Risk of Rain 2 – Shrines Guide

Shrines are where worshippers whisper sweet nothings to a deity (who may or may not listen), usually combined with an offering to help ensure the deity is at least looking in your general direction when you scream for help. Each shrine does something different, and each shrine is useful in its own way:

Shrine of Chance

It looks like a statue of one of those stupid rock golem dudes. The shrine of chance can be prayed to with a monetary offering for a chance to spawn a random item. The shrine can be prayed to as many times as you want — however the cost increases with each prayer. In addition, once you get two items out of the shrine, it cuts its losses and goes silent instead of allowing you to gamble further.

These guys initially start cheaper than normal chests (around only 65% cost, so $17 on the first prayer on the first level). Each prayer increases the cost by about 35%. Once you start failing this shrine three or four times, the cost becomes prohibitively expensive and you might as well cut your own losses. An interesting side note, the shrine is capable of giving out uncommon, legendary, and equipment items, all in addition to common items.

Shrine of Blood

The shrine of searing pain and get rich quick schemes. When praying to this shrine, it takes a percentage of your maximum health, and then returns to you gold, proportionate to the amount of health taken. This shrine is great to get some quick cash to open nearby chests, however it can be dangerous if you do not have decent healing items or are under attack.

This shrine can only be used up to three times. The percentage of health taken increases with each use, starting at 50%, then 75%, then 93%. If you do not have more health than the percent needed to activate the shrine, you will not be able to activate it until healed. For those with very small health pools (i.e people using transcendence, and have only 1 HP), you will find you get literally no money from interacting with these things. Again, the amount of money awarded is proportionate to the amount of health you lost (not the percentage of health, though that is a factor). Characters with more maximum health will get more money.

Shrine of the Woods

The shrine of laughter and tickles. It only spawns on The Roost (one of the first levels). It costs slightly more than a common chest to activate, and cost modestly increases with each use. Once activated, it creates a zone of healing around itself that heals you and your allies for a small percentage each second. Each activation of the shrine increases the radius (but not the amount healed) of the shrine’s influence.

This shrine can only be activated three times, and can be useful early and mid game if nearby the teleporter or a similar hot area. Unfortunately, its healing is relatively small compared to the amount of healing you could generate with certain item combinations, but it is welcome nonetheless.

Shrine of Order

The shrine of being… Sequenced. The ultimate gambler’s cocaine. It costs one lunar coin to activate. Once activated, the shrine takes an inventory of all of your items. The total number of items of each class is counted (I.e, 30 common items, 15 uncommon items, 3 legendary items, etc; Lunar and boss items also have their own category). The shrine then chooses a random item you had in each category, and converts all other items of that category to that item.

For example: you had 30 total common items and 15 total uncommon items. Within your common items, you were carrying some crowbars, and for your uncommons you were carrying Hopoo feathers. If the shrine were to choose the Crowbar and the Hopoo feather for its items, you would now have no items except for 30 crowbars and 15 Hopoo feathers. Enjoy doing 1020% damage to enemies above 90% health, and enjoy having 16 total jumps.

This sounds awesome. And it is. It’s completely awesome and fun to throw out the synergy of everything and try out truly radical stacks of items. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, since you have no way to control which items get picked to be the stack of items. You can end up with 30 war banners and 15 rose bucklers and be absolutely thrashed by the enemy. But, like I said, gambler’s cocaine.

Shrine of Gold

Looks exactly like a Shrine of Chance, but its gilded gold. It’s also about ten times as expensive. Once prayed to, you will see “A gold orb appears…”. Once the teleporter event is completed, a gold portal will spawn.

Shrine of the Mountain

Looks like three twisted claws coming out of the ground. Costs nothing to activate. Once activated, you will “Invite the challenge of the Mountain…”. This modifies the teleporter event for the current stage to spawn additional bosses, or modify bosses into elites. This ramps up the difficulty of the teleporter challenge, but entices double (or even triple) loot once the bosses are defeated. Multiple Shrines of the Mountain will stack together if activated before the teleporter is activated, which further increases difficulty and loot.

It should be noted, that Shrines of the Mountain appear to stack additively, not multiplicatively. Activating two shrines of the mountain will create three pieces of loot for each player (two bonus, one for each shrine) and not four (if you were for instance, double the loot normally for two, then double it again for four because two shrines) or any other number you were thinking of.

Shrine of Combat

Has a weird looking purple icon above it that looks like a mortar shell pointed downwards, surrounded by wings. The Shrine of Combat costs nothing to activate, and spawns a few slightly-more-difficult-than-the-current-difficulty mobs to fight. There’s really no reward beyond the money you get from killing the spawned mobs for activating this. Late game, this shrine can and will spawn a whole boat load of Overloading Magma Worms specifically engineered for your destruction.

Newt Altar

It’s like an… oyster or something with blue stalagmites poking out of the side of it. They appear in a few predefined places, which are usually hard to reach (though a few are just out on the ground). They cost one Lunar coin to activate, and once they do they will guarantee a blue portal spawn at the end of the teleporter event. It is, however, important that the shrine is activated before the teleporter is, or else you’ll probably end up wasting a coin.

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