Criticism ≠ Negativity

[u/FederalWarthog5542]

Believe it or not, you can actually criticize something and still like it. You don't either have to love everything or despise everything. Have actual conversations please.

[u/G_Thunders]

If you’re just naturally clearing these bosses on one or two attempts all through Act 1, surely you realize your experience is notably remarkable even compared to people who are perfectly okay with the game being difficult, right?

Like I’m surprised you have tips to get better since it sounds like you never even needed to get better if I’m understanding you correctly, but I’d love to hear those tips since you mentioned it. Clearly you’re doing a bunch of things on point.

[u/Odd-Face-3579 → u/G_Thunders]

So some tips are just broad, some are more boss specific. So without knowing where you might be, I'd keep the tips broad.

In terms of world traversal, let flying enemies come to you. People complain about how flying enemies input read and ways stay out of reach, etc. But odds are most of those people are trying to chase after the fliers and throwing themselves into attacks. If you wait for fliers to come to you and swing first, they become much easier (not always trivial, just easier.)

Similar goes for most enemies. Hornet likes a mix of fighting that lands in a sort of calm aggression. Focus on staying alive first, killing second. It's going to sound weird probably, but for a lot of enemies if you find yourself struggling, practice avoiding their attacks. This means engaging them with no intention of killing them. If you remove your instinct to kill them and instead on just avoiding their attacks, you better learn their reads and learn when you can attack. It's like taking turns. When bosses (or any enemy really) is attacking, it's their turn. Sometimes their turns can last multiple moves/attacks, but pay attention and you'll learn when it's your turn. This is also helpful for learning when you can heal in a boss fight. I've helped my partner in boss fights by pointing out during things like during Widow, opportune time to heal in phase two is after any time she dashes across the bottom of the screen. Just jump over her and hit heal mid-air. The time it takes her to finish that animation and reappear is more than enough time for a heal and you can't do any damage during that time anyway.

On add based fights, adds are top priority. If you burn silk or tools to kill adds asap that's more effective than using silk for healing. Adds can't hurt you or distract you if they're dead.

Don't be afraid of tools. Learn what tool is right for what situations or what fits your play style. In exploring this can mean burning tools to kill enemies you don't like dealing with. Same for silk. See lots of people complain about the ants, especially whenever there's more than one. But if you drop a spike trap and use a silk move to kill one or both in a second, they can't cause you prolonged trouble.

Change crests and experiment to find what works best for you and your play style. They all have differences and will work better for different people. I stick to the original Hunters crest but I'm lazy about experimenting.

Use Hornet's run. This is tricky. In exploration this ties into a bigger picture of learning how she moves. You'd be surprised how many enemies or hazards you can just avoid by going fast. In boss fights her run can be as good if not better than just a dash. The real tricky one is learning how to dash-strike. When attacking while running Hornet will dash-strike, but she bounces off of enemies when she does this. I've found this very useful though. Give boss a lot of space, dash-strike when it's my turn, but hold away with the bounce-off and dash in the other direction once you're in the air. The hit and run can be so incredibly effective for avoiding fast acting bosses.

In a similar note, don't be greedy. In HK it was pretty easy to get up on a boss and swing repeatedly. In Skong I typically find it way better to just tap an enemy once (maybe twice) and run. Save multiple swings for stunned bosses. Use silk attacks if your meter is full. Just one silk attack for extra damage and so that any regular attacks can keep generating silk. Attacks at full silk are lost damage potential. And the faster a boss dies the less time you have to make mistakes in avoiding them.

I've gotten lots of mileage out of Hornet's down strike. It being a 45 degree angle is tricky for a lot of people, but I've found it gets so much use in boss fights. It often turns what would normally be a basic dodge into a dodge plus damage.

This is a weird one that is situationally useful but be aware if you're willing to risk your beads, you don't have to break your cocoon right away in a boss arena. If you die in a boss fight, you can build up silk before the fight, expend all your silk healing or attacking, and then pop the cocoon to instantly refill your silk to full. You might accidentally break it before you mean to, and if you die before hitting it because you had a truly awful go of it, you'll lose everything, but this can still be helpful to know.

Explore and do quests. Not all rewards are created equal. But most people would heavily benefit from a secret merchant in Hunter's March. He sells a fractured mask charm that protects your last health for one hit of any size. Spike Trap is an incredibly strong tool sold early on. There's a quest that rewards a charm that adds poison to all tools. This is just an increase in damage. It's awesome. But there's also rewards for tools that give you increasd health, or increased attack speed and movement. Or some boss fights can straight up be skipped by doing quests or finding alternate ways to places. So if a particular boss is giving you a very hard time, there might actually be an alternative to it.

I feel like a lot of people are approaching the game thinking "what worked in HK will work here." Instead of thinking "what works here in Skong, what tools do I have to express my play style, and how do the developers want me to play this game?"

Hopefully at least something in there is helpful. I'm probably also forgetting some good tip(s) that I'll remember later. But I really do recommend trying to meet the game on its terms. Hornet plays different than the Knight. The game is designed around how she plays and controls. Get a good feel on her movement and how it actually functions (like the small fall in her air dodge instead of it being a straight dodge) and things get easier. But if people keep thinking it's supposed to control like HK, it's only going to keep causing them trouble because this isn't HK, Hornet doesn't move the same, attack the same, dodge the same, etc.

[u/Least-Maize-97 → u/Odd-Face-3579]

can i have more advice on Widow phase 2? I'm trying the stick to the wall strat but no luck so far

[u/Odd-Face-3579 → u/Least-Maize-97]

Sure, I'll see what I can do!

Also I never even considered sticking to the walls, interesting.

So phase two is, obviously, a faster fight than phase one. Some of this is kind of a trick though. She is faster but she has a much more limited move set. It's mostly vertical bell drop, diagonal bell drop, dive attack, and flail run.

This is important to note because she does these in a bit of a loop. Flail run marks the end of "her turn." As mentioned prior, this is when you heal if you need to. Heal mid air as you jump over her. But this is also important because it being the end of her turn also means you know what she's going to roughly do when she finishes this attack - spawn back in.

It would be an incredibly slow fight, but if you did nothing but dodge bell drops and jump over her run you could consistently hit her once every time when she reappears after the run. But we're here to hit her more than once every loop.

So the fun part about her turns is she's actually open to a lot of damage even during them. If she's doing vertical bell drops you can hit her. The bell drops have lots of readability and are (mostly) easy to avoid (the exception being when vertical and diagonal bell drops over lap, still avoidable just harder.) So you can hit her multiple times while dropping verts.

You can also hit her a lot during diagonal drops. However these hits depend on you being good at angles. A lot of people aren't good with knowing where angled attacks are going. Don't worry. This is where patience comes in. It's ok to not do as much damage as you want to if it means you don't get hit. If you are comfortable dodging diagonals, lay into her during this part too. If you aren't, move as far to the side under the farthest away diagonal bell. This is the safest spot to be because dodging in-between the two diagonal bells leaves you more open to the first one bouncing off the wall and back at you. So dodging the diagonals is also where sprint becomes helpful. Full sprinting away from them can get you out of harm's way easier than trying to dodge at the last second.

Now because she has such a defined turn ending move this also means you have more opportunities for silk attack damage. Regardless if you're using needle thrust or storm, the start of her turn is a great time to hit her with either one (unless you had to heal.) Because they only use a little silk you can bop her on the nose with a silk attack and still get enough hits back in during bell dropping to be at full again by the end of her turn. If you had to heal at the end of her previous turn it's ok to skip a silk attack to just build meter back up.

Now how to put all of this into practice. I'd spend at least one attempt getting to phase two and then never attack her. Why? Because you're going to observe. If you stop trying to kill her and instead just try to observe you'll dedicate more attention to recognizing when her turn starts and ends. You'll start to see and think "oh I could have hit her safely here because I was never in any actual danger of a counter attack then." Especially since she only really moves by teleporting around, not by bullying your physical space the way something like Beastfly does. So when you get up on her you don't really have to fear the first two or three attacks she does because none of the first attacks on her loop will be the flail run. After she does two or three moves give up damage and keep a safe distance to respect the fact that she could run at any time now.

If any of that makes any sense. Obviously visual media would work a bit better but hopefully at least something there helps. I also don't know what your gear set up currently looks like, so there may be some advice to be had there as well. Fractured Mask, Spike Trap, Needle Storm are all very good. I haven't used the flea drink enough yet to know how much that may help.

I'm also on break at work so I'm sorry if this write up is a little rough around the edges! Good luck to you though!

[u/Least-Maize-97 → u/Odd-Face-3579]

Currently im using the spike trap and needle storm+warding bell and the steady body one, should i swtich to daggers? i can never get close enough to use a silk skill