In Fortnite a new weapon has gone live today: the Stone Throwing Pistol. This pirate weapon was previously torn apart by the community, but now it proves to be useful or at least interesting. It allows for wonderful jumping and avoiding fall damage.
What the new weapon can do: The Stone Throwing Pistol came today in the new update to Fortnite. It deals high damage but has significant drawbacks:
- You can only fire one shot with it, then you have to reload
- the reload takes an eternally long 3 seconds
- the Stone Throwing Pistol only works at close range
- it also knocks the player back and the target opponent back
What players said before the patch about the weapon: Players were relatively shocked when they learned the “pure” stats of the weapon through datamining. Especially the three-second reload troubled them.
In their eyes, the weapon seemed completely useless. They saw hardly any way to finish off an opponent with it.
If you were reloading it, you would simply get shot.
Moreover, there are already many pistols and handguns in the game, and an additional one seemed pointless and unnecessary to the players.
Some were also looking forward to the weapon
This is how the weapon is now used in Fortnite: A few hours after the update went live, first stunts on reddit show that the weapon indeed has some utility.
However, not because it deals damage, but because it knocks the player back.
The first videos demonstrate how the thing is used effectively.
- Here you see a player using the Stone Throwing Pistol to catapult themselves through the air, switching to a shotgun while in flight, and then taking out the opponent.
- Here a player uses 5 Stone Throwing Pistols in succession to fire them one after the other and maneuver across the map
Here a player fires at the ground, catapults themselves upwards, and can thus claim the “high ground” for themselves in Fortnite.
Furthermore, first players have already discovered that the Stone Throwing Pistol can be used to avoid fall damage.
The community apparently finds such creative solutions quite cool.
What’s behind it: The new weapon with the catastrophic stats proves to be more of a movement item than a real alternative to the numerous handguns that are already in the game.
One can be curious about what ways the resourceful Fortnite players will find to use the weapon to their advantage. Perhaps the weapon will even find use in competitive play.
Recently, there was fear of the powerful hamster, Kugler, but now he is being thrown far away with impulse grenades: even fun items have to be balanced and countered.
