Overview
Who is this guide for? This guide is for aspiring or loyal Huntress mains that want a complete guide to playing Huntress at a high level and being able to play on Monsoon as Huntress. With almost 500 hours in the game, with a lot of them as Huntress and extensive experimentation with mods, I have a lot of experience to give valuable tips to people who are interested.As a disclaimer, don’t expect to get ‘God runs’ on Monsoon difficulty with any sort of regularity. Even with all of my experience and knowledge, I only make it past the first loop (stage 5) a third of the time, and I usually end up dying either on stage 5(difficulty acceleration) or stage 7(Clay Dunestrider and Templars on second stage rotation). This is better than being unable to get past the first two bosses though haha.
Huntress in Monsoon
Since this is Comprehensive guide to Monsoon with Huntress, I will start with some fundamentals of Monsoon and detail some specifics about Huntress’s ideal playstyle.
The first thing to know about surviving in Monsoon and RoR2 is that you survive by dodging hits, not healing damage that you take. As such, being aware of the local environment and knowing where you can find cover from enemy projectiles is important. Also, constantly jumping is incredibly important for your survivability because changing your vertical position is the most simple and effective way to dodge, in my experience.
The second thing to keep in mind is that the game gets harder very quickly in Monsoon. Because of this, it is crucial to not waste any time farming for chests in the early stages of the run. It is only worth farming for all of the chests (excluding legendary chests) starting from stage 4 or 5 and if you have some movement speed items e.g. Red Whip. It’s not worth getting a single green item from a large chest while letting the mobs get almost 50% stronger. If possible, try to get to stage 3 in about 9 mins (4 to 5 mins per stage) so you can grab a Preon Accumulator if you get the snowy stage. Locating the equipment can be a bit difficult, but you can look up tricks to locating it in other guides or youtube videos. Even if you can’t get it, however, this is still a good metric for how fast you would like to progress through the stages. That said, it’s not a disaster if you’re a minute or two slower.
Since you only have limited time and money in the early game (first loop), you have to prioritize what chests to buy. If you have the money, prioritize large chests and triple shops, then normal chests and equipment barrels. I don’t prioritize equipment barrels because equip triple shops are a thing now and they can be very inconsistent. You should also prioritize chests far from the teleporter before ones close to the teleporter. This is because you can grab the closer chests after beating the boss with the money you earned from the teleporter event. For the first teleporter, I recommend attempting it after a) you get a useful item for beating the boss or b) you reach level 3. To get money and exp quickly, Shrines of Combat are always a welcome addition to your first stage. Shrines of Blood are incredibly risky due to reduced health regeneration on Monsoon, so don’t do them unless you have a cautious slug at least. In certain runs, you may start the teleporter boss only 1 minute in because you found a royal capacitor or something. Speed is key in Monsoon.
How do we apply this to huntress? Well first of all, always sprint. Maintaining maximum momentum keeps you moving as quickly as possible, which helps you evade as many attacks as possible. Following this principle, you should also immediately press the sprint key after using normal blink or laser glaive. Any instant you are stalling in the air can get you killled by a brass contraption or wisps. Even Elder Lemurians can shoot you out of the air if you are low enough to the ground. Maintaining the sprint also ensures that Rose Buckler is pretty much always active. Even a single Rose Buckler provides you with almost 25% damage reduction, so it is very important to keep up the armor bonus.
It is also good to know how to effectively strafe while attacking enemies and sprinting. Proper mechanics involve you moving forward diagonally away from the primary target/threat. So either diagonally move left(and forward) with the enemy to your right or diagonally move right(and forward) with the enemy to your left. This form of movement allows you to slow your movement towards the target while still allowing you to keep sprinting and attacking. After all, if you close the distance too quickly, you’ll simply run past them or into them. If you’re willing to put in the extra effort, you can ‘flicker’ in between shots by sprinting in any direction of your choice, but quickly shifting your camera in the direction of the monsters to fire at them as you are running away. This technique is especially effective with the alternate primary skill, as explained in the ‘Loadout’ section of the guide. Other niche mechanics specific to Huntress’s skills will be further explained in the ‘Loadout’ section.
Huntress Loadouts
You may notice that I have noted, on a few occasions, an arbitrary statistic that I call the Proc rate/Damage product. This is a number that is calculated by multiplying the (Damage / [Unit of Time]) or (Damage / Skill Usage) by the number of procs in that [Unit of Time] or Skill Usage. This factor takes into account proc rate of skills, the base damage of the damage instances, and the fire rate of said skills to create the most accurate representation of the strength of a skill in the context of proccing items, which is the source of damage in RoR2.
This is the standard primary which, after the recent changes, has become a solid option and a pretty good primary attack, even compared to other survivors.
Flurry: seeking arrows that does 3 x 100% dmg every 1.3s = 230% dps, but fires 3 extra arrows on crit for 6 x 100% dmg every 1.3s = 460% dps. There was no official attack time for the animation, but I tested how long it takes to complete 10 attack animations, and the average was 12.94s or 13s for 10 attacks.
Flurry Comparison
There are pros and cons which make this choice a difficult one.
Pros
- Great for killing single targets by shooting 6 arrows at once
- Looks cooler than default
- Maximum crit damage per 1.3s is 1200%(6 x 200%) vs 780%(2.6 x 300%)
- Maximum Proc rate/Damage product per 1.3s is 25.2 vs 10.14
Cons
- Lower firerate means that targeting multiple enemies takes more than twice as long
- Can feel clunky with low firerate
- Starting base damage per 1.3s is 300% (3 x 100%) vs 390%(2.6 x 150%)
- Starting Proc rate/Damage product per 1.3s is 6.3 vs 10.14
So yes, the new primary is cool and has greater potential, but you start off weaker and there’s no point in greater potential if you can’t live to tell the tale. Doing the math, you start at about 77% base dps of the default primary. This isn’t even considering the lower proc coefficient. Also, each proc of the default primary is 50% stronger than the proc of the alternate primary. Taking all factors into account, the new primary starts you at 62.13% strength, but reaches 248.52% strength at max. You need 25% crit chance to start doing more damage.
However, there is an argument that most of her dps comes from her glaives and ballista anyways. Her default primary isn’t that special, but the new primary is almost like a spammable ballista shot, and is a potent single target damage tool in the late game. Also, due to the charge-up or wind-up animation at the beginning of the attack, you can start the attack animation, then turn around and run away as the arrows automatically home in on the enemy behind you. This gives huntress a great deal of flexibility in her movement while using her primary, in contrast to her default primary for which moving while shooting can feel tricky at times.
As a result, for the final verdict, just pick what you feel like using, because they are both good options. If you can survive the early game, Flurry is really good.
*Fun Fact, with the default primary, if you have a lot of backup mags or brainstalks active, when you hold left and right click at the same time, Huntress will alternate between shooting an arrow and throwing the glaive. This is not possible with the alternate primary however, and will only result in throwing glaives.
This ability is great for both map traversal and dodging threats. Although 7 seconds isn’t too long, it’s not short enough to spam unless you have hardlight afterburner. Use it to get out of tricky situations.
Kek lmao
Phase Blink Comparison
The shorter distance means that you don’t always move far enough to really disengage, still leaving you in danger. This combined with limited vertical mobility leads me to choose the default blink in every situation. It’s up to you though, because backwards blink to kite is pretty cool too. Also, you won’t have to hit the sprint key after Phase Blink.
*Note the description correction is different from in-game description
Ballista Comparison
Pros
- 2700%(3×900%) damage vs 2090%(19×110%) damage over 6 seconds
- Fires as fast as you can shoot
- As far range as you can aim
- 3 x 1 proc coefficient instead of 19*0.2 proc coefficient.
- Proc rate/Damage product is 81 vs 79.42.
Cons
- Is no longer Aoe
- Has no Crowd Control
Yes, the total proc coefficient of Arrow Rain is slightly higher, but each of those procs only have a base damage of 110% while the Ballista bolts have a base damage of 900%, making each proc over 8 times stronger than the Arrow Rain procs. When also taking into account the number of procs, Ballista is still slightly stronger. Even then, this is only best case scenario for Arrow Rain with enemies staying in the limited aoe, which doesn’t really happen. This also doesn’t help against early game bosses when there’s only one primary threat to aim for. And if you get a nice ukulele proc off of that Ballista bolt, it’s gonna be really strong with that 900% base damage, which will take care of any aoe issues that weren’t already cleaned up by her glaives. Aoe is not Huntress’s problem, and the crowd control of the ability is limited, so Arrow Rain is simply unnecessary. Ballista wins without a doubt.
One thing that you can do with both Ballista and Arrow Rain is Blink right after you come out of the animation. So if you need to scale a high wall or cliff, Ballista into a blink might get you there. Blinking is also a safer way to drop down from the animation, because without blinking, you simply enter freefall without being able to do anything until you hit the ground. You can also use the rising teleport animation of Ballista/Arrow Rain to dodge projectiles with good timing. A note for Ballista is that it blinks you backwards. To go high, aim at the ground.
Best Items to Look For
Let’s go over what are some of the best items to get or print in some situations.
Note: If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you look up an explanation of proc coefficient, because it’ll help you understand a lot about why certain items are so strong.
As I said earlier, Teddy Bears save runs.
Item Combinations
There are quite a few in this game, so I had to create a whole separate section. Prepare to witness all of the brokenness of this game. I’ll try to order it from most consistent and effective to least.
Although an item cannot proc itself (AtG -> AtG doesn’t work), they can proc each other. Ukulele and Meat Hooks hit a bunch of enemies and keep on proccing each other in a loop. They also cause you to rapid fire missiles, sticky bombs, bleed, fire and ice, crit hits, and more. with the help of a clover, this only goes even crazier. This is the fundamental concept that makes later item combinations strong.
Key items: AtG Missile Mk. 1, Sentient Meat Hook, Ukulele
Some equips, like Royal Capacitor, are really darn strong. Just one Gesture reduces the cooldown to 10s. Another Gesture or Fuel Cell reduces it to 8.5. What if you got a Gesture and a total of 6 Gestures/Fuel Cells for a sub 4s cooldown? What if Soulbound Catalyst reduces equipment cooldown by 4s(+2s per stack) for each kill? The answer: everywhere you look lies a corpse and epilepsy warnings.
Minimum Items: Royal Capacitor, Gesture of the Drowned, Fuel Cell
Will o’ the Wisp is strong. 5 of them means 1470% base dmg to everyone in 21.6m aoe at the same time. How about multiplying that first hit of damage by 5 with just 8 crowbars. 7350% base damage that procs items at a high rate? Yeah, things just die. If they proc your 2 AtGs, the missiles do 44,100% dmg. Once you have like 20 will o’ the wisps, and a handful of crowbars, you can probably kill a boss with a few hundred k hp by hitting a wisp with a normal attack. Ceremonial Daggers just help to make sure mobs on the other side of the map don’t escape the chain reaction.
Minimum items: Crowbar, Will o’ the Wisp
Ever wanted a Shaped Glass that doens’t lower your health? Look no further than Spinel Tonic! You only need Spinel Tonic, Gesture of the Drowned, and only three more Gestures/Fuel Cells. It doubles your damage, multiplies your health pool, increases your attack speed, increases your movement speed, increases your armor, and increases field of view (I think)? Sounds like a simple recipe for an easy run. Gaze of Death won’t let you play the game anymore cuz everything’s dead, but with this, you can actually move your body and do something.
Minimum items: Spinel Tonic, Gestures (1-4), Fuel Cell (0-3)
Death Mark is a strong debuff: Enemies with 4 or more debuffs are marked for death, increasing damage taken by 50% (+50% per stack) from all sources for 7 seconds. It multiplies all damage, but is kinda hard to achieve. Or is it?
- Tri-tip Daggers for Bleed Proc
- Gasoline for aoe burn Proc
- Chronobauble slow is finally useful
- Runald’s Band for chance of Ice slow or Shattering Justice
Once you get Shattering Justice or Clover and a few of these other items, Death Mark is just a free damage multiplier which is really strong.
Minimum Items: Tri-tip, Gasoline, Chronobauble, Runald’s Band
Do you just want to go on a stroll in the park? Treat Monsoon like it’s an absolute joke? You only need a few things! Actually kinda a lot.
- At least 2 or 3 Razorwire
- Harvester’s Scythes, Leeching Seeds, and Crit rate
- Lots of Repulsion Armor plates
- Jade Elephant
- Gesture of the Drowned
- At least 10 more Gesture/Fuel Cells
If you can really get this many items, you deserve to walk through Monsoon. Armor + Flat Dmg Reduction = everything does 1 dmg. Hitting you without blocking with too many Tougher times = all enemies around you killing themselves with Razorwire. A Soulbound Catalyst may significantly reduce the number of Fuel Cells you need.
I’m sure there’s more, but just go out there and have fun, hopefully. You’ve already done enough reading for a lifetime xD.
Items You Want to Print
Tougher Times: You can never really have too many teddy bears. Unless you get rid of literally all of your other common items of course.
Paul’s Goat Hooves or Energy Drinks: I recommend only 5 to 10 at max
Soldier Syringe: You only really need 5 to 10 at max because it becomes statistically inefficient when combined with other attack speed boosts in the game. In contrast better to stack the next item.
Crowbar: What is better, attacking 15 times per second or attacking 3 times per second but killing everything in one hit? It is better to stack damage than attack speed because attack speed does nothing if you have enough damage.
Backup Magazine: You can have as much as you want, but you really don’t need that many.
Lens-Maker’s Glasses: We take those, every time xD. You should only have 9 at max though because Harvester’s Scythe and Predatory Instincts give 5% crit each.
Tri-tip Dagger: It has 105% proc chance at 7 daggers. You can get more to guarantee bleed procs on ukulele and other proc sources, but it’s pretty unnecessary.
Topaz Brooch: Get a few of these, and have double health for the rest of your run! Noice.
AtG Missile: this thing is good, but you don’t need to stack it that much because it is already so strong. And there are other important items to stack.
Harvesters Scythe: always good to have 5 or more. This is so you can heal very quickly after getting hit to restore one shot protection (if you have >90% max hp, you cannot die from a single instance of dmg. This doesn’t protect you from multiple projectiles hitting you at once though.)
Infusion: If you have the items, it’s quite good, but kinda boring haha.
Chronobauble: Just don’t
Fuel Cell: Cooldown reduction makes all strong equips OP
Rose Buckler: Gives you incredible survivability. Assuming you’re sprinting, which you should be. Armor is very strong at low values, but falls off in effectiveness heavily, so don’t get more than 10 imo
Ukulele: More stacks means more targets and more arc length/range. Eventually, every proc can hit every mob on the map. Not bad. Since there’s a cap of 40 mobs on the map at a time, 20 ukuleles will hit every mob if they are close enough for the arcs to reach between them. The range would be fairly high at this level, so you can treat 20 ukuleles as a soft cap.
Will o’ The Wisp: More stacks means more range and more damage. Just go for as many as you’d like. The more you get, the easier the game gets.
57 Leaf Clover and Ceremonial Dagger: if it’s in the Bazaar, I take it. Even if it gets rid of my green items. The only time I don’t take it is if I have only one of both AtG and Ukulele and I would lose them both.
Others: Take if you have the resources and there’s no risk of losing an important green item. Otherwise, ignore.
Items to Avoid
This section will be split into two parts: items you don’t need and items that you want to avoid because they will actually hurt your run.
Bustling Fungus: I have no clue why other Huntress guides tell you to take this item, because it is useless on Huntress who is always sprinting. How do you stand still for 2 seconds when wisps are constantly shooting at you? Just give it to Engi.
Focus Crystal: It’s really good on Loader, so why steal it? Huntress is a long range character, so this is hardly useful.
Medkit: it’s just not a very good item. The three second delay is bad. 1 of these might save you in the early game tho?
Monster Tooth: It’s not bad, but Huntress kills from afar. To have to plunge into your enemies to heal, only to get hit right after is not very effective.
Warbanner: You hardly level up in the late game, and in the early game, you don’t get enough stacks of these for the area to be all that meaningful. You also usually end up leveling after hitting the teleporter to leave after all of the enemies are dead, so that’s not very helpful.
Leeching Seed: It’s not bad, but it’s just a worse Harvester’s Scythe.
Lepton Daisy: It only helps in teleporter event and isn’t that strong.
Razorwire: Huntress doesn’t want to get hit. So items that encourage getting hit aren’t very good on her. Give this to an Engineer tho, and he’ll be having the time of his life.
Squid Polyp: I’m convinced that Hopoo added this item just to nerf the green item pool.
Aegis: It’s pretty nice, but make sure this goes to Engi first. Double health on turrets is nuts.
Frost Relic: It encourages you to get close to your enemies, which is not something Huntress does.
Interstellar Desk Plant: This thing is just not very good at the moment. Needs a rework.
N’kuhana’s Opinion: It’s alright, but again, goes to Engi first every time. It needs a lot of healing to be a good damage tool, and its damage is based on your health pool. It also has limited range. Doesn’t synergize well with the lowest health pool character who attacks from long range.
Personal Shield Generator: The shield is based on your max health, which isn’t very good. Getting more than 1 of these also makes more than 10% of your total health pool shields. This means that you are unable to heal back to full hp to use One Shot Protection to save you again until the shield regenerates, which means a few seconds of not getting hit. This weakness is pretty severe, and the item isn’t that good in the first place.
H3AD-5T v2: In my opinion, this legendary equip is bad on most survivors. It’s only somewhat viable on Loader. The increase in jump height makes you way to floaty while moving. This makes map traversal a pain sometimes and can get you killed while you’re in the air. The active ability can be pretty strong, but it is unreliable in my experience.
Wake of Vultures: If you kill Overloading Elites, half of your health becomes shield. This possesses the same weakness of Personal Shield Generator.
Brittle Crown: It’s never good.
Corpsebloom: All healing is over time instead of the burst you need? A hard cap on healing? terrible
Strides of Heresy: Why replace your blink? it’s already a really powerful escape tool. If you didn’t have the reaction speed to survive with blink, Strides of Heresy won’t save you.
Transcendence: It’s not terrible, but it’s based on your base health. Just get Spinel Tonic with Gesture instead.
Visions of Heresy: Why get rid of your normal attack and replace it with a charge based ability? It’s only an upgrade for a few survivors like Acrid and Artificer.
Crowdfunder: if you ever take Crowdfunder with Gesture of the Drowned, prepare to see your worst nightmare. I managed to get out of the situation by finding an equip barrel, hoarding all of the mobs around it, killing them at the same time, and buying the new equip.
Effigy of Grief: Do you want to die?
Glowing Meteorite: Do you want to kill all of your friends?
Hellfire Tincture: Do you want to kill yourself and your friends, but still deal no damage because your max health pool is F tier? Go for it.
Silence Between Two Strikes: Cool name, but permanent overloading elite buff means half health half shields forever. Just nah.
Mobbing
This section will tell you what mobs you should kill first and how you should treat each one as a threat to you as Huntress, but this is true for survivors in general. This section is more opinionated and up for debate, but this should at least give you a good idea.
Lesser WIsp
These guys are what end Monsoon runs early. Their attacks are almost undodgeable, especially with your starting movement speed, so three or four of these attacks will drop your health to like half as huntress. They are squishy, but are the most consistent threat to you, so kill them as soon as they spawn with your glaive, assuming there are a few of them close together.
This may be controversial, but due to other mobs being tankier and harder to kill than this lesser wisps, I always prioritize Lesser wisps over everything else. Elite Lesser wisps are even higher priority than the teleporter boss in my experience.
Elder Lemurian
Ironically, for one of the largest enemies in the game, these guys are a silent killer. Their footsteps are still too quiet, and the only thing you can really hear is their fireball animation. If you hear an Elite Elder Lemurian’s fireball animation, but you can’t see it, you better pray it’s not running right behind you. If you see an Elder Lemurian, stay as far away as you can while still hitting it. Don’t expect to survive a direct hit by more than one fireball. Even one can be lethal to Huntress at times. These guys charge at you with the speed of a Bighorn Bison, the tankiness of a Parent, and the multi-hit projectile of a Beetle Queen. Just don’t mess with them.
Clay Templar
At least they’re not silent, but they still have a rapid-fire multi-hit projectile with incredible accuracy. You better have some teddy bears and some cover to hide behind, or else ur gonna be in a lot of pain. Similar to the Lemurian, stay far away as you snipe them to reduce their accuracy. At least these guys don’t chase after you as well.
Alloy Vulture
The accuracy of their wind blades never fails to surprise me. Their flying mobility, potent long-ranged capabilities, and moderate health pool can kill you if you don’t respect them. As long as you are actively moving to dodge their projectiles, you should be fine.
Brass Contraption
These guys can also kill me with some regularity. If you get hit by one, you might get wombo combo’d into oblivion kek. You might just pop with the first one too. Their projectiles are a bit easier to dodge than Alloy Vultures, but you should still be just as careful.
Parent
Did you like Bighorn Bison’s tankiness pre-patch? How about giving that tankiness, and then some, to a normal mob. How about making him TP on top of you and destroying you like Imp Overlord, and cuz it’s a normal mob, a bunch of them can spawn together? You better hope you have enough movement speed, cuz otherwise, you’re not gonna survive for long. Then again, usually you will be fine with a decent amount of movement speed. But Burning Elite Parents will just destroy you regardless of who you are. I had what seemed like a god run just earlier today and decided to spawn a shrine of combat, only to spawn a Burning Elite Parent on stage 5. He just TP’d on top of me, and even without hitting me, the burn dmg on contact instakilled me. RIP. Don’t use shrine of combat past stage 2 or until you have become OP.
Stone Golem
Stone Golems can kill, but honestly, they’re not that bad. In contrast to other high threat targets, you actually want to get close to them. Circling around them at close range makes it much easier to dodge their laser targeting. Once in a while, one of them will just snipe you, but it doesn’t happen too often.
Greater Wisp
Bighorn Bison
Beetle Guard
Mini Mushrum
Lemurian
Imp
Solus Probe
Jellyfish
Void Reaver
Beetle
Bossing
This section will detail strategies for how to beat each boss. There’s not too much interesting for Huntress, although there are interesting strategies for other survivors like Mercenary and Rex.