Why Don't Hollow Knight Speedrunners Use Fury of the Fallen?

hey everyone how's it going God gamer here and today I wanted to talk about why speedrunners rarely ever use fury of the fallen in speed runs this is a question I get asked a lot because it seems like such an obvious thing to use in speedruns in Hollow Knight there's so many bosses that you have to kill so it makes sense to increase your damage output as much as possible and theoretically Fury of the Fallen is an excellent way to do that anyone who's used an endgame build with Fury of the Fallen unbreakable strength in quick slash knows that the multipliers of each of those charms work together so well that you just melt bosses insanely fast so if you could get that set up for a speed run it would be a huge Advantage right and it is such a big advantage that some speedruns do make use of Fury of the Fallen however it's usually for shorter periods of time like just for certain segments of the run and then they unequip it and opt to use something else like Shaman stone or Dash master and the only category is that I know of that equip Fury of the Fallen are categories where you have to get all the percent in the game and charms of course are a percent so it's like you have to pick up Fury of the fallen and speedrunners only use it if you have to pick it up so one of the obvious answers as to why speedrunners don't use it is because it takes a lot of time to get picking up Fury of the Fallen is something you do right at the start of the game in King's pass and at that point in the game you don't have Dash you don't have wall jump so you're moving really slowly through the area to get to the charm now speedrunners did find a trick where if you leave King's pass right away you can actually go and backtrack to Fury of the fallen and then save and quit out and it'll warp you back to where you were outside of King's pass this ends up saving a considerable amount of time however it still doesn't save enough time to make Fury of the Fallen worth it so one of the most obvious reasons why it isn't really worth it is because Fury of the Fallen is a damaged multiplier it doesn't add base damage to the nail instead it multiplies the damage that the nail already has so Fury of the Fallen used to be a 150 damage boost and it actually got buffed to 175 percent which is an insane increase in your damage however the base nail only deals five damage so if you've used Fury of the fallen on a completed save file your nail deals 21 base damage and you're probably using unbreakable strength as well with Fury of the Fallen which means your nail is at 32 damage so when you consider the fury of the Fallen effect which is applied after unbreakable strength in the calculations your nail damage is dealing 56 damage with an end game build so in other words with an endgame build Fury of the Fallen is increasing your damage by 24. that literally more than doubles your base nail damage of 21. so with an in the game build Fury of the Fallen is absolutely insane however if your nail is only dealing 5 damage 175 percent of that is 8.75 so in the calculations the game rounds to the nearest integer so 8.75 is rounded up to 9 damage so while it is a huge relative increase your nail damage is only going up by four and you don't have the multiplicative effects of unbreakable strength or quick slash that you'd normally have with an end game build now you could consider getting fragile strength on the way to mantisclaw however that takes a lot of time to do because not only do you have to farm enough Geo to buy it which is 600 you also have to get the Geo to unlock leg eater's shop in the first place and farming Geo early game is actually really slow there's only a few spots where you can efficiently get Geo and some examples are false nights Geo chest benchfly King the the Moss Knights and Green Path but if you're farming all of those you're easily adding minutes to the run and you're never going to save that much time by just having slightly faster boss fights so getting strength from leg eater is totally out of the question and quick slash is all the way on the other side of the map if we're talking about the any percent speed run so if we're thinking about a fury of the Fallen route for something like any percent that's the only nail damage charm we're going to get everything else just takes way too much time one thing you might think about and something that we used to do in the any percent Speed Run is getting a nail upgrade and while that is something we used to do we actually found that it lost a significant amount of time I'm not sure anyone knows the exact amount of time it lost my guess is around a minute it really does just take a lot of time to get that extra Geo typically you pick up an extra Relic at some point which is adding around at least 20 seconds on top of that you also have to sell The Relic to Lem which requires you to go through multiple dialog boxes and then you actually have to go to the nail Smith and get the nail upgrade and that takes a lot of time as well now one of the most effective relics to get is The Relic after Watcher nights so after Watcher nights there's the Watcher nights Geo chest which is one of the most effective Geo chests in the game in terms of time and right next to it is a hollowness seal that we pick up and it only takes a few seconds so we really want to do Watcher nights first and then go sell relics to Lem after however if we're getting a nail upgrade we would want that nail upgrade before we fight Watcher Knights to maximize the amount of time save we get from upgrading our nail so if we go for that nail upgrade first we have a less efficient route for geo later because we have to skip the hollowness seal after Watcher nights because we're not going to go and sell to lamb twice that would take way too much time so nail upgrades just don't really fit into the any percent speed run very well and they just end up losing a significant amount of time and this is just a trend overall with the any percent Speed Run in Hollow Knight people save time by completing the run with less things so at the start of the any percent Speed Run people would get like desolate dive and descending dark and isma's tear and crystal heart and then over time we started saving More and More Time by just removing as many of those abilities as we could the less abilities and less upgrades that you spend time getting the faster the run is generally going to be and that's largely because the amount of time that you save on bosses doesn't overcome the amount of time that it takes to get those extra abilities so the other elephant in the room of course is Shaman Stone Shaman stone is an amazing charm and we already get vengeful's parrot in the 80 speed run because it's the fastest way to kill the Elder balder to get into Green Path menstrual Spirit allows you to do Fireball skips which can also save you a lot of time and Central spirit is a great option when you have base nail damage vengeful Spirit often becomes your main damage dealer so the fact that Shaman Stone not only increases the damage but also increases the size of the hitbox makes it a really amazing charm and by the way increasing the hitbox of vengeful Spirit actually has a bigger effect than you'd think a bigger hitbox for vengeful spirit means that you have more of a chance to double hit enemies with the spell and in case you don't know what double hitting is when vengeful Spirit hits an enemy it'll typically knock that enemy back and once it hits the enemy the enemy becomes invulnerable for a brief moment before it can be hit again however because it got knocked back by the spell it becomes vulnerable before the spell fully passes through that enemy so vengeful Spirit can actually hit the enemy again before the spell flies away and in some very specific circumstances you can even triple hit enemies for example when the Watcher are rolling away from you so Shaman stone is a no-brainer in the speed run and the fact that you can use Shaman Stone to get double hits on umu enabling the two-cycle strategy means that Shaman stone is absolutely mandatory even if you use fury of the Fallen one big difference between the two charms is that umu cannot be two-cycled with Fury of the Fallen alone but using just Shaman Stone you can do the umu 2 cycle in case you don't know what the two cycle means it just means killing umu by the second time it becomes vulnerable because after each time umu becomes vulnerable umu becomes Invincible for like 20 seconds so if you don't kill umu during its vulnerable phase you lose like 20 seconds instantly and if the boss does an extra attack which is just RNG you're potentially losing even more time on top of that so getting the two cycle is just absolutely mandatory in the speedrun otherwise you're just gonna lose a ton of time one other little little consideration about Fury of the Fallen is that if you get it right away in any percent nmg when are you going to equip it because you want to maximize the benefit from the charm by using it on every single boss possible but in the any percent nmg route the first time you're on a bench is after Hornet so ideally you would fight false Knight with Fury of the Fallen ideally you'd also fight Hornet with Fury of the fallen and get time save from those bosses but if you wanted to use fury for those fights you'd have to bench in dirt mouth because that's the only bench that you pass by without having to make a detour but when you enter dirt mouth there's actually text that pops up on your screen which signifies the area that you just entered it just says dirt mouth on the screen and when you have that text on your screen you're not allowed to sit on a bench so you have to wait like four or five seconds just to sit on the bench to equip Fury so that's just extra time loss and something cool that the 80 nmg route does that a lot of people don't notice is that it actually doesn't take any bench in the early game the only bench that the any percent nmg run gets early game is the bench next to vengeful spirit and we're assigned that bench without actually sitting on it that's because after the eventual Spirit section you're actually automatically assigned to that bench without even touching it so when we save and quit out after Hornet we warp back to that bench next eventual spirit and that's the first time we're on a bench in the route so while you could theoretically save a few seconds by killing false Knight and Hornet with Fury of the Fallen you're losing a significant amount of time by having to bench in dirt mouth alternatively you could sit on the bench while leaving ancestral Mound and just not use fury of the Fallen for false night and that does seem like the optimal time to equip the charm but if you do equip the charm at that point there's one other consideration just before we do the shade skip we always buy Shaman Stone and sit at the bench to equip it and like I said Shaman stone is essentially a mandatory charm because of how it enables multi-hits and it lets us do the umutu cycle so it's not a matter of Fury of the Fallen or Shaman Stone it's a matter of Shaman stone or Shaman Stone and fury so we'd use the mechanic that a lot of people don't know about called over Charming over Charming allows you to exceed your normal charm Notch cap but in exchange you take double damage from all sources so if something deals one damage you take two if something deals two damage you take four now if you're a speedrunner or if you have a speedrunner's brain you might be like oh that's actually a good thing because that lets us get to one HP even faster every time you take damage you actually lose a bit of time because there are freeze frames when you take that damage so if you can avoid avoid taking as many instances of freeze frames Then You're Gonna Save time so over Charming with Fury of the Fallen theoretically saves time so over Charming it's a good thing right in reality it's not really that great over Charming has a few downsides that actually end up making it lose time first of all in order to perform the overcharm in the first place you have to attempt to equip the charm multiple times and each time the game says no you can't equip this all told over Charming takes about 10 seconds and 10 seconds is not a trivial amount of time because that 10 seconds is on top of the time it takes to get the charm as well that's also on top of the time it takes to activate the charm prior to each encounter where you'd want to save time with it because you have to take all those hits of damage which freezes the game and causes you to lose little bits of time here and there the other thing about over Charming is that it makes damage tanking strategies a lot less viable there's a decent amount of strategies in the speedrun where taking damage actually saves you time a lot of people might be curious about like damage boosting like you see in Super Metroid because when you take damage you might notice that you get knocked back in a direction in Hollow Knight that doesn't save time actually if you damage boost in the correct direction you lose about a quarter of a second but there are strats like the damage tank Strat versus devouts and B spin that can save a significant amount of time there's also the hazard warp in Queen's Gardens for that we fall into a very specific spot in the thorns and the game kind of gets confused and warps you to the wrong side of those thorns and that saves a decent amount of time now for that section of the Run we have to do Queens Gardens acid skip which not everyone has 100 consistent because it's insanely hard so there's a chance you might just fall into the acid and take damage after that we have that Thorns Hazard dwarp and shortly after that we have the two devouts in Beast then where we need to take damage now you don't have to take damage in each of those spots but it is a non-trivial amount of time to save so for example if you're over Charmed you can only do a maximum of two of those damage tanks so you're guaranteed even if you play perfectly to miss out on the third and taking the time to heal up isn't worth it because you really want to save soul for vengeful spirit and that's assuming you play that segment perfectly it's arguably the hardest segment in the run so typically you have a bit of wiggle room for mistakes in that segment if you're using Fury you have absolutely no wiggle room for mistakes and it's the hardest segment in the run so do you really want to have fury on in that segment no if you were using Fury in the route you would unequip it before you get to that segment the point in the run where you do that is at the teachers archives bench on the way out after killing umu however getting that bench is a small detour and it takes time to actually menu to unequip the charm you could equip the charm again after Beast then or on the way to hollow Knight when you Crystal Dash through the black egg Temple and one last really small consideration is when you want to re-equip Fury of the Fallen you actually have to unequip Shaman Stone first because Shaman Stone fills all three charm notches in order to over charm you have to have one free charm Notch when you have Shaman Stone equipped you have no charm notches free so you have to unequip Shaman Stone equip Fury of the fallen and then equip Shaman Stone again so there's so many little time losses that result from trying to add Fury of the fallen into the route something a lot of people assume when they're not very familiar with Hollow Knight speedrunning is that speedrunners don't use fury of the Fallen because it would be too difficult and that's actually not the case at all if Fury of the Fallen save time people would absolutely use it personally I did bunch of timing for this when I was really actively speedrunning in 2019 and fury of the Fallen theoretically came close to almost saving enough time but for a charm that forces you down to one HP and requires you to play perfectly coming close to saving time isn't enough because practically speaking you're going to lose time because you're forced to take options that are safer if you just play balls to the walls aggressive the whole time you're going to randomly take damage to something that's outside of your control for example consider a situation where you're in the corner versus Watcher nights and one of them is rolling at you and one is bouncing if you're doing a normal run you can continue to deal damage without worrying too much about getting hit if you're at one HP and you're on a world record Pace are you really going to take the risk or are you going to play a little bit safer and exit from the corner the reality is that pretty much everyone is going to play it a little bit bit safer and playing safer often loses time now of course people use fury of the Fallen for Pantheon speedruns because a lot of these things don't apply to those speed runs you don't have to think about getting the charm you don't have to think about equipping the charm because the speedrun starts the moment you begin the pantheon so you can have all that stuff beforehand another big reason why Fury of the Fallen is viable in Pantheon speedruns but not so much in full game is because in God home you can unlock lifeblood cocoons the lifeblood cocoons are unlocked by completing the pantheons with bindings so people can perform Pantheon 5 speed runs with the maximum amount of lifeblood unlocked and because you keep the fury of the Fallen damage increase even if you pick up lifeblood it means you have insurance in case you take damage accidentally now a full game speed runs like with one 12 percent they don't have that lifeblood in order to unlock lifeblood cocoons they would have to do eight bindings so the early earliest possible time that you could unlock lifeblood cocoons is after the second Pantheon however that would mean you would have to do Pantheon one and two with all bindings and that not only slashes your nail damage the amount of spells that you can cast at once it also completely prevents you from equipping charms so that would be a huge time loss so something you could consider doing is doing two bindings for the first four pantheons and then by the time you get to Pantheon 5 you have lifeblood and of course Pantheon 5 is the longest Pantheon by far so that's the pantheon that you want Fury for completing more bindings than eight doesn't really offer enough benefit to even consider doing eight bindings gives you three lifeblood per cocoon you could go up to 12 bindings and it would give you four lifeblood per cocoon but if you're taking so much damage that you need that much extra insurance then you really shouldn't be running Fury in the first place so could you use fury of the fallen in a full game speedrun theoretically yes however you have the choice between unlocking the lifeblood and having to use bindings in the first four pantheons or you have the choice of doing Pantheon 5 at the very end of a three hour speed run without any lifeblood or Insurance in case you get hit now a ton of people have done Pantheon 5 hit lists so it's theoretically possible but doing it at the end of a three hour speed run where you're already exhausted from having to do such a marathon of a run that's gonna be really really difficult to pull off so could Fury save time in pantheons yeah Yuri could save an insane amount of time in pantheons if you consider the best Pantheon five time in speedruns it's 17 minutes and 20 seconds by endell the current world record for 1 12 has a 21 minute and 45 seconds Pantheon 5. that is almost 4 minutes of potential time save now keep in mind that's not just from Fury alone that's also because of the fact that individual level speed runs are going to be so much more optimized and one 12 Runners have so much else to optimize it's not just like they're only playing Pantheon 5. they have the entire rest of the three hour run to think about but still that's multiple minutes of potential time save and if you opted not to do any bindings you'd also have time save in the other pantheons should you use fury there so why don't 112 runners use fury in the pantheons of course like I said there's the fact that it's extremely risky at the end of an already super exhausting run but there's also the fact that the Run being so long means that there's so many other places that they can focus their energy on for saving time other than Fury a lot of the runs do have deaths before the pantheons and it's just a result of the fact that they optimize the run so much and use so many risky strats that it just ends up being the case case that they don't play perfectly for just one segment and they end up dying there's just so many different things for them to practice and as they get better and better they're using more and more difficult strats those difficult strats means more of a chance of messing them up and dying so what they're really focusing on is being able to execute those strats consistently rather than introducing an incredibly hard and risky Strat at the very end of the Run do I think people will eventually use fury for one twelve percent that kind of depends on whether people are still running it when silk song releases but I think it's definitely a possibility that it will eventually be introduced there's about 50 people who have done Pantheon 5 hit lists and it's a possibility that it could be done in a speed run but I do think that it'll be a while before anyone introduces it that said there's been so much competition in the category in one twelve percent lately people people have just been trading the world record back and forth and one of the contenders for the world record is actually nightmare 31 who's known for being insane at Pantheon 5. so I'm really interested to see if Fury eventually gets used in that speedrun there's just so many things nowadays to be excited about in the hollow Knight speedrunning community so if you're a fan of hollow Knight speedrunning I definitely encourage you to check out some of those top players who are doing these runs but that said I think that's all I have to say about Fury of the fallen in speedruns hopefully this gives you some insight into speedrunning and why we typically choose not to use the charm hope you all enjoy the video and hope you have a wonderful day peace foreign [Music]

Channel: fireb0rn

Views: 248,764

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, fury, fury of the fallen, rtsr, 1 hp, hitless, no hit, damageless, speedrun, speedruns, analysis, personal best, world record, WR, breakdown, explanation, guide, tips, speedrunners, any%, 112%, apb, pantheon, p5, poh, pantheons, godhome

Id: TgHz8YhvVQ8

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022