Fun game, but Dead Cells is better.

[Piecy]

I've enjoyed playing both games as someone who is not typically good at difficult rougelites (Noita being the most difficult by far). From my perspective, while ROR2 can be super satisfying to play, it requires more RNG to get a great run, compared to DC, in which a good run is almost guaranteed if you stay alive long enough. I think items and weapons have consistently better synergies and a 2D space is easier to combat in; losing also is reliably due to a lack of skill, whereas I feel the nature of ROR2 allows for a lot of "unfair" deaths.

The scaling mechanic in ROR2 is great, don't get me wrong, but I always seem to be outscaled by the end. I've tried full scale looting each stage (which usually gets me to stage 5), just to get smushed by the final boss. I've also tried the 2 minute per stage strat, but I don't end up finding good items and usually get assassinated by an elite or wandering vagrant lol.

I've beaten the game a lot on drizzle, but am getting tired of trying for a rainstorm win. I've gotten close, I know I have the capacity to do it and I'll probably keep trying on and off. I've just don't have the initial passion to carry me through. I've lost way more dead cells runs than I have for this game, but its progression and gameplay keeps me motivated and I've beaten the first couple difficulty levels.

Anyway, that is just my comparison between two solid games. I'd appreciate advice about the balance of time per stage and looting. Bandit is my fav character, tips for improving here also would be nice. Thanks

[Nefarious Slurp]

They are not even remotely similar though?

[lordclipsus]

Dead cells might very well be a better game than RoR2, tho that's subjective, but I find the comparison pointless to begin with. A 2d sidescroller and an over the shoulder shooter are way too different for any comparison to mean anything. The only thing dead cells and this game have in common is that you have to start again when you die.
I also believe you vastly overestimate the impact of RNG on the success of a run. Sure, good RNG can save a losing run, and bad RNG can make the game way harder, but you would need to have seriously bad, like, astronomically bad RNG for it to be the sole cause of your loss. People have beaten eclipse 8 (in case you aren't familiar with eclipse, it is monsoon with extra modifiers, one more per level and capping at 8, similar to the boss cells system in dead cells) with at least four of the survivors in this game (Acrid, Railgunner, Artificer, and Loader, that I know of) without picking up any items. The better RNG the less good you need to be to win, but if you're good enough almost any run is winnable. The best players have gotten the record of consecutive wins in eclipse 8 to over 100, while rotating through every survivor.


Now, the issue of how long to stay in a map has been discussed to death, so you might get a lot of different answers. Here is my take: you scale with items way better than the enemy scales with time. If you saw threads from a couple of years ago you'd see a lot of people parroting a "5 minutes per stage" rule. In my experience that rule is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The clock is just a distraction, you never make decissions based on how long you have spent on a stage, you make decissions based on how long your next action will take. Taking a minute to go and open three chests is always the correct choice, regardless of what the clock says. On the same vein, taking three minutes to go across the map and open a single chest is a waste, regardless of how fast you have otherwise played the stage. Put in simpler terms, "minutes per stage" is a worthless metric, the metric you shohuld care about is "items per minute". There isn't a goal to hit there and be fine with, either, even if you can use a shorthand like "more items than minutes" to assess whether you're keeping pace with the scaling. The faster you get at full looting the easier the run will be.

[Piecy]

Originally posted by Calaban:

They are not even remotely similar though?

For sure bro, I just mean that in terms of accessibility, as a roguelite novice, I find Dead Cells better and more engaging for reasons previously listed.

Originally posted by lordclipsus:

Sure, good RNG can save a losing run, and bad RNG can make the game way harder, but you would need to have seriously bad, like, astronomically bad RNG for it to be the sole cause of your loss.

I hear ya there, I definitely need to work on better gamesense and think through my runs a bit more. I guess I'm a bit hung up on the rng factor as my latest rainstorm run ended up with me not finding any equipment items which I felt heavily contributed to me losing on the final boss. But as you say, people can beat the game with way heavier handicaps. Thanks for the looting advice

[Wehzy]

Cool story but why are even posting this? What is the point?

[Piecy]

Originally posted by Wehzy:

Cool story but why are even posting this? What is the point?

True, why post and why comment? Everyone does things that don't make sense I guess

[$2 Hero]

Which game is more like vampire survivors

[George Droyd]

RoR has better lore than Dead Cells imo, Noita lore is the endgame. But the latter is a trial & error math ritual while the first two are pure number enlargement games.

[Ricy40]

I come at this from the other end of the discussion haha. I just beat 0BC in dead cells!

I as of writing (of course) find risk of rain 2 better as I have hundreds of hours poured into it. I think they both do things incredibly well and it's barely comparable.

The main difference I've found is the combat. In dead cells u have one run and the loot pool seems to put you down a set number of builds, by which I mean you get brutality build going or a tactics or a survival one. However, no matter what you do, no matter how many weapons you switch through it feels pretty limited to these options. This I think is fine as the combat in dead cells itself is much more engaging than ror2. However, where ror2 lacks in base combat mechanics it makes up for in item builds, refining random items obtained using printers and etc to come up with wildly different builds each run feels very satisfying, yes you may have the same 4 base attacks on a character but one run I'm focusing on having proc chain come from missiles from my attacks, to the next where I am one shotting everything with precision or even I am running a build where stuff dies for damaging me.

The other big difference for me is run length. Dead Cells (at the moment) seems like it has a max run length after u beat the boss or use the door at the end (whatever that may lead to), meanwhile risk of rain i go I'm not feeling mithrix today and just loop, heck I looped 20 times through 100 stages in a single run just for the fun of it.

At the end of the day both games are incredible for different reasons and very very fun roguelites. You should keep st risk of rain 2, until u get comfortable playing on monsoon difficulty at least. As that is when the true game starts to shine through. And if you need a challenge and/or hate yourself, try eclipse. I have beaten eclipse 8 with every survivor just ofr a lil shiny golden symbol and it's probably the hardest challenge any game has ever given me.

Like deadcells the key to survival in risk of rain is to not get hit at all, keep at it you'll soon find the true potential of the game, and I'll keep at dead cells and eventually beat 5BC :D

[The Official Dwayne "The Rock" J]

i tried dead cells for like 1 hour and couldnt get into it, i think a big reason for that was the lack of mouse aim (like in risk of rain returns or (modded) terraria)

[i have 2026 vision fear me]

Doesn't take too much RNG to win, it's definitely a large factor, much like how RNG is in Fear and Hunger, but knowledge is still arguably more important in RoR2 than in F&H funnily enough. There are secret chests and items you can get for boosts, like on aquaduct there's the twin bands IF you get good RNG with the pressure plates unfortunately, but things like that exist to give you a boost in you're falling behind. No idea how much you know or played but yeah, that's the thing with these games. And a large part why they're replayable as much as they are.

I never played deadcells and it does not look interesting to me at all to be frank, same with Hades even though they're highly appraised. But that's just how it is.

[Pretentieux]

I've put 40 hours into this game as of today and I still have no clue why people like this. Maybe it's one of those things where it's only good in multiplayer. For a solo player, this is a very low-tier representation of the genre IMO.

Yeah I wasn't a huge fan of hades. Over a thousand hours in Isaac and around two hundred in Gungeon. Hades just wasn't for me. Dead Cells had a lame difficulty adjustment that basically just amounted to them taking away your Estus flasks. I didn't really appreciate Dead Cells as much as the rest of the community did, either.

[George Droyd]

Originally posted by Pretentieux:

I've put 40 hours into this game as of today and I still have no clue why people like this.

It's not for everybody, if you're the type of player who kills yourself before the final boss using the clone in Gungeon just because you want to see how busted your run can get it's a good time. The RoR 1 endgame was seeing how many items you could get before the game crashed, HP maxed out at 9999 but it wasn't hard to become invincible.

RoR 2 even takes this into account by making some lategame enemies "invisible/cloaked/clear" just to reduce the load on your PC and throwing in void-time-police crabs that instantly KO everything in a large bubble. 40 hours is what some runs can take (I think my longest was 20) but if that initial hook doesn't get you then you probably won't enjoy it. Risk of Rain is more like Balatro than Hades in that it's made to be broken, and the long-time fans appreciate that.

[Pretentieux]

Right on man!

[Princess Luna]

Sure a single-player Dead Cells can beat multi-player ROR2?

[☠Black Knight]

I'm gonna play devil's advocate a bit, and go against the narrative of RNG not being a deciding factor in your run. Now, don't get me wrong. I LOVE ror2, and I like it a lot more than dead cells.

But to say that RNG doesn't decide the outcome of your run, is only really true on Monsoon and below. On eclipse, and especially Eclipse 8, you basically need a few very specific items (on most survivors) or you are simply not going to win. Just because a streamer who plays the game for a living, can manage to beat Eclipse 8 once in a blue moon with 0 items, doesn't mean RNG isn't an important factor. That's like saying you can manage to win the lottery if you buy a ticket every single time. Does it mean that it's a good idea? No.

Commando is perhaps the most obvious example of this. You can be the absolute best player in the world. But god help you if you get to stage 5 and STILL don't have any bleed or AoE. You're basically just SOL.

And it's really frustrating to spend an hour of your day trying to finish an Eclipse run, only to get to stage 5 or 6 and realize you have lost and there is simply nothing you can do about it. All because the game decided to ♥♥♥♥ you over. Some characters like Bandit, Acrid and Loader can make do with very little, yes.

But the vast majority of them absolutely NEED some very specific things, in order to have any chance in hell of doing anything at all. If you're captain and make it to Mithrix on Eclipse 8, and you don't have movement speed or a chronobauble... then don't even bother trying to fight him. You have already lost. Even if you somehow manage to kill him with Diablo Strike, the lunar chimera will tear you apart.

Now, that IS the nature of Eclipse, don't get me wrong. It's the entire reason why that game mode exists in the first place. But to say that RNG isn't the deciding factor in 99% of your runs is to say you just haven't been paying enough attention.

EDIT - And just to avoid confusion, I am assuming that someone is playing Eclipse the way most people do (ie, without lunars or going to void fields). Obviously, using lunar items or going to void fields early can fix a lot of these issues. But if you aren't doing that, then you are absolutely at the mercy of whatever you find on those first 5 stages. And 50% of the time, it isn't anything good.