In this particular case, there’s been some controversy lately about the range stat on shotguns, and whether or not it actually has any effect on a shotgun’s lethality.

First, here’s a video that looks to answer the question: Does range matter?

The short answer is “yes”, but good old RNG bullets rear their ugly head yet again, making shotguns inherently inconsistent.

Now to be fair, the whole current question around the range stat on shotguns seems to stem from this video:

In this video, Aztecross comes to the conclusion that on slug shotguns, the weapon’s effective range seems to hit a sort of cap, where increasing the range stat through various perks no longer has any impact on the weapon’s effective range.

Good info to be aware of, and another example of weapons in D2 behaving in ways that are somewhat random and counter intuitive.