How to use the Fortnite Siphon Augment

(Image credit: Epic Games)

The Fortnite Siphon is an augments that grants a player restored health when they deal damage, or some shields if they're already on maximum health. What causes the Siphon effect specifically will depend on the Fortnite Augments triggering it, but it's a good effect regardless. Especially for players who play aggressively or often find themselves on low health. We'll go into further detail about how Fortnite Siphon Augments work below, as well as what the specific Siphon Reality Augments you can find in the game at time of writing are.

What is a Fortnite Siphon?

The Fortnite Siphon is an effect in which dealing damage or getting eliminations with a certain Augment grants the player some health or shield in return. It's similar to "lifesteal" effects in certain games, but the amount restored doesn't change depending on how much damage you do in Fortnite - a bullet that does 100 damage and a bullet that does 10 both restore the same amount of health or shield, at least from what we've seen so far.

The Witcher in Fortnite

Find out about the Fortnite Geralt skin and how players can get it here!

It's important to clarify that this is different to older versions of the Siphon mechanic, which were dependent on kills, not simply damage in Fortnite. However, now it's just down to wounding an enemy - you don't have to land a killing shot to start restoring health and defenses, from what we've seen. However, we don't know if that'll stay the same for time being, owing to some technical errors we'll address below.

Siphon can be obtained at time of writing through either of these two Augments:

Shotgun Striker: Your Shotgun fire will give you Siphon upon hitting opponents.
Rarity Check: Get Siphon upon eliminations with Common and Uncommon weapons.

However, right now it seems the Shotgun Striker Augment has actually been disabled (thanks, HYPEX), owing to a bug where the effect didn't just work on enemies, but also allies - meaning you could repeatedly shoot your friends in the face, never hurting them while healing yourself. Whoops. We don't know when it'll be back yet, but presumably it shouldn't be too long.

CATEGORIES

Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and Very Tired Man with a BA from Brunel University, a Masters from Sussex University and a decade working in games journalism, often focused on guides coverage but also in reviews, features and news. His love of games is strongest when it comes to groundbreaking narratives like Disco Elysium, UnderTale and Baldur's Gate 3, as well as innovative or refined gameplay experiences like XCOM, Sifu, Arkham Asylum or Slay the Spire. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at Eurogamer, Gfinity, USgamer, SFX Magazine, RPS, Dicebreaker, VG247, and more.