SegmentNextRisk of Rain 2 Character Tier List: Every Survivor Ranked, Who To Play
A Risk of Rain 2 survivor is not fast or slow in isolation. It is fast or slow at turning a pile of items into damage, and that is what any honest ranking measures: how much a character does on its own, how badly it needs the run to go well first, and whether it has a way out when a stage goes wrong. The list below sorts all nineteen playable characters on that, with the base health each one starts with, because the numbers explain a lot of the placements on their own.
The Tier List
| Tier | Survivors | What they have in common |
|---|---|---|
| S | Loader, Railgunner, Seeker, False Son, Void Fiend | They carry a run before the items arrive, either through a single enormous hit or through healing and mobility that let them ignore what the stage is doing |
| A | Bandit, Captain, Acrid, CHEF, Mercenary | Excellent once the run cooperates: each one needs either a specific item type or a player willing to learn the timing |
| B | Engineer, Artificer, Huntress, MUL-T, Operator, Drifter | Reliable and slow to snowball, usually because the kit answers one problem well and another badly |
| C | REX, Commando, Heretic | Playable on any difficulty, but they ask more of the player or the item luck than anything above them |
No D tier is listed because every survivor here clears Monsoon with the right build. The tiers describe how much has to go right first.
S Tier
Loader is the one most rankings put first, and it is a mobility argument rather than a damage one. Her gauntlet gives her a barrier on every hit, she cannot take fall damage at all, and her grapple turns any stage into a straight line, so the two ways runs usually end, a slow retreat that fails and a fall into something that kills you, are both closed. She also starts with 160 health against the 110 most survivors have. Our Loader guide has the full kit and the charge mechanics her damage depends on.
Railgunner sits beside her for the opposite reason. She has no armor and the same 110 health as a Commando, but a scoped shot lands a critical hit for enough to remove a boss in the early stages without a single damage item, and very little else on this list works before the items arrive. Void Fiend alternates between a corrupted form that hits far harder and a normal form that has to build back up, and the swap is on a resource rather than a cooldown, so the ceiling is high whenever a player manages it. Seeker starts with 115 health and 20 armor and heals out of her own kit rather than out of the item pool, with Meditate restoring health to the team and Unseen Hand healing off the damage it deals. False Son starts with 180, the second largest pool of any survivor you can pick, and his Lunar Spikes pay him either way: every spike he has not spent is attack speed and armor, and every one he has spent is movement speed and regeneration.
A Tier
Bandit is the assassin: his kit is built around resetting a cooldown on a kill, so he is at his best where the stage is full of small enemies and at his worst against a single boss with a health bar. Captain is the support pick, with beacons that heal, stun, resupply equipment or drive purchase costs down, plus an orbital strike, and our Huntress guide's complaint about a squishy survivor with nothing to hide behind is the exact gap he fills in a group. Acrid has 160 health and the highest base damage of the ordinary survivors at 15, and poison that does the work while he retreats.
CHEF is stronger than the joke suggests, because his passive pays for variety: an enemy hit by two or more different skills before it dies drops healing food, and the bonus grows with each extra skill involved, so a player who cycles the whole kit is healing constantly. Mercenary is the skill entry on this list, and the Mercenary guide explains why: his damage comes from cancelling one animation into the next, and the two figures that page quotes, 530 percent out of a Whirlwind cancel and 730 percent out of a full chain begun with Blinding Assault, are what a practised player gets rather than what the kit does on its own. His invulnerability frames are what keep him here rather than in B.
B Tier
Engineer is the tier's headline argument, and the two rankings we checked against put him in different places, one in A and one in B. Our own Engineer guide explains both positions at once: two turrets that inherit every item you hold and revive themselves squeeze more out of each pickup than any other kit here does, and he has the worst movement of any survivor, which is precisely the thing S tier is made of. Artificer splits the same way. Her burst is enormous, her cooldowns are long and her mobility is thin, and the five builds on our Artificer page are mostly attempts to solve the second and third problems.
Huntress has the smallest health pool in the game at 90, shared with Operator, and our page calls her a hard carry whose long cooldowns have to be learned. She stays mid list because everything she does happens at range while moving. MUL-T has the largest health pool of any base game survivor at 200 and carries two equipment at once, which is unique, but his damage is unremarkable until the stacks arrive. Operator and Drifter are the newest arrivals from the Alloyed Collective expansion and have the least settled placements of anyone here; Drifter starts with 170 health and turns junk into temporary items, which our Drifter guide covers in full.
C Tier
REX pays health to use his own skills, which is a real cost on a 130 health frame, and he needs a healing item earlier than anyone else on this page. Commando is the survivor everyone starts with: a simple kit with no standout mechanic, which scales beautifully with on hit items and does very little before they arrive. The Heretic is the strangest entry, because you cannot select her. Holding all four Heresy lunar items at once replaces whoever you were with a character who has 440 base health, 18 base damage and a health bar that drains constantly. The stat line is the best in the game and the drain is why she is down here.
Who Should You Actually Play?
For a first serious run, Loader, because the barrier and the grapple forgive the mistakes that end early runs, and she is unlocked by beating one specific guardian rather than by a long grind. For a player who wants to win from range, Railgunner. For anyone learning the game rather than beating it, the Huntress is unlocked from the start and teaches the movement the rest of the roster assumes. The unlock cost of each of these matters as much as the tier, and it is set out on our survivor unlock guide.
One caution about tier lists in this game generally: the items decide more than the character does. A Commando holding the top of our items tier list beats a Loader who found nothing, and the ten items our survivor builds guide says three of our four written up survivors agree on will do more for a run than moving one row up this table.
Tier List Questions
Who is the best character in Risk of Rain 2?
Loader, on the balance of the rankings we compared and on her own stat line: 160 base health, no fall damage, a barrier on every gauntlet hit and a grapple that gets her out of anything. Railgunner is the pick if you would rather delete a boss than survive one.
Who is the hardest survivor to play?
Mercenary, by our own Mercenary page's account, since his damage depends on chaining animation cancels rather than on landing attacks. The Heretic is harder still in a different way, because she loses health constantly and has to be assembled out of four lunar items mid run.
How many survivors are there?
Eighteen you can select, across the base game and the Survivors of the Void, Seekers of the Storm and Alloyed Collective expansions, plus the Heretic, who is reached through items. The Risk of Rain 2 hub covers what each stage of a run asks of whoever you picked.