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Seven years ago, the Tonkor was introduced in Update 16.7.
It was broadly adopted almost immediately, not only because it had really good stats for a launcher, historically one of the weaker weapon classes in the game, but also because it allowed for risk-free use of explosives by the player; rather than causing self-damage, it would instead launch the player into the air in an actionable state.
Two years later, this bomb-jumping function was removed and replaced with self-damage, bringing it mechanically in-line with other launchers. This was done, chiefly, to treat the overuse of the weapon, and the "minimum travel distance" arming mechanic was implemented to mitigate self-damage problems.
Today, we are two years removed from the removal of self-damage and the implementation of radial damage falloff and self-stagger. No one playing the game today is unfamiliar with the state of the arsenal landscape; even if someone abstains from using explosives because they don't like them, for whatever reason, they will encounter a player making liberal use of them in any public match they step into, effortlessly dominating all of the enemies in a mission and turning their party members' screens into rainbow strobe lights.
At the time of the self-damage change, DE said the following:
"The complete removal of Self Damage does change the pace of destruction with some of the game’s most powerful weapons, so we want to make sure we can iterate upwardly instead of releasing a bonanza of explosions with no other choices."
I believe it is clear that not only has the outcome that they were trying to avoid come to pass, but now we're seeing the "bonanza of explosions" parasitically infect anything that happens to benefit AoE weapons.
The Furax and Furax Wraith are not meta melee weapons. They are an extremely uncommon sight in public play. They are precisely the sort of weapon the Riven system was meant to give a boost to.
They also happen to have an Amalgam mod that boosts explosion radii of "specialized" launchers, a classification that happens to include the Kuva Zarr. An explosion radius boost is, functionally, a damage boost, as it mitigates the impact of explosive damage falloff.
Today, players with Furax rivens, which they acquired and funneled Kuva into specifically because it would be beneficial to the use of the Furax itself as a weapon, are having their rivens nerfed because of a function applied by a mod that happens to only be equippable on the Furax and Furax Wraith, a function that is being taken advantage of primarily by people with little-to-no interest in actually hitting enemies with the Furax.
This is a ridiculous situation.
DE, please, do something about AoE weapons.
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