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 clean solution to, so 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).

I would love to go over everything in detail, but I'll stick to just showing off some of the notable non-numerical changes. There's so much more than this, but you can see all the details and exact numbers changed in the Wiki.

Survivor	Skill	Description
	Magnetic Grenade	Throw a grenade that attaches to enemies and explodes for 700% damage. Can hold up to 2.
	Strafe	Agile. Quickly fire a seeking arrow for 150% damage. Critical strikes reduce all skill cooldowns by 1s.
	Serrated Dagger	Agile. Lunge and slash for 360% damage. Critical strikes cause hemorrhaging and lacerate enemies. (Lacerate increases damage taken from skills by 25%, nonstacking.)
	Serrated Shiv	Agile. Throw hidden blades for 2x160% damage. Critical strikes cause hemorrhaging and wound enemies. (Wound reduces enemy speed by 40%, nonstacking.)
	Bubble Shield	Place an impenetrable shield that blocks incoming damage and grants up to 25% bonus shields to allies inside.
	Snapfreeze	Freezing. Create a barrier that blocks attacks and hurts enemies for 100% damage.
	Ion Surge	Stunning. Burst into the sky, dealing 600% damage. Only recharges while grounded. (...but it's now a utility skill, and the cooldown is only 1.5 seconds.)
	DIRECTIVE: Harvest	Fire a bolt that does 400% damage and injects an enemy. Targets can be executed and drop multiple healing fruits on death that heal for 25% HP.
	Spiked Fist	Stunning. Fire your gauntlet forward, rapidly pulling you to your target. Light targets are pulled to YOU instead. (For context, the alt grapple physics are now completely different.)
	Thunderslam	Stunning. Slam your fists down, dealing 1200% damage on impact. Barrier is granted for each target hit.
	Neurotoxin	Poisonous. Agile. Spit toxic bile for 320% damage. Always lands a Critical Strike on a poisoned target.
	Ravenous Bite	Poisonous. Slayer. Regenerative. Bite an enemy for 400% damage. Kills triple your Regenerative duration.
	Frenzied Leap	Stunning. Leap into the air, dealing 700% damage. Reduce the cooldown of all skills by 1s for every enemy hit.
	Vulcan Shotgun	Fire a blast of pellets that deal 8x100% damage. Charging the attack narrows the spread and removes damage falloff.
	Beacon: Resupply	(No description change, but now regains charges over time.)
	Void Corruption	Gain Corruption over time, the rate of which is increased by held void items. Once transformed, rapidly lose corruption. (No longer imapcted by damage, healing, or crits.)
	Inner Strength	When you take fatal damage, Saving Grace is consumed to endure the hit and grant 100% of your health as barrier. When you would gain Tranquility while under the effects of Saving Grace, you may consume your Saving Grace to revive a fallen Survivor.
	Boosted Roll	Stunning. Speed forward at full charge, dealing 600% damage and leaving a trail of oil behind you.

Item Balance

Significant changes to many Items and Equipment have been made. In terms of item balance, here are my goals:

• Make sure all items serve some kind of purpose on their own.
• Make sure that the scenarios in which a given item is strong are not too rare (basically, no item should be auto-scrapped).
• Ensure that powerful item synergies remain in order to keep runs unique, but are not too powerful as to be an automatic win.
• 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 slight changes made to hopefully open up additional synergies.

Some bigger changes that I'm particularly fond of (again, for full details check the Wiki):

Icon	Name	Description
	Fireworks	Activating an intractable launches 6 (+4 per stack) fireworks that deal 300% base damage and ignite enemies for 50% TOTAL damage.
	Roll of Pennies	Gain up to 5 (+5 per stack) gold on taking damage from an enemy, scaling with damage taken. Gain 1 armor for every 2 gold gained within the past 4 (+1 per stack) seconds. Scales over time.
	Warbanner	Prepare a banner after leaving combat for 10 seconds. Place the banner upon entering combat, strengthening all allies within 12m (+6m per stack). Raises attack and movement speed by 30%. Has a 30 second cooldown.
	Bandolier	15% (+8% per stack) chance on kill to drop an ammo pack that resets all skill cooldowns. Can overstock skills by 1 charge. (Overstock allows skills to have more charges than their maximum until the stock is consumed.)
	Death Mark	Increase damage done to enemies by 7% (+7% per stack) per debuff they are afflicted with. Enemies with 4 or more debuffs are marked for death, increasing damage taken by 35% from all sources for 7 (+3s per stack) seconds.
	Hunter's Harpoon	Killing an enemy increases movement speed by 100% for 1.5 (+0.75 per stack) seconds. Consecutive kills increase duration for up to 25 seconds.
	Infusion	Killing an enemy increases your health permanently by 1, up to a maximum of 100 health. Reaching the maximum consumes this item to additionally increase base health regeneration by +1.5 hp/s.
	Old War Stealthkit	When taking damage, chance to turn invisible and gain 40% movement speed for 4s (+2s per stack). Chance starts at 5% and scales with damage taken.
	Ben's Raincoat	Prevents up to 3 (+1 per stack) debuffs and instead grants a temporary barrier equal to 15% (+5% per stack) of maximum health. All charges refresh over 30 seconds.
	Dio's Best Friend	Upon death, this item will be consumed and you will return to life with 3 seconds of invulnerability. Drops 3 common items upon consumption.
	Laser Scope	Gain 10% (+5% per stack) critical chance. Critical strikes from your skills strike again for 70% TOTAL damage 1 (+1 per stack) times.
	Soulbound Catalyst	Kills generate soul charges. Upon activating your Equipment, consume all soul charges to fire a number of homing wisps for 320% (+320% per stack) base damage equal to 2 + the number of soul charges consumed.
	Happiest Mask	Killing enemies has a 25% chance to spawn a ghost of the killed enemy with 500% (+500% per stack) damage. Lasts 20 seconds.
	Queen's Gland	Every 30 (-10% per stack) seconds, summon a Beetle Guard with 200% (+100% per stack) damage, 100% (+50% per stack) health, and bonus 30% attack speed. Can have up to 2 Guards at a time.
	Lost Seer's Lenses	Your attacks have a 1% (+1% per stack) chance to create a void pulse, dealing 1000% TOTAL damage and instantly killing non-boss enemies below 50% health. Reduced effectiveness on large enemies.
	Ocular HUD	Gain +100% Critical Strike Chance for 8 seconds. While active, excess Critical Strike Chance is turned into Critical Strike Damage.

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 (I don't really send any messages in either, but feel free to reach out).

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