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Destiny 2

Discuss all things Destiny 2.
Edited by ben: 2/2/2022 6:09:31 AM
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The problem with hand cannons and the solution - from a hand cannon user

Hand cannons have always been my favourite weapons in this game. I have 100,000 kills with them in PvP which is more than the majority of players will ever have in overall PvP kills. I think they are the most fun, most versatile, highest skillgap primaries in the game. I have always come to their defense, saying hand cannons are skill cannons and deserve to be the meta or that they can be countered by other primaries. But I have come to the realization in the past few months, as I have gotten bored and branched out into other loadouts, that the claim that they are unbalanced in the current primary sandbox is utterly undeniable. There are a few concrete, tangible reasons why hand cand cannons are more practical and versatile than any other primary. 1. Zoom magnification Not many people know this but zoom magnification is one of the biggest reasons as to why hand cannons are better than other primaries. Just like with snipers, the shorter zoom scope you have the easier it is to acquire targets quickly and accurately after aiming down the sight. With high zoom rifles, it is disorienting to aim down sight and find your target. With a hand cannon it is easy. If you dont believe me try slide challenging someone while using an eyasluna and then do it with a night watch. 2. Handling Hand cannons tend to have a higher handling stat than rifles. This makes switching to your weapon and aiming down the sight very quick, and when paired with the low zoom it makes them very servicable in 1v1s. 3. In air accuracy It is no secret that hand cannons are the only primaries, except maybe SMGs, with perfect in air accuracy. Even without icarus grip, weapons like thorn and ace of spades still have a decent chance to connect headshots. Compare this to other primaries which are not only inaccurate in the air (try jumpshotting with an auto that doesnt have icarus... lmao) but they are just extremely awkward to use in the air, largely because of the previous points. You cant very easily fly through the air gunning someone down with an auto rifle but you absolutely can with a hand cannon. 4. Damage per shot Despite not always winning in time to kill, hand cannons have by far the highest damage per shot in the game unless you consider a pulse rifle burst a shot which I don't think anyone should. One shot, which can be fired off instantly, can do 70-80 damage which is over a third of a player's health. This leaves them severely disadvantaged and effectively incapacitates them. In that same amount of time, say they were using an auto rifle, they wouldve done maybe 40 or 50 damage to you. If played correctly, you can win a hand cannon fight while only exposing yourself for less than half of the time to kill of a normal primary. Peekers advantage in this game makes this easy to abuse. 5. Hip fire accuracy Aside from smgs and maybe sidearms, hand cannons are the most accurate primaries while hipfiring. This just adds to versatility. 6. Less flinch intake; easier to hit shots through flinch I cant prove this anywhere but anyone who plays knows it is true. Hand cannons cause a lot of flinch, they dont take in much, and it doesnt really matter anyway because you only have to hit 3 shots. With auto rifles you have to hit 8-10 shots, with pulses 2 or 3 full precise bursts, hand cannons its just 3 bullets that you have to hit and they are not hard to hit. Compared to, say, you are trying to hit your auto rifle shots through hand cannons flinch. You wont hit enough to out TTK them. 7. Advantageous for slide peeking It is no secret that slide challenging in this game is extremely powerful, but it is mostly for hand cannons, and this is pretty much because of what Ive listed above, specifically low zoom and high handling. It is very easy to slide out and acquire a target, and instantly start damaging them. Wormhaven bridges for example; the lane is long enough that you can see people on radar when they stand on the other side, and there's only one place for them to be, so you slide out prefiring and they can't do anything if they have a hand cannon themselves much less if they had anything else; theyd get flinched off before they could even aim in. Same with pantheon spawns and Jav-4 blue spawn that you can radar from rock wall. 8. Catch-all range Hand cannons are most effective under 30m, and the average engagement distance according to destinytracker is around 16m. There are outliers, but for the most part, hand cannons have the perfect range for encounters on destiny maps. Pulses and scouts would be better if the maps were bigger. 9. Stability doesnt really matter At least on pc, because HCs shoot so slow and you have to wait for the recoil to reset no matter, you dont really need stability to hit your shots. These are the best reasons I could think of in terms of why hand cannons are objectively, by design, the best PvP option for the primary slot. And what do I propose? Buff all other primaries hard. A blanket buff. Not to damage. Decrease the zoom magnification on all rifles, increase the handling on all rifles, increase the stability on all rifles, improve in air accuracy for all rifles, decrease flinch intake on all rifles. Do all of this, and reevaluate where we stand with the meta. I guarantee that these changes alone, without even touching TTK or nerfing hand cannons at all, will bring more balance than we have now. The TTK charts indicate that the meta is not a product of HCs having the fastest time to kill so we need to look at the bigger picture of what it is that makes hand cannons see so much more use than other guns. In my time experimenting with other primaries, there is ONE weapon I have found that holds a candle to hand cannons, including 2kd tryhard devout hand cannon using rumble players. I have used this gun in rumble, the only PvP playlist I play, and have maintained, even improved, my 90% winrate. The weapon is No time to explain. Unlike DMT, which is very good, it is consistent; Im not ever dying because of this game's wonky hip fire hit detection. It has basically infinite range, but it also works extremely well up close and is amazingly easy to hit shots with because the zoom magnification is some of the lowest on any rifle. The handling is stellar for a rifle. The damage output is extremely strong, being a high impact pulse it does 36 to the head which is enough to kill someone in two bursts even if two of your six bullets are bodyshots, and with Time's chasm active you get a flat extra 33 damage for a total of a potential 141 damage in one burst. Insane. Like I said I have taken this weapon into rumble and it absolutely embarasses top 1% hand cannon users, sometimes even making them rage swap to it. If every rifle was this good the game would be way more balanced. So... do that. Examine what makes no time to explain good (aside from time's chasm) and do it to every rifle. Insane base stats and high ease of use. The sandbox will be better than ever, I guarantee it. If you want another example look at vex mythoclast. Same damage profile as a 360 rpm auto rifle but instead of the useless 80+ range on that archetype it has extremely high stability. The shots are easy to keep on a target's head and they hit HARD (36). The zoom is low, the handling is high, and the gun ramps up in damage as you get kills to a max of 45 damage per headshot. It also broke the meta when it first came out and it is still pretty fantastically good even though it is basically just a glorified auto rifle which you would think would suck. What makes it different? Do it to every rifle.
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  • Hand cannons are extra stupid on MnK because MnK grants bonus stability and more importantly ACCURACY. Several of the points you made are much more apparent on MnK than controller. Now, to add to this conversation: -at higher levels, utility is king, and always will be. Hand cannons, because of their damage profile and accuracy combination will always be king even if autos got similar buffs. (The auto buffs you mentioned basically turn them in to longer range SMGs and invalidate SMGs so… idk) -I would wager that a large majority of players using hand cannons would be better off using pulses since MOST players in destiny truly don’t have the skill set to actually utilize the actual benefits of a hand cannon (seriously how often do you see average players just taking wide open, no cover, flat footed on the ground duels with their hand cannons) -usage rates will almost always follow what’s most effective at the high levels, despite it not being the most effective at lower levels because players will get farmed by a good player using X weapon and then imediately slap it on thinking it must be better for them. -flinch reception is tied to zoom value, which is why higher zoom weapons struggle with flinch. Primary flinch across the board needs toned down. -auto rifles need to have a base range and recoil direction buff, so they generally out range hand cannons. Also having good base recoil direction would open up the mod slot for Icarus or other game altering mods rather than the most commonly used counterbalance. -pulses are low key fire when rolled/played right

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