Boss I am totally with you. Before patch Auto Rifles were already lacking, in my opinion they needed a buff to be able to compete with the Thorn and The Last Word. I play on Xbox so I have no idea about the Hawkmoon. The thing is that Bungie looked at the raw data and saw that Auto Rifles were the most common weapon used. I think that is due to them being the most intuitive weapon. Most FPS have a similar weapon to a Destiny Auto Rifle so they are easy to pick up and play with. At high level play almost no one uses an Auto Rifle, you just are at a disadvantage to the Hand Cannons. The Last Word will wreck just about any weapon close - semi mid range and anything beyond that you got the Thorn. Obviously Bungie wants the majority of its players to start using different weapons the problem is that when they do not look at high level play to "balance" weapons they end up creating a meta where skilled players pick between 2 or 3 different guns and anything else has been dumbed down too much in order to get the average player to make a change. I disagree with the way they are going about it but I do see where they are coming from, if you made it so the Suros could compete with Hand Cannons at high level play then at the average skill level majority of players would chose the Suros over the Hand Cannons. I am totally ok with that but I think Bungie is trying to open players to using all sorts of different weapons. The sad part for me is that they are almost "making" players change weapons in a similar way that they created the "slaughter" rule. I can back out of a lobby if I chose to I don't need some parent figure (Bungie) telling me I played so bad that they will do it for me, some times you want another chance and you just had a fluke game. If the weapons were more balanced yes more players would use the Assault Rifles because they are intuitive to FPS but instead Bungie is "making" players use other weapons by making Auto Rifles bad enough that even if they are intuitive they are just not worth it.