Because they ran out of things they can nerf so now they are nerfing fun.

After using it in higher level content, 150 scouts suck -blam!-. It just doesn't to enough damage, neither does the hip fire. My legendary weapons do more.

Feels too similar to Polaris Lance.

I thought the change was going to even out when they said the Hip-Fire shots were now a bigger explosion that applied Scorch. In PvE, this is somewhat okay-- in lower level content. The problem is, while the explosion says is fairly bigger, then damage remains the same as a normal explosive round, and as of around a little under a year ago, if I remember correctly, Bungie went from making explosive rounds do 50/50 on damage split, to 75/25 (The 75 being the projectiles direct impact), so most of the time, enemies are only taking 25% of the shots actual damage, despite the bigger blast radius, because the spread of the hip fire rounds is quite large. The scorch damage applied isn't nearly enough to compensate the main damage loss from ADS'ing and getting direct hits. In PvP this is even worse, because of the spread of the hip fire shots most of the time ending up not being a direct hit, the explosive shot only does [u]20 damage[/u], each shot only applies 5% scorch, and the way it's set in PvP, is each 'tick' of burn damage (Which is 4 damage, mind you), removes 5 stacks of scorch per tick; So, it takes about [u]9[/u], yes [u]NINE[/u] shots with a 150 RPM scout rifle to kill somebody at full health while hip firing unless you manage to land direct hits with the non-hitscan shots. They should have kept the increased fire rate; there's very little reason they had to remove it if they removed the tracking on the shots; it makes the hip-fire near useless in PvP, and only somewhat decent in PvE in low-level / very subjective mid-level content, mainly when combined with the fragment that gives you your class ability energy back when you scorch enemies, otherwise mobs that aren't mini-bosses die before Ignition ever activates.

Because it now has a 5 meter AoE where it lands and it burns enemies.

It's close to being a good weapon. I think having the hipfire increase the rate of fire back to what it was would make it pretty good, but as it is, the hip fire sucks -blam!-.

Because now it applies scorch and has a bigger are effect. Now it's actually viable in pve. PvP.... well it was never good lmao.

Because they have both PVE and PVP game modes. The changes this season towards “airborne gameplay” are directed 100% at PVP, as if it would at all contribute positively to the game experience. Leaving skyburners with tracking rounds would have been damn beat game breaking in PVP for a couple weeks and so they went ahead and nerfed a perfect weapon into the ground. You can blame PVP for this

I think they added scorch though ?

Use Symmetry instead