The Fortnite v9.30 Content Update #3 was controversial among professional and competitive players because of the addition of a new item, Air Strike.
Players can use this item to call a bombardment on any area they want. The Air Strike is a grenade that, a short time after landing, causes rockets to fall from the sky and deal damage randomly within a small area around it. Since explosives are very important in Fortnite to counter player-built structures, the addition of Air Strike worried the community.
But players are now investigating how strong the Air Strike really is. Despite the rockets looking menacing, it’s important for players to understand how big is the damage they cause to structures before using them in a match or to plan a counter to them.
One player ran a test on Fortnite Creative using Air Strike against wooden, brick, and metal structures. The result of this explosive The Three Little Pigs remake is what we would expect based on each material’s health.
A single Air Strike demolishes an entire two-by-two wooden structure, half of a similar brick structure, and only two tiles of a metal structure.
The player also ran a second test stacking two Air Strikes on each of these structures, which almost destroyed the brick structure completely and caused more damage to the metal one. The test shows that the Air Strike radius is about the size of these structures, around two-by-two tiles.
The test shows more than the Air Strike damage. In the second video, the player misses the center of the structure a bit, and that makes several of the bombardment missiles miss the structure. This means that accuracy plays an important role when using the item, regardless of how strong players consider it to be.
Some people commented on the video that the real strength of the Air Strike is when you consider it causing damage to structures that haven’t reached full HP yet, so it would take them down faster than against the ones in the video.
With this test, both casual and professional players can now have a better idea of how strong the Air Strike is and plan ahead ways to counter it or run away from its explosions.
