PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' latest patch turned frying pans into bullet shields

The latest menace in the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds meta is one item nobody expected.

The first monthly update for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds dropped a couple of days ago and brought a whole bunch of performance fixes, a new weapon, new vehicles, and more.

The patch also made a few balance changes to weapons, but one thing the notes didn't mention concerns the most unlikely of items: the frying pan.

If you're unfamiliar, the frying pan is among the most common items you'll find in the game, but most players ignore it since, as a melee weapon, it's outmatched by the machete and crowbar. More importantly, everyone is too busy hunting for proper weapons to bother with this novelty item.

After the patch, however, the frying pans' effectiveness has gone way up. Reports on Reddit show how the frying pan can save your life. As you can see in the gif above, because of where the pan sits, taking fire from an enemy behind you is a bit less dangerous now since some of the bullets will be stopped by it.

What's more, just madly swinging it around to attack someone (who has a gun) could block some of their bullets as well, as this GIF from NeoGAF user Tecnniqe demonstrates. This all lead to the creation of this amusing image from Reddit user Ninjaassassinguy.

Needless to say, this change has been kind of divisive among players. It's fun when you block a shotgun shell with the pan, but a lot less fun when you have a guy dead to rights but end up missing because of the super pan.