Fortnite Pain Train Analysis and Review

by Whitesushii

Hey guys, Whitesushi here with yet another weapons review. This time, the weapon I’ll be covering is going to be Pain Train. Now you guys probably realized I don’t just review every weapon so it’s already looking good for the Pain Train right off the bat and I sure do have some good things to say about this weapon. As always, we will be going through the

1. Base stats comparison
   
2. Available perks to roll for
   
3. Best perk combinations
   

I will also be adding some extra bits on how this weapon compares up to some of the other Assault Rifle heavyweights such as Wraith, Silenced Specter as well as the Hemlock so you can look forward to that (one of the later sections). Without further ado, let’s dive in

Base Stats

Starting this off, we will be going over the base stats for this weapon. The weapon we will be comparing it with is going to be the Silenced Specter and Hemlock. Now you may not agree with me comparing them this way but the reason behind it is simple. The Pain Train is contesting for the close range, under 2 to 3 tiles spot in your loadout which means it’s basically up against the SS and Hemlock. Here’s a table for it

*Do note that range is in tiles

As you can see, the Pain Train has some insane base damage compared to the other 2 weapons which may lead to people thinking that the weapon puts out a lot more damage. However, much lower stats on pretty much everything else such as

• Crit Chance
  
• Crit Damage
  
• Fire Rate
  

balances the weapon out and puts it fairly close to the other 2. We will be going more in-depth with the comparisons in one of the later sections. The weapon has pretty mediocre range similar to most Assault Rifles but what really shines about the weapon is its almost pinpoint accuracy. Not only does the weapon have very little recoil, the bloom is minimal as well very similar to when Wraith was first released except this isn’t due to lowered frame rates. In fact you can quite reasonably put all your shots into the small little box at the top right corner of a T3 wood wall without any adjustments made to your aim.

That said though, after testing the weapon out in the field and checking replays through slowing it down and counting the number of headshots, it was hard to hit above 50% (and I think I’m not that bad of an aim) even with fighting within 3 tiles of range. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad weapon, it just means other weapons are probably even harder to hit >50% headshots on especially for ones with high fire rate and large magazines. However, I am putting this information out here because it has implications in our perk choice later on.

Available Perks

Moving on, here’s the table for available perks for this weapon

Note the table layout is different from my Wraith post, more intuitive for reading (perk slots flow downwards)

Good thing is there’s a lot of damage, in fact the most possible damage rolls possible on a weapon in this game. You can literally do 7 damage perks if you had a Master Grenadier support (not recommended though). That said, you can only have one copy of the weapon for now which means it’s impossible to live the triple elements dream but honestly, energy is enough for most content these days. Now for the curious minds…

Here’s a table I want you guys to take a look at

The table shows how much %DMG the 6th perk of Pain Train is worth given varying number of shots. For example if you kill a target in 10 shots, then the 6th perk is only worth 8.1% while if you take 30 shots to kill a target, then it’s worth 19.8%. Of course if you run magazine size on your perks (not recommended) or hero, the percentage can go higher but we shall not go down that rabbit hole. For what it’s worth, I would say the perk is pretty decent having almost no requirements but I will leave you guys to judge it’s value based on your own experiences slaying husks

The “best” Perks Combination

As always, we are using my spreadsheet to do all the calculations for us. Do note that when I talk about the “best”, we’re looking from a strictly damage perspective rather than a playstyle one. As such, some perks like durability and stability are completely ignored because those don’t contribute to damage in any ways. That said, I will try to give you guys as many scenarios as possible to let you better decide which combination to roll with. The only assumption we are going to make this time round is that

• The player is running some form of element/energy so 20% DMG instead of 44% and thus lesser opportunity cost of having more %DMG lines
  

Besides this, the only other point worth taking note of is that my table will display 0% damage on the 6th perk (stacking damage) but it doesn’t affect our final outcome when it comes to deciding between the two paths to take… or is there even a choice to be made?

This is what the table looks like assuming no heroes & 60% headshot accuracy <- Click This

We take 60% headshot accuracy because that is the number to beat if you want to opt for a headshot oriented build. As mentioned in one of the earlier sections, it is fairly hard to achieve >50% headshot accuracy in real combat scenarios but if you are up for the challenge (like can comfortably hit over 60% headshots), then your perk options will be

• FIRE RATE/HEADSHOT/ELEMENT/DAMAGE/DAMAGE with Urban Assault (HEADSHOT) in support
  

However, the above setup is strongly not recommended and players should instead opt for the option below being

– CRIT RATING/CRIT DAMAGE/ELEMENT/DAMAGE/CRIT DAMAGE with Master Grenadier (DMG) in support

Yes I did not mistype that damage perk, it is actually better this way. This is the de facto best setup for this weapon because the same setup also happens to be the

• Best damage/shot setup
  
• Best setup with Urban Assault (beating the rate/hs variant)
  

… and that’s pretty much it. There isn’t really much more to be said about this weapon but if you are one of those people looking to stack a lot of damage on it, here are some interesting setups, their placement ranking as well as dps loss values

1. RATE/DMG/ELEMENT/DMG/DMG with Urban Assault @ 9th place (-4.84% DPS)
   
2. DMG/HS/ELEMENT/DMG/DMG with Urban Assault @ 14th place (-6.65% DPS)
   
3. DMG/HS/ELEMENT/DMG/DMG with Master Grenadier @ 23rd place (-8.92% DPS)
   
4. RATE/DMG/ELEMENT/DMG/DMG with Master Grenadier @ 28th place (-10.14% DPS)
   
5. DMG/DMG/ELEMENT/DMG/DMG with Master Grenadier @ 71st place (-18.88% DPS)
   

Do leave a reply below if you are curious about any odd combinations but I will probably take a few hours to respond since I am heading to bed after this post.

The Juicy Bits

Alright so here’s the comparison you guys have been waiting for. Usually, I would just compare raw damage per second but since Epic Games made some unannounced changes to how damage drop-off works and I have been looking into it (there will be a separate post on that but if people are curious, I can give a short summary below), I decided to do this comparison while factoring in just that. Again, just a quick reminder that we will be comparing the

• Silenced Specter
  
• Hemlock
  
• Pain Train
  
• and Wraith (as a bonus)
  

assuming their best possible perks. If you would like to check out what these “best” possible perks for those weapons entail, click on their hyperlinks above. The process of comparing these weapons were fairly simple and all I had to do was to take their dps numbers given on their best setup, applying the new damage drop-off formula to it and finally plotting the values on a graph

The range formula was conjured with the help of Camqtr and isn’t available publicly at the moment but like all formulas I use, it will eventually be

Either way, here’s the gra… Oh wait that’s the wrong one (awesome paint skills by sakis2011 though)

Here’s the actual graph

In a perfect world, the lines should be straight but because the values and percentages are taken from tests and there’s hidden rounding issues with the game, they are a little jaggedy

As you can see, the Silenced Specter leads the charge up till 1.5 tiles and starts to lose damage due to range drop-off, falling behind the Wraith at around 2.5 tiles and subsequently Pain Train/Hemlock at 3 tiles. Meanwhile, Hemlockstays above the Wraith up till around 2 tiles and starts falling behind, getting really close to the Pain Train. Pain Trainis just losing the fight from the start. You probably think Pain Train probably sucks at this point

Here’s another graph

In this second graph, we add a new orange line. This orange line represents the damage of Pain Train if we were to include 19.8% damage on his 6th perk calculation (Read up on the “Available Perks” to understand why 19.8% was chosen). The line shows the upper ceiling potential this weapon can achieve in terms of DPS and evidently,

• The weapon can potentially, consistently beat the Hemlock
  
• The weapon gets fairly close to the Specter
  

Now all this suddenly sounds a lot better right…?

Here’s YET another graph

Since in our earlier section we factored in the 6th perk bonus of the Pain Train, I thought it would only be fair if we considered Wraith’s 6th perk as well (30% damage after 5 headshots). This results in the shift in yellow line upwards which now dominates the entire graph. Basically if you think you can consistently land 5 headshots, BundlebussWraith is the only weapon you need

After all those back-and-forth comparisons, you guys must be pretty confused about my stance on the Pain Train. Well it’s pretty simple really. If we were to examine our first graph above again, we can easily tell that the ideal loadout would be Silenced Specter + Wraith. With this loadout, Silenced Specter would be your weapon of choice up till 2.5 tiles and Wraith covers you for the rest. (I mean those lines pretty much join up, dominating the rest of the graph). However, if you

1. Don’t have the Silenced Specter
   
2. Don’t have the Wraith
   
3. Don’t like using either of those weapons
   

Then I would recommend running either the Hemlock or the Pain Train for under 5 tiles and something else like a Sniper for the rest. Below is a list of pros & cons for each of the weapons starting with Hemlock to help you better decide

and the Pain Train

The Conclusion

Pain Train is a pretty solid weapon. It’s capable of dishing out high damage per second despite having an almost equally high damage per shot and thus saving on ammunition. This coupled with it’s high accuracy makes for a weapon which is very comfortable to use and fairly easy to pick up. I would talk about the sound it makes but I play with my game audio completely off so I can’t really comment on that.

That said though, it’s not good enough to replace min-maxing builds of Silenced Specter + Wraith combos or just people brute-forcing with Bundlebuss. However, I would personally (OPINION BTW) place it above the Hemlock just because of how close the two weapons are and the drastic quality of life offered by the Pain Train easily outweighs the slight differences in damage.

Last but not least since people ask me this a lot, my loadout consists of Silenced Specter(Bundlebuss)/Wraith/Stormblade with Mercury LMG on standby for mini-boss. If you enjoy my guides and found them helpful, you can consider supporting me through my creator code “Whitesushi”. Once again, thanks for reading through my lengthy post and do feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

TL;DR Highly accurate, damage per shot oriented weapon that feels really nice to use while being able to hold its spot easily in top10 for Assault Rifles. For perks, run CRIT/CRITD/ELE/DMG/CRITD with MGR(DMG) in support