I have been a Guardian long enough to remember when Destiny 2's weapon sandbox felt like a wild bazaar where every stall promised a different kind of power. Hand cannons, machine guns, sidearms, bows, fusion rifles, swords, rocket launchers, and more, each with variants that use primary, special, or heavy ammo. With so many weapons to choose from, most players naturally chase whatever sits in the current meta. That chase has left machine guns in a strange purgatory. In 2026, after countless seasons, episodes, and sandbox revisions, the archetype still feels like a decorative sword above the fireplace: beautiful, storied, and completely useless when the house is on fire. Bungie needs to do something about it.
PvP: The Heavy Slot Is A Rocket Race
In PvP modes like Control or Trials of Osiris, a machine gun can still find a home if its stats and perks are good. But you still need to land multiple precision shots to get kills. Meanwhile, linear fusion rifles and grenade launchers are almost always one-hit kills. Rocket launchers sit in a league of their own because they also deal area-of-effect damage and can wipe multiple enemies at once. Even exotic machine guns like Xenophage and Grand Overture, which basically fire mini rockets, still require accurate hits to secure a kill. They also occupy an exotic slot, limiting your primary and special ammo options. Naturally, no player wants a machine gun in the power slot when so many better choices are staring back at them.
PvE: Boss Damage Or Bust
On the PvE side, I will go out on a limb and say that almost no one uses a machine gun in raids, strikes, Grand Master Nightfalls, higher-level lost sectors, or seasonal missions. This is not because there are too many weapons to choose from. It is because machine guns are simply replaceable. Any PvE activity usually ends with a boss you need to melt as quickly as possible. With weapons like Storm Chaser, Gjallarhorn, or literally any rocket launcher with a decent roll, you can take down a boss within seconds. A machine gun, on the other hand, takes far longer to deal that much damage, despite having more ammo. There are multiple good machine guns with great perks, but there is no activity where I would ever opt to use one. It feels like bringing a metronome to a mosh pit: the rhythm is steady, but the room is already screaming.
The Exotic Machine Gun Problem
Currently, there are four exotic machine guns in Destiny 2: Xenophage, Grand Overture, Thunderlord, and Heir Apparent. Out of these, Xenophage is still the only one I regularly see, and only because it destroys Oracles in the second encounter of the Vault of Glass raid in one hit. That is how niche its use has become. It can be replaced in every other scenario. There were also a couple of weeks when Heir Apparent's overshield was almost impenetrable, so everyone started using it in Crucible. But that became history after the gun was nerfed. As for the other two exotics, there is little reason to use them. Even if they clear hordes of enemies, their damage output is not enough to see an encounter through to the end.
| Heavy Weapon Type | Typical Role | Why It Wins |
|---|---|---|
| Rocket Launcher | Burst boss damage | Area damage, high impact, Gjallarhorn |
| Linear Fusion Rifle | Precision DPS | One-hit potential in PvP, strong in PvE |
| Grenade Launcher | Add clear and DPS | Legacy of Breach and Clear |
| Machine Gun | Sustained add clear | Usually replaced by primaries or specials |
Why Machine Guns Keep Losing
The problem with machine guns right now is not that they do too little damage or that their perks are weak. The problem is how easily they can be replaced. Whether I need crowd control or boss damage, there is always a better alternative. Even an exotic like Outbreak Perfected, which uses primary ammo, can end up dealing more boss damage than an exotic machine gun that uses heavy ammo. Sounds ridiculous, does it not?
My clanmates and I have discussed this at length, and we could not think of a single season since Beyond Light where we used any machine gun extensively, or even for a short while. They sit in our vaults, used for bounties and little else. Maybe a blanket buff to overall machine gun damage would help. Maybe a machine gun-specific artifact mod could be an option. We saw how Breach and Clear and Particle Deconstruction made grenade launchers and fusion rifles into DPS kings across all activities. But even that would be a temporary fix. It would not solve the larger issue.
Since Bungie continues to make sandbox changes, it is a good time to seriously think about the sorry state of machine guns. In 2026, I do not want another season where an entire weapon archetype is left gathering dust. I want machine guns to feel like thunder answering a boss's roar, not a polite knock at the door. Until that happens, mine will stay in the vault, waiting for a reason that never quite arrives.