Ever find yourself stuck around stage four, no matter how many items you’ve picked up? Your damage just doesn’t seem to keep up, and enemies start to feel like bullet sponges? There’s a simple yet incredibly powerful fix for that: understanding damage scaling—and how to build your item strategy around it.

This guide dives into one of the most important and misunderstood mechanics in Risk of Rain 2: multiplicative damage scaling through diverse item sources. By simply mixing your damage sources instead of stacking a single type, you can drastically increase your overall output.

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Multiplicative vs. Additive Scaling

Here’s the core of it:

• Damage from different sources (e.g., crowbar + watch + focus crystal) is multiplicative.
• Damage from the same source (e.g., five watches) is additive.

In simple terms, stacking the same item increases damage in a linear way. But combining different damage types causes them to multiply together, scaling your damage exponentially. Let’s look at the math.

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A Hypothetical Damage Stack

If you had one of each of the following items:

• Crowbar
• Delicate Watch
• Focus Crystal
• Lens-Maker’s Glasses
• Armor-Piercing Rounds
• Shaped Glass
• Laser Scope
• Radiant Pearl
• Spinal Tonic

Without even factoring in proccable items like ATG or bands, this setup gives you 3,710% bonus damage—or 37.1x your base damage. That’s absurd value from just one of each item.

Now compare that to stacking 19 Delicate Watches instead to reach the same value. The takeaway? Variety wins.

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A More Realistic Scenario: Five of Each White Damage Item

Let’s dial it back to something feasible. If you get five of each of the following white-tier damage items:

• Crowbar
• Delicate Watch
• Focus Crystal
• Lens-Maker’s Glasses
• Armor-Piercing Rounds

You’ll have:

• 5,625% damage increase on average
• Or 56x your base damage

If crit is factored in as a binary condition (either you crit or you don’t), the actual value would range between 37.5x and 75x depending on the situation. Still, that’s an enormous difference—and entirely achievable with Command or a couple of good white printers.

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Why White Items Are the Most Important

While everyone loves red items, you can’t rely on them. Reds are rare, and you have very little control over which ones you get. White items, however, are the backbone of every run:

• They’re everywhere.
• You’ll accumulate dozens of them.
• White printers and multi-shops appear on nearly every stage.

By focusing on diversity in white damage items, you can take real control over your power curve.

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Crowbar: A Misunderstood Powerhouse

Crowbar is often dismissed for “wasting value” when AoE effects like Wisps or Gasoline prematurely damage enemies below the 90% HP threshold. But that’s not how it works:

• Crowbar buffs everything that hits an enemy over 90% HP—even proc effects.
• Wisps and other procs benefit from the bonus, even if they trigger before your primary does.
• It’s not wasted—it’s amplified.

Ten crowbars give you a 750% bonus to full-health enemies. Add five Watches and five crit items, and you’re essentially looking at 30x damage from Crowbar alone. Add a Focus Crystal? 36x.

Even if it gets “wasted” on a proc, you still get the majority of that bonus. So don’t sleep on Crowbar—it’s one of the best white-tier openers in the game.

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Tailoring Items to Survivors

• Focus Crystal shines on melee survivors like Loader and Acrid.
• Delicate Watch is good on anyone who can avoid chip damage.
• Lens-Maker’s Glasses pair well with Harvester’s Scythe or Shatter Spleen.
• Crowbar is phenomenal for burst damage and synergizes with bands, Wisps, and explosive builds.

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Closing Thoughts

You don’t need god-tier reds to scale damage effectively. You just need to diversify. Stack different white damage items, build synergy through multiplicative effects, and watch your numbers explode.

Many players miss this concept—even veterans with hundreds or thousands of hours. If you’ve ever felt underpowered despite looting everything in sight, this is probably why.

Now go forth, diversify your damage, and absolutely delete the void reavers that used to torment you. And hey—if you learned something, give this guide a share. It might help someone else finally get past that brick wall on stage 4.

See you in the teleporter zone!