Destiny is part shooter, part RPG / MMO. I can't believe how many people seem to play this game and have absolutely ZERO CLUE about how games like this work. The RPG / MMO aspects of this game are designed in such a way to keep people playing regularly over several months / years. There are some good topics on game design that you should google... but just trust me. This is true. When you design games like this, you MUST keep things challenging. You must also strive for this fine balance between a sense of accomplishment and a desire to achieve more. If they allow guns to only get better, never worse, then eventually the game will not be challenging. And once that happens, people will stop playing. Again, you probably don't understand this... and that is okay... because you aren't making games for a living so you don't need to get it. [u][b]Nerfs. PvE and PvP.[/b][/u] You need to understand how PvE and PvP are scaled compared to each other in order to understand how/why changes to PvP USUALLY make sense for PvE also. In the normalized Crucible World: - PvP guardians have somewhere around 200 health. - All the primary guns in this game are designed so that they can kill a guardian (PvP) in around 1 second. Some guns do it slightly faster, some do it slightly slower. This is just an oversimplified example. In the PvE World: We take those same TTKs (time to kills) and scale them based on the delta between Crucible and PvE Let's assume that the dmg of weapons, at level 32, is 10x as much as it is in Crucible Scaled PvE World based on PvP Stats: If a gun does 50 dmg per hit in Crucible, it will do 500 dmg per hit in PvE If a monster should die in around 1 sec from primary fire, it should have around 2000 health. With this baseline, the designer can then scale monster health and difficulty. Now, there are monsters that the designers don't want people to kill in 1 second. So they think to themselves... "How long should it take for a guardian to kill this monster?" If the answer is 5 seconds, then they will give that thing 10000 health. The bottom line? Some monsters are meant to be killed via teamwork, specials, and heavies, and supers. This is why weapon changes should typically be applied to both PvE and PvP. What does this all mean? If a weapon is nerfed in PvP because it is too effective (i.e. It kills guardians too quickly), this ALSO means this same weapon will kill monsters in PvE too quickly for the designers who have spent a ton of time creating strikes, missions, raids, etc with particular design goals in mind. [b]If a gun is OP in PvP, it is ALSO OP IN PvE. [/b] This is important to wrap your brains around. If you don't understand this.... you are beyond hope and you should just quit now because you'll have nothing but tears in the future because I 100% guarantee you there are more nerfs on the horizon (Hi, Gjallahorn). Now.... imagine that there are 1000000 glasses of water. Each glass represents a designer's intent. There are guns, supers, grenades, melee, perks, combos of perks, monsters, various levels of monsters, various frequency of monsters, respawn rates, combinations of monsters, etc.... each of these things is a glass of water. To remove water from something is to nerf it. To add water to something is to buff it. If the goal of the designer is to keep all of these glasses of weapon "relatively balanced" to each other (i.e. working as designed), what happens when 1 glass of water needs more water? Hey, the players looooove buffs, so lets just add water. No biggie. Everyone is happy. What happens if 1 of the glasses of water needs LESS water? Hmm... the players will get pissed if we nerf something, so lets just leave it alone. But now... all the other glasses of water aren't balanced relative to this one. That makes that 1 glass of water more desirable than all the others. Instead of removing water from that one, lets just add water to the other 999999. Yea - that won't be hard to do at all (/sarcasm). And even worse? What happens a year down the road when all Bungie has done is add water.... now all the glasses are full. Aka God Mode. Go look at every game with God Mode as an option... you don't play those for very long. Again, you'll just have to trust me on this one. [u][b]PvP Players[/b][/u] This is a feedback forum. PvP players have feedback on certain guns, tactics, supers, that are OP. Sometimes these are the result of people "whining" after getting their asses handed to them in Crucible. Sometimes it is honest feedback that has a ton of truth to it. Either way, sometimes... they are right. If there is a primary gun with a TTK below 0.8 seconds or so, it is OP most likely. There are a few guns that fit into that category. Conversely, there are some primaries with a TTK at 1.1 seconds and higher... they are probably underpowered. Now you can blame these PvP players all you want, but at the end of the day, the PvP players are not why your gun was nerfed. Your gun was nerfed because it was OP. Period. Bungie doesn't need these forums or these players to know that. They have stats. They play the game too. They already know. Go look at patch notes for: League of Legends World of Warcraft Guild Wars Essentially... go look at the patch notes for any RPG / MMO that has a healthy playerbase. They nerf shit occasionally. Why? Because they know what keeps people playing their games more than the people who are playing their games. Nerfs will happen. Nerfs SHOULD happen. Get over it. Stop crying. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black... [b]* EDIT - thanks to L3THAL LEMONS below *[/b] He brought up a good point. Certain guns are considered OP in Crucible but definitely aren't in PvE and vice versa. i.e. Icebreaker, Black Hammer, and Gjallahorn These are special and heavy weapons...and my post was mostly about primaries, but it still brings up a good point and he cites The Last Word in particular as a counter example. i.e. Some think it is OP in Crucible but I don't think anyone thinks it is OP in PvE. My post was mostly about damage and TTK as a balancing factor... not all of the "meta" that goes with a particular gun. Black Hammer is great in PvE because there are examples of targets that are easily predictable and/or don't move much. This isn't true in Crucible so it doesn't translate. And the Last Word is more of a close-range gun... and these are typically unfavorable in PvE due to Ultras and Majors.