Risk of Rain 2 offers you multiple methods of "breaking the game." As you stack item upon item in phenomenal god runs, with the rush of enemies surrounding you and numbers whizzing past detailing how much damage you're dealing per second, it's hard not to see the appeal of this sleeper-hit roguelike. However, even mega fans might not be aware of one of the best ways to create an absolutely broken build.
If you start stacking Gesture of the Drowned, a Lunar item that reduces the cooldown of your equipment while causing it to activate automatically, you gain the potential to become a sedentary damage dealer that gets to stand around "doing nothing" more easily than an overpowered Engineer. This all depends on what equipment you have when you commit to picking up Gesture of the Drowned. Not to worry! We've got you covered with the best equipment items to use when you're trying to use Gesture of the Drowned at max efficiency!
Additional Fuel Cells needed/recommended for reducing equipment cooldowns!
5 Preon Accumulator
The Preon Accumulator possesses a notoriously long cooldown time. If any piece of equipment is going to benefit from having its cooldown time reduced, it's this discount BFG over here. Normally, a sound tactic for when you have the Accumulator is to wait until you've activated an area's teleporter. The giant boss shows up alongside a horde of enemies, and firing the Accumulator at it means you'll be taking a chunk out of its very hefty health pool.
You'll then have to wait a whopping 140 seconds before you can use it again. That is, unless you have Gesture of the Drowned. The time it takes to use the Preon Accumulator after you've acquired your first Gesture is instantly halved, with any subsequent Gestures reducing the cooldown a further 15 percent. Acquire enough, and you'll be shooting gobs of damage-dealing green energy within seconds of each other.
What makes the Preon Accumulator so nifty to pair with Gesture of the Drowned is its ability to "clear the room," so to speak. It can decimate a big boss' health while also eliminating smaller mobs along the way. If you have this baby going one shot after the other, you're saving yourself a lot of trouble once things get wild in harder stages.
One thing to note if you use this pairing is that you should try to aim the Accumulator once you notice it's automatically charging up for a shot. That way you can target the bullet-sponges while the errant bolts of energy can mop their surroundings.
4 Ocular HUD
The Ocular HUD makes a better case for itself as a pairing with Gesture of the Drowned over the Accumulator because you don't have to keep an eye on it activating in order to aim it. The HUD just ensures that when it's on, every single one of your hits will be a critical strike. So rather than having to track when the cooldown runs out, you can just continuously fire and you'll get moments of maximum damage with your regular attacks.
If you have enough Gestures and Fuel Cells in your inventory, you can even end up constantly landing critical strikes nonstop. Rather than activating once every minute, your Oculuar HUD will be permanently on. This bodes well for survivors like the Huntress and Commando, but damn does it spell supreme success for high damage dealers like the Artificer and Loader.
3 Gorag's Opus
More than any other piece of equipment, Gorag's Opus is the one you can share with friends. When you activate it, it increases the movement and attack speed of you and your fellow survivors. It even helps out any drones or turrets you've acquired along the way. So while you're receiving the benefit of this boost, your allies get to join in on the fun as well.
When you pair Opus with Gesture of the Drowned, you're essentially giving everyone on your team an extra piece of equipment as they reap the benefits of yours. It's like the ultimate support equipment you can have in Risk of Rain 2. As with the HUD, the pairing with Gesture means that at some point, you can drastically reduce the 45-second cooldown of Gorag's Opus to something negligible.
Your team can then become permanent speed demons, firing primary and secondary attacks faster than normal and zipping across the map with impunity!
2 Disposable Missile Launcher
Pair enough Gestures of the Drowned with Fuel Cells and one Disposable Missile Launcher, and you'll never have to fire your primary weapon ever again. Instead, your survivor will become a walking launcher of death as a stream of missiles just continuously spew from your character. The cooldown is not as long as the Accumulator, but it's just as damage dealing without you having to aim a weapon at a monster for it to work.
Collecting Gestures and Fuel Cells is a must if you get a Disposable Missile Launcher, at least once in your Risk-of-Run-2-playing life. If you love those moments when the game gets absolutely wild on screen, with damage numbers flying across the screen and projectiles everywhere, then you need to experience those twelve missiles shooting from the launcher on your survivors back.
1 Royal Capacitor
The Royal Capacitor is the absolute perfect piece of equipment to use with Gesture of the Drowned, hands down. For one thing, its cooldown is only one-fifth of a minute. That's just 20 seconds you have to wait before you can strike down a monster with lightning. Pairing that with Gesture cuts that measly 20 seconds in half. For another thing, each lightning strike deals an astronomical amount of damage in one hit. You are literally getting more bang for your buck.
Without Gesture, you press a button to activate the Royal Capacitor when it's ready. But with Gesture, you just look at an enemy and the Capacitor activates. Is there anything cooler than killing monsters with a glance?
Toss a few crowbars into your inventory for good measure, and you might be able to slaughter bosses in one blow. If you're looking to build your character around Gesture of the Drowned, you cannot go wrong with the Royal Capacitor.