fireb0rn's Hollow Knight Enemy Tier List

hey everyone how's it going god gamer here and today i'm going to be making a hollow knight enemy tier list so this is going to be including hopefully all the non-boss enemies in the game in this list there's actually 112 enemies in total i'm definitely feeling a little bit intimidated by this but we are going to get through all 112 of the enemies in the tier list i'm going to be taking into account a lot of different things of course personal preference is going to be a big one especially my perspective as a speedrunner but i'm also going to be taking into account things like enemy design where the enemies are placed and what kind of encounters they're involved in and just kind of giving you my opinions based on that so this tier list is going to be a lot of fun to make i'm going to be going from s tier to f and just categorizing every single enemy and just because i'm honest with myself and don't know the names of half of these enemies i'm gonna be pulling up the hollow knight wiki for each of them just to get a bit of information but yeah we have a very very long road ahead of us so let's get started okay and first up we have a few enemies from the coliseum the first of which is the winged fool the winged fool is a very basic enemy it just has the regular flying ai but if you get close enough to it it will take a swing at you it is a fairly meaty enemy it has 70 hp which is a lot for a flying enemy and it's very vulnerable to just getting above it and pogoing but you also have to take into account that it is a coliseum enemy so it's going to be a part of a wave of enemies all of which are kind of presenting their own threats but even as part of those waves of enemies you can just get above the winged tools and just poker them until they die so i just think this enemy could have maybe benefited from having a little retreat option if it detects that you're above it that said i do find the enemies be pretty satisfying to kill so i would put these enemies in the b tier so next up we have the heavy fool which is also an enemy in the coliseum this guy is obviously too heavy to fly and that does kind of show you its weak point which is that if you're above this enemy it doesn't really have that much that it can do against you so an obvious strategy against the heavy fool is to just take out all the enemies that are in the air first and then deal with the heavy fool after because the heavy fool does have some pretty intimidating options on the ground and if you go directly above the enemy it can also do that hop into a slash and just like with most coliseum enemies there's pretty satisfying ways to deal with this enemy in a speed run so overall i think the heavy fool is pretty well designed and i would put this enemy in the eightier and we're immediately going from some pretty nice enemies to one of the biggest in the game this is the death noodle it's the upgraded version of the lootal which everyone hates and a lot of it has to do with the placement of the enemy because you get waves and waves of death noodles in the final trial and as a speedrunner if you're dealing with death noodles you have to kill them like the instant they spawn which by the way you don't always have the option of doing because so many of them spawn at once and if you don't kill them instantly they just jump away from you over and over and over and end up losing you a ton of time and they're pretty tanky so you can't just kill them with one shade soul so death noodles are absolute bastards but one thing i'll say about them is that it is kind of fun to like kill them while they're jumping in the air so like on a casual playthrough i don't think they're terrible enemies it's just as a speed runner i have such a hatred for them that i have to give them the deer next up we have the volt twister which is another enemy in the coliseum this is one of the soul sanctum themed enemies that shows up in the soul sanctum section and teleporting enemies again kind of like the death noodle an enemy that jumps around and can just waste your time teleporting enemies are really the exact same thing if they teleport when you get to them you just lose time so from a speed runner's perspective i don't like these enemies however overall i think they're not poorly designed teleporting enemies can be frustrating for any player because if they just teleport at the wrong time you can end up getting screwed over but the teleporting also forces you to navigate around the platforms which is kind of like the theme of the soul sanctum section in the trial of the fools so as far as that goes i think it's pretty well designed the fact that they just kind of used umu's attack though and just kind of gave it to this enemy not sure how i feel about that one so once again this guy is going to the deterior okay next up we have the king's mould now king's moulds i don't think they're bad enemies in fact they can be kind of fun to fight against because there's the really obvious strategy of just getting above them and pogoing because they don't have any attacks that go upward it's also really easy to pull off because king's mold enemies are just placed on their own with the one exception of course being path of pain where there's two of them at once they do have a backstep movement which is kind of meant to protect them from the pogo strategy so they'll do a little backstep and just take a swipe forward but given the fact that you see king's moulds like three times throughout the game and two of those times they're just on their own it's not really enough to prevent you from just pogoing them and killing them without any problem if you take one hit from them because they did a backstep attack you can just heal it up right after also i feel like their placement in path of pain was a little bit questionable because if you're a player who takes the time to heal up before every attempt that you make at the fourth room the king's molds at the end generally aren't going to kill you if you just go in with full health but if you don't know that they're there then you're probably not going to go in with full health if you go into that room with two health because you didn't expect there to be enemies you can just instantly die to one of their boomerangs so that to me felt a little bit cheesy even as a player who doesn't really struggle with them at all but you know it is called the path of pain so it is living up to its name i just don't feel like kingsmolds offer a valid threat so for that reason i'm putting them in the seat here okay and next up we have siblings so these enemies spawn throughout the abyss and in my opinion they're actually pretty fun to deal with mainly because of how they're placed so i think the climb up to the lighthouse is actually a really memorable spot of the abyss and it's because of the siblings the whole idea of having an enemy that just flies at you and offers no other threat and you have to navigate around them especially because of the ability to pogo or up slash enemies out of the way like these are enemies that you have to fight against but you can also find creative ways to navigate around them but overall they're a fun enemy and they serve a pretty good purpose but given the fact that they're so basic i can't really give them anything above a beat here okay and next up we have the shade this is going to be a pretty interesting one to rank because the shade can spawn in any room in the game basically where you can die and the shade also evolves as you do so a lot of people don't know about this in their casual playthroughs but as you get spells your shade will also get those spells and your shade will cast them at you but its max hp is also based off your nail damage and your hp it'll also get more soul as you get more soul vessels so in terms of how it's designed i think that's really neat does it play a huge factor in the combat i don't really think so it doesn't offer much of a threat in combat and i actually think that's a good thing because if it did then you'd have to deal with the shade on top of everything else and you've already died once without the shade even having been there so it's a good thing that the shade's a pushover and it's a pretty cool enemy to have in the game i think it's just a great idea so i'm gonna put the shade in the a here okay and next up we have the winged zoteling so this is an enemy that shows up in two different spots one is in the gray princess soap fight and the other is in the eternal ordeal now one thing i'll say right off the bat is that the way it can spawn in in the eternal ordeal is a little bit annoying of course like you can say the eternal ordeal is designed to be annoying and you'd be right but i'm still taking a mark off for that one but other than that it accelerates through the air differently than the other flying enemies which does make it unique like most of the flying enemies in hollow knight just kind of fly in the same way so that can make them kind of fun to fight against also it's smart that they have different hp values in the great prince zod fight and the eternal ordeal like you need to be able to kill them real quickly in the great prince so fight because you're actually fighting against boss at the same time whereas their point in the eternal ordeal is to swarm you so if they died that quickly they wouldn't really offer a threat so overall i find wings outlings like actually really fun to fight against and i think they're some of the more satisfying enemies to kill so i'm giving wing zotling 8th here okay next up we have the hopping zotling another zotling and same thing about having different health values in the eternal ordeal in the great prince fight that said i think in the gpz fight these guys are a lot more tolerable one thing in the eternal ordeal is that they have this really weird ai it's not just this enemy but if it jumps into a corner it does this really weird thing where it just does these like three hops in the corner before jumping back outward again so unless you're really experienced at the eternal ordeal and why the hell would you ever be experienced at that it's going to be super unpredictable other than that i think the enemy is okay it's just that one ai quirk really really throws me off and in the eternal ordeal where each hit matters a lot any unpredictability makes it so much more difficult so this enemy is going in the sea tier for me okay next up we have the grimkin novice so this enemy serves a purpose in hollow knight much like the grim fetch quests in general it's meant to make you spend a lot of time killing it at least that's kind of how it feels to me i'm not saying they're not fun at all to fight but just the way they teleport around and you can't hit them because as you move toward them they like fly away at the same speed as a speedrunner if you don't get a quick kill on these enemies it's just oh like you spend so much time having to get more soul to try and cast another shade soul that is just so frustrating as a casual player they don't offer that much challenge but i guess the whole idea of the grim quests in general is that they're meant to progressively teach you different attacks that stronger enemies will also perform against you but with harder versions of those attacks that's why you have troopmaster grim to introduce you to nkg's attacks so that once you get there it's not too overwhelming similarly you have the three versions of the grimkin enemies just the only actual difficult one of them is the final version this enemy is definitely interesting to fight because of the different attacks it has and because it has such unique ai it just doesn't really offer any challenge and whenever i'm doing a randomizer i just forget to put the charm on to actually fight these guys so i don't think they're bad but i don't love them so i'm putting them in the seat here all right next up we have the leaping husk it's kind of hard to rate an enemy that just kind of walks back and forth and then jumps when you get close to it the ai is just really basic it's kind of like an upgraded goomba so it serves the purpose of kind of being a hitbox for the players to attack early on in the game where you have to kind of learn how to move around and that kind of thing i just the one thing that i think of when i think of these enemies is that part before false night where if this enemy touches a wall it actually cancels your jump so you'll fall into another husk that you're trying to jump over it's just a really really weird glitch that happens and i shouldn't let it affect my tier list but you know what i'm going to i'm giving this enemy d-tier okay next up we have the grimkin master this is the level two version of the grimkin it actually offers a little bit more challenge but again i don't think the purpose of this enemy is to offer challenge i think it's to help you learn the attacks so that once you get to the hard one you actually know what it's going to do now i'm not sure it fulfills that role as well as it could because for example the groomkit nightmare has that attack with the pillars of flame and i think if the grimkin master had a similar attack it could have prepared players a bit better however it's a teleporting enemy it has some kind of obnoxious ai and its hp values are also fairly high it's like at least with the grimkin novice you can kill it really easily these guys are tanky and take a while to kill and also don't really offer any threat to kill you so i'm going to give the grimkin master d tier okay and finally we have the kin nightmare these guys are actually pretty tough especially i think the placement of them makes them a lot tougher like the fight against the grimkin nightmare where there's spikes along the floor and you have to move from column to column while dodging pillars of flames and fireballs that's actually a really tough encounter so it's a good thing there was some preparation with the easier grimkin enemies so i think these enemies because they offer a bit more challenge it feels a bit less like a basic fetch quest but the fact that you have to kill a few of them throughout the map can really feel a bit tedious so i'm gonna put the grimkin nightmare in d tier judging the enemy on its own i don't think it's bad i'm just not huge on the quest as a whole it's probably a little bit hard to tell but this is actually supposed to be the fluke manga so these are the big enemies in those tunnels leading to the junk pit which is where god home is so they're only in one screen in the entire game but i think it's really cool that that room is so unique because it has that enemy that changes how you have to navigate through the room i think most players when they encounter this enemy for the first time are really freaked out because just having the giant enemy chasing you through those tunnels is pretty scary and you don't know how long the tunnels are it's literally a tiny maze so these enemies serve a really unique purpose they're pretty fun some players might find them frustrating but i actually like them a lot they add a lot of flavor to royal waterways which is already a cool area based off the enemy design so i'm putting fluke manga in the eightier okay so next up we have the husk bully this enemy appears in different spots throughout the game and it's very basic it's just kind of like a goomba that walks back and forth but if you get close to it it does like a little charge headbutt attack much like the leaping husk it serves a purpose which is to kind of help players get their bearings with the game and to learn the controls and the movement although this is the basic version of the husk i like that there are other versions that have slight differences and they just kind of use this enemy almost like a template for others it's also just fun sometimes to have like bodies to hit that sounds terrible but the fact that you can farm these enemies for soul and then cast spells at other enemies does offer some like interesting tactical options can't really give this enemy a bad rank can't give it a great rank either because there's not much to it so i'm just gonna put it into the deer okay and talking about variations of the husks we have one of them this is the husk warrior it really just walks back and forth until you hit it and then it performs a counter attack this enemy is a perfect example of the way that team cherry uses easier versions of enemies to teach you different ai behavior that you need to learn in order to combat harder versions of the enemies so this is a shielded enemy when you encounter harder enemies with shields you know what to expect if you hit the shield it does a counter attack and this enemy is meant to teach you that also while they're doing the counter-attack you know that they're going to be vulnerable at other sides of their body but this enemy serves its purpose and i think that purpose is actually really important enemies like this it's kind of hard to rank them on their own because the reason why they exist is part of an overall game design philosophy and while that philosophy might be well executed the enemy on its own isn't super interesting to deal with so i'm going to give the husk warrior beetier okay next up we have the husk guard this is one of the more interesting enemies in forgotten crossroads and much like the shield warrior it does teach you something which is that if an enemy is big and intimidating it can deal double damage so you better be careful wandering around hollow nest and i really like when game designers place tougher more intimidating enemies in areas like forgotten crossroads for example it's an early game area but i think if all the enemies are just easy it's not going to be interesting enough to actually be fun so you place a few enemies like these and players are like oh what's that it actually makes them think about where they're going and it reminds them that they have to be careful and methodical about how they approach different encounters or if you're a speedrunner you just jump over their heads overall though i do really like husk guards so i'm giving this an eight-year entombed husks everyone hates these enemies these are the enemies in the crypts in the resting grounds and they're kind of like jump scaring you as they attack you these enemies make the crypts feel so much more creepy and intimidating and they just add so much flavor to the area in general i like when enemies are designed for very specific purposes and when they fulfill those purposes really well and entombed husks fulfill their purpose perfectly they jump scare you dealing two damage so are these enemies annoying yeah but they fulfill their purpose super well so this is the first enemy that i'm putting in the s deer okay next up we have the balder all they do is sit there until you get close enough and then they roll at you that's it but actually like when you're dealing with other enemies that roll can be tough to deal with kind of reminds me of when i got jump scared by one in a 112 percent run and died and also in the speed run it's super satisfying to like when they get spat out by the elder balders to kill them before they hit the ground balders are a fun enemy even though they're very simple i'm actually putting balder in the eightier next up we have the elder balder of course the purpose of this enemy is to teach you use your damn spells speedrunners absolutely hate this enemy because it's a 50 50 chance whether they shoot a balder which lets you continue the speed run or a fireball which forces you to sit there and wait so this enemy can be a little bit frustrating if only it just had 45 health then you could just shoot three fireballs at it and continue on with your life but it has 60. that means it needs four fireballs and you can only store three so you need to wait for one balder to spawn before you can continue which again is a 50 50. the enemy's cool it serves its purpose as a casual player you're probably not gonna care too much if it wastes a bit of time but as a speed runner oh my god i'm losing two seconds every time it spits a fireball and that is not cool this is the first enemy that goes in the f tier so this is a basic enemy in green path it's basically like a crawled except it comes out of the ground and unburrows itself before attacking definitely adds a lot of flavor to green path that you have enemies that are just like in the ground it's kind of like telling the player hey like look at the ground before you progress because enemies might be in there other than that though it's a really basic enemy i'm gonna put it in btr okay next up we have the moss fly so this is another fairly basic enemy but you mostly see this enemy in queens gardens and i think these enemies are just kind of like flying pogo targets and that makes them fun because they're enjoyable to pogo and their movement is super predictable unlike most flying enemies they're also kind of like soul batteries so you can just farm them for seoul pretty easily and i love going through a room and just like pogoing off of them to get through the room super fast so moss flies actually go in the eighth tier for me next up we have mosken these are enemies that are just basic enemies in green path these enemies are kind of similar to like the basic husks except they have one big difference which is that instead of just walking back and forth and head butting you they do like a big roll attack so they're almost like a variant of a husk but with a slightly more intimidating basic attack so i like how they kind of evolve these enemies over time and make them more difficult i'm going to put moss kin in the b tier alright next up we have the crawled the crawled is the literal goomba of hollow knight it's the first enemy you see in king's past and it does nothing but walk back and forth once it reaches a point where it can't walk anymore it turns around and continues walking until it can't walk anymore that's a very basic enemy but it's designed to just like kind of teach you how to use your nail and that you can jump over things i guess you don't really have much to say about them they're just like little bugs that you can hit i'll put the crawled in the seat here c for crawling okay now we have another enemy that we find a lot in green path volatile masking this is one of the earlier introductions we have to the infection being in the game so it's a lot like the regular moss kin except it explodes after it dies i like that the explosion attack that it does is a pretty big attack so it really forces you to react to the fact that it's about to explode like even as a speedrunner if you kill one of these enemies you want to be careful that you don't get caught in the explosion but it does give players plenty of time to get out of the way and one little touch that's cool is that if it falls into acid it doesn't explode so they clearly put some thought into that sometimes in the any percent speed run these guys can be like a little bit annoying based off where they spawn like you want to pogo them for soul but if you do pogo them you're not going to land on the ground soon enough to be able to hold jump without letting go of the directional input so you end up losing a bit of time based off that so just based off that one room i'm like i want to give these guys a seat here and that's exactly what i'm gonna do okay next up we have the fool eater and given how often these enemies have actually hit me i can test their names i think it's kind of funny that they're often placed like next to geo rocks so you'll be farming the geo rocks you'll be enticed by the geo rocks and then all of a sudden you just get bit especially the one right next to the stag station in green path where you try to pick up a journal and one of these guys just bites you i think they're a fun enemy and they add a lot of flavor it's just a little jump scare and we love jump scares i'm giving this one an a-tier okay and next up we have the squit of course a reference to mosquito the number of times i've called this guy a vengefly and my chat has yelled at me for it i can't count i know it's not a vengefly i just sometimes call them that and i'm not sorry one thing i really like about these enemies is that you can manipulate their ai to charge at you and then you can pogo off of them i just love pogoing off of flying enemies and i remember the days where fireball skips in speed runs weren't even discovered yet so you had to use this enemy to skip this enemy is simple it does its job and it's just fun to use it for skips so squit is going in eightier alright next up we have the aubel i kind of like that there's multiple variations of the obl so you have the boss version of the obvious and you also have the bigger hobbles in the colosseum i forgot what they're called so this is another one of the enemies where i'm totally just gonna let my speedrunner bias pervade there's that one room the only room that i encounter this enemy in right below the moss night in green path there's one spot where i always lose time where an oval flies into a platform or they'll use their attack when you're trying to like navigate past them so you have to wait for the attack to finish this enemy makes me lose time and i don't like it that said i think the tier wouldn't be fair to these poor little guys so i'm putting the oppel in sea tier okay and next up is the golka if you actually knew this enemy was called a gulka then you're way too big of a hollow knight nerd but these are the enemies that you see in green path i think they're mostly on the way to fog canyon and you know i think if these enemies were a bit tougher it would almost like dissuade people from going to fog canyon but these enemies are actually total pushovers you just walk past them and if you don't stop they'll never hit you so i don't really think these enemies serve much point there are a couple spots toward massive moss charger especially in that secret in the room like before massive mass charger if i recall correctly where there's a relic or a geo rock and there's like a couple of them that like almost trap you in that spot but it's almost like unclear how to approach these enemies because your usual strategy is to just walk past them so i don't think bulkas are well designed they do have a funny name and that's why i'm not putting them in the f i'm putting them in okay next up we have the moss charger this enemy is actually pretty interestingly designed so it pops up in front of you when you're walking to a spot where it's lying dormant and then it charges at you and the first hit that you do doesn't actually deal any damage it just creates a smaller vulnerable version that runs away from you until it burrows again and i think that's really cute do i think they're like a blast to fight against no but the fact that the moss charger exists the way it does it's actually created some like pretty cool speed strats in the anti-percent speed run where collecting soul is so important and you want to do it without stopping so if you have this enemy that's running away from you you can keep moving at full speed while collecting soul and you can also collect its geo after it dies so i really like the strat and that strat actually wasn't found until like early 2019 if i recall correctly so that was about two years after the game released so the fact that these enemies are so unique i think makes them really fun i guess in terms of a casual play through they're not super interesting but it does make green path a lot more threatening which without enemies like the moss charger and moss knights i don't think green path is like a difficult area so overall i'm a big fan of the moss charger also it's kind of cute i'm putting it in the esteer okay next up we have the moss knight so this is a really fun enemy in my opinion the first time you encounter the moss night is going to be in the moss knight arena leading up to hornet team cherry was kind enough to put a bench nearby just for people who struggle with it as well as lifeblood cocoons i think the moss knight is a well-designed encounter the moss knight with its ai does have a lot of similarities to the king's mould like with its backstep attack for example and being able to throw out really large hitboxes to threaten the player but the moss knight exists at a point in the game where the player has a lot less options to approach it you're only going to have vengeful spirit by the time you reach the moss knight whereas by the time you reach the king's moulds you're going to have like descending dark and it's just not going to be threatening unfortunately they have kind of messed up hitboxes on later patches but on one two two one the moss knights are pretty great also something i didn't know for the longest time is that when it does the spit attack you can actually just block that projectile i have no idea how i didn't know that after so many years of playing this game but it's really cool that you can do that but i really like the moss knight it forces you to react to what it's doing it's a great enemy i'm putting the moss knight in esteer okay next up we have the mossy vagabond look at this fluffy dude so this isn't like really much of an enemy it's more like a lore character and they're kind of meant to show you what happens when the infection gets out because they all die sorry for the spoilers now if i'm judging them on an enemy tier list i really can't rank them very highly but they do serve a purpose in the game it's just more of a lower purpose and i'm not a lore person so i'm putting them in the d tier but actually they're pretty cute so i'm putting them seat here they're just so fluffy all right next we have the durandu not to be confused with the duranda which we'll be judging next so these are the enemies that swim in the acid pools back and forth you'll find one for example in the area to the right and below massive mass charger it's the one that you have to wait for to pogo off of in order to get into fog canyon now some people do actually have troubles recognizing the fact that they can use enemies like these to pogo off of to navigate to other places but i think this enemy is kind of meant to teach you that it's like hey it's got this hard shell maybe you should downstrike it and the fact that like under normal conditions you don't really kill it kind of suggests that it has that purpose so this is another enemy that's kind of meant to teach you something of course if you're doing something like a randomizer you always have to wait for this guy not that it's like a huge deal but yeah i want to give these guys a high ranking alone just based off their name but yeah i'm gonna put durandu in the beat here all right and next up we have the duranda so this is the variation that flies up and down through the air this is the enemy that you see a lot of on the way to shio it's just kind of like part of a platforming challenge and once again i like that they have that hard shell so that they kind of like encourage the players to pogo off of it just like any platforming section in hollow knight is nice because there aren't enough of them and i'm glad that apparently silk song is going to have more platforming sections and it felt like they got a little bit lazy towards the end of that room and just kind of placed like two giant lines of them that offer no challenge to get past so i don't think i could give this enemy an a tier so i'm gonna give it beetier all right and next up we have the squit or i mean vengefly once again it's an enemy that i mix up very often the way i remember it is the vengefly has the same look as the adventure like king and i actually remember what the bench fly king looks like these enemies are just aerial enemies that fly at you once you get close enough to them and because of how predictable they are they're very easy to use for skips if you're one of those filthy people who likes saving grubs you can use a fence fly skip in forgotten crossroads to get the grub super early and same goes for like the mask shard in the gum room there's a lot of ways you can just use event flies to skip in different places especially in like randomizers so i like the fact that this enemy exists i'm going to put the vengefly in a deer okay next up we have charged lumafly so little known fact is that these enemies actually move slightly so they're not completely static but they always start their attacks at the same time which is just based off of once you get into a certain range of them they'll start their attacks i honestly really like navigating around them in teachers archives in the any percent speed run because the movement that you have to do in order to get hit only once on the left side is actually a lot of fun you can also do things like damage tanking on them for some weird funky strats in randomizer and on older patches i don't think it's possible on newer patches but on older patches you could actually pogo the lightning that was something that was really cool i don't think they removed it on purpose it might have been like a side effect of a different change but the fact that you could do that was a lot of fun i wish they kept it in the game so these enemies offer a pretty unique purpose and they fulfill that purpose well and it's like one of the few enemies that offer an actual like platforming challenge because of the fact that you can't kill them it's all based on movement so i'm putting charged luma fly in the air deer right next we have the loma not to be confused with the uma which we're doing next these are just really basic small enemies that always die in one hit they're kind of like flavor enemies almost because without them the teachers archives and the area surrounding it would just feel super empty but they're also like hitboxes that you can fall onto and take damage it's kind of nice to have them to just because you can re-enter the room and they respawn so it's nice to be able to use them to farm soul if you really need to although i don't think that's their main purpose that said it's just an enemy that sits there so i can't give it too high of a ranking it's like at least the goombas kind of move around the oomahs just sit there so i'm giving the awoma c tier it does its job but it's just too basic to give a higher ranking all right now we have the famous uma so this is the enemy that makes fog canyon hog canyon if fog canyon didn't have umas it wouldn't be fog canyon anymore and in my opinion the physics of the explosive object that spawns after you kill it it's some of the most fun physics in the game of course a lot of that fun is ruined by the fact that you take double damage from it and die but i think the reason for that is team cherry wanted to be like hey you really shouldn't be going this way you should be navigating to the other parts of greenpath not going through this area where you're taking double damage from these giant explosions but i really like the fact that these kinds of enemies exist because they make the world feel dangerous and making the world feel dangerous and hostile is just so important in games like hollow knight and the enemy is super unique like there's not other enemies that behave like the uma does and the fact that you can take an uma explosion and bring it all the way down to umu and kill the boss in one hit in a task that's one of the coolest task tricks in any run in my opinion i'm giving the uma ester okay next up we have the ambloom so this is a name i'm 100 certain i've never seen before in my life but these enemies are apparently called amblooms so they're enemies that just kind of walk back and forth they're basically goombas they're just kind of like the mindless enemies so i guess they represent fungal wastes pretty well but as an enemy i can't give them a high ranking because they present no real challenge or anything and once you get to fungal wastes you expect a little bit more danger like you're at a point in the game where you should be able to control the character pretty well and just deal with these enemies effortlessly so i'm gonna put the ambloom into the sea here okay next up we have the fungaling another enemy from fungal wastes this is an enemy that you see throughout the area they're kind of just an enemy that you can pogo however however in the case of these enemies you can actually do that many like cool things with funglings i know that like if you're doing the deep nest route in the speed run you'll pogo off of a couple of them but i don't find them like super interesting otherwise and that's just kind of down to their placement they're not really different from like the flying moss enemies so i'm gonna put this enemy in the sea here okay next up we have fungun this is kind of like the big mama version of the angling the thing about the fungun this is the enemy that shoots downwards whenever you go under it i think the enemy has a really cute design but it offers no challenge and it's not really used or placed in any circumstance where it offers a threat i think that if you had a room where there were some of these at the top and you had to deal with other threats at the same time then it would be a bit more interesting but for the most part i think they're just kind of placed randomly here and there i'm putting fun goon in the d tier okay next up we have the sporg this is the enemy that allows us to do the infamous explosion pogo so on that basis alone i love this enemy because that's one of the coolest skips in hollow knight not only the fact that you can manipulate the attack that this enemy throws out but then you can pogo off the explosion after the attack finishes and then unfortunately team cherry removed the ability to pogo off of explosions again i think that might have been a side effect of another change but i just i'm a speedrunner so i'm still salty about that but i really enjoy this enemy i also enjoy the path up to that hollowness seal outside of queen station where there's all of the sporgs that part was like really intimidating and i think that's a really good thing but overall i really really like this enemy it's just a question of whether it goes in the s-tier or the a-tier and maybe i'm just biased for explosions at this point but i'm also putting the sporg in the s deer alright so next up we have the fungified husk so this enemy has explosions kind of like the volatile moskin in green path but it'll actually do the effect before it dies just whenever you trigger the effect by attacking it it'll release that giant spore cloud explosion however based off the enemy placements there's not really any circumstance where this enemy is super threatening so i think there was a bit of a missed opportunity there to actually give the player an encounter with these enemies where they're kind of tested on understanding its mechanics because like i said a problem with fungal waste is that you can kind of just run past everything and nothing's gonna offer like a huge threat at least until you get to the mantises so i wouldn't say the fungified husk is a bad enemy but i'm gonna put it into the sea tier alright next up we have the shroomling so these are the little baby shrooms that are nearby the shroomal warriors that just kind of get up and run away from you they only take one hit to kill and it's kind of nice that you can get soul from them when you kill them but they're just kind of there for flavor they're cute and based off that i'm putting them in the beetier all right now we've got the shroomal warrior truma warrior wins the contest for the most memorable war cry in hollow knight and they're just cool ass dudes like look at the shroom a warrior that dude is intimidating as that guy's going to whup your ass and steal your girlfriend okay but seriously i do like this enemies ai the fact that it has such a distinctive sound effect before it attacks is like a really great warning of what it's going to do so you do have to be careful around these enemies honestly the shroomal warrior is one of my favorite enemies in the game is it basic yes but it's a perfect kind of basic and i love it all right now we have the gruzzer this is like the windows screen saver of hollow knight just kind of bounces around until it hits a wall it's a flying goomba essentially it just provides a bit of an obstacle in the air it's not really that much to say about it but in the speed run when you kill the grass mother like eight of these guys pop out and then they move randomly whose idea was that because if you don't kill them right away then they're just going to scatter and lose you a ton of time like how many runs have i lost because four of these guys scatter to different corners of the arena and i'm left there killing them one at a time or if you get lucky you'll just kill them all with two fireballs now some might say that's a skill issue and you might be partially right but that doesn't stop me from hating this enemy in that particular arena so the gruzzer is going in d tier again i'm letting my speedrunner bias show all right next up we got the shrumel ogre this is the big boy version of the shrimal warrior he just has two attacks that's it but you see this enemy in the arena underneath leg eater and because of the fact that there's two of them it's a good thing the enemy is pretty basic but i think that arena is actually pretty well designed and fun the fact that they leave little infection pools with their spit on the ground it forces you to like navigate around the shroomal ogres and they also control space with their little head pound attack so the fight forces you to move a fair bit and the fight is also fairly hectic because the threat of the spit makes it harder to heal so i enjoy fighting this enemy and i think it's a pretty good mini boss encounter as well do i think it deserves s tier i wouldn't say so but it's like one of the few spots in fungal where i'm like this is a good enemy encounter and fungal probably could have used one or two more of those so i'm gonna put the shrumel ogre into the a tier alright next up we have the mantis youth more commonly known by speedrunners as the bastards you try to pogo and then they do their attack and their hitbox shifts like a football field away so you can't pogo it anymore so these enemies are in the room with mantis claw which is super important for speed runs so in the any percent nmg speed run we have to hit a lever and then you have to get back up onto this platform where three mantis youth are surrounding so typically we lure the mantis youth in such a way that we can pogo off of them to get back up to the platform but yeah if they attack they just do this like backwards movement that completely makes their hitbox like disappear eventually speedrunners did find a pretty consistent setup but for the longest time this setup was to just bring as many mantis youth to that spot as you could which was three of them and just pray that you get good pogos and yeah i'm turning this enemy talk into just a speedrunning talk but to me that's what this enemy is this is the enemy that i do mantis bogo off of and i've really struggled with that skip at times at least earlier on in my speed running career but now that i've learned it a bit better it is really satisfying to pull off so i kind of have mixed feelings on this guy so i'm putting him in the b tier okay so i'll try not to make this one just about speed running this is the mantis warrior the enemy that i kill before i get mantislaw in the speedrun these enemies are really basic however they do have a hidden upward attack that is rarely triggered the attack really isn't that threatening though it's just like a little baby swipe above its head so the mantis warrior is really designed to offer a threat alongside the mantis youth if you're just fighting a mantis warrior one at a time you can just wait for it to attack then walk away and hit it it's really really simple to do and kind of obvious however if you have mantis youth flying above your head that's a lot more difficult so this enemy has a pretty obvious purpose that it fulfills i have actually died to these enemies a surprising amount of times mainly because earlier on when i was speed running i'd lose a lot of health in the mantis claw room and then i try to get past one of these enemies and they just kill me but eventually it got to the point where you don't really interact with any of them at all so these enemies are just kind of like whatever to me i'm putting the mantis warrior into the beetier all right now we're doing the centuries in city of tears starting with the husk sentry so this is the basic one that's on the ground it does a triple attack it does a back step and it does like kind of a regular slash these enemies are really tall compared to other enemies so in some cases they can actually block your movement their ai also makes them a bit more challenging because as soon as they activate like once you get close enough to them they'll actually run right at you so i like that kind of progression in terms of the challenge that the enemies offer typically enemies earlier in the game won't actually charge at you before attacking and the enemies are also placed in such a way that you can learn what they do before you get into the more challenging parts of city of tears at first you see these enemies leading up to the quarrel bench where they're not really that threatening but you can learn their patterns and then afterward they're going to be leading up to lem in the rafters and also going up into soul sanctum and in those areas those are areas where you can definitely get killed by them also the fact that you can pogo the triple slash to get up to a higher spot in the rafters i think that's pretty cool so based off that i am giving husk sentry an a tier ranking okay next up we have the heavy sentry i'm about to let my speedrunner bias show once again okay so the problem i have with the heavy sentry is that it's kind of a 50 50 of whether you can actually jump over their heads and in a speed run you always want to jump over the heads of the enemies so you don't have to waste time killing them with the heavy sentry it's just kind of rng whether you can go over their heads or not and that can definitely be a bit frustrating so i would like it if their ai were a bit more predictable like if you were in a certain position you could bait them into doing one of the attacks over the other however if you're doing a casual playthrough i don't think this enemy is like badly designed it's just from the perspective of a speedrunner that i don't really like them so i am putting this enemy into the sea tier i don't hate them but i certainly do not like the fact that they exist okay next up we have the winged sentry this is a fairly basic flying enemy but it's also a lot larger than most of the other flying enemies that you fought up until you got to the city of tears also these enemies tend to be placed with other sentries which makes them a little bit more challenging so you have some enemies controlling the ground and these enemies controlling the air and i like that it offers a decent challenge these enemies are pretty pogoable but you can say that for a lot of enemies in the game to be fair and i do like the fact that you can use flying enemies to skip i think i've said that a couple times at this point so i am putting this enemy next to the other century in the eighth year okay next up we have the much worse and more annoying version of the flying century the lance century so instead of having nice and predictable ai like most other flying enemies this enemy can just swoop down at you with the most unpredictable arc and with insane speed and hit you from so far away or it can just stay in place and throw a giant lance at you either way it's not really fun to deal with the fact that the charge comes at you so quickly makes you have to predict that it's going to come and you kind of have to stay out of the zone where the charge could come at you and if you're playing through the game casually like you're not going to know that or memorize that even as an experienced speedrunner like you still get hit by that kind of thing sometimes so i'm not saying that the enemy should have the charge removed but i think making it a bit more reactable would have been nice also this enemy is ass when you're doing the lever skip so i'm putting the lance sentry ugh based off the lever skip i almost want to put it into the f tier but i'm going to put it into the d tier the d tier is like the annoying for speed runners tier okay we're actually changing the tier names to more accurately reflect how i think about these enemies okay next up we have the mistake imagine being named a mistake that's gotta sting just a little bit actually didn't know they were called mistakes for the longest time and then once i found out i was just like laughing at it but i think we can all agree that their name is not inaccurate these guys are actually pretty annoying because it's like where do they spawn because the way that they spawn is you have to enter a certain spot on the ground and then you have to leave that spot so it's always ambiguous exactly where the spot is especially like in the coliseum when you're speed running and you want to spawn them as quickly as possible but you don't quite hit the area on the ground that you have to in order to spawn them and then you leave that area and you're like why haven't they spawned and you're not sure which one you didn't get and you end up losing a ton of time because you're going through the entire floor of the trial trying to find which one didn't spawn not that i've ever experienced this before personally but tldr these guys are are they super annoying though i wouldn't say so but they are annoying alright next up is the folly these are also enemies that you find after master in soul sanctum and there's just so many of them in that one room that they just kind of overwhelm you and i actually kind of like that section because it is a lot of fun to like pogo off of them and you can just kill so many enemies at once with a spell cast that's always a lot of fun you know i'm playing hollow knight to kill stuff so if you give me a lot of stuff to kill i'm going to enjoy it and they don't have that weird spawn mechanic of the mistake although i will admit that the spawning mechanic of the mistake is unique and interesting i just prefer the follies also i do like the folly skip back up to the grub location that is a pretty fun set of pogos that you can do so overall i would give ollie beetier oh boy now we've got the soul twister so these enemies actually almost single-handedly made me not want to speedrun because back in the day when we were doing the any percent nmg speed run right after the game released we went through soul sanctum and these enemies can just spawn in your path like if you're dashing mid dash they can just spawn in front of you and you'll get hit so if you're doing a speed run you lose time if you're doing a hitless run you lose the run through no fault of your own other than just because you dashed now that we know a bit more about the game we know they're not completely unpredictable but they are still really annoying to deal with i actually don't mind them quite as much in the colosseum because you can one shot them at that point but in sanctum they're so annoying one might even say super annoying so i'm giving these enemies an f tier i just hate teleporting enemies okay next up we have the tiktik this is just a crawled except it goes all the way around the platform instead of just stopping once it reaches one edge you know i think it's a cute enemy i think it adds a little bit of flavor to forgotten crossroads and i think like in the speed run when you're collecting soul off of them it can be fun they're a lot more predictable than the grasses in the room which just kind of fly around randomly and interrupt your inventory drops if a tick tick interrupts your inventory drop then it's your own fault because you should know where you are in the cycle in that room then again we're judging the enemies not just the singular room and it's a pretty basic enemy so i'm going to put it into the b tier all right next up we have the soul warrior this is actually one of the more fun mini boss fights i think in the game of course it teleports so i instantly have that bias against it but i think despite the teleports it's actually a fun mini boss to fight against because of the charge attacks because of the fact that you have to dodge those projectiles and the teleports actually kind of make it like a little bit more fun because you're forced to react to that movement now it can definitely be annoying in the speed run like any enemy that teleports in a speed run randomly anyway is going to be tough to deal with you're going to lose time to it but i really like this mini boss fight and the fight in god home where it has a bit more hp does the mini boss encounter kind of feel like filler in god home yeah but i still kind of like the fight just because you can trap it in the corner and wail on it maybe that shouldn't be a criteria for ranking an enemy highly but you know i like what i like so i'm putting the soul warrior into a or b tier i'm putting it into the a tier and next up we have the husk dandy this is one of the husk variants that shows up in city of tears they're a little bit taller than the other husks but they're also very basic it just kind of walks back and forth and if you get close to it it does like a little flurry of attacks in front of it however the little spike on its head means its hitbox is a little bit higher so it can be sometimes annoying to navigate around especially in a speedrun also it's definitely kind of like a filler enemy almost that they're just kind of placed to make the rooms feel a little bit more alive not that there's anything wrong with that i just think i can't rank an enemy highly if that's what it is unless it's like cute or something and husk dandy is not cute so i'm putting the husk dandy into the sea tier okay next up we have the cowardly husk this is similar to the dandy husk in terms of being like a little bit taller of a husk and it's also just kind of like a filler enemy that's placed in different screens that doesn't offer that much threat however the lack of a spike on top of its head makes all the difference in the speed run also sometimes when you activate this enemies ai it'll run away from you and you can get extra hits on it without slowing down and that's actually kind of nice because you can get extra soul without stopping so it doesn't matter at all for casual playthroughs but for speed runs i kind of like this enemy more than the other husk so the cowardly husk goes into beatier of course if this enemy doesn't run the right way then i'm pissed all right now we've got the glutnus husk this is another variant on the other husks but this one's bigger and it'll do a little hop at you once you get close one thing i like when speedrunning is you can actually up slash this husk and when it does the hop it'll just jump over your head so that's definitely fun to pull off but if you want to farm this enemy for geo you're gonna cast a vengeful spirit at it and that vengeful spirit might or might not double hit so if it doesn't double hit then you're going to need to follow it and do two more nail slashes in order to actually kill the enemy so this enemy introduces some rng to the speed run that i don't really like otherwise it's a fun enemy to kind of like interact with i just i don't like that rng so i'm putting the gluttonous husk into the seat here i wouldn't say it's like an annoying enemy but i don't like it right and second to last of all the city of tears husks we have the gorgeous husk so of course this enemy is great because of how much geo it drops i used to not like the gorgeous husk encounter because it felt so rng whether you got double hits but actually because of the fact that you're just dealing with one enemy you can manipulate the positioning of this enemy by hitting it away from you and it'll make the double hits just super consistent so i've had less and less of an issue with this enemy over time and i'm at the point where i actually kind of enjoy the gorgeous husk encounter and the geo collection after gorgeous husk when you kill gorgeous husk its geo just explodes throughout the room and optimally collecting that geo by catching some of it in the air instead of wasting time waiting for all that geo to fall down that's actually a kind of fun part of that encounter but if you get unlucky and don't get all the geo or if you just mess up that really sucks so i have mixed opinions on this enemy but overall i do like it so i'm putting gorgeous husk into the b tier but it's kind of like high in the btr actually scrap that i'm putting gorgeous husk into the eighth here i think speedrunners will have very different opinions on that all right now we have the great husk century so back in the day we actually had to kill the great husk sentry in the speed run because lever skip wasn't possible and then finally one two two one existed and lever skip was possible but then they took it away and you had to kill the great husk sentry again so the great husk's entry is a shielded enemy so it has the shielding logic where if you hit it the enemy's going to counter attack and it's really good that they kind of taught you that earlier on because this enemy deals double damage one thing that might kind of throw people off is that when you hit the shield horizontally in front of the great husk sentry the great husk sentry can either do a forward attack and then nothing or it can do a forward attack followed by a backward attack so if you hit the shield and then jump over its head and immediately land on the other side you're going to get hit by the attack going behind it of course it's really easy to deal with that just by hitting the shield in front of it and pogoing it once or twice before landing still i do like this enemy and it's nice that they throw this enemy into a few less threatening situations like outside of king station where they're just on their own before giving you that little mini arena in the spire that said i do find this enemy a little bit tedious to kill at least in the speed run where you have minimal equipment just takes forever to kill this enemy so i think they could have maybe adjusted its hp values a little bit and relied a bit more on other enemies being around to make it more of a threat so i don't think there's anything wrong with it but i don't think it's a great enemy either so i'm putting it in the b tier okay and next up we have the bell fly so a lot of people probably find bell flies to be really annoying and i totally get where you're coming from because you're just walking through an area peacefully and all of a sudden you have an explosion dealing to damage i get that but personally i actually like bell flies first off i like enemies that jump scare you because once again it makes the world feel more dangerous and intimidating but these enemies aren't so like unpredictable like once you hear the scream you know exactly what you need to do you need to get out of the way or get into the air and if you're really ballsy you can actually just slash at them and kill them and i like that that's an option not sure if that was on purpose or not but it just feels amazing like in the colosseum if you just like slap them out of the air with a regular nail slash that feels really good to do you can also use them to kill other enemies and i think that's really really cool of course that also was a factor in the coliseum and i talked a bit about the crypts and how many bell flies there are in there and bell flies also really contribute to that dangerous kind of atmosphere so i think bell flies are a great enemy so i'm actually gonna put belfly into s tier and i totally know that's gonna be a very controversial opinion okay next up we have the pill flip i had no idea they were named pilflips so this is news to me but these are enemies with some really bizarre behavior kind of unique behavior that you don't see in any part of the map but this kind of contributes to making the royal waterways feel so unique so you hit the enemy it flips on its back and starts chasing you personally i know a lot of people don't like the waterways because of the enemies being kind of unpredictable or tough to deal with but i actually love the waterways so i'm putting the pill flip into the a tier okay next up we have the worm this is everyone's favorite enemy in the game all this enemy does is when you hit it or get hit by it it expands to like 10 times its size also in godsol it crashes your game but we're not going to be judging based off its appearance in hollow knight god soul we're just going to judge the base game so from a speed runner's perspective of course when you're doing the ism's tier skips which are acid skips sometimes these guys just fly in your way and interrupt the trick and then you fall into acid after getting hit by them so that's two damage so in those circumstances worms are insanely annoying if you get hit by them and just knowing that there's the possibility of getting hit means that if you get down to two hp you really want to heal or cast a fireball just to clear them out however i actually kind of like these enemies they're really funny enemies like they bounce off of each other like i like the fact that they bounce off of each other and they just look absolutely deranged you have some enemies in hollow knight that look cute and then you have the horp and just based off of how memorable the warmth is and the whole concept of getting warmth in a speed run i could put them in the annoying tier but worms i actually like worms a lot so let's put warmth in the s tier but if team cherry puts worms in silk song i'm officially going to cancel them okay next up we have the fluke fay we find these enemies in the royal waterways they have some unique flying ai they kind of fly in weird patterns so they can be fun to pogo off of and it's especially fun when you have to like bypass a little pool of acid and you have a fluke faded pogo off of feels rewarding to be able to do so i like these enemies you can pogo them they fly a tier all right next up we have the aspid hunter so this is the basic version of the aspid you find this asped pretty early on in the game in the asped arena where you can double spike kill them which is really fun to do because you don't have to interact with them in any way which is much preferable to having to interact with them but these enemies actually do offer a pretty valid challenge of course aspids can be a bit annoying because they fly and they shoot projectiles now aspect hunters are unlike their primal aspid brothers pretty predictable because they just shoot a projectile straight at you so you know where the projectile is going to go before they spit and unless you're like right next to them you can usually react to it so i don't think aspect hunters are like annoying at all i kind of like them although i don't have a ton else to say about them so i'm putting them into the beetier all right next up we have the flukemon this is arguably the most memorable enemy in the waterways i'm honestly a big fan of this enemy so it's got great sound design that just makes the waterways so good but also when you kill the enemy and of course you're going to because it takes up like the entire height of the tunnels that it's in usually it'll spawn extra enemies and one of those enemies spawns pretty quickly so you know that you're going to have to deal with it but then another enemy spawns like five seconds later after you've already forgotten that you killed the flukemon and that enemy actually comes pretty quickly i just really enjoy how unique this enemy is so i'm putting the flukemon into the a tier and now we have the shardmight another new name that i'm learning i've always known them as those bastards in crystal peaks that stop you from wall jumping honestly the thing about these enemies is i don't think they actually offer any particular challenge you just kind of have to wait for them to move and then continue one thing i do like is that you can pogo off the crystals but other than that i just don't find the enemy that interesting so i'm putting a shard mite into c tier okay next up we have glimback this is another like really easy enemy that you just kind of have to wait for it to get out of the way it's almost like the theme of crystal peaks is there's a lot of cycles where you have to wait a little bit in order to progress so it does fit with crystal peaks gameplay wise i just don't think glimbacks are really used in any situation where they present an actual challenge it is kind of interesting that you can up slash them from behind so that you can still hit them even if you're on the wrong side of them or if you get bad rng but in the speed run we just skip these guys anyway navigating around them can be kind of fun because they're like a big hitbox but otherwise i don't really find them too interesting so i'm also gonna put these in the seat here all right now we're moving on to potentially one of the most hated enemies in the game next to the primal aspid this is the crystal hunter i love crystal hunters okay and i know this is going to be the most controversial tier list ever made and that's okay because i like crystal hunters because you can interact with the crystals that they shoot to me it's just a lot of fun that you can force the crystal hunter to shoot in a specific way and then interact with the projectile afterward now i will admit that this isn't like really a huge factor in the vanilla game but i have done modded challenges where like the screen is filled with these crystals and you can pogo off of them and interact with them in different ways and i think that's a lot of fun if you're a player who kind of like struggles with the movement and the combat and isn't confident to be able to dodge the crystals and the crystal hunter is like the worst thing ever because it flies away from you as you get close to it and then it shoots something that's going to be probably underneath you and that you're going to land on unless you pogo so i totally get why people hate this enemy but i love crystal hunters most of the time sometimes they can be a bit annoying i'll admit but overall i like the design i like the fact that you can interact with the projectile and the crystals that spawn afterward so crystal hunter goes into the s deer okay next up we have crystal crawlers anyone who's tried to do god cycle or dog cycle in the speed run is going to hate these enemies because they're kind of random almost like when they start firing because it's based off of your proximity to the enemy and that's just like it's not always going to be consistent right because the enemy's moving and you're moving as well and you're going to be moving at different speeds through the room at each time so this enemy feels kind of inconsistent in the speed run i do think it's interesting that you can kill the enemy with spells otherwise the enemy is totally unhittable you can't hit it with a nail slash but i think it's well designed i think it fits with the kind of movement focused theme of crystal peaks so i think crystal hunters are good they belong in the b tier next up is husk minor these enemies are like a little bit tricky to deal with because they can either run up at you and do this little slash or they'll throw the pickaxe and throwing the pickaxe is a bit tougher to deal with i like that you can pogo the pickaxe afterward of course this is what allows for pog x to happen so if you don't know what pog x is you bait this enemy in a specific spot to throw a pickaxe and then you pogo off of that pickaxe to do a little skip and it's a super satisfying trick to pull off of course if it decides not to throw the pickaxe right away it can be really annoying too at the same time but overall it's a pretty basic enemy i'll give it one more point for pogx existing so it's going into the a-tier okay so next up we have crystallized husk this is the enemy that walks back and forth really quickly and then once it detects you it's gonna shoot a laser at you and that laser actually lasts for quite a while and the way that the laser is shot is based off of where you were in the air when it decided to shoot so it is predictable but sometimes the angle of the laser can hit you kind of unexpectedly like if it does a straight horizontal line it's going to be pretty tough to dodge that laser without using a double jump for example so really like as a casual player you want to kill this enemy without exposing yourself so you want to kind of like hide behind something and take a swipe and then run back or you just want to cast a couple spells at it but it does offer an actual challenge and it kind of goes with the laser based theme of crystal peaks overall i do like the enemy and it makes the rooms that the enemy is in actually feel a bit unique so i'm gonna give crystallized husk the a tier okay so next up we have the furious avengefly it's appropriate that it's named furious because of how it makes people feel and the reason is it has a huge hitbox it has a pretty tanky amount of hp and once it flies into you it's just gonna stay in your hitbox so after you become vulnerable you just get hit again and that's i think the main thing that people find annoying about it the fact that it explodes afterwards is just kind of icing on the cake and i've lost so many flower quest runs in one twelve percent to this bastard i mean it does the trick of making infected crossroads feel so much more dangerous but i'm not gonna lie this enemy is definitely annoying so i am putting it into the annoying tier okay next up we have the volatile grazer now i don't hate these enemies with a passion however i've had some speed runs where i'm going through forgotten crossroads and i want to do a menu drop and they just snipe you from the top of the room and there's absolutely no way to react to it so like what's the intended solution supposed to be just kill all of them before going down so it's just like specifically their placement in that one room that makes them pretty annoying if they weren't put into a super tall room that wouldn't be a problem because you could just react to the fact that they shot a projectile because they're on your screen and go past them if they're off screen you can't react to them so i think in that big tall room they're placed kind of poorly outside of a speedrun like does it really matter that much probably not but as a speedrunner i really dislike these enemies i'm actually gonna put them into this super annoying deer okay now we have violent husk so this is the enemy that just runs at you really quickly and explodes this enemy does a really great job of just displaying kind of what the infection is doing to hollow nest and you know that i like enemies that explode but it's pretty hard to justify giving this enemy estier so i'm just gonna give it a tear okay next up we have the aspid mother so a lot of people might not like this enemy but i'm actually a fan of this enemy and the reason is it's not like a super threatening enemy but it does put you into some tactical situations where it's like do i just try to run past it or do i kill the smaller enemies or do i just go after the one that's actually spawning the smaller enemies i also think it has some good placement like the aspid mother next to the grub on the far left near the entrance to fog canyon i think that one's kind of funny because you can run past it and then it's just going to keep spawning them and after you come back from ignoring the grub there's going to be like 10 little of those aspect babies coming at you and all you've got are like acid pools on either side of you so i do like this enemy i'm gonna put it into the eightier okay next up we have the slobbering husk so this resembles the leaping husk however instead of jumping it does the little projectile attack and it actually shoots multiple projectiles this enemy is really easy to deal with so compared to the other enemies in infected crossroads this is one enemy that you can just kind of farm soul on it's more of a threat when combined with the other enemies that are gonna be around it so it's one of those enemies in the game that's almost like a filler enemy just something for you to hit something to fill the screen up i don't really have too many thoughts on them so i'm just gonna put them into the beetier okay next up we have the dirt carver this is one of the enemies in deepness that really gives deep nest the deep nest feel because you have these enemies that are just constantly emerging up from the ground and burrowing back in it just makes deepness feel so dangerous like when i was in my casual playthrough i would always try to kill these enemies as quickly as i could but they actually just continue to spawn after you kill them it's not like they're super hard to deal with or threatening but i really like the fact that they exist in deepness so i'm gonna put these enemies into the a tier okay and next up we have the enemy that creates dirt carvers this is the carver hatcher this enemy actually is only in two rooms in the game which is just like around the tram pass i think that the idea behind the carver hatchers is pretty cool like they occupy the space in the air and they fill the ground with threatening enemies however in reality you can just kind of like go above the dirt carvers and the carver hatchers are going to offer no real threat so they could have maybe made their flying ai like a little bit more snappy or just like giving the enemy another attack or something i do think the section with them is cool but it's just not memorable because it's so easy that you just get through it without any issue so i'm gonna put the carver hatcher into the b tier i was considering sea tier but i like enemies that can spawn other enemies alright next up we have the corpse creeper these are cool enemies because they spawn kind of unpredictably when you kill husks in deepness there's a 50 chance that a corpse creeper will spawn from one of their bodies i think corpse creepers are pretty memorable like you've killed husks in other areas of the game but only in deepness do you kill a husk and then all of a sudden it unexpectedly turns into a corpse creeper and i think it was in the low wall jump hollow knight challenge run that people actually used a corpse creeper and had to use heavy blow to knock it back a certain distance away in order to hit it onto another platform to pogo off of it later on i think i've got that right so that's just like really neat of course that's like super incredibly niche but corpse creepers are cool in my books i am putting them right next to dirt carvers in the eightier okay next we have the deepling the wiki says they're very weak but very quick be careful not to jump onto them while platforming it's as if this is the only enemy that deals contact damage but yeah these are goombas in deepness not really too much to say about them i'll just throw it into the seat here and ah this guy is going at the bottom of the bottom tier this is probably for me the most annoying enemy in the game so let me explain why okay in the speed run we're going through deep nest and we want to go as fast as possible these enemies are always placed in really small tunnels where you want to wall jump up and if the enemy isn't moving predictably then you don't know whether you need to pogo it you don't know whether you need to wait or you don't know whether you need to try to wall jump above it and this enemy is so unpredictable it can decide to shoot at you at an unpredictable time it can decide to turn around or it can just keep going in its initial direction now typically you'll try to wall jump above it as it's going down but let's say it decides to turn around you can't really react to it in time before you just jump into it and there's often spikes next to these guys as well so you get hit into the spikes and take double damage then when you respawn next to it it can actually shoot a projectile at you and kill you i think i've only seen that happen like the triple hit happened a couple times but it is a possibility now imagine you're on a personal best pace and you have to deal with them at the end of the speed run it is absolutely the worst that these enemies exist on a casual play through whatever i don't care but in the speed run i hate these guys easiest bottom tier of my life okay next up we have the little weaver this enemy is a flying enemy that's kind of disguised as an enemy that crawls around on webs i like the fact that it kind of spawns in like once you get close to a specific area that's also kind of a theme throughout deep nest but it just deals contact damage once it reaches you otherwise you can pogo off of it and sometimes get up to higher places which is nice these enemies are definitely tough to deal with but i think that the challenge they offer is fair and they're really predictable enemies and they match deepness theme really well so i'm putting them into the a tier all right time for the stalking devout hope you're prepared for another rant about the speed run now stalking devouts completely block the path you can't just take damage and then dash through it because its mass kit box actually counts as a wall so that alone makes them kind of annoying now in a casual playthrough of course it's good that they don't just let you skip the enemy easily that would be a big oversight but in the speed run they're kind of annoying because you have to hit them to get soul it's a lot like the elder balder in that you're waiting for the enemy to do something to let you get soul so that you can cast another spell and get past them now i wouldn't say they're as bad as elder balders because you actually kind of have to pull off like a satisfying set of attacks in order to kill devouts but there's two of them in a row in the hardest area in the speedrun in my opinion and you have to do a damage tank in order to do the quick kill on them this is another enemy that in the casual run they're not that bad but in the speed run they're just super annoying so they go in this super annoying tier okay next up we have the shadow creeper these are basically like abyss versions of crawlids you see a lot of them in the ancient basin as well where they just kind of like go up and down on the walls kind of like wall goombas if you will it can be kind of fun to like use these enemies to pogo off of them because their movement is very predictable but other than that i don't really have that much to say about them i'm going to put the shadow creeper into the beetier okay now we have the lesser molec these enemies are just seen in the ancient basin there is a little gauntlet where you have to fight two of them at once and they're kind of similar to shrumel ogres almost except a lot more mobile their little infected blobs control areas on the ground and force you to have to move around if you use spells these enemies are total pushovers and extremely easy to kill but most players in casual playthroughs do not use that many spells so these enemies can definitely be like a little bit threatening i think they could have boosted the health on these enemies a bit it's a bit surprising that their health is so low compared to shrimal ogres but overall i find these enemies fun to fight against so i'm gonna put them into the a-tier okay next up we have the aspid hatchling this is the enemy that's spawned by the aspid mother they don't really drop anything so you really just want to kill the aspen mothers as quickly as possible so they don't spawn too many of these unless you want to farm a little bit of soul then you can use them to do that i like that they kind of force you to think about your movements and you can even pogo off of them if you need to that said they're a super basic enemy i'm just going to put them into the beetier okay next up we have the moller now overall i don't like this enemy because the spits are just kind of random and as a speedrunner you want to get past them without taking damage from the spits and it's pretty hard to do so apparently there are like consistent ways to do it on all but the last one if i'm not mistaken but these enemies are just like leading up to broken vessel so they're only in one spot in the game and they kind of give that spot like a really unique challenge so i like that about them but overall i do find them a little bit annoying are they annoying enough to belong in the annoying tier yes okay next up we have the infected balloon these are adds that spawn in the broken vessel and lost kin and winged nosq bites okay typically in other games i don't really like when you're doing a boss fight and a ton of ads spawn but in hollow knight i kind of enjoy fighting adds in boss fights and part of the reason is because you get soul for hitting enemies so of course you hit the adds and then you get to cast a spell at the boss and the other reason is that bosses are often like moving in and out whereas adds are going to typically just run towards you so it gives you an action to do while the boss is further away from you it's just like something to swing at something that you can kill and get soul and get an advantage from performing that action so i actually like the fact that these ads exist in different boss fights and also if you really struggle with dealing with ads they only have one hp so you can kill them with defender's crest so you have that option as well i will actually put these enemies into the a tier i really like that they exist in those fights okay next we have the boo fly you know i kind of wonder why these enemies exist they do give kingdom's edge some flavor when you enter it you just see these giant flies and you're like what the hell are these they don't even really do any attacks at all they just fly there and are basically stationary they can kind of add like a little bit of challenge to the platforming i guess but for me i just like to pogo off of flying enemies and these are giant flying enemies that i can pogo off of so i do kind of like them in that sense but i wouldn't really place them in the a tier i don't think that's justified so i'm gonna put them into the b tier all right now we've got the moment that everyone's been waiting for finally we are ranking the primal aspid so i've had a lot of controversial ratings in this tier list i will admit i'm fully aware of it and i think i've justified most of them pretty well as to why i like them personally and i totally get why some people might not like some of the enemies that i like however i'm gonna have to side with everyone else that the primal aspid is a total bastard and i mentioned this when i talked about the regular aspid the regular aspen has a totally predictable attack it shoots a projectile where you are located when the enemy shoots the primal aspid shoots the projectile where you are and then it shoots projectiles basically where you would go to dodge the first projectile and in order to get between the three projectiles it requires a level of finesse that most players don't have at least when they're playing their casual playthrough the enemy of course also flies away from you once you get close to it and toward you when it's far away so it's pretty much the most annoying ai possible that you could think of does it offer a valid challenge yeah sure but i think this enemy is just objectively really annoying so it has to go into the super annoying tier okay next up we have the hopper now this is a really simple enemy it's just the goomba that hops back and forth doesn't really react to you in any way but i am actually a fan of the hopper the enemy is just like really satisfying to kill for some reason because you're just taking swings at it and it's just hopping along and it has a decent amount of health too like you wouldn't expect a small little enemy like that to have 50 health but you can cast a good amount of spells at it before it dies it's basically just like a hopping punching bag and to me that's a great enemy so based off that reasoning i am actually putting the hopper into the atr but it's like a high eightier okay next up we have the great hopper this enemy is well known for its role in great hopper percent which is a speed run where you kill a great hopper as quickly as possible which was really just an excuse to use a very specific shade skip to reach the great hopper but these enemies are very basic they know what they want in life they just like hopping back and forth and much like the basic hoppers they're just punching bags and i'm a big fan of that i do genuinely think that like once you get into a pattern with these enemies it's fun to fight them and it also makes the path to the nail master whichever nail master that is kind of like fun and unique because it's filled with hoppers and great hoppers and i like how they just kind of like burst down from the ceiling too so great hoppers based off of all that i've got to put the great hopper into the s pier okay next up we have the grub mimic this is one of my favorite enemies in the game because if you accidentally swing at a grub jar you won't have actually saved a grub and it punishes players for saving grubs too at the same time the grub mimic is just an obvious inclusion in the s-tier okay now we're going to be doing the hive enemies we've got the hiveling to start off with this is just one of the basic bees it just flies around idly ivlings also exist in the hive night fight but they're pretty different in that fight because they actually fly down in a specific pattern these are just basic passive flying enemies you can use them to pogo off of i kind of like that they're placed in groups it makes them like a little bit more threatening just because of contact damage i would put hivelings into the b tier okay so this is the hive soldier everyone hates this enemy because it does that stupid charge attack okay and it's pretty obvious when it's going to do the charge attack but it often comes from off screen so you can't really react to it and the attack is so fast that like it just gives you no time at all and it forces you to kind of like move in some unique ways like using walls and corners and such to hide in like if you break line of sight then you know you're going to be safe but that doesn't make the fact that it's an attack that comes from off screen any more palatable personally i would put hive soldier into the super annoying tier okay next up we have hive guardian aka bigby a lot of speedrunners do not have a good time with this enemy because you have to bait this enemy into charging into a broken wall in order to access a mask shard which is a percent so some speedrunners who are doing max percent aka 112 percent nowadays need to rely on the cooperation of this enemy in order to continue their speed run now speedrunners will try to act chummy with this enemy like he's not a problem all because they're so desperate for his cooperation now if this enemy doesn't cooperate it can end up bouncing to the other side of the screen while you sit there and contemplate why you've ever bothered speedrunning if it weren't for that one wall existing the hive guardian would be an alright enemy but because of that i am putting the hive guardian into these super annoying tier and i'm not afraid to do so okay now we're going back to the wandering husk we did the husks and forgotten crossroads a long time ago but we didn't get to this one this one is a little bit different because it kind of does a charge where it flails its arms at you but again it's just kind of like a variation on the template of the husks in forgotten crossroads they all kind of behave similarly they'll just do something once you get within a certain range of them which makes them predictable which makes them kind of basic it serves its purpose and it goes into the bee tier okay next up we have the husk hive we're back to the hive this enemy just kind of like runs away from you and spawns hivelings and when you kill it it spawns even more hivelings so it's like you want to kill it so it stops spawning things but then it just spawns more things and also any enemy that runs away from you and does things is automatically going to be a bit annoying and the hive is already a tough area and when this enemy is running away from you and does a jump it just does the most giant jump imaginable it jumps like 10 times higher than you'd expect and if you're trying to skip the enemy you have a chance of just getting clipped by that jump i don't think this is a bad enemy it's a little bit annoying sure i don't think it belongs in the annoying tier and it does kind of do its job in the hive gives more of like a variety to the enemies and i am generally a fan of enemies that spawn other enemies so i think i'll put the husk hive into the b-tier okay so next up we have the spiny husk this is the enemy that just takes a moment to charge and then shoot spines all over it's actually kind of funny because in the main patch that i play hollow knight in which is one two two one this enemy glitched out so its spines actually didn't have any hitboxes and the projectiles could be coming right at you and you just don't worry about it because the projectiles don't do anything then i play on later patches of the game where this was fixed and all of a sudden they deal damage to me i think that when this enemy functions it's a cool enemy i think that this is a cool enemy i also like the unique behavior of how when it dies you can hit it for more soul and you also have to watch out for that little hitbox on the ground it's really nice that they put that little extra effort in to make the enemy unique and it allows you to just farm the enemy for soul to kill other enemies especially in the queen's gardens arena that's super useful so i like this enemy a lot however i wouldn't put it quite in the s deer if i'm putting it into the a tier next up we have the lootal this is one of the most hated enemies by speedrunners because there's a whole section where ideally you would just use a crystal dash or two and get across but then there's lootals which randomly jump up and down onto the ceilings and on the ground and they're 90 of the time just going to block your crystal dash and make you take damage and since your crystal dash got stopped you now have to dash through the area with the littles where they're bound to hit you a ton of the time because they just move so unpredictably like you never know which direction they're going to jump until they jump and you have no time to react because they move so quickly when they jump and then at the end of that whole area you have marmu unless you do a quick kill for marmu which back in the day i wasn't aware of then you could end up just being at such low health that marmu finishes you off so noodles are just such an easy bottom tier i do not like these enemies they offer a fun challenge and a casual playthrough but i say fun with the quotation marks because they're bastards next up we have the mantis petra so littles aren't in the any percent speed run thank god but mantis petra are in the 80 speed run and they're in an arena which you have to kill the mantis petra in in order to progress now the optimal strategy to kill the mantis petra is to double hit them with fireballs and doing so can be really difficult they also tend to fly upwards and away from you so if your fireballs completely whiff then you're left in an arena with 45 hp mantis petras and these enemies fly away from you while shooting giant projectiles typically they fly up into the ceiling so you can only get one hit on them before you have to fall back down so you can easily lose a run to these enemies and even for casual players like they can be pretty annoying for the exact same reasons like you jump up to hit them and they shoot a giant projectile at you you only get one hit on them and you have to fall back down mantis petras are a super easy inclusion in the bottom tier again these aren't necessarily badly designed enemies i just find them annoying in the speed run okay now we have the mantis traitor now the mantis trader is kind of neat because it's an enemy that's designed to teach you the traitor lord's attacks which are pretty basic attacks so you have to question like how much teaching do you actually need but it's a good thing that this enemy exists i definitely find this enemy tricky to deal with and i think it's mainly the lunge attack and i think it's mainly because of the attack where it does a jump and then a lunge afterward but the enemy is pretty predictable and you can always react to all the attacks it's just tough to deal with the enemy when there's other enemies on the screen but it's a good kind of difficulty i do like the mantis traitor so i'm gonna put it into the a tier okay next up we have the sharp balder i always thought these were called like armored balders because most of the coliseum enemies are like armored variants of earlier enemies however this is the sharp balder apparently it's the same sharpness as other balders because they all deal one damage so they have to be equally sharp right but these have a lot more hp than other balders however their ai is the exact same not sure if their hitboxes are any different these ones might have slightly larger hitboxes but it looks like pretty close it's fun to deal with these enemies in the colosseum because you can easily double hit them with shade soul so it's like you just have enough soul going into the waves where sharp balders spawn and you can just instantly clip them with a double hit so that's really satisfying to do it's always nice when you have like a really consistent way to quick kill an enemy so i'm gonna put the sharp balder into the a tier and again that's totally my speedrunner bias okay now we have the armored squit so this is the again coliseum variant of the switch it has basically the same ai as the regular squid but it has a lot more hp and obviously the hitbox is a lot bigger too but one of the things that i like about coliseum is there are a lot of other enemies like this the enemies on their own aren't necessarily that interesting but when enemies are spawning in waves like they do in the coliseum it's just satisfying to be able to kill them really quickly especially when speed running just finishing off a wave in a couple spells like that feels really good so i'm putting the armored squit in the a tier right beside the sharp boulder okay next up we have the battle obl this is the colosseum variant of the bubble uh most people find this enemy a little bit annoying and i totally see why it's really hard to react to these enemies because they fly around randomly and they periodically shoot from all four corners of their body and there's usually several of them on the screen at once they also have a decent amount of hp so it's not like you can just one shot them and move on so like typically when you're speed running you'll shoot a couple shade souls at them to kill them or you can do like a nail art and a shade soul of course if you're just dealing with one at a time you can just use the strategy of staying above or below them and as long as you're directly above or below them they're not too much of a problem so i don't hate these enemies they are a little bit annoying but not annoying enough to put them into the annoying tier i think they can even be fun to fight against at times but as a speedrunner it does feel a little bit random to fight them so i'm gonna put them into the b-tier okay now we have the shielded fool so this is the enemy in the colosseum that has a shield when it spawns so some people might not love this enemy but one thing you can do with them is just kind of walk away from them and dream nail them as soon as they get in range and you can just use them as soul batteries to heal up the full that's one way you can kind of cheese any wave of the colosseum that has a shielded pool in it otherwise you can use nail arts at max range and hit them and of course any wave with a shielded fool as a speedrunner you're going to want to have soul going into it so you can cast spells at them so these enemies aren't exactly just fodder for you to easily kill you do have to use a little bit of strategy to kill them and i definitely like that fact about them in general i don't love shielded enemies so i would put the shielded fool into the b tier okay and now we have the sturdy fool this spool is sturdy because he has 10 more hp than the shielded pool or i guess sturdy might be kind of like a euphemism of sorts anyway the enemy is kind of basic it can do like a front slash attack otherwise it'll try to throw a weapon at you so i like the fact that when this enemy is alive in a wave in the coliseum you do have to take into account that a projectile could get thrown at you so it does kind of offer a unique challenge that most other enemies in the coliseum don't one fun fact is that you can actually hit the projectile back into the enemy to deal just a little bit of damage it's kind of like the rocks in the false night fight i really like that you can do that team cherry just kind of took all of these factors into account and it makes the game feel a lot more like it just makes sense you know that said there's not really anything that i love about this enemy so i'm gonna put it into the beat here all right and this is the moment we've all been waiting for this is the final enemy that we are ranking this is the husk horn head this is really similar to the other basic husks however instead of just doing like a little tiny charge forward it does a long charge forward it also drops four geo instead of three and in the speed run that actually kind of matters like in the any percent nmg speed run we try to bait this guy into attacking to the left so that it runs into the arena so that we can collect the geo that this enemy drops after we kill false knight if you bait this enemy into attacking to the right it's going to run outside of the arena because its charge is so long so the little differences between these enemies actually does matter in the speed run and it's just cool that there is a variety of husks i think in lower quality games you'd see just like one basic husk right like you'd have one husk that does like a little charge attack and you'd have like a leaping husk for example but there's actually a good variety of these enemies in hollow knight and i think that makes the world feel a lot more alive that said i can't really justify giving it higher than b tier all right so this is the final version of the enemy tier list holy crap this was exhausting to make i've been going on recording for like four hours at this point that is insane i've never recorded for something for that long except for like the god gamers videos i guess but this is a huge tier list holy crap now there's probably some little things that i would change here and there of course if i were to review this but i'm not going to review this because this took way too long and my back kind of hurts it was a lot of fun to think about this though because like really how do you rank enemies on their own a lot of it has to do with the encounters they're in the areas they're in and there's so many different ways to rank them but some enemies aren't like interesting combat wise at all some of them are just like lore enemies where they contribute to the feel of the area but they're not that fun to fight but as you saw a lot of the enemies i just ranked poorly just because of the speed run pretty much all the enemies in the bottom tier in fact regardless i hope you enjoyed the video this was a lot of fun to make and i hope to do more in the future i'll consider making the bench dear list someday but thank you so much for watching and i hope you have a wonderful day peace [Music] you

Channel: fireb0rn

Views: 174,005

Keywords: hollowknight, hollow knight, hk, team cherry, tc, indie, independent, indie game, independent game, metroidvania, metroid vania, metroid, castlevania, exploration, hard, hardcore, difficult, challenging, expert, video game, game, games, pc, computer, speedrunner, god gamer, challenge, tier list, ranking, tiers, ranked, rank, ranks, best, top, top 5, top 10, enemy, enemies, opponents, enemys, NPCs, guide, walkthrough, analysis, tips, explanation, help, advice, meme, funny, speedrun, mald, malding, rage, music, hallownest

Id: gwde8txCRQA

Length: 98min 56sec (5936 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2022