Fortnite weapons

In this article we will look at Fortnite weapons. I used data available on kaggle.com (https://www.kaggle.com/jruots/fortnite-battle-royale-weapon-attributes). This dataset cover all available weapons in Fortnite: Battle Royale at patch 2.1.0 (January 10th 2018).

Weapons overview
First, let’s see what kinds of weapons are available and how they divide based on rarity. We use colors for rarity as they are described in the game (see: https://fortnite.gamepedia.com/Rarity). Sniper Riffles and Explosives are weapons that can be rarely found (only as rare, epic and legendary weapons). There is the biggest choice of Assault Riffles and Submachine Guns. There are no legendary Shotguns and Submachine Guns. There are no common Sniper Riffles and Explosives.

Types of weapons comparison
When we compare types of weapons in case of DPS, Damage, Fire Rate, Magazine Size, Reload Time and Impact, we can observe that average values for groups are similar in pattern to what we observe for minimal and maximal values (however, we can observe that raw values differ). On the plot below, we can observe that Submachine Guns have highest values for DPS, Fire Rate and Magazine Size and Explosives have maximal values of Impact and Damage. Shotguns have highest values of Reload Time which is not perfect. The most balanced weapons seem to be Assault Riffles and Pistols but they seem to have rather low Impact.

Rarity of weapons comparison
When we split weapons by rarity, the image we get is different. On average, we can observe that Common and Uncommon weapons has lower Impact in comparison with three other groups, where Legendary weapons maximise in case of Impact. However, Common and Uncommon weapons have maximal values of Magazine Size and Fire Rare. Legendary weapons on average has also highest Damage. In general Common and Uncommon weapons are very similar in performance.

Correlation of weapon features
When we look which weapon features come together, we can observe that DPS has strong positive correlation with Fire Rate and Magazine Size but strong negative correlation with Damage. Damage has strong positive correlation with Impact. We didn’t observe any correlation between Impact and Reload time. If we add statistics to the correlation (pearsonr test, see notebook link below) and assume alpha=0.01, we can observe that all correlations but DPS vs Reload time, DPS vs Impact, Magazine Size vs Reload Time and Reload Time vs Impact are significant.

Summary
This short analysis gave us initial information about weapons available in Fortnite: Battle Royale. We were able to see:
 * How many weapons there are, including their types and rarity?
 * Which types of weapons are best and worst in case of DPS, Damage, Fire Rate, Magazine Size, Reload Time and Impact?
 * Is there the pattern for these features when we look at rarity groups? Should we always pick higher rarity level weapons as some suggest?
 * Which features correlate? In other words, if we have a weapon with high DPS, should we expect high Impact and low Fire rate?

Link to Code
You can find the code used to data wrangle and generate the plots on github: https://github.com/martynaut/ministryofdata/blob/master/Fortnite_weapon_overiew.ipynb

Read more about Fortnite
To read more about Fortnite, visit communities on Fandom platform:
 * Gamepedia: https://fortnite.gamepedia.com
 * Fandom: https://fortnite.fandom.com/wiki/Fortnite_Wiki

Author: Martyna Urbanek-Trzeciak