Risk of Rain 2 – Eclipse 8 NO ITEMS – Railgunner

by far the hardest thing i’ve ever done in this game.

ever since eclipse came out, i wanted to see if it was possible to clear it without items. i tried a couple of times as loader but got walled pretty hard by stage 5. someone did it as acrid, which is probably the most impressive run i’ve seen, but it used a lot of stalling tactics since acrid isn’t strong enough to outscale enemies without items. when railgunner came out and i saw how strong the abilities were, i knew i had to go for it again.

my strat for this is to rush the stages as fast as possible and try to outscale the enemies. it works for the most part with the first 3 stages, but stages 4 and 5 can spawn some really bad stuff. the most notable run killer is stage 4, i believe the only realistically possible stage is abyssal depths, the spawn rate of larva is way too high on the other two stages and the larva is ridiculously fast on eclipse. if i take too long, the game has a higher chance to spawn something like a magma worm which is really bad for railgunner. getting a titan on stage 4 was pretty much the best possible rng.

apart from being a rng grind, there’s still a lot going on in terms of awareness of what is spawning / has already spawned and where the best place is to be relative to where the teleporter is. stage 5 is a good example of that, i start running far away in case a grandparent spawns, and some horde bosses can kill me instantly if i’m too close (such as brass contraptions and greater wisps)

i was really nervous during the mithrix fight which is why my aim was so bad. it’s hard to aim when your brain is turned off. the escape sequence is also much harder than it looks.

i was going for this for about a week. i got a bunch of stage 5 attempts but only got to the moon 4 times. 2 of those died to fall damage from failing pillar skip, and i also lost a run to phase 3 walls. also shoutouts to a rock hitting me on a stage 5 spawn once which killed me instantly, really fun way to end a run

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