Is it worth taking the time to beat the Pantheon Of Hallownest?

[red_sparky dragon_force]

I have 154 hours on Hollow Knight, just beat the Pantheon Of The Knight finally, and I only have 1 achievement left in the game: Embrace The Void. The most difficult achievement in the game, and after spending increasing quantities of time practicing for each of the four pantheons before this one, I want your opinion.

Is it worth it? It would take a lot of time to get this ending, because it would take a long time to practice for it, and every single attempt would take close to or longer than an hour.

[Dragonstrike]

Its worth it. The feeling of finally overcoming the POH is an amazing feeling unlike any other in gaming.

[red_sparky dragon_force]

It would just take so much time to practice for it and in it though, it might even get me to 200 hours on this game trying to beat the Pantheon of Hallownest.

[red_sparky dragon_force]

Please keep responding everyone, the more opinions I get, the more confident I will be about my decision of whether or not to do the Pantheon Of Hallownest.

[Boksha]

Depends entirely on how well you deal with leaving things unfinished. Personally, I had to finish it or I'd be left with a nagging feeling, but I have to say that amazing feeling of victory was completely absent, even though I've felt it in plenty of other games. Heck, even in Hollow Knight, it felt much better to beat NKG for the first time than beating the PoH.

As you (OP) already noticed, it requires a lot of time to practice, and each attempt also takes 40 to 60 minutes, so you'll want to do as few attempts as possible. But that means you'll have to practice until you're confident at beating every single boss, and at that point, actually beating the pantheon itself will feel more like a chore than a challenge, since it's all stuff you've beaten before countless times.

Here's a good guideline though: if you're still enjoying the challenge, or feel drawn back into the game when you don't play it for a while, then go for it. I wouldn't do it because there's any reward for it, emotional or otherwise.

[red_sparky dragon_force]

That's some pretty good advice, I'd still like to hear more opinions but yeah, practicing for that and attempting it would get really tedious, and I'd only be doing it for the achievement.

Don't get me wrong, finishing the Pantheon Of The Knight just now was really satisfying, but the things I loved the most about Hollow Knight were more to do with it's exploration and storytelling than it's fighting.

[Whiskra]

Practice bosses until you beat them on at least Radiant in Hall of Gods. You might need to attempt PoH a few times to unlock some bosses there though, but it's the only way to win. Practice, practice, practice. Eventually there will come a point where you will feel like you actually can win. The biggest hurdle then will be to wade through the boredom that is the first half of the Pantheon.

It's not a challenge for everyone, that's for sure. It requires you to elevate your gameplay to a whole new level, and once you finish it and maybe go back to the real game, you will notice that nothing in the game can kill you anymore because you've just become that good.

[🉑 rezno[R].technology]

For me it was not worth it even to beat Nightmare King Grimm or any of the Pantheons 🙂 I really admire the determination and skills of all you who manage to complete all these difficult things without any modifications.
I'm not really good at platforming games. Started playing platforming games 4 years ago and finished only a few.

IMO if you want to know the answer to your question, you will not get it from others.

You will get it from yourself.
It's worth it to ask yourself what is more important to you.
Your time?
Your nerves?
Your (hopefully, because you don't know it before the time and effort dedication) satisfaction after completion? (in this case it would be probably hope)
A low quality 64x64 pixels .jpg image of some virtual 1000000 01111000 1000000 Steam achievement that you can unlock with two clicks in Steam Achievement Manager?

Only you know the answer to your question.

Whatever you will choose to do, I wish you good luck and have fun

[5thbrother]

If you realy care about achievements, yes go for it, otherwise nope.
Its the worst thing i did in game in about last 10 years, completly wasted 50h, every run wasted around 50 min, on beating bosses that cant touch me just to die to the one dumb, kinda rng, platforming piece of ♥♥♥♥ boss.
After beating it i only feel sadness of wasted 50h of my life, nothing more, but im like main character in The Accountant movie, i just have to finish when i started DLC.

Man i realy hope there will be not such a thing in Silksong, and if they make it again i pass this time for sure.

But yea in your case its worth, for that last achievement.

[Franky M.]

I just completed it a few days ago.

Was it worth it? For me, absolutely. It is tough but not unfair, so you really have to rise to the challenge. Having completed the other four pantheons, you've already got a fair bit of practice behind you, as well as experience on the toughest difficulty spikes.

The main things to watch for in my opinion:
- Nail the nailmasters/nailsage (make sure you can beat them the Ascended versions consistently)
- Practice the harder versions of the dream bosses (they have a different arena), especially Markoth IMO (I absolutely hate that fight)
- Make sure you can get a clean fight on Zote (he comes up just after Markoth so you might arrive in a bad shape)
- Practice so you can reliably ace Nightmare King Grimm and Pure Vessel. I don't think these bosses are particularly hard once you get the hang of their patterns, but with 2 masks of damage on each hit, they can end your ascension pretty quickly. A little tip: you can repeatedly dream nail the knocked down shell of the Failed Champion to fill your soul and heal before NKG if needed.

If all that goes well, you will get to face Absolute Radiance. Let's be straight here, you will probably die the first time. The good news is that it actually unlocks it in the Pantheon for you to practice afterwards. So the next thing is to practice the AR fight until you're comfortable and consistent with it. Then I would try to do NKG, Pure Vessel and Radiance in succession to make sure your nerves can take it, and then you're good to give the Pantheon another go.

I believe clearing that final Pantheon took me around 5 tries in total. First one ended on Zote after a terrible Markoth fight, second one allowed me to unlock Radiance and die to it. After practicing Radiance a lot, I kinda got complacent with Pure Vessel and another attempt ended on it. After that I choked one further time on one of the most unlikely bosses (Uumuu), and then the following attempt was the right one.

My standard build: Mark of Pride, Unbreakable Strength, Quick Focus, Thorns and Grubsong. On my final attempt I swapped the latter two with Unbreakable Heart at the final bench before PV to give myself a bit of extra margin, but I had an excellent Radiance fight so the precaution proved unnecessary. Remember to abuse the invicibility frames of Descending Dark!

Good luck, I hope it helps.

[Odahviing]

I finished PoH in two attempts, but only after practicing multiple bosses in the Hall of Gods practically countless number of times and in Ascended difficulty. Having done that, I don't feel proud or satisfied or anything, it felt like a massive grind, I never want to do it again and I sincerely hope that Silksong does not include such masochistic sections.

[red_sparky dragon_force]

Originally posted by 🉑 reznoR:

A low quality 64x64 pixels .jpg image of some virtual 1000000 01111000 1000000 Steam achievement that you can unlock with two clicks in Steam Achievement Manager?

???

Steam Achievement Manager? What's that?

[red_sparky dragon_force]

Also, a lot of you guys are telling me *how* to beat it instead of why I should even want to.

[red_sparky dragon_force]

Thanks for the help guys, I have decided that I'm not going to bother.

I ADORE Hollow Knight, and the things I loved most about it were the exploration, the storytelling, as well as the simple beauty of the game.
The fighting was nice and all, but it wasn't why I loved the game, and I hadn't even intended to do the first 4 pantheons until I discovered that I needed to in order to get 112% completion.

Now having done that, I do love getting every achievement in games but this would take way too much time and it would all be spent on the fighting aspects of the game, which are not what I loved the game for.

Beating the Pantheon of Hallownest sounds like a waste of my time, so I'm not going to do it.

Thanks, have a lovely day!

[red_sparky dragon_force]

(Think of the above post as the topic answer, I apparently can't mark my own posts as topic answers so there you go, gonna unsubscribe from this discussion but you guys can talk about whatever you want in here of course)

[Nova Solarius]

Originally posted by red_sparky dragon_force:

Originally posted by 🉑 reznoR:

A low quality 64x64 pixels .jpg image of some virtual 1000000 01111000 1000000 Steam achievement that you can unlock with two clicks in Steam Achievement Manager?

???

Steam Achievement Manager? What's that?

Steam Achievement Manager is a program that allows you to give yourself achievements on Steam. It pretends to be another game (for example, Hollow Knight) and sends Steam the signal to grant or revoke whichever achievements you want.