After using almost all of the hand cannons for TTK and ending up with an Imago Loop w/ firefly outlaw smallbore/hammer forged, I've used hand cannons from the lowest tier to the highest such as that and have used all sorts of hand cannons in all of Year One. [b]They don't entirely suck.[/b] - The ammo sucks (the bullet to damage efficiency does NOT match other guns, therefore the total ammo / ammo picked up seems really low) - Higher rate of fire, lower impact guns just aren't worth it. A 299 mid-impact (fatebringer's arctype for example) can do ~15% more than a 316 raid hand cannon with the lower impact arctype. It makes up for it by shooting faster, but hand cannons are NOT about fire rate. It's about snap-shot headshots. Quickly aiming at one enemy (aim assist and sights help superbly) and then taking that one bullet and moving onto the next. Higher fire rate does NOT help with this, only if you miss (even then it's barely noticable for the fire rate difference. - Lowest rate of fire, highest impact guns ALWAYS have NO range, stability, or reload..seriously I bet the guy that thought up the max rate of fire snipers, null impact thought these up.. - Going off the previous post, it seems a lot of perks don't seem well-suited for hand cannons because of its snapshot headshot ideology behind handcannons. So either the perks are straight garbage, or are super good. [b]Thing's that are good about them still[/b] - Face it, headshotting things that are close range with a scoutys hard because of the zoom, and landing all 3 bullets on the head without a ridiculously rolled pulse is hard. The snapshot 1 shot thing yet again comes into play here with rewarding those one-shot kills on things or 4-5 shotting a red health knight (LOOK AT YOU LIGHT EATER). Also, yet again, it's NOT HARD to do this because of aim assist / sights. - Their range isn't trash like auto rifles. The range falls off about, no exaggeration, 75% further than auto rifles. Not only that, it's STILL damn near 100% accurate. Don't listen to Bungie when they 'nerf accuracy,' how many times has an update messed something up? The accuracy is still huge. Range is great, you may experience ~10% damage loss at pulse rifle's range fall-off but that's not too relevant when they still headshot all the time. [b]TL;DR[/b] Pros: King of close-medium range, damage-fall off insignificant w/ great innate accuracy. Cons: One arctype (the mid RoF, 81 impact) outshines the rest by a pretty big margin (not so much the highest rate of fire, more so the lowest rate of fire arctype), and ammo pick-up/total reserves =/= ammo:damage efficiency (say my 308 raid handcannon doing 5k vs 3.4k hung jury (~50% more damage), but instead of picking up 1.5x less ammo to compensate, it picks up 3x less ammo.)