At low difficulties and player counts lower than 4, bigger specimen will die from 2-3 double barrel shots as a high level Support Specialist as well. If done correctly, they will usually die in 1-2 blasts. It's best to get close to a medium specimen ( Siren, Bloat or Husk preferably) and hit the alt-fire.Long reload times are always a problem, so carrying a sidearm for trash specimen helps to spare valuable Hunting buckshots. Also it's powerful enough to take on anything as long as the wielder is accurate and practices weapon switching at the right moment. Most usual way to handle Fleshpound is stacking grenades by a single initial toss then enrage Fleshpound by a double barrel blast to throw two more grenades. Hunting shotgun generally used for uppercut combo on Scrakes, usually paired with a weapon capable of mini flinching them.At high player counts you may have to depend on combining Hunting shotgun with a high damage spike weapon just like AA12 to switch back to Hunting for a finishing touch against big specimen. See extermination tactics of the specified specimen. To kill big specimen such as Fleshpound or Scrake much quicker in high difficulties, it's advised to combine the double shotgun blast with stacked hand grenades or a flinching tool like Machete, Fire axe or Lever-action rifle respectively.Like many other shotguns however, shots lose the pierce ability when shot from too up close to a target. At the hands of a level 6 Support Specialist, Hunting shotgun deals 800 damage per shell shot, pierces up to 5 targets and only loses 3% damage per target pierced.

Support Specialist gets damage and increased pierce efficiency per perk level. Hunting shotgun has a unique pierce efficiency of 0.65, losing 35% of damage upon piercing up to two targets at its base, in which efficiency is not shared by cartridge load or magazine load shotguns. Hunting has to reload, and only can reload once both barrels are empty reloading both barrels always take 2.75 seconds which can only be reduced by Commando perk. Alt-fire shoots about both barrels and spikes up damage while forcing you to reload right after. Primary fire, shoots each barrel with 0.25 second delay in between. Hunting shotgun shoots 10 pellets per shell shot with 50 damage per pellet with 1.5x headshot multiplier. Thanks to an oversight, player able to stock up ammo over 62 shots of intended value up to 80 shells by picking up ammo boxes even if they can't buy over the limits from the trader.

Shells of Hunting costs 15ВЈ per a double stack, which makes it 7.50ВЈ per shot which is quite costly. At the initial weapon buy, Hunting comes with 24 shots total, with 2 loaded and 22 shells spare. Loads up 2 shells at once with ammunition pool of 48 which again can be increased by Support Specialist perk level to a maximum of 62 shots. Hunting shotgun costs 750ВЈ by default value and gets 75ВЈ discount per Support specialist perk level. The Support specialist perk gets a discount on the Hunting shotgun from the Trader, and spawns with the Hunting shotgun at level 6.

Double barrel shotgun reload