Risk of Rain Returns – Tips for Glass / Command / Sacrifice Setup

Intro

So out of all possible artifact configurations, there’s this one that stands out for making the game become the horror survival mess it is at late game, as soon as the game starts.

For a lot of us folks, this was our standard experience back in Risk of Rain 1.

There’s a lot of implications of what running these artifacts will have for good experience, so i’ll try to sum up the main considerations if you ever decide to join this kind of lobby.

General Plan

Zoom Out Your Game – Go to settings and deactivate perfect pixel option beside the zoom bar. Then put it around x1.2 – x1.7. Then pray whisps don’t spawn while you’re landing a jump.

Be Friendly – Rock and stone fellas

Ask Your Team If They’re Ready To Activate TP – Ask if everyone is ready before summoning boss. The old slang was just to ask “r?” and answer “r” if yes. Would love some quick com / emojis integration so you dont get oneshoted while typing.

Don’t Be Greedy – The combination of sacrifice and command is a double edge sword: having access to optimized builds will be for nothing if you die because you’re choosing items mid-wave (tp activated). Depending on your lobby, chances are your team will pick up all the remaining items and you’ll be underpowered for next stages/difficulty ramp, getting oneshot as soon as an enemy spawns.

Don’t Be Greedy – Again – Because you’re not getting kicked out of the lobby just because the lack of the feature.

Loot After The TP Coundown – Literally repeating myself for third time. Trying to save you some frustration, really.

Ask Your Team If Everyone’s Ready Before Going Next Stage – Missing a red item sucks because someone’s too anxious to wait a minute.

Share Items – If by any chance you get to become your team main dps, don’t monopolize items. If that’s your plan, play single player mode. Otherwise, if you enjoy coop survival, you’ll benefit from everyones tools to maximize your chances and ending any CHAD run will feel extremely rewarding. Personally i like to run forced shared items in randos lobbys, which at worse makes solo players quit. In this scenario: PLEASE don’t choose items that you can’t pick. You’re forcing your team into items that may not be viable for them. They can as well not pick them, resulting in you not being able to pick items until they reach your power level which is far from useful.

Share With Dead Teammates – When a teammate dies, he will become a drone (welcomed addition, really). Just learned that they can still pick items! Ask what they need if you already have whatever lets you survive and fight back. If ever…

Items Selection

Out of all possible items, I really need to mention these outstanding ones. The rest is up for experimentation. Yes, you can get Bustingling Fungus. Yes, it’s a terrible idea.

Guardian’s Heart – wonderful item. Instant impact, will prevent you getting oneshotted at least on the first 15 min. I’d go for having 1 of these every 5 min approx, but beware! even stacking stupid amount of these will not make you invulnerable. The idea is to prevent your ass getting wiped from an out-of-screen whisp. Otherwise damage and chained damage aoe will prevent enemies from ever attacking in first place. Doesn’t apply to worms because reasons.

56 Leaf Clover – Otherwise, if your cleaning off your screen of enemies while being afk, 56 leaf clover is an exceptional choice, since in late game almost all enemies will spawn as elites. More items = more tools = more dopamine. Item gets unlocked after killing scavenger.

Optional Artifacts

Of course, you can add some more salt up to your personal taste.

Honor – Makes 56 leaf clover value skyrocket, making your whole team ramp up in stats pretty quick. Huge downside: pray you don’t get any electric/blue elite spawn in your ass for an unavoidable early death and lobby ragequit. Yellows can be nasty as well, and black elites are the digital embodyment of pain.

Spite – If you ever make out of this configuration be a walk through heidi alpes, spite is always an option to avoid monotony, just beware that killing any monster may result in friendly fire, possibly killing your whole team in the process. Haven’t played with spite in ror returns, but i remember bosses dropping a mass of bouncing bombs. A fun choice imo, but you will be rehosting lobbys pretty frequently

Enigma – Good combination with honor artifact, giving you tools to survive until y’all find guardian hearts. Only downside, you don’t get to abuse captain’s brooch for free items nor use unstable watch against late mass bosses. The first could be potentially ignored if you quickly get stacks of 56 leaf clover, the later is almost a matter of faith.

Origin – While pretty fun, it could make any character without good mobility insta-die. Gotta confirm that imps can drop items. If that’s the case, there’s a good argument for turning this on with the right party.

Prestige – Another cool alternative to honor artifact, which rewards more items and make non-stalling/farming strategies more effective. Time is another resource for ending the game in this config, and any way that allows you to ramp faster than the game is welcomed.