The crucible is a rewarding but also annoying experience that Bungie seems to have either forgotten about, or not focused a lot of their time to in regards to updating and balancing it. I wanted to give my thoughts about how I would like to see the Crucible “meta” balanced and why I believe it would work wonders in to having a less toxic, less centralized experience. For starters, there’s one huge outlier in PvP. That is the Thorn. There’s hundreds, maybe even thousands of threads a day calling out people who use the Thorn or just calling for a nerf. And it’s completely understandable. As someone who has played since launch (took a 3 month break only to come back to seeing how the Thorn had already begun to take over) I’ve been through basically every shift in the crucible metagame. From the prominence of people literally running around with Fusion Rifles all game (and pre-nerf Pocket Infinity was a sight to behold along with when people found out that the Plan C was actually good), to the over usage of Auto Rifles, in particular the SUROS Regime, I’ve seen it all. And for me, I can honestly say, I find this current metagame of Thorn and then some (then some being Red Death, TLW and sometimes the Hawkmoon) by far the worst. The problem with Bungie was that they saw that over usage meant overpowered, which is logically incorrect, but that’s for another thread entirely. With the way the Crucible is now it directly contradicts what Bungie said they wanted PvP like, 8 months ago in a weapon tuning update. About “not having to use the same thing to achieve a desired result”. At least when Auto Rifles were prominent there was a lot more variation in which ones were used, and guns like the Hawkmoon and Last Word stood up to said Auto Rifles the same way they try to stand up to the Thorn. But the Thorn is an entirely different monster. The gun literally hands you kills and is a guaranteed 2 head shot kill. TLW very rarely can glitch for two 111 damage head shots and the Hawkmoon is just as likely to two shot as consistently as you hit for 95-95-95 and 3 shot someone. There is absolutely no downside to using the Thorn at all. Passive damage from it’s perk means it’s effective at virtually every single range you shoot from, and the fire rate couple with the easy to hit head shots, means it can even beat out guns like the Last Word, provided your aim is true (and that isn’t hard at all). When I see people calling for a nerf on all the hand cannon exotics, I always find myself disagreeing. Simply because, the others should not be nerfed. I continuously see a continuum fallacy in play whenever someone tries to argue about that, but I’ll put that in a later point. The Thorn’s wide ranging capabilities make it extremely versatile. Hawkmoon for instance, is only effective from medium to long range given the range on the gun. It doesn’t have the fire rate to keep up with the last word or Thorn in close quarters. Likewise, the Last Word is the opposite of the Hawkmoon. It has pitiful range outside of it’s effective range, and it’s doing it’s designed job by getting fast kills in closer to medium range encounters. Thorn has no such deficiencies and because of that, it’s unanimously the best weapon in PvP. Due to Thorn’s prominence and the fact that the other two hand cannons (along with Red Death) are good enough to at least combat it, people cry for nerfs on the other two, which I find completely unjustifiable. The attention should be on the gun that is a complete detriment to the game itself. That being the Thorn. I won’t deny that the Last Word and Hawkmoon will get even more popular, but the fundamentals of the guns themselves even in higher usage is nowhere near negative enough for them to literally dominate an entire metagame of players. Trials has become Trials of the Thorn. Iron Banner is actually Thorn banner. It’s become ridiculous. The Thorn clearly needs a nerf and if you want to touch upon the Last Word a bit, sure. But nothing drastic. But enough about the Hand cannons and the ramble that was there. The rest of the weapons are way to under utilized because of the Thorn’s prominence, so here is what I propose. Nerf the Thorn Rebuff Auto Rifles to where they were after the first patch (so when Suros was doing 39 crit damage instead of the 45 it was doing at launch) Buff the fire rate across the board on all scout rifles (this would likely make guns like Mida top tier choices in PvP) by a bit Patch bugs like the ADS 111 glitch that happens with the Last Word