What do Fortnite siphon boosts do?

Fortnite Siphon Augments grant the augmented player restored health when they deal damage, and also some shields if they are already at full health. What specifically causes the Siphon effect to trigger will depend on Fortnite Augments, but it’s a good effect regardless, especially for players who play aggressively or often find themselves low on health. Below we’ll go into more detail about how Fortnite’s Siphon Augments work, as well as what specific Siphon Reality Augments you can find in-game as of this writing.

What is Siphon in Fortnite?

Siphon in Fortnite is an effect where dealing damage with a Siphon weapon grants the player some health or shield in return. This is similar to the “life steal” effects in certain games, but the amount restored doesn’t change depending on how much damage you deal in Fortnite: a bullet that does 100 damage and a bullet that does 10 damage restore the same amount of health or shield, at least from what we’ve seen in the game so far.

(Image credit: Epic Games)

The witcher in Fortnite

(Image credit: Epic Games)

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It’s important to note that this is different than previous versions of the Siphon mechanic, which relied on Bush, not just damage in Fortnite. However, now it’s just about hurting an enemy – you don’t need to land a killshot to start restoring health and defenses, from what we’ve seen. However, we don’t know if it will stay the same at the moment, due to some technical errors that we will address below.

Siphon can be obtained at the time of writing via either of these two augments:

• Shotgun Pickguard: Your shotgun blast will give you a siphon when hitting opponents.
• Rarity check: Get Siphon after eliminations with Common and Uncommon weapons.

However, right now it seems Shotgun Striker’s augment has actually been disabled (thanks HYPEX), due to a bug where the effect worked not only on enemies, but also on allies, which meant you could repeatedly shoot your friends in the face, never hurting them while healing yourself same. Oh! We don’t know yet when it will return, but presumably it shouldn’t be too long.