Today I will be sharing with you the Risk of Rain 2 community tier list for 2020. This list has every survivor up to Acrid (sorry console people) and I collected the data from a few different sources just to see if there are any biases.
A little backstory on this. I created a ror2 tier list last year (that I update every now and then) and inside this post, right at the top, there is an optional survey for people to take. So, when people make it to this page, through google or various other sources, they often vote on their favorite survivor in Risk of Rain 2. Sadly, this survey is through SurveyMonkey, which only allows a maximum of 100 results on the free plan (and the paid plan is $99, so no thanks).
Knowing that 100 responses weren’t going to be enough, I made a post on Reddit. Just a simple post with a straw poll. From that post, I received over 200 responses, although, they don’t have comments attached to all of them.
To combat the fact I can’t get comments on why people voted in the straw poll, I asked people to comment on why in the post itself. I can’t be certain of the exact number of people that voted similarly, but I will be using the upvotes as an indicator of support for a certain survivor.
All right. With all of that explaining out of the way, let’s get into the tier list!
Table of Contents
Risk of Rain 2 Community Tier List Results
Some things to know before we get into the data itself.
- There is no way to know if console players voted too
- Not all survivors are unlocked at the beginning
- These votes are across all difficulties
- Some people vote for the memes
Keep all of these things in mind when looking at the results, as this is certainly not an objective evaluation of survivors, merely a fun way to involve the community.
Above is the Reddit tier list survey results. Although the overall quality is lower, the responses are far more substantial than the website survey. Just part of the pain that is online surveys.
I’ll just list the results real quick for anyone who can’t see the image.
- Loader with a whopping 75 votes
- Rex with 66 votes
- Mercenary with 47 votes
- Engineer with 35 votes
- Huntress with 17 votes
- Acrid with 17 votes
- MUL-T with 9 votes
- Commando with 7 votes
- Artificer with 7 votes
What I Think
I think that anytime you try and do a survey on the “best” characters in any game you are going to find that the easier/fun characters are at the top of the list, regardless of objective usefulness. That being said, it is hard to argue with most of these.
Loader is a really good survivor in Risk of Rain 2. High health, high armor, lots of damage, best mobility in the game, and pretty freaking fun. With the newest loadout for Loader, the Thunder Gauntlet, she now has even better AOE potential, something she lacked before the Hidden Realms update.
Rex, on the other hand, has gone from being one of the hardest/worst survivors in Risk of Rain 2 to being one of the best. It all comes down to the fact he received massive buffs in the Hidden Realms update AND the fact that he got a brand spanking new loadout to top it off. No surprise here.
Now that we get to Mercenary I start to disagree with the community. Merc hasn’t received anything that makes him better in ages. Even the loadouts he received in previous updates (not Hidden Realms) are worse than his base kit. To top it off, he is melee, gross.
Alright, so you probably don’t care to read my opinion on every survivor I will just briefly summarize the rest.
- Engineer is personally my favorite survivor and is quite easily top 3. I think his boring playstyle lowered his poll results
- Huntress is squishtastic and difficult to play for face rollers. With the proper loadout, she has everything you would need in a survivor
- Acrid is both bad and good at the same time. I still can’t quite put my finger on it
- MUL-T has the highest DPS potential in the game. Should be higher
- Commando sucks. I would say he is too vanilla, but vanilla doesn’t taste like crap
- Artificer is at the very least better than Commando. She has a built-in Guillotine for god’s sake.
Those are my takes. Do with it what you will.
What the Community Thinks
Link to both posts for those who would rather read it on Reddit. Post 1, Post 2.
Rex vs. Loader
Both can clear the first loop and beyond with no items but rex will eventually outperform loader every time. Being basically innately immune to all damage that doesn’t 1 shot through healing at all stages of the game is simply too good. The lack of mobility can be easily rectified through item choice and if you’re good he’s not that slow in the start either. Not to mention nearly every item has incredible synergy with him.
Commando is on the other end. Weak at nearly every point in the game unless you get god items… even then he’s just a worse mul-t… He needs some serious help.
In Response:
Sorry, but that’s flat out wrong. OSP isn’t what it used to be anymore, first they nerfed it from 80% to 90% of your HP, then they removed the secondary OSP from Barrier, making it a type of HP.
What that means is that healing is still strong early on, and so is OSP (like the first 2-3 loops), but as you go further and further into the run, OSP and healing start losing relevance, since:
- one, many enemies gain ability to break OSP and kill you even through healing, in one frame;
- two, malachites can turn off healing entirely.
Since Rex relies on healing during the whole game, late game becomes so much harder for him, which is also exacerbated by two factors: the fact that he can break his own OSP and the fact that he just doesn’t like the new PSG (which is actually bonkers on Loader).
Loader, on the other hand, can generate 5% HP barrier with each punch. Basically healing that doesn’t get turned off by malachites and scales off HP. On top of that, Loader can easily (much easier than anyone else) essentially double his HP pool. Who cares about OSP when you constantly have 4k health starting from the 3rd loop and get more going forward. That barrier gain on M1 is so good that PSGs and Transcendence are S-tier items on Loader, simply because they increase his 5% HP barrier gain.
For whatever reason people think that Loader can’t manfight things and has to rely on his Shift, when in reality he is best survivor survivability-wise (while also having great damage) and all that without any iframes or healing built-in.
More on Loader:
Loader because straight out of the gate you have better mobility than most of cast would have 4 stages in, while also having a highly damaging attack that lets you tear through pretty much everything with minimal damage items. She’s the only character I could see being consistently able to obliterate with no items at all.
Yep, the community is definitely sleeping on how (frankly) overpowered Loader is with her alternate punch. You can smoothly speedrun to obliteration on rainstorm with practically zero items on her. Passive lets her facetank monsters, her damage is insane single target AND AoE, incredible speed and mobility.
It makes me kinda sad as an Artificer player because I scale badly (no benefit from attack speed/very little on-hit scaling…) which is supposedly offset by a stronger early, but Loader is 5x as strong as Artificer is early.
Actual Truth From a Redditor:
I feel like MUL-T is technically the best (large HP, most flexibility, highest base fire rate,) but being slow makes him not so fun to play.
Mercenary Voter:
I voted for Mercenary because he is BY FAR my most consistent character. I can get the bands for free on Monsoon, dunk any Vagrants or Sirens call Units in one shove, and be invincible half the time. He’s also the second most mobile character in the game at the moment.
Rex, Acrid, and Loader are the others that I would consider to be the strongest.
Engineer Voter:
I’m voting Engineer only because it seems to be the most balanced and least likely to get tweaked or nerfed (Loader).
With non-mobile turrets, you can really get some high damage output and high survivability due to the damage soak they provide.
As many Engineer runs as I’ve made, there isn’t a whole lot that can kill me even on a weak-moderate RNG run if I don’t get too ballsy.
Acrid Opinion:
Acrid: honorable mention for being the least item dependent character which is a virtue in multiplayer. Meleeing requires you to be very cautious, while the other 2 melees don’t have to worry as much. Very fun to play but could use some sort of change to encourage risky melee instead of spit and run.
And those are most of the responses from Reddit.
Above is the website survey results. As you can see, only 100 responses.
Quick results for the lazy or those who can view the image:
- Loader
- Huntress
- Acrid
- Engineer
- MUL-T
- Artificer
- Mercenary
- Rex
- Commando
Loader yet again taking the top spot, although, not in the most secure position, only sitting 3 votes ahead of Huntress (who would have thought?).
What I Think
Personally, I think some of these answers could be biased. The survey is located at the top of my tier list for RoR2 and some of the readers may have been influenced by my picks. Just a thought.
Loader is just the most balanced survivor in RoR2. Balanced meaning, Loader is fun and viable for most players. A very straightforward character with point-and-shoot punch gameplay that makes it easy for any player, good or bad, to feel like a god.
Wait, what the hell am I doing? I did this already. Scroll up to the Reddit section and see what I wrote about the survivors there. Everything should be the same.
What The Community Thinks
Ok, so I put a disclaimer at the very top saying that I thought some people might be memeing when they vote. You might have had your doubts about that, but I am about to show you the inside of a player’s head. Beware.
Mhm. What did I tell ya? Here is my personal favorite below.
Because of the low response rate and the fact that not all 100 people wrote something in the comment field, I will only be showing you some of the comments they wrote.
Loader:
“so much damageeeeeeeeeee”
“Loader has several high damaging abilities along with an very consistent escape option with both her grappling hook and charged punch, she also takes zero fall damage which while not being the most important thing in a character definitely doesn’t hurt to have when she already excels in pretty much everything”
Engineer:
“Fungus spam is easy mode”
Huntress:
“damage and survivability”
“While I agree that it’s annoying to auto home in on minions when you’re fighting bosses, the mobility simply can’t be matched, and the primary and secondary make farming for money a piece of cake”
Mercenary:
“decente dmg, low cooldowns, have iframes in shift and “r”, high mobility,”
“mobility + invulnerability”
Acrid:
“he strong”
“DoTs”
Best Risk of Rain 2 Survivor
If any of you read the wall of text up top, or just took a glance at the results from Reddit, you will know that Loader made it to the top in both lists. Making her the de-facto best survivor in Risk of Rain 2’s community tier list.
Most people consider her the best no item survivor and many more consider her to be a tremendous amount of fun. Either way, congratulations video game lady!
