Risk of Rain 2 Monsoon Difficulty Guide

In this Risk of Rain 2 Monsoon difficulty guide, I will be showing you how to consistently get god runs on the hardest difficulty in Risk of Rain 2. I will include tips for both solo Monsoon and group Monsoon difficulty, so regardless of how you play you will learn something.

Other Posts:

• Risk of Rain 2 Engineer Guide
• Risk of Rain 2 All Character Unlock Guide
• How to Unlock Loader in Risk of Rain 2
• Risk of Rain 2 Mods – Best Mods and How to Install

First up are the best characters to play on Monsoon difficulty.

Best Characters for Monsoon

The two best characters to play in Monsoon difficulty are MUL-T and Engineer. To be blunt, the Engineer is obviously good because he is essentially three characters in one and MUL-T has the highest damage potential in the game. You can check out my tier list if you are interested in the other characters.

Engineer is going to be the easier character to play in Monsoon for obvious reasons, but MUL-T has more damage and if you understand how to play him can be far more reliable.

Although, the character you choose to play doesn’t really matter that much. Understanding how the difficulty scales in Risk of Rain 2 and how to properly gauge what you should do given your circumstances is far more important.

Timing – When to Farm or Do Boss

If you have ever wondered when to farm items in Risk of Rain 2 or when to pop the teleporter and just go to the next stage, this section is for you.

Any of you who have read my other guides know that time is the most important resource in Risk of Rain 2. Every second counts because your enemies scale infinitely based on the time spent in a run and how many stages you have completed. Stay too long in one stage and the next will become impossible.

Let’s start with what to do within your first loop. A loop is the first four stages whereafter you will “loop” back to the first stage.

The First Loop

In stage one, you should immediately find the teleporter. No looking for loot here. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t get items, but you shouldn’t be roaming the map looking for items. It takes roughly three minutes for the difficulty to go up from easy to medium in Monsoon, so your goal is to leave the first stage before then.

Do the teleporter, look around for any nearby chests, leave after one or two.

Stage two is more or less the same. You will be focusing on getting to the teleporter as quick as possible. Unless you see a really good 3D printer (glasses, fungus if you’re engi, etc) then repeat what you did in stage one. Try your best to leave before nine minutes into the run.

Stage three is where things start to change. If you have got here before ten minutes have elapsed in-game and have gotten lucky enough to get Rallypoint Delta, you have the chance to the Preon Accumulator, the highest damage equipment in the game.

To find the Preon Accumulator you need to get to Rallypoint Delta and find the timed security chest. Reaching it before the timer reaches ten minutes will allow you to open it and retrieve the Preon Accumulator inside. This is also how you unlock the [REDACTED] achievement.

The Preon Accumulator can carry you through several stages by itself. It takes a few seconds to charge up when you are using it, however, it does massive AOE damage and depending on the time/stage can one-shot teleporter bosses.

For those of you wondering why we rush through the early stages, this is one of the biggest reasons.

Now, stage four is the stage that can set up a god run for you. Most people don’t know or notice this, but every multi-shop on stage four is green/uncommon rarity. And man oh man are there a f*ck ton of shops.

Stage four will be either the Abyssal Depths or Siren’s Call. You would, preferably, like to go to the Abyssal Depths as this map has the legendary chest in the middle, although, you can still get a guaranteed legendary from the Alloyed Worship Unit in Siren’s Call.

Your goal in this stage is to farm up. Every item in this stage is going to give you 10x the boost any item you previously could have gotten. Check all the multi-shops for the best gear that you can. Items like Fuel Cell (for Preon), Ukulele, ATG Missiles, Old Guillotine, etc. will all provide you with a massive boost to damage and survivability. Spending five or six minutes here is A-ok.

Once done at the fourth stage, you can either do the same thing – ignore chests until stage four- or you can farm the stages for as long as you want. Personally, I continue with the strat until the second loop, but you can do as you like. At this point in the run, you make quite a pretty penny. Plenty of gold to buy all the chests you will ever need on the map.

Keep this timing in mind when you are doing your next Monsoon run. If you are reaching the twenty-minute mark by stage two you might want to reconsider what you are doing with your time and take a closer look at this guide.

Next up is the section about important gear in Monsoon.

Important Gear

This section is focused on important items to get and when one item might be more valuable than others. I see a lot of people who are confused at the tradeoff between getting a soldier’s syringe over a gasoline can and want to clear that up.

For starters, let’s look at what items most characters will prefer to use.

Characters like Commando and MUL-T don’t have good ways to deal with large groups of enemies early on, so when given the choice, you would give priority to something like gasoline over something like a soldier’s syringe, for example. Attack speed is nice and all, but having a horde pecking at you while trying to complete a teleporter isn’t.

Certain items are only good for specific characters but are god-tier on those characters. Examples of this include fungus for Engineer, a backup magazine for Huntress (yes it is good on others as well but really good on Huntress), and focus crystal for Loader/Mercenary.

There isn’t a set guide for every character. Everyone loves crit damage and attack speed but you should be focused more on what the character sucks at rather than what it could be good at. The Engineer is super slow so get mobility, MUL-T sucks at doing AOE damage so get AOE items, Artificer relies on her CD’s so get CD reduction, etc.

Guaranteed Items

I’ve talked about some guaranteed items already in the timing section but in this section, I will speak more in-depth about them and elaborate further.

First things first, what are guaranteed items in Risk of Rain 2? Guaranteed items are items that will always be there no matter what happens, no RNG involved. Utilizing these can help prevent bad chest luck from ruining your run.

Examples of guaranteed items you can get are:

• Both Kjaro’s and Runald’s Band
• Random Legendary
• Preon Accumulator
• Lunar items

So how do we get these items? Let’s start with the Preon since I’ve already mentioned it.

To get the Preon you must reach stage three (Rallypoint Delta) and open the timed security chest before ten minutes. There are three places the chest can spawn, either on the mountain, below the mountain, or inside one of the large metal containers.

Next, Kjaro’s and Runald’s. For this item combo, you need to get to the second stage (Abandonded Aqueduct) and kill the two Elder Lemurians having a wedding ceremony. This is a bit of a task so I will leave a video for you to watch instead of trying to type it all out.

As for the legendary items, they still have some RNG tied to them as you don’t get to choose what legendary item to get, but you do get a red item guaranteed, so that’s a win in my book.

To get the legendary items you will need to be on stage four. It doesn’t matter which map you are on (Abyssal Depths or Siren’s Call) as both have guaranteed legendaries. That being said, the Abyssal Depths has a way easier legendary to get because to get the legendary on Siren’s Call you have to kill the big daddy of Risk of Rain 2, the Alloy Worship Unit. He is so tough, I consider him the final boss.

On Abyssal Depths, just go to the center of the map and underneath one of the rocks will be a small passage you can go through that has a legendary chest inside. Usually one single player difficulty this will be around one thousand dollaroos or whatever the currency is called and for every player in your game just add another thousand dollaroos.

For Siren’s Call, you gotta summon the optical boy of doom (Alloy Worship Unit) and kill him. This is also how you unlock Loader for those of you who didn’t know. I recommend you check out that guide here for tips on how to kill him.

Finally, let’s talk about lunar items. Using a newt altar will allow you to spawn a blue portal at a teleporter which will take you to the Bazaar Between Worlds, BBW for short. The BBW has a selection of four lunar items to choose from as well as two items you can trade for (uncommon and legendary).

The lunar items cost lunar coins to buy, but the uncommon and legendary cost three and five items respectively, meaning you have to trade five of your items for one legendary.

Therefore, by using the BBW, you can tip the scales of RNG ever so slightly in your favor. Got sucky white items? Trade em in for a better green.

Monsoon Tips

We are reaching the end of this Monsoon guide so I am going to leave you with some tips.

• Don’t farm the whole map before the first loop.
• Use newt altars as often as you can.
• Build for your character’s weakness not just for high damage output.
• Abuse guaranteed items when the RNG sucks.
• Five minutes per stage is a good average to go for.