Just like the previous game, there are some artifacts that are made more for the sake of having your run become stupidly broken.
- The Artifact of Command returns from Risk of Rain 1 in all its glory. Just like the first game, the ability to choose which item you get from that rarity pool and basically custom-build your run can make the game almost hilariously easy. It is especially important to note that using Artifacts does not block your ability to unlock other items/challenges, making getting most of them a lot easier. The only nerf to Command is that it no longer allows you to pick items you haven't unlocked, but this is at best a nuisance.
- Also returning from the first game is the Artifact of Sacrifice. Sacrifice removes all chests, shops, and chance shrines from the game, but now items will drop from enemy kills. While the odds of a drop are somewhat random, enemies are limitless until the teleporter event is done, which means you can spend as long as you like cutting down enemies for items. As the difficulty increases, enemies spawn in greater number and the odds of a drop increase proportionally. The wildest part about Sacrifice is that it synergizes with Command, meaning that you can have a run with potentially infinite items, completely at your discretion what you get. This combo also makes the Void Fields extremely powerful as the game considers it a "late" map, meaning drops are late-game common at any point in the run and its wave-style gameplay means a lot of enemies are spawning, which results in Command spheres littering the area by the time it's done. It's especially powerful in the Bulwark's Ambry and Golden Coast because the timer pauses in those areas, allowing the player to grind for more items off the endlessly-respawning enemies for as long as they want without worrying at all about the game's difficulty increasing.
- Forgive Me Please is an Equipment that procs your on-kill effects eight times over eight seconds. Soulbound Catalyst is a Legendary that reduces your Equipment cooldown by four seconds for every kill. Get lucky enough to combine the two and you have a self-sustaining Equipment that can fill Infusions, trigger Topaz Brooch and Fresh Meat, and cause constant Gasoline, Will-O-The-Wisp, and Ceremonial Daggers effects to pop off. Stack enough of these items, a couple of Fuel Cells, and (for fun) throw in a Shaped Glass or two, and ANY run can rapidly become trivial.
- The Double Rebar trick for MUL-T. Due to a Good Bad Bug, changing your use item loadouts makes MUL-T's next attack come out instantly and fully charged, even the Rebar Launcher which is normally a 6 second charge to get to full strength. Ergo, putting the Rebar Launcher as both loadouts' primary attack and spending the entire game holding the R key (or whatever you rebind it to) means that from the start of the run you can pump out 600% damage attacks so quickly that even max attack speed won't make it go any faster, turning MUL-T into the character with the single highest damage in the game. Unfortunately this has been patched since the game's full release.
- The original Ben's Raincoat from Survivors of the Void, which was Boring, but Practical in its purest form. An extremely useful defensive item, the Raincoat granted the holder 100 additional HP per stack, and (more importantly) near-perfect debuff immunity. Burn, Anti-Heal, Freeze, Bleed, Collapse, etc, all became completely nonexistent while holding this item, with the only debuffs that could touch the user being Overheat (which only increases the now non-existent Burn damage), cooldowns for items that had them, and the Curse debuff in Eclipse. It didn't take long for Hopoo to take the nerf hammer to the item, making it so it could only negate one debuff per stack every 5 seconds.
- The legendary items Aegis, Rejuvenation Rack, and N'kuhana's Opinion work extremely well together. Aegis gives the player temporary shields beyond their max HP for 50% of the amount healed per Aegis. Rejuvenation Rack adds +100% to all healing for each Rack the player has. N'kuhana's Opinion periodically damages enemies around the player whenever the player is healed past a certain point. Put these all together with Bustling or Weeping Fungus and you can just stand around (or run around) and kill enemies. Get the Mired Urn and you don't even have to pick!
- This is especially broken for Void Fiend, whose Suppress ability allows him to reduce his corruption by 25% to heal 25% of his health. Rejuvenation Rack changes the latter to 50% (without affecting the former), N'kuhana's Opinion causes this to fire skulls at nearby enemies, and Aegis causes this to heal him above full health. What makes this especially overpowered is that each Void item he collects raises his minimum corruption by 2%. Collecting exactly thirteen Void items would raise his minimum corruption level to 26%. However, you can still use Suppress at 26% in this state. This means that consistently spamming Suppress to keep him in his uncorrupted state will keep him at or near 200% of his HP while he fires skulls at enemies. Needless to say, this makes him incredibly powerful. That said, there isn't a single character for whom this setup isn't a Game-Breaker.
- Another extremely powerful item is Little Disciple, which fires tracking wisps at nearby enemies whenever the player sprints. The rate of fire is based on movement speed, so raising this stat will result in more wisps being fired. So with Little Disciple and enough Paul's Goat Hoofs, you can simply run around killing everything on the level without really having to fire. Unfortunately, it's a rare drop from Grovetender that only occurs when it's the level boss, so you can only get it rarely (unless you're playing on Command, but even then, not every boss drops a boss item). If you manage to get a Trophy Hunter's Tricorn by the time you fight Grovetender, you can use that to guarantee a drop, though.
- The boss item Mired Urn, dropped by Clay Dunestriders, is also immensely powerful. Whenever the player is in combat, it siphons health from nearby enemies while also slowing them down. Beyond that, it also gives the player obvious visual indicators of nearby enemies and contributes to Death Mark (enemies with four or more unique debuffs take 50% more damage from all sources for seven seconds per Death Mark in the player's possession).
- Some items that target multiple enemies can easily become ridiculously powerful if stacked highly enough. Gasoline, for example, inflicts Ignite on all enemies within a given radius of any enemy that dies. Its radius scales linearly, meaning that its power grows exponentially (for those that don't remember their geometry, the area of a circle with radius r is πr, while the volume of a sphere with radius r is ⁴∕₃πr³. In other words, whether its power grows on a quadratic or cubic curve depends largely on the layout of a given level). Stacking Gasoline well into the double digits leads to a point where killing one enemy causes all other enemies on the level to suffer Ignite damage. It can get more ridiculous still, though, in the Survivors of the Void expansion, whose Ignition Tank item adds +300% damage to the player's Ignite effects for each Ignition Tank the player acquires. This can quickly lead to a point where killing one enemy kills all others on the level.
- The Heretic has extremely broken base stats because she has natural health degeneration, which normally requires players to use her Shadowfade ability at opportune times. To compensate for this, she has faster movement, higher attack power, and vastly higher HP than the other characters. However, it's possible to negate her health degeneration entirely by either stacking Cautious Slugs or using the item Transcendence (which does convert all but one of the player's health to shields, nullifying the effectiveness of items that rely on health-based healing; however, it also gives the player +50% HP overall for the first Transcendence and an additional +25% for each stack of Transcendence). Of course, even getting her requires that one character collect all four Heresy items, which normally costs at least eight Lunar coins. (However, the DLC item Eulogy Zero gives a 5% chance for all drops to be Lunar items for each Eulogy Zero the player carries, which can ultimately reduce the number of Lunar coins needed to get her - note that this can convert drops like Aurelionite's Halcyon Seed into Lunar items, or give Lunar items to Scavengers and the enemies in the Void Fields, the latter of which can be extremely dangerous for unsuspecting players.)
- Light Flux Pauldron and Stone Flux Pauldron sound like questionable tradeoffs on paper. The first halves cooldowns but also halves attack speed; the latter gives the player +100% HP but halves movement speed. (Further stacks of these items do not affect these stats in the same way.) However, these can be roughly offset with, respectively, seven Soldier's Syringes (+15% attack speed) and Paul's Goat Hoofs (+14% movement speed), or with fourteen Mocha (+7.5% attack speed and +7% movement speed), all of which are relatively common white items. This can result in significantly broken builds. Stone Flux Pauldron also pairs well with Shaped Glass, which halves HP and doubles damage output (though even with Stone Flux Pauldron, Shaped Glass will remove your one-hit protection). Collectively, stacking enough of these items can result in increased damage and reduced cooldowns without net reductions to HP or speed, leading to extremely high damage output.
- Because damage multipliers are multipliers, it's possible to raise damage output to ridiculous levels by stacking several of them as high as possible. With sufficient stacks of Armor-Piercing Rounds, Crowbars, Focus Crystals, Delicate Watches, and Laser Scopes, your maximum damage output can climb into the billions or, if you spend long playing enough with Command and Sacrifice enabled, far beyond (though you'll need to make sure the Delicate Watches don't break).
