Rain Effect w/o Particle System

Hey you guys,
I am currently working on a small mobile game in which you play as a cloud which has to rain on people, and I am having trouble with the "rain" part of that. Initially, I went for a Particle System to simulate the rain coming out of a cloud. But, turns out, to make it look at least passable - the PS is way too performance heavy for my mobile target.
So, my question is: can you think of another way of "simulating" rain coming out of a cloud? My second thought was having "blocks" of animated rain fall out of the cloud (which would also solve my problem of registering people getting hit by it) - but - you know...it looks awful as well. Any ideas? I really hope I am missing something totally obvious, otherwise it would be back to these hungry, hungry particle systems, and I´d really like to avoid that (as I am right now really bad at making those look at least okay).
I´d appreciate your Feedback / Help.

 

You could have a sprite or quad under the cloud with a repeating rain texture that you continuously scroll downwards on the Y axis. Use a cutout shader instead of a transparent shader for even better performance.

You could also try a ParticleSystem with a material that uses a "Mobile -> Particles" shader for better particle system performance.

 

See, that´s what I´m talking about. Thanks, mate. I´ll try that and see how it works.