Felwinter’s Lie - Destiny 1
Felwinter's Lie made its way into Destiny with the Iron Banner and upset the entire meta through its absurd level of damage. It was one of the few shotguns that could hit incredibly high Impact levels, enough to one-shot another player. But what made it truly grotesque was its range value.
Felwinter's Lie had the longest range of any shotgun, turning it into a monster at taking down distant opponents. If you weren’t lucky enough to wield one, that was pretty much it — as you’d be constantly out-gunned when it came to duking it out with Special weapons.
Even better? Felwinter’s Lie could roll with some truly broken perks. If you managed to combine it with the spread reducing Shot Package and distance-boosting Rangefinder, you'd pretty much win every single encounter. Until the Matador 64 joined the party with The Taken King, it was the only shotgun you could reasonably use in the Crucible.
There was a saying in Destiny’s community at the time: Felwinter’s real Lie is that it's a sniper rifle, not a shotgun.
Model 1887s - COD: MW2
There was a time in Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer life that the Model 1887s dominated the game. You’d struggle to play a single match without two or three people charging through the map with a pari of these nasties in grasped in their mitts. The old-school, lever-action style, coupled with the fact that you could dual wield to do that flashy spinning reload, gave them an undeniable cool factor. It also helped that they were wildly overpowered. Despite being shotguns, these weapons were capable of killing at ridiculous range with only the vaguest sense of aim, making them feel even more broken than the game’s Commando perk. Okay, maybe they weren’t quite that bad, but they were pretty powerful all the same.
Activision eventually patched the guns, but in a rare case of not applying too firm a hand, the post-nerf akimbo Models remained perfectly usable, and retained a place in one of my loadout slots for the duration of my hours spent sprinting through the shacks of Favela, or clearing the snowy blocks of Sub Base. In a title obsessed with the keenest edge of military tech, wielding two of these outdated old weapons was just good old-fashioned fun.
Honorable mention here goes to the fully auto AA-12, a shotgun so fun in MW2 that we’re pretty sure it inspired this scene in The Expendables.
