Ultimate Risk of Rain 2 Guide - Know Everything about RoR2 (2024)

Risk of Rain 2 has some chaotic and not so straightforward gameplay. Without a guide it is easy to get overwhelmed, that is why I have created this Risk of Rain 2 guide so that you can comfortably get a handle on the many intricacies of Risk of Rain 2.

This RoR2 guide will answer many questions from beginner to advanced including things like “What’s the difference between difficulties?” or “What are Proc chains?”. Although this guide may be more towards beginners, there is plenty for veterans to learn as well, including certain mechanics you might not have known existed like One Shot Protection.

Other Posts:

• Risk of Rain 2 Character Tier List

I will begin the guide with basic information but it will ramp up quickly so bare with me.

First up is gameplay and difficulty.

Risk of Rain 2 Guide – Beginners Section

This section of the guide is made for beginners and will explain basic gameplay concepts. Most of the information won’t be helpful to veteran players but you may find some tidbits here and there.

Risk of Rain 2 Beginners Gameplay/Difficulty Guide

Starting out in Risk of Rain 2 is sort of confusing. You are dropped into the world without any direction besides “find the teleporter”. For those confused (as I was) here is how the progression of the game works.

1. Find the teleporter (spawns randomly every new stage)
2. Activate it
3. Stay inside the ring to charge it and defeat the boss
4. Activate it again to teleport to a new area
5. Repeat

Risk of Rain 2 is an endless horde game that can quickly get into bullet hell territory after enough time has passed. Your only objective is to survive and get stronger as you complete more and more stages.

As you may have noticed there is an ever-increasing ticker at the top right of your screen that tells you how long you have been in a run, what the difficulty is at, and what stage you are in.

Enemies scale based on several factors, the most important being time and stages completed (after completing a stage the ticker goes up a bit as well) but also based on how far the ticker has gone. It starts out on Easy, then goes to Medium, then Hard, Very Hard, Insane, etc. until it finally reaches HAHAHA which is an unending difficulty but still scales up enemies as time goes on.

There are three difficulties in Risk of Rain 2:

• Drizzle: Easy mode.
• Rainstorm: Normal mode.
• Monsoon: Hard mode.

Drizzle is a slow-paced game mode that won’t scale enemies as quickly and gives you more health regen and damage reduction.

Rainstorm is the normal mode. Neither you or the enemies receive any bonuses.

Monsoon is the hard mode of the game. Your health regen is stifled and the enemies scale much quicker. For example, easy mode lasts 7 minutes on Drizzle, it lasts a mere 2 minutes on Monsoon. I actually have a full guide to playing on Monsoon difficulty if you’d like to check it out.

If you want more information on this, go to the Difficulty Scaling section.

Killing enemies grants you some experience and gold, the latter of which you spend on chests, which are scattered randomly across the map, so you can get items that increase your overall power. As the stages and time scale so does the cost to open the chests (while also the gold you receive from enemies).

Every time you kill a teleporter boss, they are guaranteed to drop an item of uncommon quality or a boss item. Remember to pick it up before leaving for the next stage.

So, in reality, the progression in Risk of Rain 2 really looks like this:

1. Farm gold from enemies
2. Open chests for items
3. Activate teleporter once you have enough items
4. Charge the teleporter and kill the boss
5. Grab the boss item
6. Teleport to the next stage
7. Repeat

Obviously, the game is far more intricate than this, however, that is what the other sections are for!

Quick tip on finding the teleporter quickly. If you look closely it will have a somewhat orange particle effect around it, look for those to find the teleporter quicker.

Next up are the Risk of Rain 2 characters.

Risk of Rain 2 Characters

Currently, in Risk of Rain 2, there are nine characters released with one more to be released later.

Initially, you will start out with only Commando unlocked and will have to complete several challenges to unlock the rest. For example, we have a guide to unlocking Loader, which requires you to defeat a hidden boss at Siren’s Call.

Here is the full list of characters in Risk of Rain 2:

• Commando (Ranged)
• MUL-T (Ranged)
• Huntress (Ranged)
• Engineer (Ranged)
• Artificer (Ranged)
• Mercenary (Melee)
• Rex (Ranged)
• Loader (Melee)
• Acrid (Melee/Ranged)

I will be making a guide on how to unlock each character and later a guide on how to play each character in Risk of Rain 2. If you are curious as to which character to play, check out the Risk of Rain 2 tier list I created.

Risk of Rain 2 Enemies, Elites, and Bosses

There are a plethora of enemies to encounter in Risk of Rain 2 and even more being added every update so instead of jamming every single enemy into this section I will be making another post with more detailed information that will cover everything you need to know. Until then, this should be a good starting point.

As of the last major Risk of Rain 2 update, there are 15 monsters and 11 bosses.

One important thing to note is that bosses aren’t necessarily tied to the teleporter. Eventually, the teleporter bosses will start becoming recurring enemies the farther along in the game you go, with them almost being as common as any other enemy.

Elites are another enemy type in Risk of Rain 2 that is extremely important to understand. There are five elite types in the game currently with various bonuses for each. Here are all five:

• Blazing – Fire
• Glacial – Ice
• Overloading – Electric
• Malachite – Poison
• Celestine – Haunted

While the first three are fairly self-explanatory, the other two have some interesting mechanics attached to them that aren’t apparent based solely on their names.

Malachite elites can poison the players and cause them to not be healed for 8 seconds. They also spawn random spikes around them that can damage you.

Celestine creates a field around them that turns all enemies within range invisible. Also, they slow you for 80% for 3 seconds if they hit you.

Besides those unique characteristics, every elite has 4.7 times the health and twice the damage of the normal variation except for malachite and celestine, which have 23.5 times the health and six times the damage.

Bosses can be elites and elites, in general, will become more common the longer the game goes on.

Risk of Rain 2 Maps/Stages/Loops

Each map, or environment, in Risk of Rain 2 has various procedurally generated chests, shrines, and teleporters but more or less will always be the same. Stages are different than the environment because they are independent of the current environment you are on.

For example, you could be on stage one, but there are two, stage one environments, Distant Roost and Titanic Plains.

As of right now, there are eight main environments levels and three secret levels. It is from these environments that your stages environment is selected.

Once you complete a certain amount of stages (four for now) you will “loop”, meaning you go right back to a stage one map.

Here is a table of the possible maps you can go to in Risk of Rain 2:

Risk of Rain 2 Items

There are several different types of items in Risk of Rain 2 (check the sections below to see where you get each). The item rarities in RoR2 are:

• White – Common
• Green – Uncommon
• Red – Legendary
• Gold – Boss items
• Lunar – Items bought with Lunar Coins
• Orange – Equipment

While most of the time white items have less of an effect on your game, they are far more plentiful and still offer various bonuses that go from lackluster to downright game-changing. Most of these items need to be stacked to be truly effective.

Green items are the next step up, however, they still have some straight-up bad items among them. Noticeably, the Lepton Daisy and Red Whip. Items like Ukulele are really good regardless of what character you choose and can change the entire run for you.

Legendary items are excellent boosters to whatever build you are going but are extremely rare. You can get a guaranteed legendary by either killing the Alloy Worship Unit or the legendary chest in the Abyssal Depths.

Lunar items are strong but usually, come with a noticeable trade-off. For example, Shaped Glass doubles damage but halves health.

The following two sections will describe how to get all of these items.

Risk of Rain 2 Chests and Robot helpers

• Red Chest (Damage)
• Small Blue Chest (White item/common, small chance for higher quality)
• Large Blue Chest (Green item/uncommon, small chance for higher quality)
• Purple Chest (Utility item)
• Cross Chest (Healing item)
• Large Orange/Red Chest (Legendary)
• Orange Pod (Equipment)

Chests gold cost scale with time played and stages completed and specific chests (such as the damage chest or utility chest) will be more expensive than a small chest.

Also in the game are little robot helpers that cost money to activate. Some of these include gunner turrets, healing drones, sentries, incinerators, etc. Most of these will follow you around and provide some extra damage or healing, but the sentries will not.

Risk of Rain 2 3D Printers, Multi Shops, and Lunar Pods

Other than chests, Risk of Rain 2 players have a few alternative ways of acquiring items.

The first of these are 3D printers. 3D printers are easy enough to spot as they have an item floating above them. This item is what the 3D printer will “print” for you if you trade in one of your items of the same quality.

For example, a white item can be traded for another white item and you can do this an unlimited amount of times, as long as you have another item to trade. Another thing to be aware of is 3D printers take items from you inventory randomly, so be careful.

Multi shops are exactly what they sound like, a shop where you can select from multiple items, three to be exact. You can, however, only get one of the three and all items will always be the same quality, i.e. three whites or three greens.

Lunar pods are small white buds that stick out of the ground and cost one lunar coin to open. They will drop a random lunar item when opened, but be careful, as lunar items can have some pretty massive drawbacks and end up ruining your Risk of Rain run.

Risk of Rain 2 Singleplayer vs Multiplayer

Both multiplayer and singleplayer have the same mechanics in Risk of Rain 2. In both game modes, you are trying to survive hordes of enemies, get stronger, and defeat bosses on repeat until you inevitably die. The main difference being, you can do so with friends.

Of course, there are a few differences between the two game modes, so I’ll highlight them below.

• You can pause in Singleplayer.
• Amount of enemies and prices scale-up in Multiplayer.
• Items and Lunar Coins are Free-For-All in Multiplayer so communicate or be mindful of what builds your teammates are going for and share the goodies. Pinging is a useful tool.
• Gold and Experience in multiplayer is shared equally among the party.
• While Gold isn’t in a shared pool in Multiplayer, you can buy items and leave them on the ground for allies.
• Boss loot scales with # players in the party.
• The speed at which the Teleporter is charged appears to scale based on how many party members are in the teleporter zone.
• You may see items you have not personally unlocked on Multiplayer. This would be because an ally has unlocked it.
• Quitting Multiplayer as the host ends the session for everybody.
• If you die in multiplayer, you will respawn at the beginning of the next stage with all of your items.

Some tips on how to play Risk of Rain 2 multiplayer effectively:

• Don’t item hoard. See a bustling fungus? Please let your Engineer have it.
• Spread out. Your gold is shared and the chests are limited, try to split up like Scooby-Doo to more effectively cover ground.
• Bosses drop one item for each player in the game but that doesn’t mean everyone has to get one. Sometimes stacking it on one player is better (ask permission first please).

Oh, and by the way, you cannot drop items in Risk of Rain 2. If you pick something up, it stays in your inventory unless you use a Shrine of Order or a 3D printer.

Risk of Rain 2 Shrines

• Shrine of Blood – Trade your health for gold up to three times (50%/75%/93%).
• Shrine of Chance – Pay for a random item at an increasing cost every time you use it. (High) Chance to spawn nothing.
• Shrine of Order – In exchange for one lunar coin, the Shrine of Order will randomly turn your items of the same rarity into another item that you already have. For example, if you had a 5 Soldiers Syringes and a Medkit, you could end up with either 6 Soldiers Syringes or 6 Medkits.
• Shrine of Combat – Summon monsters to fight. These will always (I think) spawn an elite and will become tougher enemies as the number of stages increase. Beetles on stage 1, Beetle guard stage 2, etc.
• Shrine of the Mountain – Doubles the base amount of bosses you have to fight (but doubles the item reward) can be stacked. For example, if one boss was supposed to spawn and you used a Shrine of the Mountain, only one more would spawn, however, if two bosses were supposed to spawn then two more would spawn.
• Shrine of the Woods – Spend gold to create a healing ring around the shrine. It can continually be upgraded for a larger AOE.
• Shrine of Gold – Extremely expensive shrine that will open a portal once the teleporter is finished. Takes you to the Gilded Coast to fight a difficult boss battle.

Shrines are not guaranteed to spawn on a map but you can expect that you will have several Shrine of Chances and maybe one or two Shrines of Blood on every map.

If you ever get the chance to use a Shrine of Blood or Shrine of Combat it is recommended that you do so as they provide an extra source of gold to spend on items (provided you don’t die in the process).

Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT use the Shrine of Gold unless you are completely face-rolling bosses during your run. The Shrine of Gold is super expensive and requires you to fight an extremely tough boss fight against a unique enemy. Pop it too early and say goodbye to your run.

Alright, we got most of the basic stuff out of the way. Now onto the Advanced section of this Risk of Rain 2 Guide.

Risk of Rain 2 Guide – Advanced Section

This section of the guide will focus on advanced mechanics that even veteran RoR2 players might not know about. Things like One Shot Protection, early game strategy, and events.

Artifacts

Artifacts in Risk of Rain 2 are gameplay modifiers that add an extra challenge of unique quirk to the gameplay. Some allow you to choose your items while others half your health, so they are quite the mixed bag.

I’ve made a guide on how to unlock every Artifact in Risk of Rain 2 you can check out.

Risk of Rain 2 Teleporter Mechanics

• Once the teleporter is charged to 99% of enemies will stop spawning.
• You don’t have to remain in the red bubble the whole time if you are afraid of dying, leave it and come back.
• Teleporter charge time scales linearly with the number of players standing inside the red dome, out of the total number of players currently alive. This requires a minimum of 90 seconds if all players alive always stay within the red dome. The finish of the event is marked by the Teleporter being fully charged and the red dome disappears. (source)

Risk of Rain 2 One-Shot Protection Guide

Without a doubt, the most important mechanic in Risk of Rain 2 is one-shot protection. As the name suggests, one-shot protection protects you, the player, from getting one-shot by monsters/bosses/fall-damage/etc.

The way this works is as follows: if you are above 90% combined health (this is important) you cannot die from one instance of damage. What this means is if your total health is 100 and you are at 91, you won’t die from a single instance of damage.

Now, there are two things you need to remember. One, combined health is health + shield, aka, personal shield generators or transcendence count towards combined health. Barriers are not counted towards combined health (Topaz Brooch or Loader’s Passive) and therefore have their own one-shot protection.

Also, I made sure to include the fact that one-shot means exactly what it says, one-shot. Not two, not three, not negative four, but one-shot. Greater Wisps, for example, have two projectiles, meaning that one will “break” one-shot protection and the other will put you in an early grave. Damage over time effects such as burning will also kill you.

You might be wondering why this is such an important concept. Why couldn’t you just get more health and damage reduction? Well, simply put, one of the most broken builds right now revolves around Shaped Glass, something that halves your health but doubles your damage AND stacks. I’ll explain this in further detail in a later section.

Risk of Rain 2 Early Game Strategy

Early on in this guide, I mentioned how time is your greatest resource in Risk of Rain 2 and I meant it. Depending on how quickly you can make it through the early stages you could either be setting yourself up for a God run or be gimping yourself into an early grave.

The key to success in Risk of Rain is determining when you should farm items versus when you should just pop the boss and go to the next stage. If you are struggling with this concept take note.

Key concept #1. You should only open one or two chests on the first stage before popping the teleporter. With some very minor exceptions.

Why only one or two chests? Simply put, you can’t make gold quick enough early on in the game for it to be worth staying on stage on and hoping for good loot. Also, one of the stage three maps has a guaranteed Preon (one of the best equipment in the game) and both stage four maps have a guaranteed legendary, therefore staying at stage one for too long will prevent you from getting these superior items.

The minor exceptions to the rule are when you notice a multishop with an extremely good item or have popped a Shrine of the Mountain and are unsure if you could complete it.

Key concept #2. Understand what your character is good at and what they are bad at.

This concept is critical because it determines what your build should look like and how you play the early game where you are weak. For example, if you are a character that lacks AOE and you have a choice between lens crafters glasses or gasoline what would you do? Most would choose the glasses because they like doing crit damage, however, if you did choose the glasses what could you do against a gaggle of beetles or a swarm of lesser wisps? The short answer: die.

There are a few more things you might need to know, such as what enemies to kill first or what bosses do what but I will flesh that out in a later post as this is already getting quite long. These two concepts should help you enough before then.

Risk of Rain 2 Newt Altars and Bazaar Between Worlds

The Bazaar Between Worlds is the place to go when you want better gear or you feel like RNG is giving you a slap in the face. It is here that you can trade items in for a random uncommon or legendary item (3 items for uncommon and 5 for the legendary). Also present are a random assortment of lunar items and the Artificer (if you haven’t unlocked her yet).

But how do you get to the Bazaar Between Worlds? Well, you need to get blue balls, and not like that you pervert.

Sometimes when spawning in a new stage there is a chance that a blue orb will spawn around the teleporter. You will notice that in your chat box the text “A blue orb appears”will pop up when this happens.

Alternatively, you can cause the blue orb to spawn through more direct means, in this case, by using a newt altar. Newt Altars are randomly spawned on the map but some Newt Altars are guaranteed to spawn in certain maps. For the full up to date list (with images) check this guide out.

Risk of Rain 2 Shaped Glass Guide

Ah, Shaped Glass, easily the most broken thing about Risk of Rain 2 right now. Let me explain.

Shaped Glass is a lunar item that halves your health but doubles your damage. Fair trade-off right? Not exactly, and there are two reasons for this.

First, Shaped Glass can be stacked and although it might seem like it linearly stacks, it actually stacks exponentially. In other words, having just three Shaped Glass(es) gives you 800% damage. This damage is also applied to all of your items, meaning that things like ATG Rockets or Bleeds also get double damage (yes, even equipment).

Secondly, health doesn’t matter in Risk of Rain at a certain point. Eventually, all monsters in the game will kill you regardless of what number your health is at. However, because of one-shot protection, they will never “one-shot” you. This is where Shaped Glass comes in handy.

Let’s say you have some form of life leech, either through a leech seed or the crit heal. With 1000 health it would take a tremendous amount of time to heal back to the 90% threshold of one-shot protection. Instead, if you had Shaped Glass, your health continually gets lower and lower until you are likely below 100 health, making it trivially to get back to the 90% mark.

So as you can see, Shaped Glass is currently the best item in the game (assuming you can heal back up quickly enough).

Risk of Rain 2 Events Guide

At some point in the game, you might get an odd message in the chatbox like “the air crackles and arcs”. These messages signal Risk of Rain 2 events.

Events are just stages with one particular enemy. Taking the example above, the air crackles and arcs means that you will only encounter jellyfish and vagrants.

Here are all of the events in Risk of Rain 2:

• [WARNING] The ground begins to shift beneath you…
  OnlyBeetles,Beetle GuardsandBeetle Queenswill spawn.
• [WARNING] The ground’s temperature begins to rise…
  OnlyLemuriansandElder Lemurianswill spawn.
• [WARNING]The air begins to burn…
  OnlyLesserandGreater Wispsspawn, with Greater Wisps serving as the boss.
• [WARNING] The earth rumbles and groans with mysterious energies…
  OnlyStone GolemsandStone Titanswill spawn.
• [WARNING] A tear in the fabric of the universe…
  OnlyImpsandImp Overlordswill spawn.
• [WARNING] The Air Crackles and Arcs…
  OnlyJellyfishand theWandering Vagrantwill spawn.

Risk of Rain 2 Proccing Guide

There are three important terms to know when dealing with Risk of Rain 2 proccing. Before I start though, let me explain what “proccing” is.

Proccing in Risk of Rain 2 (or any game really) is short for“programmed random occurrence” aka the chance for something random to occur. If you have seen something with a percent chance to do something in a game and then it occurs, you would call that proccing.

Now that you know that basic concept, let’s explore the three important terms that affect proccing in RoR2.

First up is Proc Damage. As you can imagine, proc damage has to do with how much damage an item does when it procs. There are actually two separate formulas that determine this and the game itself doesn’t follow it’s on labeled rules either, which makes it quite annoying if you don’t know any better.

Here is a Reddit post that goes in-depth on the topic, however, the simple explanation is this, the larger % of base damage the primary attack does, the relatively worse the item scaling is. The exception to this rule is items that deal less than 100% of hit damage (Ukulele for example), which will use the other formula.”

Even simpler explanation: Big damage items are bad for big damage abilities (ATG and Artificer), small damage items and small damage abilities are bad (MUL-T’s first ability and Ukulele), but big damage items and small abilities (MUL-T’s first ability and ATG) or small damage items and big abilities are better (at scaling that is).

If this seems complex, it is, this formula is one of the reasons that MUL-T is one of the strongest characters in the game while Artificer is one of the worst.

Ok, that was a lot for just the proc damage, so I will probably condense this and put it into another post later if you guys want. The next two will be quicker.

The next term is Proc Coefficients. These bad boys are what determine how often an item will proc based on abilities, i.e. the chance you will proc if you are shooting something as Commando versus shooting as MUL-T.

Here is the wiki page on all proc coefficients in the game. A few things to note are this: items can proc each other (with some exceptions) and a proc coefficient of 1.0 means that it takes the base chance of that item, aka a 10% chance to shoot an ATG with a 1.0 is a 10% chance but a 10% on a 0.4 is 4%. If an item has no proc coefficient, it cannot proc.

Note: Item proccing is called proc chaining.

Lastly, we have item stacking. For those of you who don’t know, items stack in Risk of Rain 2. Each stack gives you a bonus amount of something, whether that be an increased chance of proccing or increased damage.

This wiki page has all of the item stacking information you need. There are three types of item stacking, linearly, exponentially, and inverse exponentially. An example of linearly would be lens crafter glasses, which give you a 10% bonus to crit chance and maxes out at 100% at 10 glasses.

As you can see with the example above, some items can be maxed out, meaning you don’t receive an added bonus when stacking more of them.

That’s it for this section. Like I said I will probably condense this section and make a more in-depth post at a later time.

Anyway, next up we discuss luck in Risk of Rain 2 (the actual stat not RNG).

Risk of Rain 2 Luck

In Risk of Rain 2, there is a stat called luck. This luck stat is directly tied to a legendary item called the 57 leaf clover, arguably one of the best items in the game.

Note: You have to unlock the 57 leaf clover by completing 20 stages in one run.

What luck, and therefore the 57 leaf clover, does is re-rolls the proc chance to get a favorable outcome. This works both on negative debuffs and item procs.

For example, if an enemy DOT (damage over time) was to affect you, the clover would re-roll once (more if you have several clovers) in an attempt to not have the DOT on you.

Items themselves can proc other items, as I mentioned above, and these procs all get re-rolled individually. Let’s say you only have one clover, if your Ukulele doesn’t proc it will re-roll once, if it does proc afterward and you have a Tri-tip dagger which doesn’t proc, it will then re-roll the dagger as well. In layman, any item in a proc chain gets re-rolled individually as many times as you have a clover (5 clovers = 5 re-rolls per proc).

Where the 57 leaf clover doesn’t work:

• Tougher times
• Chests
• Shrines

So why call it luck instead of the 57 leaf clover? Because negative luck is supported in the game and is likely to be added further on in RoR 2’s development.

Risk of Rain 2 Prismatic Trials

Risk of Rain 2 Prismatic trials are a different game mode that challenges you to complete two stages as quickly as possible at a specific difficulty and with the exact same player environment as everyone else. You can only play these trials solo.

When doing a trial everything, including monster spawns and chest locations, are the same. Because you can also take the trials as many times as you like, this means you can memorize the map and keep getting a faster time.

This is also the only way to unlock the Harvester’s Scythe.

Risk of Rain 2 God Runs

God runs are Risk of Rain 2 runs where you feel like a god. These are the runs that you screenshot to post on Reddit or send to your friends to boost your ego.

There is no set definition for a god run, however, you can say any run where you are melting enemies past 50 mins is a god run.

Risk of Rain 2 Gameplay Tips

I’ll end this guide with some quick tips that will hopefully help you get your first god run.

• If you think your items suck, find a newt altar and go to the BBW (Bazaar).
• Lesser wisps can’t miss (I think) so either kill them or take cover.
• You can ping out items and locations with your middle mouse button. This is useful for keeping track of item locations.
• Going out of bounds will slowly kill you, so don’t.
• Always sprint. Most enemies can miss attacks, so don’t make it easier to hit you by standing still.
• Items are unlocked by challenges so if you don’t unlock that item it won’t drop unless someone else in the game has it. It can be used to your benefit if you only want specific items.

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