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Risk of Rain 2: Equipment Tier List

The classic multiplayer roguelike, Risk of Rain, returns with an extra dimension and more challenging action. No run will ever be the same with randomized stages, enemies, bosses, and items. Play solo, or team up with up to four friends to fight your way through hordes of monsters, unlock new loot, and find a way to escape the planet.

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With each run, you’ll learn the patterns of your foes, and even the longest odds can be overcome with enough skill. A unique scaling system means both you and your foes limitlessly increase in power over the course of a game–what once was a bossfight will in time become a common enemy.

Equipment

Introduction
Equipment are a subset of items that add an additional skill to the player’s arsenal. Although they often come with extremely powerful effects, equipment items have very long cooldowns to compensate. Equipment items drop from their own chests and therefore deserve to have their own rankings.

Ranking
Because of the significant downtime between casts, I will be ranking equipment based on their impact in the overall tempo of a fight.

  • S: This item is exceptionally powerful and can easily make a difficult fight significantly easier. With Fuel Cells / Gesture of the Drowned / Soulbound Catalyst, this item becomes god tier.
  • A: This item is powerful and can support the player in a difficult fight. Good synergy with Fuel Cells / Gesture of the Drowned / Soulbound Catalyst.
  • B: This item is mediocre at best but can find some good uses in certain scenarios.
  • C: This item isn’t very useful at all.

Equipment: S Tier

Foreign Fruit
A consumption of a Foreign Fruit will heal you by 50% of your max health. I cannot stress how important this is for prolonged fights. You WILL end up taking damage. This item WILL end up saving you. Because you can heal in any situation, the Foreign Fruit acts as a panic button for players of all skill levels.

Preon Accumulator
Although you need to charge for a few seconds before firing a ball of death, the Preon Accumulator is the number one way equipment for bursting down bosses. Dealing a total of 4600% damage on a direct hit to a boss (and lots of extra damage to the adds surrounding the boss), the Preon Accumulator is one of the best ways of getting rid of a boss before it has any chance to react. For boss damage this item does fall out of favor over the Royal Capacitor in the late game, but it still remains a top tier choice for it’s ability to deal area damage (600% damage per second to nearby enemies). Out of all the standard equipment, the Preon Accumulator is the most efficient at clearing hordes of enemies.

Royal Capacitor
The damage from this item on single target is absolutely crazy. Not only does it deal 3000% damage on hit, but it also stuns nearby monsters, has unlimited range, and has one of the shortest base cooldowns out of any equipment. This item is just too useful in any situation. It can nuke bosses, take out dangerous elite spawns, and defeat difficult enemies from far out of their line-of-sight. The Royal Capacitor also scales the best with any sort of equipment synergy item. With enough Fuel Cells, your main attack can just become a Royal Capacitor lightning strike.

Equipment: A Tier

Primordial Cube
The Primordial Cube is an amazing item because it sets up AOE combos from items such as Sticky Bomb, Gasoline, and Will o’ the Wisp. If done properly, the resulting chain explosion can severely damage the boss. Also, on certain stages, you can use the Cube to drag small enemies off of the map. I’ve found myself doing this once when there were too many adds and I lacked an AOE option. Which leads me to the reason why Primordial Cube is in A Tier: it’s heavily reliant on the player having certain items.

The Back-Up
Imagine having an army of drones that cost no money to summon so it doesn’t matter that they have terrible AI. With The Back-Up, you can summon your own horde to fight against the horde of mobs that spawn. Although the individual damage from each drone is relatively low, a few Fuel Cells can create a storm of drones that will melt through bosses in the early game. Despite this strength, The Back-Up falls off in effectiveness in the mid-game when bosses and adds get significantly tankier. The Back-Up still is a good option in supplementing damage and distracting enemies, however, and thus obtains a spot in A Tier.

Equipment: B Tier

Disposable Missile Launcher
No, seriously the missile targeting in this game is just terrible. While they are able to properly seek out air enemies, the problem occurs if they target a enemy on the ground. As soon as the target dies, the remaining missiles proceed to charge into the ground. Similarly, when fighting in enclosed spaces, the missiles will often hit nearby walls and do no damage. When this doesn’t happen, however, this can be a great equipment for damage against bosses. It can also be a good cleanup equipment after the boss is down.

Ocular HUD
With an Ocular HUD, you get the equivalent of 10 Lens-Maker’s Glasses on your character for eight seconds. This bonus is likely one of the most devastating early game as you can quickly plow through bosses with the double damage. Unfortunately, this bonus is also the most short lived and the Ocular HUD quickly falls out of favor over any other equipment as the player obtains more and more crit. Thus this item obtains a spot in B Tier as it scales poorly but has a definitive purpose for the early game.

The Crowdfunder
Because it costs money to use, The Crowdfunder is definitely the worst early game item by a significant margin. It begins to climb up in effectiveness, however, in the mid/late game when cash isn’t as tight. The damage this item can do is great when firing and can be especially important on Mercenary as a safe way to deal damage from range. I’ve only used this item a few times and each time it’s seemed relatively lackluster for how much I’m spending to fire it. But it does seem to have a set purpose and can be relatively powerful in the right hands in the right situation.

Gnarled Woodsprite
The Gnarled Woodsprite is especially good on MUL-T as the bonus regeneration supplements MUL-T’s naturally high base HP. Additionally switching between equipment counts as “sending” the woodsprite to MUL-T which will heal you 10% of your max HP every switch. Aside from this limited use, it’s relatively hard to find a good use for this guy in singleplayer. Sending him to drones is hardly ever worth it but it can be done in a pinch.

Equipment: C Tier

Milky Chrysalis
Although flight can be useful for early game fights, the Milky Chrysalis quickly falls out of favor in the midgame. While flying, you can still get hit by a lot of different attacks. Additionally, if you don’t have a lot of Fuel Cells, the effect doesn’t last long enough. If you do have the Fuel Cells to sustain flight for a while, it’s just better to switch to a more effective piece of equipment.

Radar Scanner
The Radar Scanner could be good for clearing out levels, but if you’re investing all your time in finding and obtaining every chest in the map your pacing is going to be pretty bad. Ditch this item over something that can actually help you against spawns. If you’re playing MUL-T you could hold one of these to help find chests faster, but I personally don’t find this item to be useful at all (since it doesn’t distinguish between chests, 3D printers, and shrines).

Written by Potor10

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