Pump or tac, which shotgun is better?

Fortnite Chapter 2 saw yet another shift in the shotgun meta. Now the question is, which shotgun should you run?

After the past few seasons, it’s a breath of fresh air to have a 2 shotgun loot pool. Although the tactical shotgun remained unchanged, the pump saw three additional rarities (Common, Epic, Legendary) brought back from the vault. The damage was also nerfed to 70/80/90/100/110 respectively

For reference, here are the stats for all variants of the tactical shotgun

If you’d like to see any other gun stats, make sure to use our up to date list

For starters, the tac shotgun shoots faster than the pump and has a higher headshot multiplier. The headshot multipliers for both guns were left unchanged at 2.25 and 2x respectively. The only disadvantage to using the tac over pump is a higher spread and slightly lower range

With that said, the common and uncommon pumps (which only do 70 and 80 damage) should be your last resort. The pump is supposed to send one big hit - and doing a maximum of 140 to 160 damage (assuming you hit all pellets to the head) just won’t cut it. Carry a tac over the pump for lower rarities

On the other end of the spectrum, the Epic and Legendary pumps still pack that punch you’d expect from a one-shot shotgun. These two are the only shotguns in the entire game that have the potential to one shot a 200 health opponent

The tactical shotgun is pretty consistent from grey to gold, which means they are always the better option over lower rarity pumps. Since the tac goes up by only 4 damage per rarity upgrade versus the pump’s 10, purple and gold pumps fair similarly to the higher tac variants

TLDR: Lower tier tacs are better than lower pumps. Purple and gold pumps definitely edge out lower tier tac shotguns but only edge out purple and gold tacs based on your preference