With the recent release of Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm¸ a handful of new items were made available to owners of the DLC. Aside from that, a bunch of new elite enemy types and environments were also introduced, and with that, new desirable builds have started popping up. In this tier list, we will try to rank the new items based on how useful we think they are in the current update and DLC.
Best Items Tier List
Before we begin, just remember that this tier list is purely subjective, and your own rankings might look very different based on your play style and preferred characters. At the end of the day, if you aren’t running an Artifact of Command, you’re going to be getting random stuff in your run anyway.
Also, we will be including a few items from the base game or even the previous DLC. This is mainly due to the new maps and enemy types, especially twisted elites.
Finally, the current state of the patch will also affect some of these rankings. If you want to learn more about this, consider checking out our article on why Seekers of the Storm has a lot of negative reviews. With those out of the way, let’s get to the tiers!
S Tier
- Sale Star (Uncommon) – One of the best additions of Seekers of the Storm is the Sale Star item. Despite being a mere uncommon, its ability to guarantee an extra item from one chest each stage is insane. This even has the potential to give more with additional stacks.
- Getting another Sale Star after already using it in the same stage will let you proc it again.
- It’s cracked for another reason too. Not only will you get an additional item, but this extra drop is also pulling from the same loot pool. That means double legendaries if you open a legendary chest. Maybe avoid equipment barrels, though.
- Sonorous Whispers (Legendary) – This thing will help you print items, especially once bosses start spawning outside of events. Outside of bosses, you also get a base 15% chance to get items from elite enemies (affected by the 57 Leaf Clover). Insane item.
- Seed of Life (Equipment) – Hear me out. I know it’s not that good considering it takes up the equipmentslot. With how janky the game is right now though? I’d like to think a free revive, especially in solo play, is extremely useful.
- Also, twisted elites exist. Right now, there’s a chance that you essentially obliterate yourself out of the blue because of your procs hitting stuff buffed by them.
- Dio’s Best Friend (Legendary) – Not a new item, but I’m putting this here for the exact same reasons as Seed of Life. In fact, it’s better than that, though pretty dang rare.
A Tier
- Chance Doll – I actually kinda consider the Chance Doll as barely S Tier. Basically, it gives you a chance to upgrade a shrine dropto a higher rarity. It only misses out on being at the very top due to the RNG factor of shrines, since this doesn’t really change the fact that you could get absolutely nothing from them.
- This does synergize pretty nicely with the 57 Leaf Clover, which would bump this up into an easy S tier as well.
- Runic Lens (Legendary) – The wording for this item is a bit strange, but it basically gives you a chance to summon a meteor that will deal a ton of damage on hit. It’s good, though a bit of clarity as to how it works would be nice. What even is “Overspill”?
B Tier
- Luminous Shot (Uncommon) – It increases your next primary attack’s damage after using your secondary skill. Depending on what survivor your using, this can work pretty well with the Backup Magazine. As somebody who enjoys Soul Spiral Seeker, it’s a nice item to have.
- Electric Boomerang (Legendary) – Pretty nice item as it just adds more free damage and crowd control whenever it procs. It could be better if it dealt more damage.
- Might be a bit buggy right now, as I’ve seen at least one boomerang get completely stuck in a random surface at Rally Point Delta. No idea how often that happens.
C Tier
- Warped Echo (Common) – If you ignore the current issue with it making Mithrix invulnerable, among other massive bugs with this item in particular, Warped Echo is just fine. It tends to get wasted on weaker enemies, especially with its long cooldown.
- Chronic Expansion (Common) – The downside I see for this item is that you need to stay in combat to keep the damage buff it gives. Unless you’re wiping out large clumps at breakneck speed or have Forgive Me Please, it is generally just “meh” at best.
- Prayer Beads (Uncommon) – I personally kind of like Prayer Beads, but I don’t like how you need to find a way to get rid of it first before you actually benefit from it. You could chalk it up to a skill issue, but I tend to completely forget that I even have it after a while.
- Unstable Transmitter (Uncommon) – This can be a get out of jail free card in sticky situations, but you are not guaranteed to be teleported to a safe location whenever it procs.
- An argument could be made for bumping it up a tier if you run it with an Old War Stealthkit and / or a Power Elixir.
- Growth Nectar (Legendary) – Not bad, but not particularly great either, especially considering its rarity. Highly dependent on having a lot of buffs active frequently.
Niche AF
- Longstanding Solitude (Lunar) – This item does have some niche uses, and it’s actually pretty good with Artifact of Sacrifice active or some multiplayer shenanigans. I’m giving it its own spot as I have no idea how to rank it, to be honest.
“LMAO” Tier
- War Bonds (Legendary) – For a red item, War Bonds is laughably bad. Seriously, it’s pretty much just a better but significantly rarer version of Ghor’s Tome. If it was dropped down to uncommon rarity, I might actually bump it up to be at least in the middle of this tier list.
- Antler Shield (Common) – This item just gives you a chance to reflect a relatively small amount of damage, which increases per stack. It’s just… not good.
- Early on, you don’t really want to get hit because you’d still be pretty squishy. On top of that, a 10% damage reflection is essentially nothing at the first few stages, assuming it even goes off.
- In later stages, assuming you somehow have 100% reflect damage due to having ten of these things, how would it really benefit you? You’re going to get chunked for a lot and all you have to show for it is probably the equivalent of one or two normal attacks.
- Noxious Thorn (Uncommon) – Just like the Antler Shield, it only benefits you if you get hit, and even then, it’s only a 25% chance. Even with a bleed build, it doesn’t seem all that useful when a Tri-tip Dagger can do it much more consistently and without relying on getting hit.
- Bolstering Lantern (Common) – What is it with this DLC and wanting you to get hit? This item increases your damage as long as you are under 50% health. I just don’t see why you would want to stay that low, especially since you would be healing up that damage immediately anyway.
Knockback Fin
- Knockback Fin (Common) – This item just gives you a 7.5% chance on hit to knock enemies into the air (per stack). I mean, I guess you can knock things up every now and then? Uhh… Okay? It’s prime scrapper food for me, but if anyone knows a niche use for this, let us know in the comments below.
And that wraps up this entire tier list, which I should emphasize once more, is purely subjective. There weren’t any new void items, unsurprisingly, but we did get a new lunar that I honestly have no idea how to rate.
We might get a few changes to these eventually as the developers work on fixing some of the major issues with the latest patch, so it remains to be seen if these rankings will hold up in the near future.
