This was born out of boredom and probably an insane waste of time, but I felt like doing it anyway just to see if it was possible. After the 2.0 patch was released and we saw a bunch of new weapon changes, things changed mostly for the better. Thorn wasn't an overpowered monster, The Last Word wasn't running rampant from across the map, and shotguns - were still shotguns, but hey, what can you do. However, one change was not well-received and was not anticipated my many in the Destiny community - the nerf to everyone's favorite Crucible darling, the Hopscotch Pilgrim. Knocked down to the stats of the 55A-Allfate, it is currently no longer able to two-burst an enemy player without Reactive Reload active. As one of the people who searched high and low for it, I was momentarily distraught (this faded after seeing that it was still pretty damn good.) But then I thought to myself, "I have another pulse rifle, why don't I try doing the same thing with that?" And so I decided to ask a question I never thought I would ask myself:
[b]Can I turn a Spare Change.25 into a Hopscotch Pilgrim?[/b]
The short answer, of course, is no. However, what I ended up with was better than what I initially expected. If you're interested, keep reading and see what happened.
A little background: the advent of the House of Wolves introduced three new pulse rifles of the Low Fire Rate/High Impact class, which I refer to as the Pulse Brothers. They are the aforementioned Hopscotch Pilgrim and Spare Change.25, along with the Messenger from Trials of Osiris. Equal in the first two stats, where they differ is what sets them apart: The Hopscotch, with its massive starting stability, could be rerolled for Braced Frame or Hand-Laid stock and suddenly become a laser, with its bullet spread looking more like a [url=http://i.imgur.com/qAjBujt.jpg]single shot[/url]. Sexy, right? That's a bullet spread you'd invite inside on the first date. The Messenger is all-around decent in every way, with a perfect roll for PVP. You can't change the perks on it, but with it already being so good there's really no reason why you would. And then there's the black sheep of the family, the Spare Change. It boasts the best range out of the 3 but with its lackluster stability and atrocious recoil to the left, it was passed over due to its spread looking something like [url=http://i.imgur.com/AQgdVW6.jpg]this[/url]. Yikes. Despite this I decided to give it a go anyway and see if I could do the impossible.
My first attempt was to try and make it like my current Hopscotch: Outlaw, Reactive Reload, and a Stability perk. Why not, right? It works for the Hopscotch, maybe the Spare Change will appreciate it too. And it did make a difference, but it [url=http://i.imgur.com/0Pn4Cy4.jpg]simply wasn't enough[/url]. Simply adding a stability perk wasn't enough to make the recoil less severe because the Spare Change's recoil was already so [url=http://imgur.com/eZ0LDFx]awful[/url]. Going against everything I believed in, I decided to forgo Reactive Reload in favor of focusing on the stability only. So what can you put on a pulse rifle to make it more stable? I decided to go with Rodeo in the first slot to balance out the recoil, a stability perk ( I got Hand-Laid Stock) and although I wanted to go for Counterbalance in the third slot I eventually settled on Hidden Hand because reforging is expensive and hard. [url=http://i.imgur.com/He61Pnd.jpg]Here's what the spread looks like as of right now[/url]. Even though it clearly is still pulling slightly to the right, it's significantly better than that spread-out mess that we started with. However, just shooting a wall leaves out one important factor: Hidden Hand. Hidden Hand not only keeps your reticle on an enemy longer, it actively [i]fights[/i] the Spare Change's odd pull, ensuring that your bursts are going to land. In the very next Crucible match I took it to, I finished at the top of the leaderboard having almost double the kills of the next person up.
So did I turn Spare Change into cold hard cash? No, but I found a new way to use a gun I had previously written off and it's doing pretty well. Now all three of my characters have pulse rifles, yeah!
As an aside, you [i]could[/i] still run Reactive Reload on this thing if you have gauntlets that increase reload speed like the ones on my Hunter, but you'd be missing out on the benefits gained by either Hidden Hand or Counterbalance in the third slot, and I do not recommend anything but stability when trying to tame this bronco.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far. Try messing around with some reforges, you never know what you might find!