I did not see these changes in the testlive patch notes, the following weapons have all had their Damage reduced. I forgot about them the other day when I made the Undocumented bug dump.
Thanks for finding this. We have gone through all the data changes for 2.2 and were able to figure out what caused this. It appears a few other items were impacted by this as well (item rewards from Dagon). We should have a fix out on Testlive either this week or next.
Thank you for bringing more transparency to the situation and what caused the changes. I for one appreciate that you took the time to do that. Though I don’t expect it every time it was nice to see in this case.
I am a firm believer that Patch Notes for all games should be exhaustive and fully transparent (to the extent that is suitable for public knowledge; obviously source code won’t be sitting in the public domain).
When Patch Notes are exhaustive, they greatly aid in community testing efforts and can also be invaluable to the development team for comparison against the Design Document, Source Code, and Database(s) for verification and validation of full patch implementation without unintended changes.