Thunderlord has recieved 2 great tools this season, with the catalyst and intrinsic overload, but I feel like this weapon still has one big glaring issue: Its ammo reserves.
Thunderlord gets a measly 220 rounds total without any reserve mods, and 265 with 2 reserve mods. For the sake of comparison, let's pit it against an equally capable, 450 legendary machinegun: Corrective Measure.
Corrective Measure gets 283 rounds with no reserve mods, and 328 with 2 reserve mods. Machineguns are primarily used for ad clear and sustained fire, and Corrective Measure doesn't fall back here compared to Thunderlord at all (depending on your roll of course).
A Rewind Rounds/Firefly roll gets a great tool for ad clear (which also lets you deal solar damage with the headshot explosions btw), and a great deal of sustained fire.
The one big upside Thunderlord has over Corrective Measure is its damage output against single targets, but even that is gimped because of its low reserves (although it is true that Thunderlord can get more dmg against single targets out more quickly than regular 450 Machineguns because of the lightning strikes and the fire rate ramp up).
Now, Thunderlord also has intrinsic overload, which may lead you to believe that it's a good tool to dispatch of overload champions, but here it also falls flat on its face because of its ammo reserves.
Thunderlord takes about 40 shots (give or take) to take down an overload champion in a legend lost sector. With no reserve mods, that's about 18% of your total reserves to dispatch of a single champion. The situation doesn't get much better with 2 reserves mods either, taking about 15% of your reserves to down the champion.
In my opinion, Thunderlord needs some help with its ammo situation. Either increase its maximum reserves, or "spice up" the catalyst a bit.
In terms of ammo reserves, even a "small" buff would help. Something like 250 rounds with no reserve mods, and 300 with double reserve mods.
In terms of "spicing up" the catalyst, a solution could be to make the catalyst put 5 out of the 7 rounds back in the magazine from reserves (as it already does), and 2 of the rounds pulled from thin air (with the game prioritizing the reserve ammo first, so it can't be exploited to have infinite ammo against very low health enemies).
Let's please have a civil discussion in the replies, and if we make enough noise, hopefully Bungie will notice this post.
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Edited by JazzyPaladin477: 9/7/2022 2:17:06 PMIt’s Made worse by the horrible heavy ammo economy. If you actually got ammo drops the low reserves wouldn’t matter so much. As a test I ran three strikes with thunderlord, mg ammo finder and double mg scavenger mods. In three strikes I picked up 1 purple ammo brick, which gave me 19 rounds total (while running double scavenger!!!??!?!). So 6.2 rounds per strike picked up on average. What’s the point?
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more or even double reserves for machine guns, they were to be ad clear not dps. thunderlord as overload doesn't make sense. overload exotics shoudl be poison type weapons (tick damage stuns overloads properly/more reliably) like le monarque, osteo striga poison, witherhoard, anarchy. unstoppables should be explosive damage, like thunderlord lightning strike, ticuu's explosion, malfeseance explosion, legend of acrius, xenophage etc. barrier exotics should be piercing weapons, like snipers, some scout, thunderlord normal bullets, tresspasser, hardlight etc. thunderlord as overload for me doesn't make sense to me, more like it should have been anti barrier.
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Honestly other than completing the catalyst I've hardly used Thunderlord. I managed to get A Fine Memorial with subsistence and demolitionist right before the last season ended. It's been way more useful and gives back grenade energy.
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Ok but like, Corrective Measure is a fast firing lmg, Thunderlord is a midrage one, It's just how it is.. harder hitting weapons have less ammo
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Add in Killing Tally and Subsistence.
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My problem with thunderlord is ammo finding mods that don’t seem to work. Trying to do the catalyst while the gun is empty is no joke.
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Yeah Machine Guns have been needing a buff in ammo reserves ever since they were reintroduced into D2. In D1 I remember having lmgs with 500 rounds total, that needs to be possible with our lmgs too. Also thunderlord needs feeding frenzy replaced with a different perk now that it has faux subsistence in its catalyst
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Literally all it needs is ammo. Which is a machinegun wide issue. Because it’s raw DPS output is actually really solid.
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The cat should also increase ammo reserves or just replace the lightning reload.
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I have had trouble with that gun as well, just in general. I can't seem to significantly dent yellow bars with it, the ammo reserves are light, and the ammo finder doesn't seem to work for it.