All Fortnite Melee Weapons and How One Won a $1 Million Event

Fortnite has endless weapons, every season we get more and more. There are our standards of shotguns, ARs, and in Chapter 5 especially merciless snipers. But what about Fortnite melee weapons? It’s thought of as more of a gun game but there’s actually a much bigger list of all Fortnite melee weapons than you’d expect.

The game features quite a few options for whacking people instead of shooting them. Often, they don’t really do as much damage as just whipping out your shotgun. Bad news if you’re trying to win Fortnite games with just your rusty pickaxes. Although, they are viable options. These are the Fortnite melee weapons we have, how they work, and the secret one you can only track down in Creative.

Fortnite Melee Weapons in Chapter 5

In Chapter 5, we’ve already had more Fortnite melee weapons than normal. There’s your Pickaxe which you get spawn in with. This does minimal damage if you land a hit. More suited to harvesting mats than actually racking up kills. This season we also have the chains of Hades, a fun item for pulling other players around. It’s a shame nobody takes fall damage from being pulled though, that could have made the Chains an S-Tier troll weapon.

Last season, we had quite a few options for Fortnite melee weapons. We had the Ninja Turtle weapons, four different items which were essentially in the same thing when you actually picked them up to play with. They had a short animation with a Melee combo. The much better use though was their secondary rotation tool. It burst you forward, like the old Kinetic Blade.

Later in Chapter 5, we’ll be getting the lightsabers back. They’re popular, but at this point having the disruptive sword fights take over so often is becoming a little tiresome for those of us who actually enjoy the gunplay in Fortnite. Compared to past Fortnite seasons, we will have had quite a variety of melee weapons though.

All Fortnite Melee Weapons

That’s how things look at the moment but we’ve had quite a few different melee weapons over the years. That includes some that have been game-breaking.

• Pickaxe – In hundreds of varieties thanks to the Item Shop.
• Infinity Blade – A ridiculously broken one-of-a-kind sword from C1. Gave you more health, healing, and near insta-killed.

• Donatello’s Staff
• Leonardo’s Katanas
• Michelangelo’s Nunchaku
• Raphael’s Sai
• Chains of Hades
• ODM Gear – Mobility tool with a melee secondary
• Thorne’s Vampire Blade – Mythic Kinetic Blade
• Sideways Scythe
• Kingsman – Reskin of Chapter 2 Lightsaber
• Kinetic Blade – Much missed, a sword with great mobility uses
• Lightsabers – In more than different re-skinned options
• Thor’s Stormbreaker
• Predator Claw – Item exclusive to Predator boss back in C2
• Sword – Creative Tool
• Hammer – Creative Tool

The Fortnite Sword That Ruined a $1 Tournament

Out of that big list, we can see there have been a lot more Fortnite melee weapons recently. One from Chapter 1 might explain why Epic avoided them for so long. The Infinity Blade.

This was an item which looked pretty much like a sword. You even had to pull it from the stone. One of a kind, the player holding it didn’t have any other weapons. It did deal over 100 damage per second though, doing 75 damage on each quick swing. Compared to your normal expectations for a sword, it granted a ton of other powers too.

It gave players a super jump, and even healed them. The sword did 1 shield or health per second and a siphon 50 upon elimination. It made players able to chain kill after kill getting powered up along the way.

The player didn’t just get those bonuses though. You also had 200 HP and shield, 400 in total. Double everyone else in the lobby. A big movement speed buff. If all that wasn’t enough, the sword demolished builds at a crazy rate.

The Infinity Blade was added to the game with Patch 7.01. That was December 11th 2018, and it was vaulted just three days later, on December 14th. Why so quick? Epic held the Winter Royale in between, a huge tournament with a million-dollar prize.

One player absolutely demolished a lobby with the Infinity Blade, with insane kills and taking over the entire tournament.

Looking back, the builds are almost quaint by our standards for sweats in Chapter 5! It’s clear this item just didn’t work though, especially not in a tournament context.