Spellbinding

Nova on release was a much different frame and I would say the first iteration of room nukes. Her molecular prime was not duration based, so it would instantly affect things in its range so both the effect and explosion were range based. This is pretty significant since now you usually don't build for range because of narrow minded and her 1 is actually more useful if the null stars arent beaming enemies. 10 years ago was a different game with a different power level but she was pretty much sayrn on crack since it was a slow + 2x damage that scaled etc. And I don't know how misinformed you are about nezha's capacity to "only kill weaklings" and "not very strong". The augment was insanely broken as it was 50m non los armour strip cc if built right ON TOP of everything nezha does - damage vuln, 90% dr, iframe on halo cast AND break, fire walker providing cc cleanse, and usually roar/nourish. He has no problems killing anything in 1hr+ SP. No other frame in the game does as comfortable as nezha does and thats why it was nerfed. Every frame you listed has to have some sort of interaction to nuke things. Equinox has to ramp and is squishy, Octavia has to maintain her nocturne or she'll just die from a stray bullet 100m away, mags crush is 18m for armor strip but polarize is base 8m with pulse travel time so its pretty much like nezha's augment now, Gauss's thermal sunder is like 10m or 12m i dont really remember, Lavos has actual cooldowns, Mirage outside of ESO isnt using discoball or ledgerdomain tech as the main nuke for anything more than 20min. Revenant aoe builds usually have some kind of conflict with his comfy roar build and you have to do some major min/maxing to have everything in one build, but its still balanced around the fact the beams have some weird oscillation and it drains energy. There was no balancing or downside to nezha's nuke. And no they probably didn't care for initial testing because nezha probably has like a 5% lifetime playrate and practically no one uses him if they either have rhino (easier to get) or revenant (completely immortal). I'm a nezha main but I think its delusional for people to complain about the nerf. It's in line with what DE usually does to "nuke" like abilities, and in fact they know they could have made it worse. In the changes they said "We didn’t want to change the Mod in a way that would alter the functionality that makes it so effective" because in the past they would usually change the damage, change the scaling, add los, add a cap, or just change the ability completely. The mod still does the same thing, but now you might just have to bullet jump one more time which is totally fair.

It was here under the changes section you saw that: Anyway, I don't know why people are pretending that spears was being used as a cc tool. It made enemies into status sponges that would nuke them on a 50m non los basis. DE has ALWAYS nerfed things like this either by adding los, nerfing range, making it duration based, or just straight up changing the ability. Remember old ember? Kneecapped. Excalibur? Gone. Mesa? Gone. Nova? Gone. All of those have something in common which is what I fear the real reason for the nerf was - All of them were being used to macro/afk farm things. Its a huge reason why if you afk long enough you dont get resources anymore. I fear that they saw nezha's augment was going down that same path and had potential to lead to the same degenerate gameplay loop as previous abilities and just wanted to get a fix out quickly (which is on brand). However that's not to say that nuke frames are all gone. Most of them are now super niche, mostly not as comfy builds, and the build for nezha's divine retribution also fits that design philosophy. Form their past choices I think we can safely infer that any sort of build that leads to a comfortable experience while also having nuke potential will be suspected of a nerf. We can't have both. Personally I'm a nezha main and while I don't like that I finally got something new to play with and it was nerfed, it was a bit too strong. It turned most already decent weapons into 50m non los nukes just by running COR+H and two emerald shards, and non-aoe meta weapons we're thriving. I don't know why we're pretending that the strength penalty on overextended means pretty much anything outside the context of also using a helminth ability. Halo still works fine, you pretty much never need chakram to actually kill anything because we're at a point where our guns mow down everything in sight, and it was mainly used for energy generation. Most of the time if you're in a public lobby your spears wouldnt hit half the targets anyway because other people also have aoe weapons or are just killing stuff. For solo play, the mod still functions the same. Enemies come toward you. Sure you can't hit an extra 25m away, but you can just....bullet jump and cast it again? It's not like nezha struggles for energy, defense, or anything for that matter.