What is Rainstorm Refinery

Rainstorm Refinery is my attempt to create my '''ideal''' Risk of Rain 2 experience for myself and my friends. It is a fairly large balance mod primarily focused on refining and expanding various playstyles for a "vanilla +" feel. While I would ideally like to utilize more buffs and reworks then nerfs, there is a lot of content (especially newer stuff) that needs to toned down in order to maintain the difficulty that I and many other people expect from a Risk of Rain game.

Known Issues

• TheTimesweeper's Red Alert mod - There's a particular compatibility issue that I haven't been able to find a solution to, my global changes to execute thresholds are disabled when used alongside it.
• Other large balance mods - Not tested, but it should be pretty obvious that multiple mods with similar goals would lead to conflicts. Please only use one large balance mod at a time, for the sake of all of our sanities.

What does this mod contain?

All Changes

Survivor Balance

As of right now, this mod makes changes to all survivors except the new Alloyed Collective survivors. These changes frequently come in the form of simple number changes, but there are several cases of more significant additions in order to make certain skills feel more unique. Overall, bad default/alternate skills have been tuned up, minor changes have been made to make a lot of skills feel more fluid to use, and a lot of the more recent survivors have been heavily nerfed (and even still they remain incredibly powerful, SOTS 2.0 part 3 really did break survivor balance in half). These changes include, but are not limited to:

• Commando's default secondary and utility are more useful, and both specials have received massive buffs.
• Huntress's default primary has its own crit synergy to maintain parity with the alternate, and Arrow Rain is much stronger.
• Bandit's secondaries each have a unique variant of Hemorrhage with additional effects.
• MUL-T's less used primaries have been buffed, but Power Mode is more limited.
• Engineer's default secondary and utility are much less clunky and are more enjoyable, while the turrets don't scale quite as well with items.
• Artificer's ice wall can block attacks, and Ion Surge has been moved and reworked as an alternate utility.
• Mercenary does a bit more damage overall, and the secondaries are Agile.
• REX's health costs ignore armor and block chance but are slightly reduced, no longer deactivate Cautious Sluf/Oddly-Shaped Opal, and no longer reduce health in E8. The alternate special has also been revamped into something I actually enjoy using.
• Loader has reduced utility damage but her alternate grapple has unique physics and Thunderslam is more interesting.
• Acrid's secondaries have both received new unique properties, Blight stacks reset duration, and Frenzied Leap actually synergizes a bit better with Acrid's kit.
• Captain's primary has reduced damage but more flexibility via removed falloff once fully charged, shock is better and most beacon types (except Hacking) have been buffed.
• Railgunner has slightly reduced power in her default secondary and her specials.
• Void Fiend has had corruption gain reworked, and feels a lot smoother to play with quicker animations, at the cost of reduced power in corrupted form.
• Seeker has been nerfed all over to try to keep her in check and she's still OP. The revive is less broken but can be used with both of her specials, and Tranquility's stacking bonuses are slightly less powerful.
• CHEF's skills are slightly weaker on their own, but stronger in combination with activated oil pools actually being fairly strong now. To complement this, the Boosted default utility has been reworked to make sure oil is always a aprt of CHEF's kit.
• False Son's most broken elements - Growth and Lunar Ruin stacking - have been nerfed, but some abilities have received minor buffs to feel less clunky.

Item Balance

Additionally, significant changes to many items have been made, as well as Equipment. In terms of item balance, here are my goals:

• Make sure all items serve some kind of purpose on their own.
• Make sure all items can be strong in certain scenarios, and that these scenarios are not too rare (basically, no item should always be scrapped).
• Ensure that powerful item synergies can remain in order to keep runs unique, but are not too powerful as to be an automatic win.
• Lunar items should always offer a valid choice for each pickup. This means they need to have stacking downsides, but also have notable benefits so as to be more appealing with the right build.
• In the case of void items, there needs to be an actual choice between them and their uncorrupted counterparts.
• Equipments are generally a bit stronger, with some additional reworks to allow for additional synergies.

Overall Difficulty

This mod also adjusts certain elements pertaining to difficulty. To start with, it uncaps monster levels so that enemies keep scaling well into the late game (this won't really have too much impact unless you were only barely getting by). The other change is a significant modification to the gold formula, as gold drops from enemies are now increased slightly in the early game, but have reduced scaling with the difficulty coefficient. This makes it such that, as enemies become more plentiful, each individual enemy drops less money. This is both an indirect buff to items that grant money as well as a way to force players to continue engaging with the central game mechanics in longer runs.

There exists a config for this mod, but the options within it are reserved for the changes that I see as possibly controversial. If there are certain config options that you want me to add, let me know, but I will NOT be adding config options to adjust every single value (for the sake of my own sanity).

Contact

• Sorry, the github repository isn't public because there are a lot of in-development branches for future changes that I don't want to make accessible at the current time. If you have questions, comments, or bug reports about the mod you can contact me through discord. My username is OblivionAXiS, and I am on both the official RoR2 discord server and the RoR2 modding server (though I don't really send any messages in either).

Credits

• Risky_Lives (RiskyMod, RiskyTweaks): thank you for publicly available code on GitHub, which I pretty much used as my RoR2 modding tutorial. RiskyFixes is also included as a dependency as a collection of vanilla bug fixes/extremely minor balance tweaks that I want in my mod but would rather not implement myself.
• Many other balancing mods served as inspiration for what I did (or in some cases, what I didn't) want to do in my mod. It's hard to remember all the mods that have had an influence on this one, but here are some that I know have directly inspired one or more of my changes:
  • Groove_Salad's Groove Salad vs the Game
  • kking117's FlatItemBuff
  • TheBestAssociatedLargelyLudicrousSillyheadGroup's Well-Rounded Balance