Beginner’s Guide on How to Risk of Rain 2
Risk of Rain 2 is an action rogue-like third person shooter currently in early access with plans to officially release on the August 11th, 2020. This guide is meant to be a quick glance at what Risk of Rain 2 has to offer for new players and a concise overview of the mechanics more experienced but still relatively new players may have overlooked. The contents of this guide is roughly ordered based on the level of experience it’s intended for, from total beginner, to casual player.
The Basics
You begin the game by entering the first stage in a drop pod with no items to begin with. The game tells you that your objective is to find the teleporter which is located randomly in the stage. Along the way you’ll find crates which can be opened with money gained from killing the mobs that spawn. These crates contain a random item that will help you get through the stages by boosting stats like movement speed or applying an effect after a condition is met for example having the chance to shoot a missile on every hit. These items come in different rarities and having stacking effects which we will discuss in later sections.
The goal for new players getting in to Risk of Rain 2 at the early stages is to get familiarized with the enemies, items, and tilesets that the game has to offer. This doesn’t need to take too much time and can be done with friends as it doesn’t take away the fun from playing the game. Public matchmaking, however, is a mixed bag, with some players only wanting to play on certain difficulties or with certain artifacts on (we’ll get to this later). This may change with the introduction of a server browser in the release update. Regardless, I’d highly recommend playing with friends you know and even better ones that are starting out alongside you especially in the early stages as it really helps ease the introduction to the game.
Quick note: in my opinion based on my experiences, Risk of Rain 2 isn’t the kind of game I’d play for long periods regularly, at least after the introduction phase. It’s the perfect kind of game to have on your computer and get back in to when you have free time or if you’re just in a bad spot. Playing it casually helps me enjoy the game more and avoid burnout. Your mileage may vary.
Difficulty
When starting a game in Risk of Rain 2, you are given the option of multiple initial difficulties which are Drizzle (Easy), Rainstorm (Normal), and Monsoon (Hard). These initial difficulties affect a multiplier that determines the progression of difficulty of the game and change some initial stats. Easy progresses 50% slower than Normal, and Hard progresses 50% faster. Easy also gives players a bonus to armor and a higher initial multiplier for health regeneration, whilst hard reduces the multiplier (hard does not debuff armor).
Things that affect the difficulty which you can take note of are:
- The amount of players. Which is not removed when players leave the game.
- The amount of time that has progressed. Indicated by the meter on the top right.
- The initial difficulty. Has multipliers and changes stats as stated above.
- The stage. Changing stages causes a spike in difficulty
Generally, to manage the difficulty, use your time in each stage effectively. Some other tips would be to always be mobile, constantly jumping, and prioritize enemies with hitscan attacks first.
Play in whatever difficulty you feel you’re having the most fun in but don’t be afraid to try to take a challenge and do the harder ones.
Unlocking Survivors, Items, and Artifacts
If you feel like you’ve gone through the introduction of the game, maybe indicated by confusion as to what to aim for or maybe just being bored of the stages or constant dying, you can set a goal for yourself to completing some challenges and unlock survivors, items, and artifacts.
Unlocking survivors seems to be the easiest. I unknowingly unlocked all the survivors aside from Rex through regular gameplay. Some items may be unlocked just through regular gameplay, but some have weird requirements such as killing certain mobs by driving them off a cliff. If you’ve been playing with more experienced friends or in public matchmaking, you may never have noticed that you had some items locked for you because one of your party members has them unlocked.
Unlocking artifacts is slightly more complicated than survivors and items as they’re unlocked by a somewhat secret event that’s available somewhere on stage 5. It’s actually a pretty fun puzzle involving hidden codes scattered around in stages. I’d leave it at there so that you can enjoy the satisfaction of figuring out what to do the first time encountering it on your own before you go online to look for instructions on how to do it.
Item Stacking
What sets Risk of Rain 2 apart from other rogue-likes is that item stacking is a highly celebrated feature that can lead to some very unusual but fun outcomes. Item stacking happens when you have multiple duplicates of the same item in your inventory. How item stacking behaves is generally divided into three groups: Linear, Hyperbolic, and Exponential. What effects stack depends on the item. An example given by the Risk of Rain 2 gamepedia is how stacking one item, Kjaro’s Band, increases its damage but not its proc chance and how stacking another item, Tri-Tip Dagger, increases its proc chance but not its damage. The Risk of Rain 2 gamepedia, fandom, and many other sources have in-depth guides on how items stack.
Quick overview of the stacking behaviors:
- Linear : The stacking effect is multiplied by the amount of duplicates in possession added by the initial value. For example, Crowbars multiply damage by 150% on healthy enemies and +50% on each stack. Having 5 Crowbars multiplies damage by 150+50*(5–1)=350%.
- Hyperbolic : The stacking effect becomes increasingly less effective the more duplicates owned. For example, Tougher Times adds a 15% chance to negate damage taken. 1 Tougher Times gives a 13% activation chance, 2 gives a 23% activation chance, which is a noticeable increase. However, going from 10 to 11 stacks increases the activation chance from 60% to 62.3% which is a somewhat negligible increase. (if you’re confused about the maths, you can check the gamepedia for the actual formulas. I’d rather not explain them here)
- Exponential : The stacking effect becomes increasingly effective the more duplicates owned. The stacking effect is raised to the power of the amount of stacks it has. For example, Shaped Glass doubles damage and halves health. 4 stacks of Shaped Glass would multiply damage by 2⁴ and divide health by 2⁴.
Some items have effective limits where stacking more than a certain amount is either useless or deemed unnecessary. Some notable ones are Tougher Times (teddy bears) at 10 (for a 60% activation chance), Lens-Maker’s Glasses and Tri-Tip Dagger at 10 (for a 100% activation chance).
Damage
If you’ve read the descriptions of items in-game, you’ll notice that when describing damage they represent it in percentages instead of flat values. This is because many descriptions of damage found in the ability menu and item pop-ups scale off your base damage. Your base damage scales with level, and so, leveling up increases the damage dealt by your items as well.
Some items however scale off the total damage you deal. As an example, Shaped Glass will multiply your damage by 2 after all other calculations. Other items such as AtG Missile Mk.1 also use total damage calculations, so they’re multiplied last as well.
The general idea is that total damage is more superior compared to base damage scaling items, however items like my favorite Will-o’-the-Wisp are just as effective (and as fun) given enough stacks.
Any item can be fun given enough stacks
Proc Chains
Each attack in Risk of Rain 2 has a chance to proc an effect on hit (those that can’t have a chance of 0%). The chance for an attack to proc this effect is called the proc coefficient. Items that have on hit effects will have their own chance to proc their effect. When calculating whether or not an effect is triggered, the game takes to account both the proc coefficient and the proc chance. To explain it better, think of it as each attack having a chance to have a chance to proc an effect.
Some items, notably the ukulele and my personal favorite the Will-o’-the-Wisp have an area of effect and a proc coefficient with the ukulele being 0.2 and the wisps being 1. Because of the area of effect and the proc coefficient, it is possible when these items proc for them to proc other items, this is called a proc chain. In later stages of the game, proc chains help deal a large portion of your damage. I won’t be explaining in-depth in this guide on the intrinsic details of specific items and how they contribute to a proc chain. I’m hoping that you guys try it out for yourself and should you need a more in-depth explanation, there are many amazing in-depth videos that explain these mechanics already available.
Artifacts of Command, Sacrifice, and Swarm
In public matchmaking, it’s pretty common (very very common), to find groups that only want to play with these artifacts on.
Quick overview of how they work:
- Artifact of Command items are replaced with a drop of the corresponding rarity color that when interacted with gives a menu of items to choose from
- Artifact of Sacrifice items drop from killed enemies
- Artifact of Swarm doubles enemies but halves their health
There are some things to consider when playing with these artifacts.
Playing command without knowing any items is quite the roller coaster and because it requires a menu popup, pickup items in the midst of battle is not recommend early on. It does however make it easier to have godly builds, which may get boring after a while, and meme builds, which can be fun given you survive that long.
Sacrifice has bad drop rates in the beginning of the game, but give a lot of room for players falling behind to catch up later in the game. Also reduces the need to look for crates.
Swarm is personal preference in my opinion. More enemies with less health makes it fun to look at proc chains happen, but since enemy damage is not effected, it’s easy to get, well, swarmed.
Conclusion
If you’re waiting for the 1.0 release or just as happy as I am playing Risk of Rain 2, I hope this guide answers some questions you might have before or while playing the game.
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