As with most roguelike titles, Risk of Rain 2 is equal parts luck and skill. Players are dropped into a level as one of many chosen Survivors and tasked with completing as many stages as possible. Equipment, drones, and items can be found along the way to make this easier.
Items are the lifeblood of Risk of Rain 2. They allow players to dish out more damage, activate powerful effects, or simply make the game easier. With hundreds of items to find, the variety of good and bad ones is quite high. While nearly every item in the game has its place, some are far better than others. From common items to Lunar items, here are the five best and worst items players can find in Risk of Rain 2.
10 Best: Spinel Tonic
Most Lunar items in Risk of Rain 2 incur a large penalty in exchange for a build-enabling trait. While Lunar items are usually hit or miss, Spinel Tonic is a top-tier option for almost every Survivor.
As an Equipment item, Spinel Tonic grants the player +100% damage, 70% increased attack speed, +20 armor, +50 health, increases passive health regeneration by 300%, and it increases movement speed by 30%. The caveat is that it has a 20% to reduce a player's stats by 5% when its 20-second duration wears out. This can easily be circumvented with a few Fuel Cells and a Gesture of the Drowned, however. For many players, there simply isn't a better Equipment item.
9 Worst: Bustling Fungus
Mobility is key to survival in Risk of Rain 2. The best means of avoiding damage is to never get hit in the first place. Bustling Fungus encourages the exact opposite by granting a healing zone when players stand still for two seconds. A heal rate of 4.5% per second might sound appealing, but standing still is a death sentence in most runs.
That said, Bustling Fungus is perfect for Engineer as his turrets inherit these items. Stationary turrets that have a strong passive heal is nothing to scoff at. Since it is effectively 3D Printer fodder for the other Survivors, however, it still is considered by most to be a useless item.
8 Best: AtG Missile Mk. 1
Proc-based items are key for dealing damage later in Hopoo Games' third-person shooter. Part of what makes these proc items so strong is activating them with the AtG Missile Mk. 1. This item has a 10% chance of firing a missile that deals 300% total damage per attack. Since it scales with total damage instead of base damage, it is influenced by damage-enhancing items and critical hits.
Best of all, AtG Missiles has a massive proc coefficient of 1, meaning these missiles can activate other proc-based items such as Ukelele and Tri-Tip Dagger as reliably as most Survivor skills.
7 Worst: Lepton Daisy
Lepton Daisy releases a healing nova outward from the Teleporter once a boss spawns, granting every player in the radius 50% of their total health back.
It's a potent heal that can be made consistent if multiple are equipped. However, the lethality of both players and enemies is so high on later runs that the former can out heal targets with Harvester's Scythes to reset one-shot protection.
6 Best: Tougher Times
Even if players have great mobility and can dodge most attacks, there will be instances where hits will connect when they least expect it. For those circumstances, the Tougher Times item is a must-have.
This teddy bear grants players a 15% chance to block incoming damage entirely. It is not influenced by luck bonuses such as the 57 Leaf Clover item and has diminishing returns. Using 10 Tougher Times will grant a 60% damage block chance, which couples perfectly with a type of healing and one-shot protection.
5 Worst: Purity
Purity is one of Risk of Rain 2's stranger items. This Lunar item reduces all skill cooldowns by 2 seconds while granting +1 unlucky, forcing proc-based effects to roll twice with the worse outcome being chosen. In other words, Purity drastically reduces the strength of proc-based items. Since these items are vital to surviving in late-stage runs, Purity is a great early-game Lunar item that becomes more detrimental as a run continues.
57 Leaf Clover can counter its effect, but using arguably the strongest item in the game to counter a Lunar item isn't worth it except the most niche of cases for the likes of Artificer or Acrid.
4 Best: Shatterspleen
Defeating an Imp Overload boss can grant Shatterspleen as a boss item. Shatterspleen is incredible as it grants a guaranteed bleed for 240% base damage when a player critical strikes. Better yet, bleeding targets explode when slain, dealing 400% damage plus 15% of their total maximum health in a small radius.
This can turn a build focused on single-target critical into a wave-clearing machine. Out of every boss item in the game, Shatterspleen is leagues above the rest.
3 Worst: Radar Scanner
Radar Scanner is an equipment item that, once every 45 seconds, can ping the location of all interactables on the map. This is somewhat handy for newer players who don't have much Risk of Rain 2 experience, but only a few runs are needed before players realize the spawn locations of most Newt Altars and chests.
Radar Scanner can also clutter a player's screen with junk information as well, making it more beneficial to have no Equipment item at all than using this.
2 Best: 57 Leaf Clover
No item comes close to the sheer power of 57 Leaf Clover. Every proc-based item in the game is lucky, meaning its proc chance is rolled twice instead of once with the favorable outcome being used.
Effectively, this means players can expect a significant increase in their damage output from items! Since proc-based items are key to achieving endurance runs, finding a legendary 57 Leaf Clover is a game-changer.
1 Worst: Corpsebloom
On the surface, Corpsebloom seems rather potent. Healing twice as much as normal sounds great, but the negative is it can only heal the player for 10% of their maximum HP per second.
All healing is applied overtime as well, making this ceiling of healing per second easy to reach and nigh-useless on late-game runs. Except for incredibly niche cases, Corpsebloom is a death sentence to grab and makes runs harder rather than easier. It's hard to find an item worse than this.