Elephant Gun

* Item
* HUD

As it looks when dropped.

As it looks when equipped.

18-22 x 7 (Power + Power / Bulk + Bulk)

0.5/0 - Minimum (Agility + Agility)

0/0 - Perfect Accuracy (Sniper)

## Class Perks

**Scavenger (Technician)**Convert weapon into a Mod Pack

**Assembly Optimization (Technician)**10% damage increase.

## In-game Description

*Originally developed in centuries past when the hunting of lions and bears was still legal, the Elephant Gun has experienced a resurgence in popularity now that humanity is the endangered species, and Earth has been invaded by that most dangerous of game: Demons.*

*It only holds one shot at a time, but that shot is a slug that deals tremendous damage.*

### Assembly Description

*The Elephant Gun takes all the pellets of the shotgun, and combines them into a fairly accurate single slug.*

*Powerful at ranges where the shotgun starts to drop off, and armor piercing.*

## Tactical Analysis

The Elephant Gun is a Basic Assembly and a variant of the Shotgun, created by combining a standard **Shotgun** with 2 Power Modpack. It is an efficient early game powerhouse that unfortunately, slowly losing it's effectiveness as the game progress.

The Elephant Gun is a simple hard hitting, pump-action rifle that use shotgun shells as ammo. Despite using the same ammo pool, a shot from the Elephant Gun is a very accurate, single projectile called a slug, as opposed to the multiple ones with wide coverage that is the buckshot. The Slug rounds is heavy and powerful, able to gibs low-tier enemies from across the room with ease.

The Elephant Gun's true strength lies in it's knockback power. It is capable of knocking back monsters, up to the **Baron of Hell** in size, with each shot. This is something only the strongest weapons in the game can do. The Elephant gun is also highly effective against all flying monsters such as the **Cacodemon** and the **Volacubus** due to being able to knock them across the room in one shot and providing much needed room for the player. Lumbering monsters such as **mancubus** and bosses usually have some resistance or total immunity against this knockback power.

The primary drawback of the Elephant Gun includes the high damage randomization produced from each shot. While the weapon itself is high-powered with reasonably slow firing speed to match the damage output, the range between the minimum and maximum damage can lead to mid-tier enemies surviving a single shot. This unreliability exacerbates the previously problematic, but still managable rate-of-fire, to a very annoying degree. Similarly, knockback effect of the weapon goes both ways. If **vertical aim** is allowed, the player can knock themselves up into the air simply by aiming downward, the player can even perform a **double jump** by jumping first then shoot the ground. While sound in theory, using the Elephant Gun is quite dangerous to use in an area with a death pit.

Overall, Elephant Gun can be very hard to use in a situation where speed is important. The slow rate-of-fire and being a single-projectile weapon also putting more pressure on aiming and return firing in a big battlefield.

The Elephant Gun could be considered a poor man's **Focused Double Shotgun** and a temporary solution to the damage dealing and melee fending problems of the early game. As the appearance of modpacks and higher tier weapons becomes more frequent, the Elephant Gun gradually loses it's usefulness in term of damage and speed. The massive knockback power and long range however, still have their merits, especially in a custom map where hordes of rushing monsters or alot of cacodemons are present and the player immediately need some breathing room.

Despite being a shotgun, The **Renegade** class perk will **NOT** synergise with the Elephant Gun due to being a single-projectile weapon.

The **Technician**'s passive optimization synergize the Elephant Gun with an immediate 10% increase in damage due to being a basic assembly gun. This makes a full damage-modded Elephant Gun extremely deadly in the hands of a Technician.

The Elephant Gun is a basic assembly weapon and has 2 mod slots available.

## Modpack Analysis

**Bulk & Power** - Increases the mulitplier by 1 per modpack (x5 by default) but the damage range stays the same. Both **Bulk** and **Power** increase its base damage for the same amount due to the gun no longer has the multiple pellets property to upgrade with the Bulk modpack. It is highly recommend to put use both slot for damage upgrade (Bulk and/or Power, any will do). A full damage Elephant Gun can deals around 140 damage on average and can kill a base Hell Knight and Mancubus in 4-5 shots from any range.

**Agility & Sniper** - Both **Agility** and **Sniper** mod increase the accuracy of the Elephant Gun and both of them are not recommended. The Elephant Gun already has a very good accuracy, further upgrading its accuracy is a waste of slots and modpack. Note that a single Sniper modpack can make the weapon perfectly accurate.

**Technical** - Players will requires 2 **Technical** modpacks to see the difference in reload speed, but that difference is highly noticable and can be extremely useful in any circumstances.

**Firestorm** - **Firestorm** modpack is also a waste of modpack because the Elephant Gun is a single-shot weapon, as such, it's firing speed is solely governed by the reload speed. Increasing fire rate on this weapon will do nothing.

## Evaluation

### Pros

* High damage, can one-shot any Former-Humans except the **Elite Captain** and **Minigunner** withtwo Pow/Bulk upgrades**.**
* Very accurate, but not 100% due to the kick from the gun.
* Massive Knocback comparable to top-tier weapons in the game, can repels all Pinky variants and any flyers.
* Very good against dodgable enemies due to being a single-projectile weapons.
* Very good entry-level weapon for the Technician.

### Cons

* Single-projectile, relying much on player's aim and lose effectiveness at extreme range.
* Is a pump-action, not fast enough for chaotic fights and ambushes unless upgraded with two Tech mods.
* Too much damage randomization, Slowly becomes unreliable when using against big enemies. Starts from Pinkies.
* Quickly outperformed in damage, speed and efficiency by higher tier weapons.

## Trivia

* In real-life, an elephant guns and a shotgun loaded with slug rounds is a mutually exclusive term. an Elephant Gun is type of a large caliber rifles used for hunting large animals of Africa during the 19th centuries. A large caliber military rifle cannot be called an Elephant Gun due to having different purpose during the creation (civilians vs military use)
* A slug round is type of ammunition that were made to use with a shotgun for hunting purpose. Compared to a rifle round, a slug round is much heavier, much larger and more blunt shape. The size, shape and weight of the slug round translates to more energy on impact but also more air resistance and in turn, range (but still having much more effective range than any buckshots)
* Sprite used for the Elephant Gun strongly resembles a Winchester M1887 with a stock sawed off. It is the iconic lever-action shotgun used by the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from the Terminator franchise. Also, it could not be considered an elephant gun as the M1887 uses 12 gauge and 20 gauge shells as opposed to the much larger 10 to 2 gauge used by the real elephant guns.
* Despite being a lever-action shotgun in the pickup sprite, Doomguy cycle the shells with a pump mechanism which the gun doesn't really have.