A Legendary Handcannon can kill in .73 seconds with three critical hits (This is the highest RoF-tier, including guns like Devil-you-don't). [1] To compare, Red Death and Stranger's rifle can kill in .67 seconds with two-critical bursts. Mythoclast kills in .61 seconds with five critical hits. Clearly, Legendary Handcannons are balanced, with TTKs near other guns. However. Moving to Thorn and The Last Word data. The Last Word kills in .50 seconds with three-headshots, and .50 seconds with three hip-fire body-shots. But this isn't the scary part, it kills in .75 seconds with ADS body-shots. A guardian's shoulder-to-shoulder hitbox is (conservatively) about 2x wider, and 2x taller than the head hitbox. This means that Last Word's Slowest TTK is only as much as .15 seconds slower than other gun's fastest TTKs. The Gun's hip-fire bodyshot is the fastest killing primary weapon damage in the game. It surpasses the second-fastest (Vex mythoclast) by .11 seconds. To compare, Vex Mythoclast surpasses the third-fastest (red death) by only .05 seconds, which in turn surpasses the fourth-fastest by... again .05 seconds. To put .50 seconds into perspective, human-reaction time averages at .25 seconds. Also, Corrective measure kills in all-crits in .50 seconds. Jolder's hammer/AAO kills in .40 seconds. TLW is also extremely easy to use in the air due to its hip-fire perk. https://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Pwadigy/video/1796312 https://xboxdvr.com/gamer/Pwadigy/video/1796322 In case you need a visual. Thorn, on the other hand is broken for entirely different reasons Falling in the high RoF tier, thorn's aggressive ballistics and DoT allow it to solidly kill in three-hits with body-shots. This means that its TTK with body shots is exactly equal to guns like Devil You Don't with headshots. Furthermore, it has an aim-assist stat of 60 (which is improved even further with send-it), making it easier to aim than Hawkmoon. The worst part is its two-hit headshot. With only .34 seconds of exposure, a Thorn user can have a player marked for a kill. This is faster than any Machine-gun in the game, and can be accomplished with two-trigger pulls. This means that a Thorn user can actually strafe-in and out of cover, only needing to be exposed long enough to pull the trigger. With other guns, like red-death, a player would have to at least be fully-exposed and lined-up with the target's head for the .15ish second burst-time. With Thorn's Legendary counter-parts, you'd have to get three shots off, effectively making the peekaboo play exponentially harder (having to expose yourself 50% more) To add on-top of Thorn's brokenness, it also delays recovery over a span of 4 seconds (regardless of Body Shot or Headshot). This means that if a player can even get one body-shot off before running to cover, they can keep a player at one-shot status for four whole seconds. Also, the DoT gives players communicating mics the ability to tell eachother exactly where a player is, allowing for an easy arc-bolt/firebolt finish. To add on to all of this, players planning to team-shoot a thorn-user will find that they will often get hit without being aimed at, due to the over-penetrating rounds. Finally, Thorn's bullet drop-off with send-it is well over 100m. This is almost the entire length of most PvP maps. So basically, Thorn could be classified as a Sniper-range gun. No wonder Handcannons are more used than all three weapon types combined [2], the two exotics are ridiculous statistical outliers for their own weapon-class, and even other exotics [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L7FV9l4hXo2tHD3XlFUp854XvJIwTKFIPvASLduPPS4/edit#gid=0 [2]http://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/359b48/discussion_a_months_worth_of_crucible_data_april/ Edit: To be fair, I don't think the guns need heavily nerfed, they just need to be brought in-line with the-next best things. Really, I think removing a lot of the aim-assist from both would really make them into the skill-guns that they are supposed to be. (Fact: Clint Eastwood didn't have aim-assist) Counter-Arguments Edit: So far, the counter-arguments have been the continuum fallacy of: "If they nerf those guns, then they have to keep nerfing them all. Which ignores the fact that the closest thing to TLW is .11 seconds away in killtime, and requires headshots, and that after that, everything is relatively close to eachother in kill-time (in increments of .05, again all other guns need headshots). The unfounded claim that: Thorn and TLW are exotics, and are hard to get, and therefore have to be OP. Bungie stated very clearly that Exotics are never supposed to simply be Better than other guns. They are supposed to feel different and unique. Last Word is literally just a regular handcannon with more damage and a higher fire-rate. It even has aim-assist and stability. Same thing with Thorn. And the popular belief that: Thorn and TLW are Skill Guns that can only be used at certain ranges. All the numbers say otherwise. Near Max-stability is possible on both, generous aim assist on both (which is a stat that literally tells you how easy aiming is with a gun), and the ability to get faster kill times with body shots than the all of our generic weapons can with headshots. Special mention of the vague: Yeah, well those are just number, in real PvP, those TTKs never happen. To that I say, More Damage is More Damage If more damage is at all controllable, it will always be better. With plenty of aim-assist, and the ability to achieve fast kill-times on 4x larger hitboxes, there's no reason to believe that Last Word and Thorn have some kind of special drawback that makes their obviously, massively superior Kill-times any less relevant to this discussion. And, Of Course: "blahblahblah.. it is because of you that guns in this games are nerfed one after the other.." I'm flattered that I personally have so much sway /s. Although, to be fair, this game's TTKs are all over the place, and there are lots of different guns that work differently. Therefore, it's only natural that we would have a lot of balancing to do, as there is an increased change of massive statistical outliers.