Big weapon and building nerfs implemented to Fortnite Battle Royale

On Thursday, Epic Games made some serious changes to the balance of a couple weapons and building in Fortnite Battle Royale. The changes to the game were made to two of the SMG’s and the overall health of the building, affecting the game rather significantly.

Before jumping to conclusions, let me go into to detail about the changes made to the BR earlier today. They are pretty important to the game, but they aren’t revolutionarily big.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the building, upon the release of season five, the building materials health at the start was nerfed considerably. But, the update has now bumped the health back up just a little bit.

Here is what was affected in the building according to the official release from the website:

“By increasing initial wall health values based on material type, material strength should feel more intuitive when making decisions.”

• Wood wall initial HP increased from 80 to 90
• Stone wall initial HP increased from 80 to 100
• Metal wall initial HP increased from 80 to 110

The other changes to the game came to the SMG’s. Both the compact SMG and the Drum Gun saw changes that nerfed the damage, accuracy, and for the compact SMG, the magazine size.

This is one area I think all players can agree needed a change. The compact SMG is like a buzzsaw against opponents building and the magazine size definitely needed to be reduced.

The two weapons had the following changes made:

“Compact SMG”

• “Reduced damage from 22/21 to 21/20”
• “Reduced magazine size from 50 to 40”

“Drum Gun”

• “Reduced falloff range damage from 80% to 70% at 3500 units”
• “Reduced falloff range damage from 65% to 55% at 5000+ units”
• “Added environmental damage fall off matching player damage fall off”
• “Decreased jumping accuracy by 5%”
• “Decreased targeting accuracy by 10%”
• “Reduced spawn rate from chests and floor loot by 40%”

I can get on board with all these nerfs because these are all things the community were asking for.

The shotguns are slowly but surely making a return to being popular and the SMG’s are slowly but surely receiving changes that are more than overdue. Well done Epic Games, well done.

You are listening to the majority of players and making the weapons much more even.

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