All too often you hear from veteran players, players who have thousands of hours in the game say how you should play or how you get over being afraid of the game. The thing is most players don't have thousands of hours to play Tarkov. A lot of us have families, work full time, and have other obligations.
So I decided to make a being a player with less than 900 hours how, I have managed to deal with Solo Anxiety and Gear Fear.
For Solo Anxiety find a focus. Whether that is completing tasks, leveling skills, making money and try to "focus" on that when you play. This will help you hopefully not just sit in your inventory and manage all night like we all do in the beginning.
Now Gear Fear. Ask yourself if you have gear fear when you are playing in a group. If you run your best gear in a group then you aren't afraid of using the gear. You are afraid of being alone and using it. There are many reason why that might be, but if you aren't afraid to use it in a group, it isn't gear fear you necessarily have it is solo anxiety. Now if you answered yes to not wanting to use it in a group then you probably do have gear fear.
How do we deal will that? 3 Step approach.
Step 1: AMMO | GUN | ARMOR
use guns and gear (armor) you are comfortable using but I encourage you to start using better ammo. The biggest game changer in any fight in tarkov is going to be the ammo you bring. Once you have gotten comfortable with regularly using better ammo —>
—> transition to using better guns and modding your guns. This opens up more opportunities in engagements that you otherwise didn't have before. Full auto, hip firing, range, etc. Then obviously once you have become a connoisseur of firearms —>
—> we change our sights to fine armors. Now level 5 and 6 armor will carry you a lot farther that you have gotten comfortable killing Contractors. Before if you used good armor and a great gun with trash ammo you were shooting yourself in the foot.
Step 2: Set Left and Right Rouble Limits
Very straight forward. For example – less than 1m roubles, budget runs. More than 5m roubles, we taking a trip to the candy shop.
Step 3: Build A Backpack (My Method)
All that gear just sitting around in your stash collecting dust because you are too frugal to sell it and too scared to use it. Start building "ready to go" kits. I call this technique Build-A-Backpack. It consist of taking a large backpack and filling it with armor/gun/ammo/meds/helmet(if you so please)/mags/etc. Everything you need to go into raid. I will sometimes remove the pistol grip and suppressor to save space in the bag if things are tight and reassemble it before I go into a raid.
I like this method because it allows you to get through all that gear just sitting around. Gets it out of sight out of mind. And is great for raid turn over time. No longer do you need to take 20 minutes in-between each raid to build a new gun, heal and figure out what all you need. The big factor as to why this helps with gear fear is, when you have a handful of these bad boys ready to go, even if you die over and over. You don't see the cost of putting the kit together before each raid. You don't see your rouble count go down after each death. Lastly, it saves you heaps of time figuring out what to equip on yourself.
I doubt this will see many people but leave a comment below letting me know how many hours in the game you currently have and what method/s helped you conquer gear fear and solo anxiety.
Thanks y'all and good luck out there!
