TL;DR: Volatile explosions dont count as damage from their source, eg. volatile from grenades (via controlled demolitions) dont trigger grenade mods, and volatile rounds dont trigger weapon perks. This, among other things, disables elemental ordnance from working and excludes using controlled demolitions with ability spam builds. The question is, is it intended and why is it the way it is? Example: Controlled demolition more or less disables elemental ordnance from functioning, as most of the time enemies will die to volatile explosions rather than grenade tick damage. Because the volatile kills dont count as grenade kills, you get no wells. So you have to be lucky, and have the grenade get the last damage to kill the enemy if you want wells. This problem extends to volatile rounds, where weapon kill perks wont trigger when you inadvertently kill your target with volatile rather than raw weapon damage. Example: Repulsor Brace, "Defeating a Void-debuffed target grants an overshield.", doesnt trigger most of the time on volatile enemies, as they will simply die from volatile. A possibility I found interesting, was using volatile rounds with the unforgiven smg, where you would constantly get overshields via volatile rounds and the perk, but unfortunately, that is very troublesome to get to work. You can get it to work, but you have to apply volatile, and then kill them before volatile kills the enemy. This is probably close to impossible on difficulties like legend and above, because of the increased health bar excacerbating the issue. I feel like this should be fixed or changed, as it makes it difficult to justify using controlled demolitions if youre running an ability spam build, simply because you cant spawn wells. Could you use heart of inmost light instead? Yeah, definitely. But having to use just one exotic to carry your build, if you want to spam abilities, kinda sucks. I figured thats why elemental wells kept getting better since they were added. And it removes a potentially really cool buildcrafting possibility, as volatile rounds with repulsor brace would remove the necessity to use bastion on void titan, to proc overshield for offensive bulwark, which would allow you to use controlled demolitions while still having high uptime on offensive bulwark. While I'm no expert on balancing, this doesn't seem like a balancing decision to me, due to it not being that op in low to medium level content, and it probably being pretty bad in endgame/master content (because of the reliance on kills for overshields and wells). So, the question is; is this intended or not? Whether its a balancing decision or something else, I would love to know what the cause of this mechanic (or perhaps lack of) is.