Forsaken Tier List May 2026

How this tier list is built

Most Forsaken tier lists you find on YouTube are one person's opinion expressed as a tier ranking with no methodology disclosed. That can still be a useful artifact if the person has a few hundred hours and a stable framework, but it's impossible for the reader to know which it is. So this section exists to explain exactly how the rankings on this page got there, so you can decide whether to trust them.

Each character gets ranked across three weighted signals. The biggest weight (about fifty percent of the final placement) is win rate at red rank, measured across the most recent four-week window before publication. Red rank is the only rank where matchmaking is consistent enough to compare characters meaningfully, because at lower ranks the variance between players in any single lobby dwarfs the variance between characters. The win-rate data comes from a combination of publicly available community-tracked match logs and my own queue records, which is a smaller sample but a more reliable signal because the queue conditions are controlled.

The second-largest weight (about thirty percent) is pick rate at high rank, which functions as a sanity check on win rate. A character with an inflated win rate but a low pick rate is usually overranked, because the players selecting them are self-selecting for skill. The clearest example in May 2026 is Dusekkar, who shows a fifty-eight percent escape rate but a four percent pick rate, meaning the people picking Dusekkar are largely Dusekkar specialists, and the rate would collapse toward the survivor-average forty-eight percent if a random player picked them up. Tier placement accounts for this by treating pick rate above ten percent as legitimate signal and below ten percent as suspect.

The remaining twenty percent is qualitative judgment about how each character performs against the current killer or survivor meta. A survivor whose strongest ability is generator-speed contribution is over-tier when the killer meta is slow-paced and under-tier when the killer meta favors fast three-gen pressure, even if their raw win rate looks the same in both scenarios. The qualitative weight is where this list will most often disagree with raw-win-rate tier lists, and where you should expect occasional revisions when a balance patch shifts the metagame.

What “S tier” actually means here

S tier is reserved for characters who are either flatly the best at their role under current balance, or who provide a unique capability that no other character can replicate. A character can be the highest-win-rate killer in the game and still not be S tier, if their advantage comes from numbers that the developer will probably patch within a month rather than from kit design that will persist across patches. The reverse is also true: a character can be S tier with an average win rate if their kit is the only way to handle a specific situation that comes up in most matches.

A tier covers characters who are strongly viable across the entire skill range, recommended without reservation, and the best long-term unlock targets for any player building toward red rank. B tier is the wide middle. C tier covers characters who have known weaknesses you have to work around, but who are still viable if you main them deliberately. There is no D tier on this list, because every character in Forsaken is at least playable at red rank with enough practice. A “D tier” rank would communicate that a character is unplayable, which is never accurate in a game this well-balanced.

Notable tier movement since launch

Forsaken has had about a year and a half of balance patching at this point, and the tier list has moved enough that a few historical notes help newer players understand why the May 2026 rankings look the way they do.

1x1x1x1 has been S or A tier for every month of the game's existence, but the reasons keep changing. At launch, his teleport was an unconditional fifteen-second cooldown that made him fundamentally uncatchable, and he was banned in most tournament formats. The January 2025 nerf added a range limit, dropping him from S+ to S. The April 2026 patch added an animation lock to the teleport, which is why some lists started moving him to A. He's back on this list at S because the animation lock made his play style harder, not weaker, and the players who stuck with him through the change are now even more dominant.

On the survivor side, the Guest 1337 rework in March 2026 is the single biggest tier movement in the game's history. Pre-rework Guest 1337 was a B-tier “everyone's first survivor” with no competitive viability. The rework reduced the Speed Burst cooldown by forty percent and removed the requirement to vault for activation, which turned a casual character into a top-three survivor in coordinated play. Some lists rank Guest 1337 S now; this list still ranks them A because the rework hasn't had time to fully settle, and patch-fresh tier movements are statistically noisy.

Bacon Hair is the clearest example of a character whose tier ranking depends almost entirely on the rank you're playing at. In green ranks, Bacon Hair has the highest kill rate of any killer in the game by about eight percentage points, because his rage mechanic punishes the exact mistakes that low-rank survivors make repeatedly. In red ranks, he's mid-B tier at best, because high-rank survivors don't feed him the stuns that build his rage. Most online tier lists average these two scenarios and end up putting Bacon Hair somewhere near the middle, which is not useful guidance for anyone. This list ranks based on red rank specifically.

When this list updates

The pillar tier list (this page) gets refreshed on every minor patch (every two to four weeks) and a major rewrite every quarter. The monthly meta reports on the blog cover smaller week-to-week shifts that don't justify a full pillar update. If you want fast notification when the rankings change, the blog RSS feed is updated within a day of every refresh.

Patches that don't change ability cooldowns or HP values rarely move the tier list much, even when they feel impactful in match. Cosmetic patches, audio rebalancing, and map texture changes don't cause tier movement. Number changes do. The May 2026 rankings reflect the 4.1.0 patch, which mostly tweaked generator-pressure mechanics and didn't directly buff or nerf any individual character.