Data basis: the modifier screen in your own client, on the day you read it. Written 2026-08-16, after the early-August 2026 quest rework. We publish no modifier list. The reason is at the bottom, and it is not laziness.
The post that prompted this called a modifier the worst ever and asked whether anything short of resetting the account could fix it. A hundred and twenty-three replies later, the thread had produced exactly what these threads always produce: half the room saying it is unplayable and the other half saying they barely notice it. Both halves are telling the truth. They play differently.
A modifier is not good or bad. It is a tax on a specific activity, and whether the tax hurts depends entirely on whether that activity is how you spend your raids.
Tarkov seasonal modifier trade-off, at a glance
| Situation | Estimated verdict | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Mild, mostly time-and-danger roll, casual few-hours player | keep (-2.3 net) | Barely worth reacting to — play through it and spend your limited hours on the season instead of on the reroll queue. |
| Default negative roll, task runner | adapt (-14.3 net) | This is the calculator's default roll — enter your own axis percentages below rather than trusting this verdict for your screen. |
| Severe danger and healing penalty, PvP-first player | reset (-29.0 net) | A roll this heavy on danger and gear recovery is worth resetting for a PvP-first player rather than adapting around it. |
These are outputs of this site's playstyle-weighted scoring model, not values extracted from the game — the axis weights are this site's judgement, not published game constants. Use the calculator below with your own modifier screen and playstyle.
Six axes, and only some of them are yours
Almost every modifier lands on one of a small number of axes: how long a raid takes, how much loot is around, what the economy charges you, what injuries cost, whether you get your gear back, and how dangerous the raid is.
Which of those you feel depends on your week. A task runner is spending raids on objectives and eats the time and danger axes directly. A loot runner lives or dies on availability and prices. Someone with six hours a week is almost purely time-constrained, and a modifier that adds ten minutes to every raid is doing more damage to them than a brutal-sounding combat penalty ever will.
Score your own roll
Open the modifier screen, and for each axis write down roughly how much worse or better it makes things for you. Precision is not the point; the ordering is.
Modifier trade-off: keep, adapt, or reset
Playable, but you have to change how you play. Net drag -14.3 points.
Biggest single drag: raid time and queue cost (-6.0 of the total). For a loot runner the same roll scores -9.8.
Negative numbers mean the modifier makes that axis worse for you. Scores are weighted by playstyle, and the weights are our judgement, not game values.
Read the effects off your own modifier screen and translate each one into a rough percentage. We hold no modifier list, because the pool moved in the rework and a stale list would be worse than none.
The result is a link. Paste it into the thread instead of the modifier’s name and the argument becomes about your weights rather than about vibes.
What each verdict actually means
- Keep. The roll costs you less than a reset costs you. Resetting is not free: you pay the entire early progression again, which for most people is more raids than the modifier will ever take.
- Adapt. The modifier is real but it is aimed at one axis. Usually the fix is to stop doing the thing being taxed — shorter raids, different maps, fewer insured runs — rather than to keep playing into it and getting annoyed.
- Reset. Reserved for rolls that hit the axis your entire playstyle rests on. If the calculator says reset and you have thirty hours invested, check the number against the season timeline first: a bad modifier with plenty of season left is worth resetting, and the same modifier three weeks from the end is not.
The row that contradicts itself on purpose
| Your roll | Reset now | Play around it |
|---|---|---|
| Heavy time penalty, and you play under 6 h/week | Yes — the tax lands on the one resource you cannot make more of | No — adapting costs raids you do not have |
| Heavy time penalty, and you play 20+ h/week | No — you can absorb it and the reset costs more than it saves | Yes — it is an annoyance, not a wall |
| Gear recovery penalty, PvP focused | Defensible if the season is young | Only if you switch to cheaper kits, which is a real change |
| Loot availability penalty, task focused | Rarely worth it — you were not looting anyway | The default, and you will barely notice |
The first two rows are the same modifier with opposite answers, separated by nothing but hours per week. Any tier list that ranks modifiers without asking that question is ranking them for somebody else.
Where the numbers come from and what is missing
- The modifier effects are yours, read off your own screen and translated into rough percentages. That is the only method that survives a shifting modifier pool.
- The weights are our model, shown in full in the chart above so you can disagree with them precisely rather than vaguely. They are judgement, and they stay labelled as judgement everywhere they appear, including in the chart caption.
- The keep / adapt / reset thresholds are ours too, and they are deliberately conservative about resetting, because a reset’s cost is certain and a modifier’s cost is not.
- No modifier tier list here. The pool and its numbers moved recently, we have not verified them ourselves, and a list assembled from stale pages would be exactly the thing that made people distrust the existing sites in the first place. If we verify the pool properly, that becomes its own page rather than a guess bolted onto this one.
Sources
- Patch 1.1.0.0 — Escape from Tarkov official news — official announcement of the Kord Breach season, the source of the modifier-choice system this scorer works from.
- Escape from Tarkov (@tarkov) on X, 5 August 2026 — official BSG post: “It’s time to choose your modifiers and prepare to escape anew — Kord Breach season has begun!”, confirming modifiers are chosen at season start rather than random mid-run events.
- Escape from Tarkov (@tarkov) on X — Battle Pass announcement — official confirmation that seasonal progression (Battle Pass, Seasonal characters) runs across PvP, PvE and Seasonal modes, which is why a reset decision has the account-wide cost this page describes.