Everyone Says Marathon’s Volt Thrower Is Trash, But I Won’t Drop It

The moment the “worst” gun in Marathon saved my run

I was one bad peek away from losing everything.

Late in a Perimeter run, backpack bloated with loot that would finally tip my vault into “I can relax for a while” territory, I got caught in the open. I’d just tagged a Runner rotating across a catwalk when a second one materialised on my flank, already mid-sprint, already aiming. Classic Marathon punishment: you win one fight, the game spawns a second you aren’t ready for.

Muscle memory kicked in. I popped smoke, vanished into my Assassin invisibility, and did the thing you’re not supposed to do: I pushed forward instead of backing out. I couldn’t see them. They couldn’t see me. The only thing I really trusted in that moment was the faint blue trace of the gun everyone keeps telling me to unequip: the V22 Volt Thrower.

Crosshair roughly where I’d last seen their silhouette, I held the trigger. The Volt Thrower’s chunky, battery-fed rounds curled through the smoke like they had an agenda, snapping onto something I couldn’t see. I heard panic shots from the Runner, then the tell-tale stumble of shields breaking. By the time the smoke cleared, they were already on the floor and my heart rate was somewhere around raid-boss-wipe level.

That was the moment I realised I wasn’t just stubbornly clinging to a bad weapon out of contrarian pride. I genuinely trusted this thing in a way I didn’t trust Marathon’s more meta-approved tools. And after 70-80 hours in this game, that trust matters more to me than raw DPS numbers.

On paper, the V22 Volt Thrower absolutely sucks

I get why people hate it. Really, I do. Within days of launch, the early meta verdict was brutal: low damage, slow projectiles, and a battery mechanic that punishes you for holding the trigger a millisecond too long. When you look at it on a spreadsheet next to the Bully, the Longshot, or even a halfway decent shotgun, the Volt Thrower reads like an inside joke.

My first week with it was a misery parade. I stubbornly ran the Volt Thrower as my primary in almost every loadout, crashed into heavily armed squads, and watched my targets shrug off what felt like a thousand foam darts. I’d get my crosshair on a Runner, dump most of the battery into them, and still lose the trade to someone with an assault rifle and functional hand-eye coordination. Then I’d tilt, blame the gun, and swear I’d finally swap it out next run.

And yet, every time I tried to move on – to the Bully, to a comfy AR, to the Longshot (which, fine, absolutely slaps) – something felt wrong. I was winning more straightforward duels, sure, but my whole rhythm was off. I was playing Marathon like a conventional extraction shooter. I wasn’t playing my version of Marathon anymore.

That’s where the conflicted part of this comes in. If we’re talking pure efficiency, the community isn’t wrong: the Volt Thrower is underpowered. But this game isn’t a firing range. It’s a mess of vision breakers, vertical sightlines, audio clutter, and human panic. In that chaos, the V22 does something other guns just don’t, and that’s why I refuse to drop it.

Homing bullets change how you think about cover

The V22’s secret sauce is its lock-on behavior. Bungie basically slipped a mini-Halo Needler into a hardcore extraction shooter and then made it look like a power stapler. The projectiles are slow, yeah, but they bend. Slightly. Subtly. Annoyingly, if you’re on the receiving end.

That small homing effect rewires your brain in gunfights. Instead of obsessing over perfect tracking, you start aiming for lanes and silhouettes. If I know someone is dipping in and out behind a crate or a column, I’m not trying to beam them in the 200ms where they’ve over-peeked. I’m pointing the Volt Thrower just above the edge of cover and letting the rounds hunt for anything that dares to poke out.

The most disgusting example I’ve had was at Perimeter. I’d lost the opening to a better-geared player who broke my shields clean and forced me to duck behind a rock to heal. They rotated to mirror me, started their own heal animation, and did that classic “my shoulder’s technically sticking out but surely they won’t punish it” move. I snap-aimed roughly at the rock edge, dumped a burst, and watched the Volt Thrower’s projectiles curl obediently into that tiny exposed hitbox. They went down mid-heal, mid-confident, mid-“I’ve got this.” It felt evil in the best possible way.

Is that something another SMG could technically do with better bullet speed and recoil? Maybe. Yet the Volt Thrower lowers the execution tax. It forgives slightly lazy tracking. It lets you concentrate on macro decisions – when to push, when to vanish, where to funnel people – instead of sweating every micro-flick.

And when you combine that with Assassin’s toolkit, something just clicks.

Assassin + Volt Thrower: a janky, beautiful synergy

I pretty much live in the Assassin Shell. If I wanted to sit on rooftops clicking heads all day, I’d play something else. Assassin turns Marathon into a semi-coherent stealth sim: smoke, angles, flanks, information denial. You’re not supposed to win fair fights. You’re supposed to make fights unfair.

The class’s passive invisibility in smoke is the glue that holds this whole Volt Thrower obsession together. The gun can lock onto targets even when they’re obscured, so long as the aim assist has a hint of them to latch onto. That means the ideal Assassin engagement, for me, looks like this: throw smoke to cut line of sight, step into it and vanish, then shove your face way closer to the enemy than is socially acceptable while the V22 does unspeakable things through the haze.

From their perspective, they’re getting tagged by an unseen SMG from a cloud they can’t see into, and their options all suck. Shoot blindly and risk burning ammo into nothing. Push into the smoke and get shredded at point-blank. Or sprint away and hope my homing rounds don’t catch that fleeing back just long enough for me to finish the job.

In those two or three seconds of chaos, raw damage isn’t actually the most important stat. What matters more is reliability: will your bullets find their target while everybody’s stumbling, fumbling, and trying not to freak out? The Volt Thrower’s lock-on compensates for my own panic. It smooths over the mess.

And because Assassin usually gives me the drop on people – coming out of flank routes, popping out of concealment, using distractions – I often only need that first chunk of the V22’s fire before the battery overheats. Its fast initial rate of fire means my opening burst lands quickly enough to crack shields or force a disengage, which is all I really need. I’m not standing in a lane trying to hose down three Runners sprinting in formation. I’m deleting one poor soul before anyone realises what happened.

The brutal downside: it falls apart in honest brawls

This is where I have to stop romanticising it and admit reality: if your idea of a good Marathon match is taking straight-up duels in the open, the V22 Volt Thrower will betray you.

The clearest example for me was my first Cryo Chamber run. The UESC mobs in that zone don’t care about your cute little battery gimmick. They stand their ground, chew through your health bar, and respawn in numbers that make every extra second-to-kill feel like a crime. With the Volt Thrower, my DPS just wasn’t there. I’d start trades thinking “I have this,” and end them staring at a respawn timer while three NPCs were still standing.

Even in PvP, the story’s similar when things devolve into chaos. That same Needler-lite behavior that helps in smoke becomes a liability when targets are zig-zagging across long sightlines. The projectiles are slow enough that good players can strafe out of entire bursts. And once the battery overheats, you’re just standing there with a glowing brick while someone with a WSTR or a rifle sends you back to orbit.

I’ve lost plenty of fights where, if I’d been holding a Bully or an AR, I’d probably have won. There’s no coping past that. There are matchups and situations where the Volt Thrower simply does not stack up, and pretending otherwise is how you end up malding about “cheesy builds” when you’re the one intentionally handicapping yourself.

So I’ve drawn some personal boundaries with it.

• High-tier squads with obvious comms advantage? I bring a backup gun that actually melts.
• Zones with dense, aggressive PvE like Cryo Chamber? The Volt Thrower is a sidearm, not the star.
• Long, exposed sightlines and no reliable flank routes? I’ll swap to something with real bullet speed.

That’s the price of loving an underpowered gun: you have to be honest about when it’s dragging you down.

Marathon’s guns are all situational – the Volt Thrower just makes it obvious

One thing I’ve come to respect about Marathon is how unapologetically situational its weapons are. This isn’t a game where you grab the “best” AR and vibe. The Longshot can turn you into a god on wide maps and an actual liability in Hauler’s tight corners. The Bully hits like a truck but its mag size makes you sweat every peek. The WSTR shotgun, especially post-nerfs, oscillates between “deleted that Runner from existence” and “did I just fire my pellets into low Earth orbit?”

The Volt Thrower just sits at the extreme end of that philosophy. It’s comically bad when you’re using it wrong and shockingly effective when you build around its quirks. It wants smoke. It wants cover. It wants angles where people think they’re safe. It wants you to be the rat in the vents, not the hero in the spotlight.

In that sense, my attachment to it says more about how I’ve chosen to play Marathon than about the weapon’s objective power. I treat this game almost like a single-player immersive sim with other people inconveniently existing in it. I sneak, I over-rotate around noise, I avoid fair fights. A gun that automatically punishes over-peekers and panicked runners fits that fantasy perfectly.

Off-meta weapons scratch an itch spreadsheets can’t touch

I’ve been around enough live-service metas to know how this usually goes. Launch window hits, everyone races to find the broken combos, the tier lists solidify, and anything that doesn’t fit the S/A/B conversation gets written off as a meme. Then, months later, some balance patch shifts a number, a new piece of gear drops, or a single perk changes, and suddenly that “trash” gun is the foundation of an entire new strategy.

Does that mean the Volt Thrower is secretly OP waiting to happen? Not necessarily. Bungie could easily buff it into actual viability, or they could leave it in underdog territory forever because it fills a weird niche they like having in the sandbox. I don’t have inside info, and I’m not going to pretend I do.

But what keeps me hooked on it isn’t some hope that it’ll be “good” later. It’s the feeling that I’m playing Marathon at a slightly different angle to everyone else. When I win a fight I had no business winning because I abused smoke, homing rounds, and someone’s bad assumption about cover, that win feels more mine than anything I get with a stock AR.

There’s a sort of quiet joy in mastering a weapon that the wider playerbase has already thrown in the trash. It’s the same satisfaction as making a janky fighting-game character actually work in tournament, or leaning into some weird off-role pick in a MOBA and watching the other team burn bans on it later. It’s expressive. It’s personal.

Living with the tension: love versus viability

So where does that leave me with the V22 Volt Thrower after ~80 hours in Marathon?

I won’t pretend it’s secretly top tier. If a new player asked me what to run for their first extraction, I’d tell them to avoid it. If I’m pushing for a high-stakes loot run with friends who actually value their time, I’ll pack something safer in my main slot and let the Volt Thrower ride shotgun as a specialist tool.

At the same time, when I queue up solo on Assassin and decide I’m going to play this game like a stealth puzzle with guns, nothing else feels as right. The homing projectiles, the way it lets me bully people through smoke and around cover, the fact that it forgives my scuffed tracking when adrenaline spikes – all of that lines up perfectly with the experience I’m chasing.

Maybe Bungie will buff it. Maybe they’ll silently tweak some values and the community will “discover” that the Volt Thrower was always destined for greatness. Or maybe it’ll stay exactly where it is: the One Bad Gun that only a handful of weirdos will ever bother to learn.

If that happens, I’m weirdly okay with it. There’s something fitting about a stealth-focused, homing SMG living in the shadows of the meta, quietly doing disgusting things in the hands of the few people patient enough to make it sing. And as long as Marathon keeps giving me smoke, corners, and overconfident Runners, I’ll keep slotting the Volt Thrower and trusting those crooked little bullets to drag me through situations I probably don’t deserve to survive.