YMMV / Vigor

• Breather Level:
  • Sagbruk. Players generally agree that its currently the easiest map in the game for a variety of reasons. First of all, it has pretty good loot spawn rates even in the more rural and isolated corners of the map, which greatly mitigates the consequences of a bad spawn unlike most other maps. Secondly, it has a large lumbermill area in the lower center of the map that tends to draw away most of the more powerful players due to its high loot tables and the fact that it serves as a hotspot for valuable optional interactables like comms stations or locked safes. Finally, the whole map takes place in a large forest setting, which means there's plenty of cover provided by the trees and bushes to enable stealthier approaches and provide hiding spots for unexperienced or lightly equipped players. All in all, Sagbruk is a really good map for any playstyle and with a bit of caution and luck even the weaker outlanders can usually get out with at least half a backpack of loot so long as they don't get too greedy.
  • Players looking to level their Battle Pass through Non-Combat EXP will find themselves at home in Batterie Draug and Grøntheim Valley, which has no shortage of interiors chock full of random materials to loot.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict: Read any Vigor-related forums long enough and chances are you'll find people who just want to sneak, loot and extract with as little conflict as possible arguing with people who have a tendency to call others Scrubs if they're not trying to inflate their kill/death ratio. Given that various in-game side objectives cater to both sides, it's unlikely this debate will die down any time soon.
• Fan Nickname: "Greencoats" for newer players, since the most notable part of the default outfit is a mint green rain jacket.
• High-Tier Scrappy: The entire light machine gun category of weapons became this during Season 13 Chronicles: Deliverance due to a number of factors: LMGs were buffed, Outlanders were now allowed to fire while falling and after taking Fall Damage, and the season introduced adrenaline syringes as consumables, which briefly granted infinite stamina and faster sprinting speed. These changes collectively turned the game's gunplay into duels to see who can land a sprinting jump shot with their LMG first. The playerbase justifiably compared the changes unfavorably to faster-pased Looter Shooters like Call of Duty: Warzone or Fortnite, and Encounters saw a sharp increase in queueing times as less and less players tolerated the season's newfound meta.
• Junk Rare:
  • The John. It's a top tier rarity weapon that is so hard to come by that most players don't have more than a couple in their stash. It's also a knife which means it deals low damage, has short range and is generally outclassed by most of the common weapons. The only real advantage it has over normal knives is that it deals slightly more damage... which still gives it far less DPS than virtually anything that spits out lead. It's not like guns are at all rare either... most encounters usually have Outlanders run across at least one or two in a weapons crate or locked container. This means The John is only effective against players who only have knives or no weapons at all... that is, about 5% of the opponents they can expect to meet during a match.
  • Crossbows. While most knives are only white or green tier (common) weapons the Crossbow is a blue tier (rare) weapon that is often considered to be vastly underpowered for its prestigious rank. While it does do pretty good damage and is much quieter than a gun its simply outclassed by many rifles and even pistols that, despite lacking its silence or high damage, simply perform better due to their higher overall stats or useful attachments. It really doesn't help that many weapons of its own rarity (or even lower rarity) can perform its role better than it does. (There's a blue tier revolver that does nearly as much damage while also having the bonuses of being able to hold multiple rounds and shooting a lot faster, making the Crossbow nearly obsolete even at its own level.)
  • Iodine. It's the rarest type of medical item in the game and gives the player resistance to deadly radiation poisoning, sounds like a great asset to have in a post nuclear apocalyptic world, right? On paper, maybe, but in practice its mostly useless. Not only does it not actually restore any health (something virtually every other medical item does, even the common ones) or provide any benefit outside a radiation cloud, its also very easy to come by despite its rarity due to medical loot spawns being both plentiful and not at all hard to find. The only time radiation even becomes a factor anyway is when the match is about to end and most players have either died or already left, limiting its usefulness even further. It can make getting an achievement for being the last person to leave a level easier, but that's about it. All in all, players are usually better off bringing in meds that actually help out in a firefight and leaving their bottles of Iodine to gather dust back at home in their stash.
• Memetic Mutation: Hei. ^explanation  The default result when the reaction button is hit involves the player character waving and spouting off a quick "Hey!" to anyone nearby. Given that this reaction is fairly loud, reveals an Outlander's position and is often followed up by a hail of gunfire it quickly became a source of memes and jokes among the players. Even the devs themselves caught onto this and often precede their newsletters and updates with a heading of "Hei Outlanders" in reference to the famous shouting audio clip.
• That One Level:
  • Fjellkanten. The map is located up in an isolated mountain range with tons of open areas, very little usable cover and tons of bushes for enemies to hide in. Most of the good loot is heavily condensed to a small handful of hotspots scattered around areas likely to feature heavy traffic from rival players. Add in some pretty bad starting spawn locations that can force the player to do nearly a minute of walking just to get to the first landmark and you have a map where most engagements are very brief and one-sided. In short, it's a map that heavily encourages sniping and camping in a game that already has plenty of both.
  • Anikken. Most of the snowy maps in general can be considered harder than other the maps due to the fact that players stand out more against the white background (especially in darker clothing) and the fact that they can't easily cross water due to the freezing temperatures giving them hypothermia. What makes Anikken stand out is that it suffers from many of the same problems as Fjellkanten while making a few of them even worse. Loot is pretty sparse outside the few urban sections of the map and the whole area is wide open with little cover to hide in, which is exasperated by the snowy setting making it easier to spot foes at a distance. The map itself is also a series of small islands that are connected mainly by broken bridges of ice linking them together which are just far enough apart that players take a huge risk by jumping into the water in hopes of finding a shortcut or alternate route around the more linear paths. Because of this the entire area is extremely hard to move through without getting picked off by snipers, especially while traveling along the floating pieces of ice. The one saving grace is that Anikken has several massive landmarks on each corner of the map, which makes navigation much easier to figure out than other maps even if the actual traversal is much more dangerous.
  • In a case that's more like "That One Location", Grøntheim Valley has one exit at the west edge of the map that's only accessible by ladder and preceded by not one, but two potentially deadly jumps, with the second having an exceptionally narrow ledge and a bit of obtrusive rock jutting out of the cliff right next to said ledge because "screw you". This makes this particular exit only usable for the daring or truly desperate, and that's before factoring in campers that take advantage of the animation lock from climbing ladders.
• Paranoia Fuel: There are few things more unnerving in this game than hastily making a mad dash though the forest towards an exit while carrying a backpack full of good quality loot. Even when a player is sure that every single other outlander on the map is dead or long gone every little sound and noise can start to feel like someone sneaking up on you, even the sounds of your own footsteps... and then you hear the snap of a nearby twig or distant gunfire. This is only made worse with things like Signal Detectors, Signal Jammers and Booby Traps. The enemy can find you anywhere, at any time... and you'll never even see them coming...
• Scrappy Mechanic: Season 7: Mercenaries introduced an automated mortar strike that specifically targets camping players. While it was supposed to be an Anti-Frustration Feature to combat players camping in bushes with sniper rifles, it got a lot of flak for "altering gameplay in a way we didn't intend", as the devs put it, and the mechanic was unceremoniously removed by Season 8: Trappers.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Knives. They swing slowly, do pitiful damage for such a short range weapon and take up inventory slots that are better filled with handguns or revolvers that actually have some decent effective ranges to help offset their low damage. The John (an ultra rare yellow tier item) is considered to be outclassed by common and uncommon guns that are infinitely easier to obtain since they can be found virtually everywhere. So what are knives good for? They're good for being looted off the corpses of the poor fools who thought they were a match for shotguns and rifles.
  • Crossbows are pretty disliked as well, for a wide number of reasons. They mostly have mediocre to average stats, including both an abysmal effective range and (naturally) rate of fire. They have a weight of 5 which actually makes them heavier than several of the higher tier rifles and shotguns and they use a special type of ammo that can't be regularly found like bullets for quick and easy resupplies out in the field. The worst thing about it though, hands down, is the fact that its categorized as a medium tier rare (blue) item and will often replace much more valuable and effective weapons in the loot tables it can appear in. It does have a few big pluses like high damage and being silent to prevent it from being completely useless, but in most situations players are just simply better off going in with a good rifle, revolver or even a pistol.