How to Jump Into Risk of Rain 2's New Hallowed Concepts Update

Risk of Rain 2's fourth paid expansion, Hallowed Concepts, went live on Steam on October 8, paired with a free update that changes something for every player whether or not they buy in. Gearbox laid out the full scope in a patch notes post on the base game's Steam page, and there is enough new material, old-content rebalancing and bug fixing in it to make a short orientation worthwhile before your next run.

What Actually Shipped on October 8

Hallowed Concepts is a $14.99 standalone purchase built around two new survivors, three new bosses, three new standard enemies, a new elite type, three new standard stages, several new Trial stages, six interactables, three new standard items and two entirely new item categories called Hexes and Hallowed Items. In multiplayer, only one person in the lobby needs to own the expansion for its monsters, stages and items to show up for everyone; players without it simply cannot select the new survivors or permanently unlock its items and logbook entries for their own account.

Gearbox bundled the paid expansion with a free update that touches every copy of Risk of Rain 2, regardless of whether Hallowed Concepts is installed. That update is where most of the day-one strategy changes live, so it is worth reading even if you have no plans to buy the DLC yet.

Unlocking Enforcer and Working Toward Acolyte

Of the two new survivors, Enforcer is unlocked by default the moment you own Hallowed Concepts. The official description bills Enforcer as a defensive vanguard who can "hold the line or drive it forward with dynamic, tactical movement," built around making cover and then choosing when to break from it and dive into a fight.

Acolyte is the unlockable one, and Gearbox has kept the exact condition close to the chest. The only hint published so far, from the expansion's own storefront copy, is the line "fight well, and Ascend," attached to a kit built around close-range glaive swings mixed with ranged strikes that "chip away at an enemy's soul." Treat any specific unlock steps you see repeated elsewhere today as unconfirmed rumor sourced to player testing rather than an official condition, since Gearbox has not published one.

Both survivors tie into three new challenges Gearbox calls the Winnowing of Survival, the Winnowing of Predation and the Winnowing of Mortality. The storefront describes them respectively as enduring pain, hunting your quarry and racing against time "for your soul," and they sit alongside the new Trial stages as the expansion's main skill checks.

Collecting N'tormat Pages and Trading Hexes for Hallowed Items

The other new systems revolve around a curio called the N'tormat. You find and collect its pages over the course of a run, and turning enough of them in unlocks powerful abilities "at a cost," per Gearbox's own wording, so budget for a downside before you commit to using what it gives you. Hexes work as a companion system: discovering and enduring a Hex is how you earn access to a Hallowed Item, the expansion's new top-tier item tier, with 14 Hexes and 11 Hallowed Items in the pool at launch.

If you are still deciding whether to buy in, the free side of the update gives you a decent preview. An optional "Karma" system was added to the base game that, per the patch notes, "can make the final confrontation on the moon significantly more challenging," giving anyone who wants a harder final fight a way to opt into one without needing the expansion installed.

Why the Halcyon Shrine Now Plays Differently

The single biggest change to existing runs is a full rebalance of the Halcyon Shrine, the gold-siphoning shrine introduced with the game's second expansion. Gearbox's own developer note explains the reasoning: the shrine was spawning so often on Stage 1 that players had started expecting it every run, which front-loaded entire runs around it.

• It now appears in only about half of runs on Stage 1, down from being close to guaranteed.
• On Stage 1 specifically, it now consumes 40 stage spawn credits instead of 0, which crowds out some of the other spawns you would normally see that early; Stage 2 and beyond are unchanged at 50 credits.
• It siphons gold faster, up from five ticks per second to seven, but its Stage 1 drop tables were downgraded and its red items from the Survivors of the Void content are now rarer from the shrine overall.
• Halcyonite, the elite enemy tied to the shrine, no longer drops gold on death, and it spawns an extra golem, three instead of two, to compensate for the lower early drop quality.

Practically, that means you should stop building an opening strategy around finding a Halcyon Shrine on Stage 1. It still shows up roughly half the time and still pays out well once it does, but a run where it never appears is no longer the unlucky exception; it is close to a coin flip every single time.

Smaller Changes Worth Knowing Before Your Next Run

A handful of other base-game changes from the same update affect moment-to-moment play even if you never touch the new content:

• Six of the game's original survivors got brand-new skills this patch: Commando's Sabotage, Huntress's Laser Cyclone, Acrid's Cloying Breath, Artificer's Tectonic Blast, Engineer's Laser Cutter and REX's Proliferation. Gearbox says each has its own unlock condition, though those conditions have not been published in detail yet.
• Solus Scorchers now spawn less often and basic Solus enemies, including Scorchers, Extractors and Mines, have 50 percent less armor, which should make the Void Locus questline noticeably less grindy.
• Engineer's Bubble Shield and Operator's Firewall now block explosions originating from outside the shield, including the Voidling's laser, closing off a death players had been running into for a while.
• Gunner turrets can be repaired after they die rather than needing to be rebuilt from scratch.

Gearbox is routing bug reports for the new content through its official Discord server rather than Steam's discussion boards, so that is the better place to flag anything that looks broken in your first few runs with the expansion installed.