So everything is NERF NERF NERF right now, people barking chicken squabble over seeing that stats are going down and presuming that it means the end of the weapon in question. "This is the second time auto rifles have been nerfed!" "Necrochasm is already bad!" "I like hand cannons besides Thorn!" Those are the most legitimate of the complaints, mind. So let's look at how these changes will actually affect the game, namely the Crucible. [u][b]Auto Rifles[/u][/b] The most contentious of the announcements, the average player's choice weapon is once again being toned down in what's being received as a hate crime from Bungie. They're losing an average of 2.5% damage and some effective range. The damage is being harped on far more, however, so let's look at that. SUROS Regime headshot in Crucible: 35 damage :: 6 rounds to kill Take away 2.5% of that. SUROS Regime headshot in Crucible: 34 damage :: 6 rounds to kill Well what about those ones with really low Impact? Atheon's Epilogue headshot in Crucible: 13 damage :: 16 rounds to kill -2.5% still 13 damage :: 16 rounds to kill. 2.5% is literally intangible in the Crucible. It only stands to lower PvE DPS a very slight amount and make them more like other primary weapons in terms of performance. In my ideal world, auto rifles would have markedly lower DPS for their ease of use, so this model still caters to player preference. The real meat of this change is the effective range decrease, which cannot be quantified right now, but will likely make auto rifles lose to pulse and scout rifles at longer ranges instead of tying or defeating them. That affects both sides of the "PvX" coin. [u][b]Hand Cannons[/u][/b] I hope you all realize that most of these people (possibly including yourself!) only care about this because hand cannons and auto rifles (and the Mythoclast, but it's an auto rifle by any other name and we know it) are the only primaries worth using in PvP right now. Time to kill is not changing. If you could 3-shot consistently before, you should be able to post-patch as well. The changes are to its long-range effectiveness because they were persistently defeating scout rifles in their established range. No hand cannon takes 4 shots to kill (to the head). Most scouts take 4. Hand cannons shoot just as fast or faster. They were too good, believe it or not, your tears change nothing. Their most recent buff was an overcorrection. All it means now is that at longer ranges you may need to pace your shots, and at really long ranges you may not be able to land successive headshots or even hits. Just means you have to use it like you use a revolver in almost any other game. [b][u]Pulse Rifles[/b][/u] These are not going to become the "new auto rifle". Adding 9.7% will only drop one round off the time to kill at most, but also give a marked boost in PvE, where pulse rifles still really struggled. I will note that the increase should push Red Death back over its old damage threshold and be capable of a 2-burst kill as it was before (6 perfect headshots), and with its new rate of fire it will be pretty irrefutably the best pulse rifle. Still fairly certain that it will continue to lose to the Regime, which kills in the same amount of rounds but with automatic fire. Just perhaps not so consistently as before. More than that though, we should expect a pulse rifle to kill thralls in one burst and kill majors in one magazine as other primary classes can. [b][u]Conclusion[/b][/u] It's difficult to look at an update like this objectively. I like my hand cannon as much as anyone else likes theirs (check it out on my Hunter, willing to assert that it's the best possible Devil You Don't). Anyone who played the beta will hopefully realize that the first auto rifle nerf was absolutely necessary. I thought I was good back then, a young Warlock with a Cydonia-AR3, but it was the auto rifle doing all the work, and the Shingen-C was virtually unbeatable (fairly certain some machine guns lost to it). Balance is an ongoing effort. It cannot be strictly defined and is based on a variety of factors beyond rate of fire and damage per round. Bungie's proposed changes represent an effort to introduce a skill basis on weapon choice: not only in the obvious sense of weapon accuracy and control, but positioning, and playing to your weapon's strengths. Just as much a part of skill as hand-eye coordination. Squatting in a corner with Hawkmoon or the Regime may not produce the results it once did. Lastly, I'll be the first to admit that this is not everything the game (especially the Crucible) needs. Why the Mythoclast's crucible performance has gone unchecked, I don't know. Why the Necro only has 2% more Attack than legendaries, I can't explain. The heavy ammo glitch, raid bugs, and Hawkmoon's Holding Aces logic all need address. "But it's a start." -Lord Shaxx It is my belief that this is absolutely a step in the right direction and hope that Bungie makes efforts to correct their other mistakes and, moreover, prevent similar mistakes from happening in the future.