A Quantitative Approach to Basic Weapon Selection in Fortnite

When I first picked up Fortnite and started playing the Zero Build version, I was overwhelmed with the number of decisions I needed to make effectively to compete and win. Looking for loot, selecting weapons, packing health, and battling players while racing against the storm was a rushed and chaotic endeavor often resulting in early deaths. As I continued to play, I realized that virtually ever action and reaction in the game is a series of small data driven calculations. These actions and reactions in unison form the game mechanics that determine the winners and losers on any given day.

I figured in order to get better I needed to practice and, along the way, begin to understand these game mechanics to accelerate my chances of succeeding. The most fruitful areas for understanding these game mechanics is arguably in:  Weapon Selection.

Limited carrying capacity forces you to make tradeoff decisions between what weapons you should take and which you should leave behind. Should I carry a sniper rifle? Which shotgun is the best? Do I pick up a gray DMR or a Green Striker burst? These are all questions that I felt I wasn't able to figure out optimally within the game because I was relying on personal preference rather than the data that underpins each gun. 

Within this article we will discuss the following three weapons selection questions: 

1. What weapons should I avoid? 

2. Which weapon of each category is the best?  

However, before we get to these questions we first need to familiarize readers with some of the metrics that we are using to answer these questions and the underlying source data we are using. The following are the metrics and definitions we are using to produce our analysis and to save on space, I'll highlight two of the most important. 

1. Damage per Second: The amount of damage that a weapon does to an opponent per second. 

2. Seconds to Kill (StK): The amount of time the weapon would take to down or eliminate an opponent who has full health (full shield, health, and over shield). 

In any FPS game, one of the most important elements of the game is getting kills quickly, this helps to ensure that you 1. accumulate kills 2. finish engagements quickly to focus on new targets or healing.

The first metric is well established in the Fortnite community and is seen on a variety of forums and clearly seeks to target the relationship between success and speed. The problem with this metric though is that it overvalues high damage, low round weapons because it doesn't take into account the reload time between magazines.

In order to better compensate for this, we need to take into consideration  the amount of damage required to knock down or eliminate an opponent. To do this, we calculate the total damage that can be given per magazine, the number of magazines needed to down or eliminate an opponent, and then the time it takes to reload between magazines if the first magazine doesn't eliminate or knock down the opponent. This new metric Seconds to Kill (StK) enables us to fully understand the standalone capabilities of a single weapon and with it we will work to answer the key questions in weapons selection: 

1. What weapons should I avoid?

Using this new metric we can rank the Season 3 Chapter 3 weapons in the following order. 

We are looking to minimize the time to knockdown, so lower values are better. It is clear from this chart that the two shot shotgun, heavy sniper rifle, and boom sniper rifle are key guns that you should look to avoid as they take materially longer to kill opponents than their other weapons options. 

2. Which weapon of each category is the best?

One of the obvious counterpoints to this ranking is that it doesn't exclusively take into account range. Without doing so quantitatively, let us group all the guns into range categories to control for this factor. 

 Once this is done, the best performers become clear. The best guns to select in each category are: 

Shotguns: Auto Shotgun, Pistols: Side Arm Pistol, SMG's: Combat SMG, ARs: Ranger Assault Rifle, Scope Rifles: Striker Burst Assault Rifle. 

Using this new metric, you can easily decide between guns of similar type when looting in early or end match play.