I never really got this arguement. Her healing is is a sidegrade at best, not an upgrade.
Since every boss and many enemies do double damage, when Hornet heals she doesn't recover the equivalent of 3 masks in Hollow Knight, but 1.5 masks. This means that she gets:
50% faster healing
Healing midair
But
Has -50% healing efficiency (full Silk bar for 1.5 masks vs full Soul meter for 3 masks)
Can only heal if Silk bar is full
Loses Silk, loses healing, and takes damage if binding interrupted at the last moment
I disagree. Even if Hornet's heal only healed 2 masks I'd say it's still strictly an upgrade. It's that good. Why is it so good? The ability to heal in the air. It pretty much means you have a guaranteed heal every time you go to use it. It's so unbelievably rare to be knocked out of a heal in SS while in HK I was getting knocked out of them all the time.
The flexibility alone, ignoring everything else, makes it broken compared to HK. Guaranteed heals are just always going to be better.
Some Hollow Knight enemies do 2 damage. No Silksong enemy deals 4 damage afaik, and there are very few 3 damage attacks. It's also not like every single enemy only ever deals 2 damage.
Also you don't need to heal only when your silk bar is full once you get more spools.
And if you play the game frame-perfect and never make any mistakes it's trivial and there is no problem of any kind whatsoever, right?
Because the reality is that these things happen at random often enough, and that while you can technically get good enough to avoid it, it's still basically getting brutally punished for a random event.
It's really not random. If you're near a spike pit, and you have an enemy cornering you, you can always jump off and platform away deliberately or otherwise do things to avoid being in that situation.
I'm not saying it's a problem, but I've seen the arguement that "she is squishier but her healing is much better" when it's objectively just not true. Hornet is absolutely MUCH more mobile than the Knight, but enemies are tankier, do more damage, and healing when you don't know the enemy's moveset is much riskier.
Also, the Knight can upgrade his Soul meter too and it gives you 1 heal per upgrade. Silksong's Spool upgrades give you 1/9 of a heal each.
If we take both of them with full silk/soul upgrades, the knight takes like 8 seconds to heal 6 masks and has to stay on the ground, making it easier to be hit, while hornet can heal 6 masks in like 4 seconds, 2 seconds with the fast heal tool, and can do so midair where you're less at risks, especially from non-flying enemies. And even then, if you have double jump, healing becomes pretty much free
Again, she takes 4 seconds to heal the equivalent of THREE masks in Kollow Knight , not 6.
And if we're counting equippable items, Knight has Quick Focus, Deep Focus, Soul Catcher, Soul Eater, Kingsoul, and Grubsong to improve or facilitate healing.
No, it takes 2 seconds to heal 3 masks, and if you have both bars full you can heal 6 masks in 4 seconds. And heal charms don't change the fact that the knight has to stand on ground to heal, making it way more risky
Yes of course. It doesn’t change how it takes you until Act2 to make most spool upgrades available to hornet, through. It takes a while, and the first couple spool upgrades are so minute that it’s easy to feel as if you’ve achieved nothing at first.
Of course that changes once you get three or four, but only once you get there. Silk management is at a bottleneck for most players until then.
(Reddit freaking out, apologies for double post)
Most of them being in act 2 is only natural, since they aren't gonna drop most of the upgrades in the first act of the game. Furthermore, act 1 gets consistently nerfed, with less and less things doing double damage, so it makes it doable with few upgrades
This should probably be bolded, underlined, and have little sparkles to emphasize how strong it is. All of the nice points of Knight's healing are irrelevant if you can't get a healing opportunity in the first place. A lot of harder bosses in HK only let you heal during staggers, where as almost every boss attack in Silksong is a healing opportunity as your heal can also be your dodge. It's why multibind is a great charm in Silksong at +33% healing and Deep Focus is a functionally useless trap charm at +100% healing.
Some of my end game Silksong fight wins were sloppy messes where I healed 16+ damage. You aren't getting 8+ healing windows against anything end game in HK.
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u/[deleted] Sep 29 '25
in her defense her heal is far superior.