A hand cannon should be a weapon that rewards excellent shooting skill with hard earned points. Generally not for the noobs out there. A weapon that trades fire rate and stability for impact and damage. The guns I list here are undermining that balance and out gunning the majority of primaries on the battlefield: Thorn: So youre not a good enough shot to land those headshots? Dont worry. Thorn will get those kills for you. A few sloppily landed shots to the chest and the lingering damage will take care of you, even if youve managed to kill your opponent, even if you made it to cover. Hawkmoon: Who doesnt love getting killed with one shot? And were not talking about snipers. You line up your shot, your targets almost dead, then he looks over and caps you once in the head with that 'luck in the chamber' and goes along his merry way. Or destroys you in two swift shots from across the map. And those lucky shots always seem to stack right on top of the magazine. And if you miss your first two shots dont worry. Youve got eleven more and youre ready to spam away. The Last Word: A legendary hand cannon is deadly enough if used correctly. Take that hand cannon and triple its rate of fire. Now you have a spam cannon. Yes. It has a lot of recoil. A lot of very predictable recoil. In close to medium range any noob can spam those eight shots fast enough to kill you. In the hands of an ok player, these guns are very annoying. In the hands of an excellent player who doesnt need to rely on cheap weapons to rack up a lot of kills but chooses to do so anyway, theyre downright rage inducing. People say these guns are 'hard to get' and 'require a lot of skill to use'. Getting hawkmoon is lucky. We all know where most people got their TLW. And yeah the thorn bounty is a pain in the ass but if youre even half decent at pvp you can get it. Regarding skill, there must be A LOT of very skilled players out there because I see one or more of these hand cannons in essentially every match I play. They need to be tamed. Make it more difficult to land shots with these beasts. Limit their range. Tone down the damn lingering thorn damage. Do something. Dont neuter them completely but do something. Please. They are a slap in the face of this concept of 'balance' that bungie is supposedly trying to achieve in the crucible. EDIT : I posted this very same thread a few days ago with the title 'Exotic Hand Cannons Reward Poor Marksmanship in Crucible'. I guess that title wasn't very appealing because it got maybe one reply. Even though that's the discussion I was interested in having with people. So I thought I'd make the title a little more inflammatory and sure enough, throw an insult out there and people are all over it. And for everyone who seems to have trouble reading IM NOT TALKING ABOUT LEGENDARY OR BELOW HAND CANNONS. Just exotics. I have utmost respect for people who can wreck heads with Fatebringer for example.