It might have been fine with less of a dmg nerf. (Destiny)

by iconicbanana, C2-H5-OH + NAD, Portland, OR, Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 00:24 (3775 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I think this may all be moot until we get some post-patch numbers on the player base. I'm not seeing many anecdotes from people saying they're still content to run AR's in this thread.

A lot of good players, and myself, abandoned ARs long ago and never looked back. That's why I am utterly baffled by this nerf, since after their first nerf way back when, they lost their effectiveness over other weapons. I'm not saying they were BAD then; you could certainly do well with them, but they were by no means imbalanced or overpowered, or even the best choice most of the time. In fact, I would say they were probably in a good place.

I was there in the Alpha when they were actually considerably overpowering any of the other primaries, in both PvE and PvP. I know what that looked like, and the ARs of a month ago were extremely far from that.

The fact that a bunch of people chose to use them is simply because they are a low skill weapon, and is not indicative of their power necessarily.

Now they are simply useless in PvE and PvP if your aim is to perform.

In PvE they've been worthless for a long time, but prior to 1.1.1, they were still very effective, due mostly to good perks on legendaries. I know I used Vanquisher with my Pocket Infinity for a long time and only switched to Scout Rifles after the update. Suros with the ADS semi auto was still extremely effective. Now Handcannons are squarely superior (IMO, we don't have numbers); TLW/Thorn are now absolutely the two best guns in the game, with Hawkmoon right there, due to the range nerf effecting it more than the other two.