The Mastiff has finally come out of the supply drop and is now available all across King's Canyon. While player's get used to the gun's feel, one thing is important to remember: aim that sucker at the body.
Redditor u/tacticalcombatwalrus demonstrates the power of Mastiff in the Training Mode by firing repeated Mastiff shots into the head and body of a dummy. With relative ease, the Redditor is able to prove that body shots with the Mastiff do significantly more damage and close, medium, and long-range.
This Training Mode test is something you can do yourself, and we recommend that you do. It's a quick and fun way to practice with all the weapons in the game and the best way to learn more about the game. In this case, the only way to know for sure that body shots work better than headshots with the Mastiff is to test it out.
It's a bit counter-intuitive, considering the way weapons work in Apex Legends, but it makes sense if you check the math and carefully read the patch notes for Season 5.
In Apex, most guns have a 2x multiplier on headshots, meaning bullets that hit the head do twice as much damage as bullets that hit the body. This was true for the Mastiff as well, until it came out of the supply drop. With the Season 5 weapon rotation, the Mastiff saw a number of nerfs to bring it in line with other shotguns in the game:
- Reduced damage per pellet from 18 to 13.
- Reduced headshot multiplier from 2.0 to 1.25.
- Increased blast pattern distances for the outer pairs of pellets.
- Increased blast pattern scale ADS multiplier from 0.5 to 0.55.
- Reduced fire rate from 1.3 to 1.0.
- Reduced projectile size to be more in line with other regular shotguns.
- Increased shell count from 4 to 6.
- Increased projectile speed to standard shotgun speed.
The headshot multiplier has been reduced from 2x to only 1.25x. This plays a major part in why the gun is less effective at making headshots, but the other major component is the unique pellet spread pattern of the Mastiff.
As you may be able to tell from the target reticle, the Mastiff has a wide horizontal spread. This means that the pellets spread out in a wide pattern. While aiming down sights, that spread is reduced by 50%, but as u/tacticalcombatwalrus demonstrates in their video, that spread reduction still isn't enough to make up for the reduced headshot damage.
Headshot damage is 25% higher than body damage, but >25% more pellets are able to hit the body than the head. Simply put, more pellets hitting the body means more damage. Body shots do more consistent damage with the Mastiff, so when you're using the shotgun, don't aim for the head!