hexed venture
I've been mainly playing shotgun for most of my hours in this game and after trying the shotgun for a while now I can safely say it's not that bad. I was able to clear nightmare fairly easily (not trivially as before of course). You just need to drop the unique jokers and put those ammo points you were probably using into damage and you're fine.
The real problem is that the shotgun has landed into the same situation as the quad cylinder (imo), in the sense that both their unique jokers are not worth taking, and that is a huge problem. I think the appeal of every weapon relies heavily on their unique jokers, every other gun has something unique to offer via their jokers: minigun for shredding enemies, sniper for mage builds and leveredge for clicking heads and feeling cool while doing so. Both shotgun and quad cylinder have pretty much the same uniques, by this I mean they both have a "raw damage amp" joker and a "long range relliability" joker. They used to differ in the sense that the "damage amp" joker for the shotgun didn't suck like the quad cylinder one, on the contrary it was broken. But now both weapons have no real appeal because you are wasting joker slots by picking their uniques (not really but you get the point. I actually really like the 100% acc ADS with quad) so I think that not only does the shotgun nerf needs to be looked at, not reverted though because it was indeed broken (maybe try making it every 2 shots?) and the unique jokers for quad cylinder could use either a buff or a rework.
Again, they are not bad weapons by any means and you can perfectly clear nightmare with them with ease, but they do feel quite underwhelming compared to the other options.
TLDR:
-shotgun is still viable you just need to turn on your monitor now
-shotgun and quad cylinder have no appealing unique jokers
slim hatch
dull osprey