CS2 Shotguns and Machine Guns: Worth a Loadout Slot?

The most expensive weapon in Counter-Strike 2 is not the AWP.

It is the M249, at $5,200 against the AWP's $4,750, and it pays a $300 kill reward — the same $300 a $300 P250 pays. Spending more than an AWP to earn less than a shotgun is a hard trade to justify on any round I can construct.

But the M249 is not a curiosity sitting in a corner of the buy menu. It is one of eleven weapons fighting over five loadout slots, and that squeeze is the part of this class worth pricing in before any of the damage numbers.

Five slots, eleven guns

Counter-Strike 2 does not have a "Heavy" buy-menu tab. Valve deleted it. The release notes for June 6, 2023 spell out the replacement: "Players have 1 Starting Pistol slot, 4 Pistol slots, 5 Mid-tier slots (previously 'SMGs' and 'Heavy'), and 5 Rifle slots, per team."

Mid-tier is where the shotguns and machine guns went. Per side it contains six submachine guns, three shotguns and two machine guns — eleven weapons — and you may equip five.

So the question is not "is the Nova good?" in the abstract. It is: is the Nova better than the fifth gun you would otherwise carry? With six of the eleven being submachine guns, the thing a shotgun usually displaces is an SMG, and the CS2 SMG guide covers what you would be giving up.

That framing changes the answer. Two of these six earn a slot on most maps. Two are situational. Two are not weapons, they are trivia.

Every shotgun and machine gun, priced

Two structural notes before the damage math. The Sawed-Off is Terrorist-only and the MAG-7 is Counter-Terrorist-only — they are counterparts, not competitors, so no player ever chooses between them. And the Nova, XM1014, Negev and M249 are all available to both sides, which is why a CT loadout and a T loadout end up looking almost identical in this half of the menu.

Armor penetration decides the whole class

Shotgun damage is quoted per pellet, and a shotgun "one-shot" only happens when enough pellets from a single trigger pull land on the same hitbox. So the number that matters is not the headline damage figure. It is per-pellet damage against armor, measured against the pellet count.

Here is the Counter-Strike Wiki's point-blank chest data for all six, with the arithmetic done:

The Nova is the cheapest shotgun in the game at $1,050 and it is priced that way for a reason: 50% armor penetration, the lowest of the four. Thirteen damage per pellet against an armored chest means eight of its nine pellets have to connect for a one-shot kill. That is close to a perfect hit, at point-blank, with no falloff. Against an enemy in a vest the Nova is a two-shot gun with a 68 RPM pump between the shots.

The MAG-7 and Sawed-Off both sit at 75% and both need five of eight. That is a realistic hit at close range, and it is the entire case for the class.

Heads tell the same story more bluntly:

Of these six weapons, only the M249 kills through a helmet with one projectile — 102 damage, two over the line. The Negev misses by a single point at 99. And a single Nova pellet kills a bare head at 106, which is why the gun feels wildly inconsistent: against an unhelmeted eco it can delete someone with a graze, and against a full buy it needs almost the whole pattern.

The XM1014 cannot one-shot an armored chest

This is the finding that should change how you aim it.

The XM1014 fires six pellets. Against an armored chest each pellet does 16. Six times sixteen is 96 — four short of a kill. A perfect, every-pellet XM1014 chest hit on an armored opponent at point-blank range does not kill them. No range, no angle, no aim fixes that; the gun does not carry enough pellets.

The abdomen does. Armored abdomen and pelvis take 20 per pellet, so five of six pellets deal exactly 100. Against an armored target the XM1014 is a stomach gun, not a chest gun, and that is a different aim point from the other three shotguns.

The $900 kill reward, and the shotgun that does not get it

Shotgun kills pay $900 in Competitive and Premier. That is triple a rifle kill and the highest reward any gun in Counter-Strike 2 pays — only the knife's $1,500 beats it. Buy a $1,050 Nova, get two kills, and you are $750 up on the round with a weapon still in your hands. The full reward table is in the CS2 economy guide.

The XM1014 does not get it. It pays $600 in CS2, down from the $900 it paid in Global Offensive.

Stack that against its price and the gun has a problem. It costs $2,000 — almost double the Nova, $700 more than the MAG-7, and only $700 short of an AK-47. For that you get the worst per-pellet damage in the class, six pellets instead of eight or nine, a kill reward cut by a third, and a chest hit that mathematically cannot kill an armored enemy. Its 171 RPM and 80% armor penetration are real advantages, but they are paying off a very expensive ticket.

The two machine guns: 99 damage and a $5,200 price tag

The Negev costs $1,700, carries a 150-round magazine, fires at 800 RPM and has a property the wiki records as unique to it: the Negev slows the player while firing, from a 150 running speed down to 75. It is already the slowest gun in the menu standing still — 150 against the MAG-7's 225 — and firing halves that again.

The wiki calls it the most inaccurate weapon in the game when bursted, and then it stops being that: after sustained fire the recoil concentrates to a fixed point and stops moving. That is a suppression tool, not a duelling tool. Spraying a choke through smoke is the honest use case, and its 200 penetration power is what makes the spray worth anything on the far side.

The M249 is the strangest entry in the buy menu. At $5,200 it is the most expensive weapon in Counter-Strike 2 — $450 more than the AWP, $200 more than the SCAR-20 — and it returns $300 a kill. It has the best raw profile here: 200 penetration power, 80% armor penetration, and the only one-projectile helmet kill of the six at 102 damage. It also has a 195 running speed, a 5.7-second reload, and a price that would otherwise buy an AK-47, kevlar and helmet, a smoke and a flashbang with $1,000 left over.

Two frags with it leave you $4,600 down. That is the whole review.

What March 18, 2026 did to the MAG-7

The March 18, 2026 update rewrote reloading. Valve's note: "When you reload a magazine-fed weapon, all remaining ammo in the magazine is discarded and a new, full magazine is taken from the reserves. Reserve ammunition is now represented either as number of magazines, shells, or bullets, depending on the weapon." The companion blog post added the design intent — most weapons got a three-magazine fill-up, with some given less "to reward efficiency and precision" and some more "to encourage spamming through walls and smokes."

Read that against this class and one gun is exposed. The MAG-7 is the only magazine-fed shotgun in Counter-Strike 2. The Nova, Sawed-Off and XM1014 all load shells individually through a loading gate, which is why they can interrupt a reload and fire mid-animation. The MAG-7 swaps a detachable box magazine, cannot cancel the reload, and — after March 18 — throws away whatever shells were left in it.

With a five-shell magazine, that is punishing. Top the MAG-7 off with three shells left and you have binned 60% of a magazine to save a second. Topping off between fights was free in Global Offensive; on this specific gun it is now a straight loss, and on no other shotgun in the menu.

The same update was not a balance patch. In Valve's 2026 release notes published through August 19, 2026, the only weapon repricing was January 21, 2026, which cut $100 from the MP7, MP5-SD and PP-Bizon — all submachine guns. No shotgun or machine gun has had its price, damage or kill reward changed in 2026.

Range, and what a shotgun does to smoke

Shotguns die at range in two separate ways, and the second one is more brutal than falloff.

The first is falloff. The MAG-7 and Sawed-Off share a 0.45 range modifier — the multiplier applied per 500 hammer units of travel, against the Nova's 0.70 and the M249's 0.97. That is more than half the damage gone every 500 units. The Nova's gentler curve, combined with a spread the wiki describes as tightly clustered around the crosshair, is the best argument for taking it over the MAG-7 on a CT side.

The second is a hard wall. The wiki records the MAG-7 and Sawed-Off pellets as disappearing entirely at around 1,408 hammer units. Not weakened — gone. Past that distance those two guns deal literally nothing, which is a different failure mode from a rifle that merely does less damage far away. The MAG-7's listed accurate range is 4.6 metres and the Sawed-Off's spread is the widest of the four.

There is also a property the class has that does not show up in any stat block. Valve's June 6, 2023 CS2 release notes carry a single line: "Shotguns now create larger holes in smoke volumes." CS2 smoke is a volumetric object that bullets carve through, so a shotgun blast opens a bigger window in a cloud than a rifle round does. Holding a smoked choke is one of the few places a MAG-7 has a property an AK does not, and the throws it applies to are in the CS2 utility guide.

Numbers I could not verify

Reserve ammunition is not in the tables above, and it should have been.

The wiki lists 32 reserve shells for the Nova, Sawed-Off and XM1014, 200 rounds for the M249 and 300 for the Negev. None of those values is tagged as Counter-Strike 2-specific, and Valve explicitly retuned reserve counts per weapon on March 18, 2026. So those five figures may be Global Offensive values carried over unrevised.

The MAG-7 is the exception and the tell. Its infobox reads 15 in CS2 against 32 in Global Offensive — and 15 is exactly three of its five-shell magazines, which matches the three-magazine default Valve described. The same wiki page's prose still says the MAG-7 "carries 32 shells in reserve." The two contradict each other. The infobox is the one that agrees with Valve's stated design, so it is the one I would trust — but it is flagged here rather than printed in a table.

Note also that the M249's 200 and the Negev's 300 both work out to exactly two spare magazines, not three — consistent with Valve's "some weapons will have less," but derived, not confirmed.

What to buy, by round type

Anti-eco as CT, enemy has no helmets. The MAG-7 at $1,300. Five of eight pellets to an armored chest, 120 to a bare head, a 225 running speed that is the fastest in the class, and $900 back per frag. Take a short angle, take the fight inside 4.6 metres, and swap up if you live.

Anti-eco as T. The Sawed-Off at $1,100, on the same math — five of eight, 128 to a bare head — with the widest spread of the four and a 210 running speed. It is a corner weapon, not a pushing weapon.

Cheapest possible frag on a save. The Nova at $1,050, both sides. One pellet kills a bare head. Do not take it into a round where the enemy bought armor: 13 damage per pellet against a vest means eight of nine, and you will not get eight of nine.

Against a full buy. None of the four shotguns. Buy the rifle, or read the M4A4 versus M4A1-S breakdown and pick one. A 0.45 range modifier and pellets that vanish at 1,408 units is not a tool for contesting a site against armor.

Holding a choke you have already smoked. The Negev at $1,700, and only if you accept you are suppressing rather than duelling. It slows you to 75 while firing and pays $300 a kill.

The M249. No. $5,200 for a $300 kill reward is a donation, and the AWP guide explains what $4,750 buys you instead.

The rest of the weapon math lives on the Counter-Strike 2 coverage hub, and the wider archive is on the Mythras blog.

Quick Action Checklist

• Your CS2 loadout holds five Mid-Tier slots for eleven guns per side. A shotgun usually costs you a submachine gun.
• Shotgun kills pay $900, the highest gun reward in the game. The XM1014 is the exception at $600.
• The MAG-7 (CT, $1,300) and Sawed-Off (T, $1,100) are the two that earn a slot: five of eight pellets kill an armored chest.
• Aim the XM1014 at the stomach against armor. Six chest pellets total 96 damage; five abdomen pellets total exactly 100.
• Skip the Nova against armored opponents. At 50% armor penetration it needs eight of its nine pellets.
• Never top off a MAG-7. Since March 18, 2026 reloading discards the rest of the magazine, and its magazine holds five.
• The other three shotguns load shell by shell and can cancel the reload to fire — the MAG-7 cannot.
• The M249 costs $5,200, more than the AWP, and pays $300 a kill. It is the most expensive weapon in CS2.
• The Negev is the one weapon the wiki records as slowing you while firing, from 150 to 75.
• Shotgun pellets on the MAG-7 and Sawed-Off vanish at about 1,408 hammer units. Past that they deal nothing.