It should be but I hope not, getting hit left right and centre by people spraying ARs aimlessly is probably more annoying than Thorn
I just wish they could balance it all more but that boat has long sailed with all the class abilities etc.
Weapons are basically near balanced right now except for a few details.
A handful of Exotics break the norm. TLW, Thorn and Hawkmoon all have potential for sub 0.5s kills, which is ridiculous.
But if you ignore those for a second, you'll find that Hand Cannons, Pulse/Auto/Scout Rifles all have theoretical TTK in roughly the same ballpark. HCs and PRs are in a better spot, with ARs and SRs lagging slightly behind.
Issue with Hand Cannons: TTK is perfect, they're 3 shot kills and are balanced by RoF and mag size. However, they're too effective at long range and thus make Scouts pointless. One detail: not enough differentiation between the impact classes. A low impact HC and a high impact HC have dramatically different rate of fire but they're ultimately 3 shot kills anyways.
Issue with Pulse Rifles: they're...ok really. High impact versions are a 2 burst kill. Lower impact requires 3 bursts, but this is offset by an actually *better* TTK; harder to pull off, but it balances the impact classes. Red Death is an outlier of sorts, since it's the lowest impact possible that can still kill in 2 bursts, making it a min/max version of the RoF tiers; its offset by having less than perfect stability. Again, these things are a bit too good at range but then again they're hard to use at close range so maybe that's the tradeoff?
Issue with Scouts: HCs and PRs having enough range for this Scout advantage not to matter, mostly. 4 shot Scouts have pretty good TTK considering the range they can engage at, with better RoF than HCs and higher mag size. Map design doesn't help though. Most engagements don't take place at super long range so I don't know how much can be done for these. I'd love to rock MIDA in coming days!
Issue with ARs: Honestly, just that everything else kills too fast. ARs have the perfect TTK in my opinion, and everything else should slow down to this level. As it is, they're not accurate enough to compete at range and don't kill fast enough to compete close up. They'd have to either do more damage or get more accurate or stagger enemies a bit so you can throw their aim off or something. I think it'll happen.
I'm just sad the HC Trinity will bring a nerd to the entire weapon class, when they were pretty much perfect balance outside of maybe being too accurate at range. 3 shots with mags averaging 10? It was perfect. Now they'll probably be murdered the way ARs were, a goddamn shame.