Escape from Tarkov: How to get over gear fear (2024)

Gear fear is a phenomenon somewhat unique to Escape from Tarkov whereplayers are afraid of losing their gear inside the raid and adapt their approach accordingly, either by avoiding popular/high-tier maps or by using cheap gear while more expensive stays in the stash.

That is stopping them from truly enjoying the game, and in most cases, it dampens their performance as they are constantly playing in fear with inferior gear.

Here is a guide on getting over that gear fear, which should, in turn, improve your performance.

Remember that Tarkov has wipes

Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that your wipe started terribly and you lose most if not all of your gear.

There are two options even in that dreadful scenario:

• Doing the Scav runs to get yourself new gear and some money,
• Resetting your account which can be done every three weeks, and getting your initial loadout back.

Both of those scenarios offer a decent fresh start, so you will never be worse than you are now, afraid of going to raids and using cheap, Scav-like gear.

Second case scenario, let's say your wipe goes excellent, and at some point, you have acquired a decent amount of high-tier gear. It will be erased from your profile on the next wipe.

Either way, you have a fresh start together with everyone else. Gear fear attitude has the underlining assumption that the gear in your stash is safe indefinitely and that you will use it sometime in the future, but that is simply not true: your gear will be gone whether you use it or not. It is better to die with your gear than to have a full stash of guns and armors erased at the end of the wipe.

Try one wipe going all in, playing like an absolute Chad, with the idea that you will lose everything and that the gear doesn't matter. You will be surprised how much that attitude will change the game for you.

Embrace that you're going to die often

You will never stop dying in Tarkov. Popular streamers like AquaFPS and Pestily have a 60-70% survival rate on average. That is not a lot, and they die every third or fourth raid. But dying every fourth raid is vastly different than dying every second or even more, and you will feel it by the shift in your attitude towards the game.

But to reach that level, you will have to die a lot, and not just by doing hatchet runs and running cheap gear, but you will have to die with good gear as well, to get better.

Tarkov's player base doesn't have an obsessive K/D ratio mentality so there is no need to pay attention to it.Try different approaches, from going guns blazing to doing rat runs. Try different weapons, or strategies when you encounter another player.

Playing constantly with cheap gear will have you at disadvantage against most players, and because of that, you will die more frequently. That will soon turn into the fear of conflicts as most conflicts result in death for you.

That will still be the case with better gear but should happen less and less over time. And once you get a couple of scalps, you will gain self-confidence andplay a lot better than you did in fear.

Learn how to make money

If you have a problem making money, even at higher levels, it will fuel gear fear additionally, and you don't need that.

Knowing that by dying you're losing half a million rubles is a troubling thought, and you need to counter that with: I can make that in half an hour. Only then you can start playing freely, taking chances, and enjoying the game.

We will not cover in detail how to get money more easily, as that is a bit broader subject, but you can always do Scav runs in between raids, and take some time into learning what loot is valuable and what is not, so you know what to take out of the raid next time, as your backpack is limited, and you don't want to be extracting with a bunch of nails.

The frequent gear changes should not bother you anymore in that case, as you will have the means to buy it back soon at any time.

Practice in offline mode

If you tried playing with the mindset shown above, and you still fail, lose equipment, or just can't get rid of the gear fear, offline mode is your friend.

Offline mode is forgiving, and no matter what gear you bring in, you will get it back once the raid is complete. You can learn the maps in the offline mode and more importantly, practice the PvP fight against the A.I.

Numerous options can be set, both for A.I. difficulty to their spawn rate. Start at the very bottom, and raise the difficulty as you progress. You can also turn on events like the Tagged and Cursed, and fight against bosses as well.

By the time you reach the highest difficulty (which is tougher than online A.I.), you will be prepared to tackle most enemy players while enemy Scavs should become a breeze to you.