Marathon's Best Shotgun Hit With a Second Nerf

One nerf wasn't enough. Bungie's already taken a swing at Marathon's WSTR shotgun once, slashing its effective range so hard it became a point-blank-only weapon. Players adapted, kept it holstered as their secondary, and continued deleting anyone who got within arm's reach. Now the studio is going back for a second pass, and the reasoning tells you everything about how dominant this gun has been.

"Right now, it's become a dominant option and is eclipsing a lot of the other short range options that exist in the game," Game Director Joe Ziegler wrote in a Steam post on Saturday. The fix, arriving Tuesday, targets the WSTR's ability to two-shot runners carrying blue shields or higher. After the update, those encounters will force a reload, giving the target a window to actually fight back. Runners with green shields can still be dropped in two blasts, so the gun won't become useless on earlier maps where green gear is common.

The subtext here is pretty clear: the WSTR has been warping Marathon's entire secondary weapon meta since launch. When every other close-range option is "eclipsed" by a single shotgun, you don't really have a meta at all. You have one correct answer and a bunch of wrong ones. The first nerf tried to solve this by limiting range, but all that did was change where you used the WSTR, not whether you used it. I wrote about Ziegler's initial acknowledgment of the problem earlier this week, and I'm glad the follow-through is coming fast rather than languishing for a month.

Blue Shields Change Everything

The specific mechanical change matters more than it sounds on paper. In Marathon's extraction loop, blue shields are the baseline for anyone running mid-to-late content. A two-shot kill against blue shields meant the WSTR could handle virtually any player you bumped into during a run, no matter how well-geared they were. Forcing a reload in that scenario is a significant shift. Reloading a double-barrel takes time, and in a game where fights are decided in fractions of a second, that gap is where counterplay lives. You'll actually have a chance to turn on someone who opens with a WSTR blast instead of just watching your screen go dark.

Ziegler's framing suggests Bungie wants the WSTR to remain a strong early-game equalizer rather than a universal delete button. I think that's the right call. A newer player finding a WSTR and using it to survive their first few extractions is a good experience. A fully kitted runner using it as a crutch in Outpost because nothing else competes is a design failure.

Bungie has been making aggressive balance moves since Marathon launched, and the pace has been refreshing. The sponsored kits experiment, which locks all players into a free loadout, has been a smart way to shake up the extraction loop without permanent consequences. Even the Mercy Kits, intended to let players revive downed opponents, have taken on a life of their own as players use them to kill runners twice. The studio seems willing to let Marathon's meta be messy and reactive rather than locked down, and that energy is keeping the game interesting week to week.

Tuesday's update goes live on April 21. If you've been leaning on the WSTR as your go-to secondary in higher-tier content, start thinking about alternatives now. Bungie clearly isn't done tuning this gun until something else actually sees play.