Bungie,
In the pursuit of finding balance amongst pvp, many changes have taken place that have made it equal parts better and equal parts worse. The first enforcement that made Destiny more difficult was the imposed ranges for each weapon in year one. Many regard the weapons from Y1 with nostalgia and longing. Why? Because almost all weapons were viable against one another. When imposed ranges were brought forth, it started the decline of versatility and satisfaction with players. And before that, the first misstep was the severe nerf to autos. This lead to a HoW meta with exotic hand cannons. Why? Because autos no longer kept them in check and the broken hand cannons were able to thrive easier. Then when hand cannons were nerfed, pulses thrived when they went unmatched. It is a cycle. This game is something that will never achieve perfect balance because it was never meant to. It's like an ecosystem of weaponry--it's easy for a weapon to be noticed as overpowered when it's "predator" that kept it in line is knocked down. Here are my suggestions:
*Return all primary weapons to year 1 range, accuracy, handling, stability, and damage values. This does NOT include exotics, ballistics, or perk changes. This is only the base stats and capability for each weapon class.
*Address each exotic DIRECTLY and SPECIFICALLY to that weapon.
*Exotic changes:
-Thorn: make Mark of the Devourer stack as a healing capability while draining it's target of life/armor. Each consecutive hit will add +1 damage to the DoT and restore the equivalent amount to your health. For example: 5 hits does 5 damage per tick and restores the health to you. This stays in line with the lore of Thorn and makes it good in pve as well as not making it overpowered since it will not be able to kill guardians much faster than it's base time to kill. The limit stack is 9.
-The Last Word: change out smart drift control for field choke or increase it's base stats slightly, but make it ONLY able to fire in full-auto from the hip. Make hip firing do increased damage to Minions of the Darkness. This brings it back to a viable pve weapon and gives further reason to fire from the hip in both pve and pvp.
-Hawkmoon: increase it's base stability slightly.
-The First Curse: extend it's base range slightly and increase the range provided from it's namesake perk to make it the longest range hand cannon possible in the game.
-Hard Light: reduce screen shake slightly and have a majority of ricochet bullets that hit enemies return to magazine.
-Fabian Strategy: increase fire rate while retaining it's base damage when Front Lines goes off. Possibly extend it's perk's effective range for more fair play.
-MIDA Multi-Tool: restore high caliber rounds in place of quickdraw.
-Pulse rifles: increase the effectiveness of high caliber rounds. What made it so powerful to use high caliber rounds on pulses was because it was added on top of the increased flinch of pulses introduced in Y2. All that needed to change was to remove that base flinch.
-High impact scouts: increase fire rate by half of a frame.
-Remove Luck in the Chamber as a possible perk from medium impact and high impact hand cannons. This does not include Hawkmoon.
-Increase the stability benefit of smart drift control slightly.
-Surrounded: have it increase damage resistance and reload speed instead of it's current application.
-Underdog: have it increase movement speed and weapon stability when activated instead of it's current application.
-Exhumed: have it increase agility and armor for 5 seconds after respawn/revival while this weapon is equipped instead of it's current application.
-Have primary exotics with restored effective range and damage drop-off of Y1 values.
Please keep in mind these suggested changes are AFTER primaries are restored to Y1 base stat values (excluding exotics). If anyone disagrees or agrees to my suggested changes, please say so and explain why below. In addition, if anyone has anything to contribute to make the changes better, please share it as well. Thank you for your time.
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Bungie will respond by nerfing every weapon mentioned