Risk of Rain 2 Best Characters — Who to Play at Every Skill Level

By the Choost Games team — indie game developers behind Granny's Rampage and Granny's Gambit. We play what we recommend.

Huntress is the best character in Risk of Rain 2 for most players — her auto-aim removes the biggest skill barrier in a game where you're constantly moving, and her Flurry alternate turns every proc item into a room clearer. For high-difficulty Eclipse runs, Railgunner takes the top spot with her scaling burst damage. But the best character for you depends on where you are in the game.

Best Characters for Beginners

Huntress is the starting recommendation and it's not close. Her auto-aim means you can focus entirely on movement and positioning — the two skills that matter most in RoR2. Flurry fires six arrows per activation, each triggering on-hit items independently. Find a Ukulele and suddenly you're chain-lightning the entire stage. She's easy to learn, hard to outgrow, and viable at every difficulty.

Engineer is the second-best pick for new players. Place two turrets, stand on a Bustling Fungus (Bungus), and let the turrets kill everything while you heal. It's passive, it's boring to describe, and it wins runs. Turrets inherit your items, so every proc item you pick up doubles in value. The playstyle teaches you about item synergies without requiring mechanical skill.

MUL-T forgives mistakes through raw stats. He has the highest base health, can equip two equipment items simultaneously, and his Rebar Puncher oneshots most early enemies. The large hitbox means he takes more damage, but for beginners who are still learning enemy patterns, his durability covers that weakness.

Best Characters for Intermediate Players

Loader rewards players who understand movement. Her Charged Gauntlet dash deals massive damage and grants brief invulnerability — but you need to aim it and commit to the animation. When you learn to weave dashes between enemy attacks, Loader becomes unkillable while outputting melee damage that dwarfs ranged characters. Her passive shield regeneration means chip damage doesn't accumulate, which forgives the occasional mistimed dash.

Bandit teaches target prioritization. His Lights Out ability resets all cooldowns on kill, creating a chain where you execute one enemy, reset, execute another, reset. Against bosses with add phases, this chain produces infinite burst damage. The skill is knowing which enemy to target to keep the chain alive.

Captain is the team player pick. His orbital abilities clear early stages effortlessly, and his Hacking Beacons provide unique utility — one gives your team a free equipment charge, another reveals the entire map. Learning when to deploy these tools is the skill expression, and it teaches you to think about runs strategically rather than reactively.

Best Characters for Eclipse Difficulty

Railgunner has the highest skill ceiling in the game. Her scoped shot crits for percentage-based damage that scales infinitely — at Eclipse 8, she's one of the few survivors who can still oneshot stage 5 bosses. The Supercharge mechanic (firing within a narrow timing window for bonus damage) rewards precise play in a game that usually rewards spam. Everything else about her is mediocre, but the scoped shot is so strong it doesn't matter.

Void Fiend operates on a corruption mechanic that transforms him between two forms. His corrupted form is devastatingly powerful but drains health, and managing the transformation timing is the entire skill expression. Expert Void Fiend players switch forms to burst bosses during vulnerability windows, then switch back to sustain through adds. At Eclipse difficulty, this micro-management creates a satisfying rhythm that other characters lack.

Huntress remains viable at Eclipse for the same reasons she's good everywhere — Flurry's proc rate with late-game item stacks produces damage that scales with your collection, and her mobility keeps her alive against one-shot mechanics that punish slower characters.

Characters That Underperform (and Why)

Acrid deals damage over time in a game where instant kills matter. His poison is consistent but slow, and at higher difficulties, enemies deal enough damage that "consistent but slow" means dead. Heretic sacrifices your entire loadout for a glass cannon transformation — high risk for questionable reward when other characters achieve similar damage without the self-imposed handicap.

More RoR2 Content

See our full Risk of Rain 2 Tier List for detailed rankings, and games like Risk of Rain 2 if you want something fresh. For the broader genre, explore the best roguelite games.