At the time of my writing this I obtained the pinnacle Vanguard Grenade Launcher roughly forty minutes ago. Needing to work on my Hard Light catalyst, I decided to load into the Shuro Chi encounter of the Last Wish raid (where I always go to work on catalyst progression). I figured the orbs created by Hard Light would give me the opportunity to play around with Wendigo’s Explosive Light perk. After playing around with this weapon a bit, I must admit that at first glance it seems much more useful (and fun) than I would have expected. In case you haven’t been keeping up with TWAB or any other previews of the weapon, it is a drum fed, six round magazine Grenade Launcher for the Heavy slot. It is thus far the only drum fed GL that fires blinding grenades, a perk that was previously only available on single shot models. And it’s one of a kind Explosive Light perk states “Picking up an Orb of Light increases the next grenade’s blast radius and damage”. Each orb of light picked up empowers a single round for Wendigo up to a maximum of six rounds, the weapons maximum magazine size without mods. Two very important (and to be honest, somewhat surprising) notes about Explosive Light: • Having the Wendigo [i]equipped[/i] allows you to pick up orbs of light even if your super meter is full. Because of this you can keep your super in reserve for an upcoming boss while still being able to utilize the full ability of the weapon. • I stressed in the first point the word “equipped” because even if Wendigo is currently stowed, you can still pick up orbs of light (again, even at max super) to power up Explosive Light. You can then draw Wendigo when you desire and have the empowered rounds ready to use. Even if you pull out Wendigo, fire a shot and then stow it again, any previously empowered shots [b]stay[/b] empowered until you pull it out again. It even persists if you hop on your sparrow and take a quick spin. (Explosive light does not persist through death, but that’s to be expected) The fact that the weapon also has the Auto-Loading Holster perk helps out a great deal as well. These two facts carry with them a couple of implications to consider when Wendigo is equipped. One being situations in which careful management of orbs created by yourself and allies is important to victory. Being that the weapon allows you to pick up orbs of light even when at full super, the possibility of ruining your ability to chain supers through fire team coordination becomes a real possibility. The other, more positive implication being that with the ability to pick up orbs of light even at full super, that means any armor perk activated by picking up orbs of light (such as Better Already) can now also be taken advantage of at full super. With that out of the way, it is true that the weapon’s normal blast radius [b]stat[/b] is rather small, although it can still kill lesser enemies a decent distance away from the point of impact. With an empowered shot the area of the explosion does seem quite a bit larger, although the extent of the increase to damage can be a bit hard to determine as the numbers tend to be all over the place. An interesting note is that, with my limited experimentation, the range at which you can potentially damage [b][b]yourself[/b][/b] with the explosion does not seem to increase with the empowered shot. The most readily obvious improvement to the empowered shot is the radius of the blind effect, as it will now extend [b]far[/b] outside of the damage radius hitting enemies that seem almost comically far away. This is especially obvious in the Shiro Chi encounter where I did most of my testing. The blind effect, empowered or not, lasts roughly four seconds against pve targets. Bosses are of course unaffected. As a Heavy Grenade Launcher it’s magazine carries six shots, with an additional eleven shots in reserve (without armor perks). This ammo count along with the empowered blind effect makes it ideal for [b]mitigating[/b] a large amount of enemies, affording other players more time to kill them. While the perks of this weapon may not be the best for burning down a boss, or killing [b]every single[/b] enemy in order to clear a timed challenge, it should at least be considered in situations where surviving a large number of rushing enemies is the key, especially for the solo player, such as myself. so alone... i mean... solo / (΄◉◞౪◟◉｀) [b]EDIT: Because it was asked elsewhere in the post, I’ll share the strategy I used in order to get this done so quickly.[/b] [i] Fighting Lion and a legendary GL in heavy are what I used to get this done so quickly. Fighting Lion is very useful once you learn how to properly use it. Hold down the button and then let go when the round reaches the target. Don’t try to hit targets head on with FL unless they’re really big. With practice you should be able to one shot sniper mobs from far off in the strikes. Also the fact that FL uses primary ammo and that enemies killed with it drop primary ammo means you will almost always have ammo for it. After an hour of reacquainting myself with FL, I was generally pulling down anywhere between fifty and ninety GL kills per strike. The biggest bottle neck is actually the third bar of the quest that requires you to get kills in strikes, with GL final blows granting the most progress and death causing you to lose progress. As best I could figure, thirty GL kills equates to 1% progress earned while a single death loses you 1% progress. I don’t know how many non-GL kills equate to 1% progress. By the time I had completed the GL kills and multikills bars I had only earned 74% progress on the third bar. And no, you cannot earn any progress in Nightfalls. Everything must be done through the strikes playlist. [/i]