Not better than every weapon just better at normal crucible ranges. Red, vex, and TLW can beat it. I disagree on the idea of a nerf because Bungie have proven they cannot do so without destroying a weapon. Now the times they have buffed weapons has a much better track record. To properly balance they need to increase damage on ARs back to before the last nerf. Scouts should probably hit a tad bit harder, and pulses should be more stable, producing better burst groupings. The other weapons should be buffed rather than nerf a single weapon or a weapon class. If Thorn needed to be rebalanced, a easy fix would be to change perfect balance to a different perk. Maybe a quick reload. Or the faster move while ADS. The gun is already well in line with the other exotic HCs and some of the heavy hitters like Timurs. The big issue I see is that people don't seem to understand DoT weapons. They're hated in most games. This proves a pattern. Non stacking now refreshing DoT normally tends to be a weakness unless the DoT effect contributes a significant amount of damage in a short time. In thorn this creates a vulnerability window where you can kill the user even though you are technically already dead. So use your second chance wisely. Now the reason many switched to thorn is because Bungie created some pretty bad hand cannons for the dark below. There were a lot of people trying for red hand drops with a good role but hand cannons in general seemed to have a low drop rate. Before you'd see lots of other HC like lord high fixer and the devil you know, which made great crucible weapons with good stability mid damage large mags, and good RoF. Without good easily obtained alternative HC, thorn becomes one of the only choices for those that favor HCs. Now the new HCs are a lot better than the dark below, but their perks appear to be less useful than the originals. Bungie has been passively nerfing and buffing weapons by doing this. Honestly Bungie needs to open up custom games that allow player fine tuning to weapon class balance so they can collect much more relevant player data to the effects of possible changes. The other problem I mentioned earlier is map design. Most are CQC with few mid range lines. With more open truly long range areas in maps you'd see weapon choices change a lot. Maps are the first thing to fix as that'll change how everything else should be balanced. Ideally ARs will excel in CQC maps, pulses and HC in mid maps, and scouts in long range maps. But these advantages based on class should be only slight. With exceptions being scouts performing poorly in CQC and ARs in long. But there should be exceptions to the rules in the form of of focus fire ARs and full auto scouts.