Epic change Fortnite’s explosive weapon drop rate

Tired of coming up against a rocket launcher in every game of Fortnite Battle Royale? Epic Games feels your pain and has made a big change to explosive weapons.

Fortnite’s arsenal of explosives, from rocket launchers to grenades, have always been very powerful, and often it’s necessary to carry at least one type of explosive if you hope to pull off the victory royale.

Due to the power of explosives, particularly their ability to wipe out player builds, they can quite easily spoil an otherwise exciting ‘build-off’ battle for survival.

Article continues after ad
Players have highlighted the frequency of rocket launchers particularly.

Developers Epic Games have continued to tweak the explosive meta, adding and removing weapons and tuning their blast radius, accuracy and more.

But, with continued complaints about the high frequency of explosive weapons from the player base, Epic has taken a more immediate step to curb their over-use.

In a hotfix on January 30, the drop rate of all forms explosive weapons from chests was significantly reduced, from 4.13% to 3.08%.

This reduction of only 1% may seem small, but in practice it’s a drop of just over a quarter, meaning you are much less likely to receive an explosive weapon, or come up against one in an opponent’s hand.

Article continues after ad

Epic will monitor feedback on the change, and evaluate if perhaps the reduction was too drastic or not big enough.

With Season 8 around the corner, there are number of big updates expected, with the most recent patch vaulting a number of weapons and unvaulting the Suppressed SMG, but this is the only change to explosives specifically.