Epic Games disabled the Boom Bow from Fortnite’s Team Rumble last night. Despite this being a casual limited-time mode, this change has led to a backlash from the competitive community.
Players are mad at Epic over the reasoning behind the removal and, more specifically, how the company is willing to make changes to a casual mode rather than to competitive playlists like Arena.
Epic said that “the Boom Bow was too powerful” in Team Rumble “due to players respawning with 100HP.” Players in the competitive Fortnite community joked about the explanation and asked the company to remove Boom Bow from Arena because players also spawn with 100 health in that mode.
One player noted that players in Arena Duos who respawn from Reboot Vans also come back with 100 health.
Players also found a reply an Epic employee wrote to a player who asked why the Rocket Launcher wasn’t removed from Team Rumble along with the Boom Bow. “Rocket launcher has a better tell, moves slower, and thus can be fairly easily blocked by a single wall,” the developer wrote.
The competitive community is using both this reply and Epic’s reasoning in the original tweet to say that both statements hold true to Arena, so Epic should also remove the Boom Bow from that game mode.
Their main issue with the weapon is that it’s a fast explosive projectile with a predictable path that deals at least 100 damage to anyone within its explosion radius. Despite that radius being small, it’s big enough to make accuracy become secondary, making it a strong weapon that easily deals 100 damage with no punishment for missing.
But competitive Fortnite players shouldn’t expect any changes specific to Arena or tournaments. In the competitive AMA Epic held two weeks ago, it wrote that it has no plans to have a specific loot pool for Arena. That means unless the Boom Bow is vaulted from default Solo, Duos, and Squads modes, it should stay in competitive modes as well.
