Destiny’s Xur has brought a big problem to Crucible

Fridays, or Xursdays, as they are affectionately called, are tenser than ever for Destiny players. The recent release of The Taken King has left them hungry for year two exotics, and the weekly return of Xur is the most reliable source of them—doubly so given his new Three of Coins consumable. Players awoke to a real treat today, the weekend of September 25: Xur is selling Hawkmoon, along with a suite of top-shelf armor. But as glad as I am to see such an iconic and powerful weapon fall into the hands of so many players, especially new players, I can’t shake this cloying sense of dread.

Hawkmoon is a unique hand cannon, to say the least. Its eccentric appearance echoes its colorful history: for some time, it was a PlayStation-exclusive item. As such, Xur was never able to sell it until now, as he must maintain parity between PlayStation and Xbox platforms. That he is finally selling Hawkmoon—its year two version, no less—is bittersweet. On one hand, Xbox players, in particular, have improved their exotic archives considerably. On the other, Crucible is about to become a mess.

I speak no hyperbole when I say Hawkmoon is the most imbalanced primary weapon in Crucible. I speak from experience: it has been my most-used weapon throughout my 300-odd hours of Crucible play. Frankly, Hawkmoon has always been absurd. It has a 13-round magazine, sniper-contesting range and accuracy, and highly controllable recoil. Going by its looks and sounds, you’d think the thing would kick like a moose on a rollercoaster. But in fact, with every shot it delivers a jolt on par with that of a newborn fawn.

Image via Nerdstash

And that’s just its stats; the true design blunder lies in Hawkmoon’s skills. Hawkmoon improves on its “Luck in the Chamber” perk, which slips a single high-damage round randomly into its magazine, with its unique skill, “Holding Aces,” which adds two more bonus rounds to the mix. Following weapon update 2.0, this perk also increases the gun’s magazine from 11 to 13. Ultimately, however, this updated nothing, as the gun’s magazine was 13 to begin with. The new Hawkmoon is functionally identical, just more flavorful.

This would be fine for most guns, but Hawkmoon is disgusting. See, Hawkmoon’s bonus rounds allow it to two-shot all targets in Crucible, provided you land two head shots. This has earned the gun the nickname “Procmoon,” in honor of the proc chance of its Holding Aces perk. Given its rate of fire, Procmoon is impossible to beat with every other primary in the game. Even the likes of The Messenger and The Last Word, two brutally low-TTK (time-to-kill) weapons, will fall to Procmoon 100 out of 100 times given equal circumstances for and skill from both combatants. Procmoon is infallible, and even worse, random.

Whenever you reload Hawkmoon, Luck in the Chamber and Holding Aces assign bonus damage to three random bullets. Assuming each bullet only gets buffed once (up to a maximum of twice), on a fresh magazine of 13 rounds, there’s roughly a 24 percent chance of firing one of your three bonus rounds in your first two shots. In other words, you have a 24 percent chance of two-shotting your next target after reloading—again, assuming you put two in their dome. Keep in mind, the odds of firing a bonus round will only increase as you burn through normal rounds. Eventually, Procmoon will rear its ugly head.

Procmoon can even tie with heavy machine guns like Thunderlord.

Herein lies the problem: random chance regularly decides the outcome of confrontations involving Hawkmoon. And when you introduce random chance into combat, all strategy goes out the window. There is nothing to be done about Procmoon; if you’re unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end, you’re going to drop. Bam, dead. Because the game said so. This is most apparent in Hawkmoon-v-Hawkmoon fights, which more closely resemble two slot machines duking it out than hand cannons. Hawkmoon delivers the same sting of unfairness which Bungie has gone to great lengths to remove from Destiny’s loot systems over the past year. Yet the gun has gotten off scot-free.

Indeed, weapon update 2.0 did virtually nothing to Hawkmoon, which is a big chunk of the problem. While Thorn and The Last Word, two infamously overpowered hand cannons, were given the nerfs they so sorely deserved in the update, Hawkmoon was inexplicably untouched. Save for its six-and-half-a-dozen magazine tweak, the only change it received was to the possibility of having a single bullet receive all three stacks of bonus damage, which would one-shot players. The odds of that occurring? One in 2,197. That’s a .045 percent chance. That’s it; that’s all that was removed. In fact, update 2.0 indirectly buffed Hawkmoon further by taking out its competitors, which is to say nothing of its membership among the currently limited pool of year two exotics. As a result, I fully expect Hawkmoon to become the next Thorn.

Why now, though? If Hawkmoon has always been a problem (which it has), why is it only going to flare up now? Because Xur is selling it; the gloves are off. Now, I love that Xur sells weapons like these. He should sell Hawkmoon, Gjallarhorn, Hereafter, Zhalos Supercell and so on. That’s why he’s here; to bridge the gaps invariably left by RNG loot. The problem is not strictly with Xur’s latest inventory, but with the obvious implication of it: there are going to be several hundred thousand more Hawkmoons running around. And with a gun as broken as Hawkmoon, that’s the last thing you want.

Hawkmoon's rarity was the only thing that kept it from rising to the heights of the pre-nerf Thorn, which dominated more than 50 percent of competitive play (Trials of Osiris) in its heyday. Hawkmoon’s newfound prevalence will only compound its dominance over the other exotic hand cannons. Things are shaping up to be a perfect storm of imbalance, and the Crucible meta will suffer for it. The only prayer left is the fact that hand cannons are an underused, more skill-dependent primary weapon, but we’ve already seen how much that affected Thorn.

Hawkmoon is great, but Procmoon cannot be allowed to exist. It is unquestionably the most lethal primary weapon in the Crucible, despite being completely out of player hands. It’s frustrating, unfair, and anti-fun—and that’s coming from someone with roughly 6,000 kills with the thing. For it to be fair, Hawkmoon needs to be completely reworked—stripped of its RNG and rebuilt from the ground up.

The silver lining here is that, given Hawkmoon’s probable rise, Bungie may finally be forced to address the weapon’s absurdity, as they did with Thorn, Suros Regime and so many others in the past. But until that nerf comes, Crucible is going to sound like the O.K. Corral and feel like being trapped in a casino on the seventh circle of Hell. Hope you like gambling.