sad song for you on the world's smallest violin." In a sense Richard is the least affected by R12 and R15 because it lives those downside. Richard actually does have a lot of positive traits to try and counter this. Highest ammo and barrel count, longest range and piercing bullets. It's easy to forget that Richard (used to) have the highest damage potential per shot of all the guns at 6. The pre-patch basic strategy was to fire "weakening" shots from 3/4 spaces away in the very early game to get the white piece's hp down so that you could finish them off when they finally reached you. Any fire arc <180 can hit a piece on an orthogonal space with all it's pellets so baiting them onto an orthogonal was very important. Richard basically had to use this tactic even at the mid ranks but once you hit R15 all guns basically want to to use this tactic.

Now if you were paying attention, you might notice that so far I've only stated why other guns are much more harshly affected by R12/R15 to the point of gaining most of Richard's weaknesses but I have not actually provided any reason why Richard would be better than any of them and indeed, with it's base stats, Richard is not better then them. In fact, a lot of R15 is beating the first level and Richard is pretty bad at consistently beating it since one run you can shoot 3 times and deal 18 damage, another run you can shoot 3 times and deal like 2 damage. But eventually the luck will fall your way and you will pass the first few levels and it's here that Richard's advantages start showing. Richard MUST find some sort of damage increase in it's first few cards. Holy Gun Powder is good but the 3 best are the +2 damage cards, Cornered Despot, Sawed-off-Shotgun, and Blunderbuss. All three of these instantly fix Richard's low damage but come with with downsides but Richard is uniquely well statted to counter their downsides. Cornered Despot is normally hard to use because it forces your king to fire from positions further away than normal but Richard has the best range in the game and therefore isn't bothered by this. Sawed-off-Shotgun has a high learning curve and comes with a -1 range but again Richard having the best range allows it to absorb that downside better than any other gun. Lastly for Blunderbuss, although Richard does not uniquely deal with it's downside better it is not affected by the downside as much cause again, it always had unreliable arc and as long as it's arc doesn't hit 180 the strategy doesn't change. It's hard to really describe that but just know one of my easiest Richard wins got 2 Blunderbuss and a 150 fire arc feels a lot less bad when you're puking out 7 long range bullets per shot. All of this is on top of Richard's piercing indirectly increasing all damage by 25% and having 3~4 extra ammo on average than all the other guns meaning it didn't need to look as much for an ammo solution. That being said if it didn't find damage early on it was screwed. To summarize, Richard had fewer, more extreme weaknesses to patch up but could do so more easily with a little bit of good luck and ride this to a win. This generally reflected itself in Richard taking fewer attempts to get a R15 win with than many of the other guns.

However, the most recent update has kind of thrown this out the window. The damage cards added were pretty meh and not great for Richard. Even Monarch's Confidence (+1 damage per missing bullet) which on paper looks like Richard should really like, is more or less an inferior Holy Gun Powder when you do the math (while you have ammo left +3 damage if you fire all 3 shells). Although the new cards are cool, they are much more focused on utility rather than damage. However the real kicker is the AI Increase. The pre-patch enemy AI basically always chose to check you if it could and if it couldn't it always chose to move as close to you as possible with Orthogonal being closer than Diagonal hence you could very reliably bait pieces towards you for reliable shots. Now pieces often won't approach you if they cannot check you, often will attack you from further away, and will make choices specifically about trapping you such as Queens attacking on a diagonal or Rooks not checking you when they could. Whereas before I could basically guarantee that Rooks would never go to the back rank, now they go there all the time if they see that other pieces are covering the closer squares. This is especially bad for Cornered Despot and Sawed-off-Shotgun which basically wanted to keep Rooks off the back rank. Now I want to be very clear. I think the AI increases is pretty cool but I disagree with the combination of AI increase causing enemies to stay away from you more and the +15 fire arc making ranged shots more rng as I feel this decreases the strategy and increases the luck factor.