Bungie is only nerfing Ice Breaker because of its PvE potential. Same with Black Hammer. Now, while Black Hammer arguably is a little too good with its white nail perk, Icebreaker is not. It's a damn good weapon, and is well balanced for what it does.

These guns were largely used in the same way: very long distance combat with relative safety. In feeling the need to change how they work, Bungie may be telling us that there will be quite a few situations where the guardians will be able to camp in one place and take people out from a distance, and these changes have made that process more annoying.

Yes, no? Am I pulling too much stuff out of my ass here?

They nerfed weapons that allowed you to completely bypass boss fights (Sexy prime walker), or easily solo a raid (the Crota strike). I wouldn't read too much into it.

They could've done this at any time. They didn't feel the need to after the second expansion; indeed, they improved Black Hammer.

They're planning something.

Didn't they try to address the power Black Hammer has against Walkers by having immune shots interrupt the white nail perk?

That didn't actually pan out, but it was an attempted nerf.

Yeah, but that was just a bug, not an intended damage reduction thing. It's only supposed to work on crit hits, not immune ones or normal damage ones.

Well the 'improvement' it got was just them fixing a bugged perk, unless I'm forgetting something

From the update:

At times, we looked into rolling out one or two of these changes in advance of the 2.0.0 update; addressing Shotgun perks when Felwinter’s Lie became popular, addressing Thorn when it became the popular choice for Trials of Osiris. We heard your voices and we felt your pain, but plucking a few meatballs out of this massive plate of spaghetti proved to be very risky. These changes are all very dependent upon each other to be successful, and after careful consideration we decided the best road ahead was to present them all together as a full update.

If they don't kill the old standards, everyone is just going to keep using them. So they weaken them and introduce new powerful guns to give us something to chase.

Btw, I think vision of confluence might actually be getting a damage buff. It falls into the medium damage category, right?

looked at planet destiny database, yea looks like it might be.

1st piece of evidence: Luke timmons in the vidoc talking about how bullet sponge bosses are a thing of the past.

2nd piece of evidence: Bungie seems like they want to play more with how Ammo is used, see the recent crucible changes. There's a ton of design potential there, and I think the crucible changes hint at it.

3rd piece of evidence: More attempts to push users away from cheesing tactics and into more movement. See POE goals like mines to get players moving around the maps.

As a very general you can see Bungie's design emphasis moving in a direction with more variety, that's a pretty great thing IMO. I'm looking forward to it.