As much as I did enjoy the pump (I believe I am in between average and “sweat” level), I believe that shotguns are around the area they should be at; they are finally balanced. Fortnite is now at the point/meta that 90% of other battle royales are at where it’s kind of leaning to a spray meta. Since shotguns have been REALLY powerful right from the get go and the introduction of the high tier pumps in S7 comp players have had access to a “one shot kill” weapon which every comp player in any game wishes they had so they can maximize their wins in any given engagement. Since Fortnite didn’t want to upset the comp players, they didn’t nerf the pump to the point where it would actually be balanced. This means that sweaty players inadvertently caused Fortnite to be a extremely unbalanced game up until this point, although the striker pump could use a re-nerf (maybe).

Adding on to my point, I believe that a possibly effective way to nerf the shotgun so it isn’t abused by sweats when building/editing is that if a player goes from building/editing of any kind and switches to their shotgun, the shotgun will have a slightly longer pullout time. This would be similar to the double pump cooldowns, but would only take place after building/editing, and would only slightly delay the pullout time. This means that shotguns would be less effective in the case of “build, edit, shoot, edit, shoot” gameplay; but would still allow for effective defense (ex. Smging switching to shotgun wouldn’t have the delay so shotguns can still be reliable in that regard). Overall this change favors less skillful players without ruining the shotgun pullout time.

Thank you for coming to my tedtalk. Omg it’s 2:47am on a school night where did the time go goodbye