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The Inner Game of Fortnite – Sidegrading
In the 11.4 patch on Tuesday, Epic introduced Sidegrading, the ability to upgrade your AR to a Heavy AR for 60 mats. They also dropped the requirements to upgrade from grey to gold which is great.
Sidegrading is interesting for the meta because it opens up the ability for the upgrade stations to potentially become loadout stations in the future. Sort of like Counter-Strike, where you have money from the past round and can spend it on weapons and body armor, if the upgrade stations expand with more functionality, the chance of people running around with weak weapons goes down, so we’re all incentivized to use them more.
Much like in Chapter 1 when Epic changed the vending machines from being overly expensive things that few people ever used to being single-use free places to get great guns and items, making the upgrade stations cheaper means we should definitely use them more, even if it’s to get our Tac from green to blue. Every point of damage helps.
Strategy side note here: in the late game, if you have a trap and are near an upgrade station, put it above so that if someone runs in there hoping to swap a gun, you can take them out while safely hiding somewhere else. Also, watch out for traps around and above upgrade stations. This note brought to you by me getting killed by a trap over an upgrade station a few months ago.
I’m curious to see what direction Fortnite takes upgrade stations. Sidegrading your AR to a heavy AR means maybe the heavy shotgun makes its return in Season 2?
The x.4 upgrade has traditionally been a big one, even if it’s behind the scenes and we don’t see it. It allows Epic to release less potentially breaking changes in their next big patch which should be the next season update.
Things they are-a-changin’ out there.
Sub-Skill Drills – Non-Dominant 90s
90s are the most frequently used and talked about building construct in the game, still. Most of us tend to specialize in 90s one direction or the other. I myself and great at right 90s and tend to mess up more on my lefts.
Your drill today is simple 10-15 minutes of 90s in the direction that you mess up more. Go slow, get the mechanics right, then get faster. If you mess up, slow down again.
Remember, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
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I’m taking next week off to go on vacation so I’ll talk to you on 27th!
Go get some wins.