The short of it: The whole advantage of any automatic weapon is that they produce a great amount of fire power in short time, but Bungie didn't have to nerf fire power to balance the weapon out. The long of it: Bungie has numbers to back up their reason for nerfing, but if the numbers are based on a faulty premise, then the conclusion is wrong, no matter how flawless the logic built upon it. So what about the auto rifle nerf proves Bungie's lack of wisdom? Two things: 1. The ignorance to what an automatic weapon's strength would actually be. Namely, a lot of impact in a short amount of time. Automatic weapons, by nature, outclass other weapons in many ways. That's why they are considered "advanced technology." A bullet from an automatic rifle, granted, is not like a bullet from a .44, but it's still got enough power to make it far far more advantageous when combined with the fire rate. That's why the army uses machine guns as standard issue instead of .44 magnums. Hence, it should not surprise anyone that auto rifles would, naturally, be the most powerful and useful class of gun in Destiny. It's the very nature of an automatic anything. However, Bungie need not nerf power to balance this issue out. The reason is because of an automatic weapon's natural weakness.... 2. Ignorance to what an automatic weapon's weakness would actually be. Namely, very low stability. It's very backwards that all the auto rifles are weak in impact, yet have high stability. My guess is because if people can't spray and pray, they don't have fun. In reality (and I realize this game is not based on reality) the way to get the fullest out of an automatic is the have short controlled bursts. If Bungie had simply nerfed the stability on their autos, then players would have had to actually aim and think about how they fire the weapon,. This would force them to use skill and reason, YET they would still have the natural advantage of an automatic function available to them in the case of dire emergencies i.e. lots of enemies or a large enemy. Some might argue that pulse rifles are supposed to be THE burst fire weapon of the game. I argue that's silly. Pulse rifles should have the exact same impact and stability as an auto-rfifle with a much slower fire rate. In reality, they should contain the highest single "shot" damage outside snipers, but I digress. I'm not here for pulse rifles, I"m here for auto-rifles. In the end, I'm a hand cannon person, but this thought came to mind, so I'm posting it. Thank you for your attention. Edit: This person's statement caused me to futher refine my stance, so I posted it in an edit. pajama dad wrote: Faulty logic does not necessitate a false conclusion. I replied: Your statement is 100% true. However, I stated that the logic behind the auto-rifle nerving was based on a faulty premise. Actually faulty premises. If the premise is wrong, then that does actually necessitate a false conclusion, no matter how good the logic is. Their premises were: 1. The assumption that it's somehow "wrong" or "inaccurate" for auto-rifles to out class other weapons, ignoring the fact that automatic weapons were designed with 100% unfairness in mind. 2. That it would be accurate to nerf an automatic weapon by going straight for it's strong point. Both of these premises were used in their logic of how to nerf the auto-rifles. Now auto-rifles are plain weak-feeling, awkward and flat-out-boring to me.