So, one thing that has me hung up at the moment is thus, a large portion of pvpers use pulse rifles, mostly red death, nirwins mercy and now no time to explain (guilty as charged) and to me at least, this in itself is an imbalance, but really, why so many pulses?
I see most posts that complain and outright state that pulses are OP get slammed, badly. Is this just folks defending their new favorite weapons, or are they on the right track? If 80%+ of crucible uses pulse rifles, doesn't this show up that imbalance? If the common consensus is 'just use a pulse rifle yourself' doesn't that indicate a bad balance?
Honestly, I can't make my mind up here, I've started to use high stability PRs and tlaloc (depending on the map/team) and it certainly doesn't make me a godlike scrub, but the proliferation of pulses, and the general consensus on countering PRs is to use one yourself (to a much lesser extent, scouts are offered up as a viable counter too) confuses me.
To conclude, I'm not saying PRs are OP, they definitely aren't weak, but I can't come to a strong formulated answer to 'are PRs OP?' So come forth, educate a scrub. I'll also save you some time looking up stats: I'm terrible, and should feel bad.
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Honestly PRs have been teetering on op since HoW. I said many times to my friends the only reason Red Death and other pulse rifles werent the meta back then is because of Thorn and TLW and even with those 2 handcannons imbalances pulse rifles were still amazing. Its why everyone went trying to farm Hopscotch pilgrim and the Messenger from trials. So it was obvious as soon as they gutted Hcs pulses would reign supreme because HCs were the only thing keeping them in check. With that being said i dont think PRs are blatantly op as much as everything else just sucks. A huge huge issue is that bungie decided to give every player in the game that participated in IB a max stability pulse rifle almost for free. Nirwins is a laser which leads to alot of cross map sniping with it and its a majority of what i see in crucible. By doing that along with the crazy flinch that PRs do when shot its essentially turned crucible into a game of whoever gets first shot wins and has phased most AR and HCs out that cant consistently kill let alone hit from PR ranges.