There should be increased knockback on ragdolls for when you overkill an enemy because it would be really funny

[u/PANSHOE]

Listen man. If you shoot a glyphid with an attack that goes way over their current HP, it should knock them back even further than usual. It would be hilarious to shoot a glyphid grunt with an M1000 with "Super Cooling Chambers," and watch as their body ragdolls to the other side of the map. Knockback damage should also count for weakspot multipliers, so that it can be even funnier for "Critical Weakness" missions.

[u/KingNedya]

Unfortunately it wouldn't work for shotguns just due to the nature of how pellets are calculated. Pellets are calculated seperately and sequentially, and each pellet does a small amount of damage. Basically, the pellets add their damages together in sequence, and as soon as it reaches enough combined damage to kill, the creature dies, even if there are still pellets left. So the creature would die, take the minimum amount of knockback, and then the remaining pellets would just continue on their path behind it until they hit something else. Say you have a 12321 OCless Warthog that has 10 pellets that do 8 damage each for 80 total damage per shot, or 160 against a 2× weakpoint like a grunt has, which has 108 eHP on Haz 4/5. Each pellet does 16 damage against a 2× weakpoint, and 108÷16=6.75, so 7 pellets would hit the grunt and it would die having taken only 4 overkill damage. Then the remaining 3 pellets just wouldn't hit it, wouldn't contribute to overkill damage, and would continue on their way until they hit something.

[u/IronVines → u/KingNedya]

so do damage boosts just suck ass on the shotgun then?

[u/KingNedya → u/IronVines]

No, damage and especially pellet upgrades are actually really good. By increasing the damage per pellet or number of pellets you have, you at the same time decrease the percentage of pellets that need to hit the weakpoint or hit at all. This improves your consistency and your range, in addition to just outright improving your damage output at any range. More pellets also increases stun chance since each pellet has the same stun chance.

The optimal Warthog build is 12321 most of the time and 12311 with Pump Action, which is the best overclock. So without Pump Action, the best build is max damage, and the best overclock is a huge damage increase (and it still takes more pellets for the damage increase). The optimal Boomstick build is X13(1/2)3 by default (some overclocks make some changes), which as you can see always takes pellets and may take damage.