Using Your Rings
Your rings soulbind. You'll never sell them. We mean it. You'll see this message in here a lot, because people KEEP ASKING over a year after the fact.
Lets face it, you're not just here to talk to people. You want to kill some things while you're at it! To do that, you're going to need to use your Rings - and to do that, you're going to need to know how to target things. As such....
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Targeting ---
Rings work three different ways. Some need to be targeted at an enemy to work. Some need to be targeted at an ally (or yourself!) to work. Some do not need to be targeted at all - if you use them, they work. In most cases, you need to know how to target.
The simplest way to target is to use that mouse - point at whoever you want to affect, and click on them. Bam. They're targeted. This works on friend and foe alike, but can be a bit annoying to do if you're in a hurry. There are some short-cuts you can use however.
For targeting your Crewmates, there's the Crew Panel. Simply click on their portrait in the Crew Panel, and if they're on screen you've selected them. That's a hell-of-a-lot faster.
If you need to target yourself, the spacebar will do it in one button press.
For targeting enemies, pressing the ~ or q button will allow you to cycle through all the enemies on screen. Normally it starts with enemies closest to you, but I have seen it go wonky sometimes - make sure to look at what's being targeted, lest you attack the wrong animated.
--- Rings ---
Now you have a target. Great. You need to actually do something to it though - and that's where your rings come in. You can wear up to 8 rings at a time, and every one of them does something different. You're going to have to learn what your rings do yourself, but generally speaking...
- Healing rings affect you and your allies. You'll need to target someone to use bandage or wish, diagnose is an AoE(Area of Effect) centered on you. Be aware that Wish only affects allies.
- Buff rings affect you and your allies. You need to target these in the current build, but most buffs will affect the entire crew of the person targeted (if they're all on-screen, that is).
- Attacks, debuffs, and crowd-control affect your enemies. Most of these rings require you to target an enemy to be used, although there are a couple which are simply an AoE around you.
- Passive rings are always active - if you've equipped them, they're working. Right now there are three passive rings (Fitness Fortune's Favor, and Sugar Rush). If they're equipped, they're working.
To activate a ring, either click on its picture or use the number button 'linked' to that slot - they go from 1 to 8 for rings from 1 to 8.
--- More bang for your buck - RAGE ---
You may have noticed the red-bar in the lower right part of your screen.
This is your RAGE meter, and you can use it to power-up your rings effects. The rage meter fills up as you use your rings, or as you get attacked. Every ring can be activated at a higher level of rage by holding down the button as you activate it - either the mouse button if you're clicking, or the number button if you're using that method.
Just having the bar filled up doesn't do the trick, you need to hold your button to USE that filled up bar.
See? The dark red is how much you have. The lighter red is what it looks like when you're actually USING rage.
There's four rage levels. Rage Rank 1 is a ring that has no rage in it - the 'default' so to speak. The other rage ranks can be used by charging your rings to the following positions.
Use that rage wisely, it can make your life a lot easier - adding Rage to a ring can increase it's area of effect, add to it's damage, make it heal more, or even add special buffs/debuffs that it didn't have at lower levels. Experiment with rage, you won't regret it.
--- Getting more rings ---
You don't start off with every ring in the game. Don't sweat it - getting more rings is easy. Just play the game to gain more! Complete quests, some of them offer rings as rewards. Kill animated, sometimes they'll drop a random ring for you.
Sometimes when you get a new ring, it'll be a ? - see the Common Issues post lower down.
In the game's tutorial sequence you'll be given a Guns Guns Guns ring.
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