I'm really torn between the two.

It's hard for me to compare the damage from a clickclickclick power like the shotgun to the SMG's maintained burst.

With advantages, is the shotgun's guaranteed knockback better than the SMG's bleed effect?

Any thoughts?

The shotgun is really amazing. The ability to knockback everyone in front of you, with what seems like at least 30% is hard to beat, and its cheap and pretty damaging.

The advantage I've been trying out recently, not sure if its worth it. You have to charge it for 1 sec then it guarantees a knockback. Only real use is to knock a troublesome boss off his ass if you're having bad luck with spamming it.

SMG seems to have a much larger cone and is pretty good for ripping apart weaker guys. I would always take shotgun over the sub though.

My impressions from late in CB, is take shotgun...the cone on smg is hard to control and easy to aggro mobs you dont want.

Echoing the other sentiments...

Shotgun is just amazing. If you get the knockback going you can just push an enemy around the map for a while with it. It is seriously my most favorite Munitions power.

SMG is... not as amazing. Try it out in the Power House first so you can try to get a handle on how wide it's spread is. I found that I never quite was able to get a feel on when I was and wasn't going to hit someone other than my primary target with it. I think I played with it as long as I did during the OB only because I had found a really fun looking power replacer for it and used it more for the 'shiny pew-pew' then as a serious power.

In the end, I did go with the shotgun... I'm not a huge fan of how the click powers 'feel' (too spoiled to being able to queue them like in CoX), but the tiny energy cost of the shotgun won out.

It also matches my private eye character motif more than the SMG would have.

Your next assignment is to test it with Quarry (from Archery).

Only then will you understand what Shotgun can really do.