You will need a solid build in Hades 2 if you want any chance of taking down Chronos. Duo Boons offer just that: These incredibly rare upgrades massively improve Melinoë’s potential. There are 56 Duo Boons in total. Let’s rank the top 10 that can change a build for the better.
How to get Duo Boons in Hades 2
To get a Duo Boon in Hades 2, you must have all prerequisite Boons from both gods involved, then get lucky on your next find. You’ll know a Duo Boon is active if both gods appear to converse with Melinoë before offering it. “The Queen” Arcana can help give you a small percent bonus for seeing these.
While Duo Boons are nice to get in the wild, some are good enough to straight-up build towards. That said, make sure you have a backup plan in case the gods are stingy and don’t show you a Duo Boon.
If you’ve performed the Insight into Offerings Incantation, you can see what requirements the Duo Boons have by pressing the “Insight” key (Y on Xbox Controller, I on Keyboard). Then, you can use Keepsakes to get the god of your choice guaranteed and maximize your chances of finding these synergies.
10. Spiteful Strength
- Required Gods: Hera and Hephaestus.
- Used for: Specialized damage-dealing.
Spiteful Strength is a unique build-around Duo Boon that buffs your Boon-less Attack and Special by 200 percent. This is much higher than any standard option—even a high-rarity Aphrodite Boon struggles to break 150 percent without levels. As long as you’re avoiding Attack and Special improvements, you can stack alternative ways to increase damage, such as Demeter’s Weed Killer.
However, this Duo Boon is not for the faint of heart: It requires you to carefully navigate the game’s Boon system. You will constantly be offered Attack and Special Boons during your run, so you’ll have to choose carefully.
9. Hearty Appetite
- Required Gods: Aphrodite and Demeter.
- Used for: Rewarding high-health builds.
This simple Duo Boon boosts Melinoë’s damage by 10 percent per every 100 health she has. This can get quite good if you get lucky with Centaur Hearts and early Aphrodite Boons. Both Aphrodite and Demeter offer a myriad of ways to increase your max HP, and Aphrodite does a good job of keeping you topped up.
It’s possible to get to 500 health or so if you find the right Boons and reward doors. As long as you’re not taking hits, a 50-60 percent damage boost is yours for the taking.
8. Romantic Spark
- Required Gods: Aphrodite and Zeus.
- Used for: Quickly applying and removing Blitz.
Romantic Spark provides a unique way to pop Blitz—Sprinting. By running into your foes, you can activate Zeus’s powerful Blitz status and deal triple damage with it. Weapons with quick Specials, like the Witch’s Staff and Sister Blades, can easily pump out 600 damage per activation using this ability.
It’s a legitimate strategy, and you can be quite evasive with it if your Special allows you to move quickly. Sprint can be a bit awkward to handle at times, however, since it requires you to hold Dodge, and Melinoë is harder to control while at full speed. Try to find Hermes for defensive barriers, and you’ll be able to run all over the opposition.
7. Island Getaway
- Required Gods: Poseidon and Aphrodite.
- Used for: Defense and utility.
The only purely defensive option on this list, Island Getaway provides a 15 percent damage reduction for Melinoë alongside other defensive qualities. Hard percentages like this aren’t easy to find for defense, so this can keep you alive quite a while longer. And that’s not even the best part of the ability: Aphrodite’s weakness is that you must be right next to enemies to deal massive damage, but this entirely negates that.
This Duo Boon also activates Aphrodite’s good buffs, such as her Glamour Gain for Magick regeneration, without having to hug Weak enemies. Island Getaway makes Aphrodite a much more versatile goddess and actually useful for long-ranged Nocturnal Arms, like the Umbral Flames and Argent Skull.
6. Freezer Burn
- Required Gods: Demeter and Hestia.
- Used for: Extremely high damage over time.
Freezer Burn is a potent combo tool. For builds that can build a lot of Scorch on targets—like Sister Blade Special or Witch’s Staff Attack—this can add up to thousands of Scorch damage on a foe. Freeze does have a cooldown of 10 seconds without an entirely different Duo Boon to help out, so time your Demeter-enhanced attack wisely for maximum benefit. Scorch Synergies are critical to ensuring you get big numbers, though avoid Hestia’s Fire Extinguisher if you want the maximum benefit.
5. Glorious Disaster
- Required Gods: Apollo and Zeus.
- Used for: Extremely high damage over time within your Cast.
Glorious Disaster brings the thunder to your Omega Cast by striking it with lightning constantly before erupting into Apollo’s Omega Cast—the Sunbeam. This means your Omega Cast deals 50 damage every .13 seconds in a region of the battlefield, averaging to about 400 damage per second—albeit at a large 45 base Magick cost.
If you have any abilities, like Charon’s Weapon Aspect, that improve the length of your Casts, you can instantly nuke fights. Try to pair this with Apollo’s extra Cast size and Hermes’s Cast cost reduction to make the best of it, as well as anything that bumps up Cast damage to make those bolts of lightning hit even harder.
4. Golden Rule
- Required Gods: Poseidon and Demeter.
- Used for: Specialized damage dealing.
Golden Rule works somewhat similarly to Hearty Appetite in that you gain damage per resource you have. You only get plus five percent damage per 100 gold, but it is a lot easier to control your wallet than your health bar. By not buying much at Charon and focusing on lucrative gold-gathering options, such as Arcana or Charon’s Keepsake, you can reach 50 to 100 percent damage buffs. The cost—pardon the pun—is quite large, though, as Charon is a great source of boons and upgrades. Weight the costs and benefits of losing five percent damage for any boon you pick up.
3. Torrential Downpour
- Required Gods: Apollo and Demeter.
- Used for: High-damage Cast builds.
Cast builds tend to suffer from slightly more limited damage than their Attack or Special counterparts. Torrential Downpour fixes that and then some. You can see your Omega Cast pumping out over 100 percent extra within the first 30 seconds of the fight with this Duo Boon. And at the cost of five extra Magick per Cast, you’re not seeing the downside for a little while. Make sure you have a good way to regenerate Magick—like from Hera or Apollo—and you’re off to the races.
2. Master Conductor
- Required Gods: Hephaestus and Zeus.
- Used for: High single-target damage during boss fights using quick attack speed builds.
Master Conductor turns Zeus’s passable Chain Lightning damage on each hit to something truly barbaric. Against bosses, you’ll basically be tripling your on-hit damage thanks to the self-bounces. This is also useful for fighting many enemies since the lightning bolts can tear through three enemies at a time for solid damage. This is a crushingly powerful option that makes Zeus the boss killer he was in the first game.
1. Scalding Vapor
- Required Gods: Poseidon and Hestia.
- Used for: Extremely high rate on-hit builds.
If you want to talk about on-hit builds, Scalding Vapor is the ultimate Hades 2 Duo Boon. It rips off your small damage buff from Poseidon’s Slip to deal another 250 damage to the foe. If you have any way to activate Scorch while also applying Slip simultaneously, you’ll be racking up damage over time on hit from Poseidon’s Splash effect and the miasma of steam that you produce. If you can get other on-hit effects, like bonus Scorch, you can boil any enemy or boss in the entire game in seconds.
