Acrid Character Guide - Risk of Rain 2

MY ACRID GUIDE FOR RISK OF RAIN 2
Intro: 0:00-0:33
Acrid's Abilities: 0:34-4:38
Playstyle Tips: 4:39-6:10
Acrid Build/Items: 6:11-7:11

First up is Acrid's passive loadout, which has two choices available. Poison, the default ability, is exactly how it sounds, a poison that deals 10% of the enemies max health over 10 seconds, or Blight, which does 60% of Acrid's damage per second. The main difference between the two is that Poison cannot kill, ever. Instead, enemies will be brought to 1 health and you will have to use other abilities on them to finish them off. Blight, on the otherhand can kill, but it does far less damage than poison does. To compare is pretty easy. 10% over 10 seconds means that in 100 seconds you can bring down any enemy to 1 health. A teleporter event only lasts for 90 seconds, so even if you never hit the boss, you could end almost every stage within 100 seconds. To me, the answer is always to go poison, but you are free to do whatever. That being SAID, Guillotines do work, so if the poison gets elites below the threshold they will instantly die.

Second up is Acrid's primary, Vicious wounds. It functions almost the exact same as Mercenary, where your third hit does more damage than the preceding two. There is also a bug currently (i say bug because the devs said they will probably remove it) where if you cancel your attack with a sprint you can reset the animation of your attack, meaning you can do a buttload of DPS with your melee. Don't get used to it though, it will likely be removed.

Alright, THIRD we got Acrid's secondary loadout with a whopping two choices again. Neurotoxin or Ravenous bite. Neurotoxin is a ranged attack that will poison any enemy hit. Ravenous bite is a melee attack that deals 3x more damage to low health enemies and poisons them. Neurotoxin is Acrid's bread and butter and is what makes him the hybrid ranged/melee survivor he is. It allows him to spread poison safely from a distance without getting hugged by an imp.

Next up, we got Acrid's utility, which is either Caustic Leap or Frenzied Leap. Caustic Leap does 320% damage, stuns, and spreads poison. Frenzied Leap does 550% damage, stuns, and reduces the cooldown by 2 seconds for every enemy hit with the leap. Both give you big hops but one allows you to spread poison, which is my personal preference, however, Frenzied Leap is better if you like playing 3D frogger.

For the ability finale we have Epidemic, the best ABILITY EVER! With a ten second cooldown, Epidemic allows you to shoot a projectile that will spread poison to the nearest 20 targets. This ability itself makes Acrid the AOE king dino. The projectile spread can also kill (it does 100% damage to whoever it hits) AND proc, so you could quickly kill massive groups of enemies. I consider this the stronger version of Neurotoxin and basically use it the exact same way.

Thar be his abilities for all the world to see. Now, let's talk about what stages look like Acrid and some general playstyle tips.

In general, you shouldn't be spending too much time in the first stages as Acrid, as you need next to zero items to be successful. Like I said earlier, poison can bring any teleporter boss to one health in a maximum of 100 seconds. So bum-rushing the first few stages and only grabbing a single box or two is a viable strategy, seeing as how the first loop is super slow.

As for Acrid's "playstyle", rotation, whatever you wanna call it, all you do is spam poison on enemies. This means using Epidemic on groups of enemies whenever it is up and making sure to spam Neurotoxin on low health enemies/the boss. Rinse and repeat for total domination.

So that's your free blueprint to Acrid, your welcome, let's now talk about what items are good on Acrid.

If you watched the whole video so far it should be no surprise that DOTs or AOE items are god-tier on Acrid.

Tri tips, for example, are pretty lackluster for just about every survivor, but since Acrid's Epidemic can proc it on a group of 20 low health enemies it turns out to be an insane item on him.

Gasoline and Will-o-the-wisp are both exceptional for chain killing enemies.

The backup magazine is one of the most valuable white items for Acrid. More Neurotoxins = more poison.

Guillotine has already been explained, but I'll do it again real quick. Poison can proc Guillotine on enemies that go below the threshold.

And, of course, my personal favorite, Ceremonial daggers. Kill one enemy and start a chain reaction that wipes the whole map, it is just beautiful to watch.