Tl;Dr: Auto rifle damage is too low. The recoil limits viability and makes having full auto more detrimental than beneficial. Range being limited by recoil also cripples damage which is a triple negative. Long ass rant. They are garbage in pve, lacking damage and a good base recoil control on console. They have no useful benefits as their bodyshot damage is around 1/3-1/4 of the precision damage which is just terrible. On the plus side, they do half damage against bosses...like handcannons do...but this means they make up for it with higher potential damage right? Yeah they don't. I used the acolytes from menagerie and I'll share my results with you on this but seeing as nobody cares to listen to numbers...ill just give you the run down: So we always hear how "beneficial" the full auto is right? How the magazines and spraying are so good? Yeah that's horse shit. It takes around 15 bullets from an adaptive frame auto to deal roughly the same damage as 3 shots from an adaptive frame handcannon. "But DuB, 15 doesn't sound that bad." Uh...according to the ttk charts used for crucible, adaptive frame autos put out 10 bullets in a very similar time adaptive handcannons put out 3...well, it's like a small gap of 0.03, but it's close enough. "So what you are telling me is...is that adaptive autos take around 1.5x more bullets to deal the same damage...despite it taking only 10 to almost match in crucible?" That's right Timmy skill thumbs. So in terms of damage done in a burst, autos are quite a bit worse. And that's understandable because of how they are designed...but does it need to be as bad as it is? To add insult to injury, to simply land all 15 headshots against this single acolyte and kill it at a SLOWER rate than a handcannon, you also have to be 100% accurate as well. Something not particularly challenging for a handcannon because it only has to shoot 1 maybe 2 bullets which is something easy to do rapidly and in quick succession. Maybe not as easy as simply holding the trigger, but when that benefit is HEAVILY outweighed by the negatives...is it really a benefit good enough to move it towards the easier side of weaponry? At that point isn't using a handcannon simply just going to be an easier weapon to use and a more viable one at that? "Ok ok, you must be getting something wrong, there's no way that's possible. How could a full auto weapon possibly be harder to use than a precision one?" Well Timmy, that's because of recoil. Handcannons are a precision weapon that relies on a single shot to deal it's maximum damage in a burst. But even with higher recoil, only having to land a single shot for maximum damage is a big deal is something that's actually considerably easier to do in actual use than most are willing to admit. But with auto rifles...a lot of them have rather uncomfortable recoil and when you pair that with their necessity in hitting more rounds to deal the same relative damage...the actual amount of aiming required sways more in the autos direction, because there's a lot more factors "in the moment" you have to deal with. Handcannons have a built in mechanic that literally lowers their accuracy over rapid succession because in the previous game they were simply dominating the game with only the bare minimum recoil they generate. Even on pc where autos don't have recoil issues, they simply get outclassed by handcannons because of their design, which allows for more difficult long range kills, but much easier close range kills. One final nail in the coffin is the effective range. Handcannons and autos share the same general effective range. Auto rifle damage wouldn't bother me half as much if they could actually shoot further than handcannons could but unfortunately most can't. My ether doctor has a medium zoom scope, ricochet rounds, and a range masterwork which allows it to hit at an impressive 36 meters without damage fall off. Austringer requires pretty much max range and range finder to reach around 30 meters, which is quite a bit further than most handcannons can shoot. Even though there's around a 6 meter difference in range between my ether doctor and austringer, the sheer damage austringer has allows it to extend to much further ranges both in pve and PvP, while my ether doctor has damage fall off that has a much larger effect on the damage due to it innately being lower. So with their damage so high, even damage fall off has minimal effect until a certain distance is met, to which it drops drastically more than my ether doctor will. But on console...autos are so hard to control well over long distances that you can't shoot much further than that 36 meters without incredible difficulty. But with my austringer, I can still hit some headshots and bodyshots for big damage without too much issue, until bloom kicks in. And to clarify, 600s have the best range out of all autos as they are the easiest to control with a good amount of range. 360s have higher potential, but simply can't reach it on console. So to summarize my points, autos simply don't bring anything valuable to the table. In most scenarios, the full auto is detrimental as the weapon creates issues for itself, much like bloom on handcannons do...does(?)...only it's immediate. This should be changed in shadowkeep because autos simply don't bring anything valuable to the table. No matter how much people believe they are supposed to be a beginner weapon, that shouldn't take away from their viability as everything else has higher potential while realistically not being much harder at all..but autos continue to push themselves into the trash as they don't ever improve and such leaves them to be much more difficult to use effectively and efficiently. So please bungie, improve their recoil and bump up their damage. None of that 5-6% crap please.