For those who don't know, there is a bug that allows running double specials to spawn more heavy ammo, and bungie will be fixing this next season. Unfortunately, this pretty much means trace rifles will go back to being nearly useless again. So, I have a few ideas to prevent them from fading into obscurity.
1. Give trace rifles infinite ammo. They can either make them primaries or remove the reserves and make the magazine recharge similar to ice breaker from D1.
2. Buff base damage by 15% and buff crit damage by an additional 15%. This would give them a faster ttk than autos and smgs while playing into their precision playstyle since bungie does consider them precision weapons.
3. Buff reserves by 30-50% and buff damage vs minors by 40%, and majors by 25%. Given hand cannons are getting a pretty big buff next season, I feel this similar buff would be out of the question.
I personally feel all of these would be fine since Sweet business is basically a primary trace rifle with infinite ammo and can out dps most trace rifles currently, not to mention that a rapid fire auto rifle does basically the same thing since it deals more damage per shot and despite having a slower ROF the dps for both are nearly the same, except rapid fire autos have better damage dealing perks, a much better variety, and infinite ammo.
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If you think trace rifles are “dead” with this change you crutch to hard on double special. It will not kill them, they will be fine. Agers/witherhoard/etc + forbearance will still be a “meta” pick. There’s generally never a reason to run double special except for memes anyways.