Shotgun Guard (Q4)

In Quake 4, a Shotgun Guard, or "Shotgun Marine", is a Guard with a Shotgun for a right arm. Like the other Guards, it is generally used to guard an area if powerful Strogg are unavailable. Teleport Droppers can teleport them in.

It makes it's first appearance in the first level, then appears in nearly all of the others (except for the second vehicle level).

Description
Besides firing their shotgun normally, they will often dive forward and roll towards you and fire a shotgun blast at you as soon as they come out of their roll. Being equipped with a close range weapon, they tend to charge you much more than the other guard types.

Strategies

 * Despite being cannon fodder, the Shotgun Guard can inflict a good amount of damage it if gets close to you before firing. If you see it, stay away from it so that it's shotgun will have very little effect on you.


 * Any weapon is effective against it, but the Machine Gun or Hyperblaster should be used to conserve ammo for stronger weapons. But if you want, charged Blaster or Shotgun headshot should work well, Shotgunners should get close to deal more damage, but this is a risky move on higher difficulties. Charged Blaster shot will work best if headshot is scored.


 * With a group of enemies, the Shotgun Guard should be one of the first killed. It's cannon-fodder status means that it'll annoy you while you try to take out stronger targets, especially if it is close or multiple of them show up to divert your attention.


 * Like all Guards, the Shotgun Guard will delay for about a second (they will not attack immediately after showing up), if there are no stronger foes around, feel free to kill before it fire back.

Trivia

 * When flyers are destroyed, the corpse of a Guard will fall out. This shows that Guards have both infantry and aviation roles.