[2020] Feel like the Fighting lion was nerfed? Check-in and theorize here.

Hello. I am JagJon founder of r/fightinglion and I have come with some bad news. The fighting lion has been nerfed in PVP. In the fighting lion discord, we have found that due to the recent changes in the PVP sandbox, The lion's explosive damage has been nerfed, almost halved in some situations. The changes we have seen are reduced explosive damage and reduced blast radius.

With no way to test in the prior patch, we have to rely on our intuition for some aspects of this nerf such as the blast radius. With almost 10,000 crucible fighting lion kills underneath my belt, I can assure you the blast radius has been reduced.

Our fighting lion theorists have three working hypotheses at the moment for this nerf.

1. The PvE buff to direct hits has been applied to PvP.

With a change to direct hits in order to keep balance, the explosive power was dropped. In PVP direct hits with the fighting lion only achieve 98.6% of pre-patch damage values(PrePDM) likewise in PvE we see 98.9% of prePDV. Both are within the margin of error accounting for the difference of damage values in PVP vs PVE (144 vs 10,292). The same holds true for direct hits and overall damage. It seems that the PVE change stated in the patch notes have been applied to PVP.

1. The changes to heavy grenade launchers have changed the Fighting Lion.

With the release of forsaken the fighting lion was in its best state. The forsaken buff to heavy grenade launchers increased the lion's power. Bungie made some back-end changes to how grenade launchers work in these patches. Nothing in the patch has said anything about blast radius for gls, but we can not put it past Bungie to make unannounced nerfs.

1. The lion was meant to be nerfed

True horror, one of the weapons with the highest skill ceiling nerfed by Bungie.

The lion must be returned to glory. Do you have any ideas about why this change happened? Please comment below.