Hat tierlists

[Atari4600]

So how I made this list of hats is I looked at all of the speedruns of the campaign levels and wrote down which hat was used for the fastest time. My results in descending order

Santa: Used in 21 maps
Jump Start: Used in 16 maps
Prop: Used in 3 maps
Cowboy: Used in 3 maps with hat removers (compare to jumpstart without hat remover)
Top: Used in 1 map
Moon: Used in 1 map

When speedrunning a map, it is silently understood that you do not use cowboy because it usually pretty simple to beat a map quickly with cb hat and takes away the skill from speedrunning a level. So while being overpowered it is functionally useless.

So, the two most commonly used hats are the Jumpstart and the Santa hat. this is for two reasons
1) Santa hat allows for some pretty amazing shortcuts that are just not possible with any other hat
2) Jumpstart is basically hatless but a 2 second headstart with a speedburst at the beginning. However, besides this advantage it is useless in the duration of the run but the maps in pr2 are generally short enough that any effect from any of the other hats dont save enough time to make up for the power of the jumpstart hat. 

Hence, why I made the "sorta useful" row. These are hats that have an affect that is useful and has the potential to save more time in the long run, just typically aren't used
Top hat can save time with maps with lots of vanish blocks.
Prop hat is great for long maps with lots of jumps.
Moon hat is great for maps with maps with a lot of jumps in a short range of each other (scaling mountains and stuff)

Crown, Cowboy, and Artifact are special picks for the useless category. Cowboy, is typically not used as seen above, artifact only gives you 30 seconds to complete a map (with complete speedburst) which makes it nearly impossible to control consistently. Now the crown hat is a very "Useful" hat because it makes you immune from sword/laser/mines. But in speedrunning, it is never used. This is because most maps it is faster to use jumpstart and just avoid the mines rather than being lazy and allowing yourself to jump off of the mines. It mostly just isn't practical.

The useless hats I believe don't have a use that benefits the player in any way, whether in a speedrun or in racing. I debated. While not listed, Cheese and Jelly hat are in this category as well because while jumping on someone waste time for the victim, it also wastes time for you to jump on them. It would be better if you just speedran the map in order to beat them, rather than trying to slow them down with jelly or jigg hat.

Thief hat is completely useless in every possible way. You need to hurt yourself to lose the hat, to then pick it up. It would be better in racing to have it steal a random hat at the beginning of the race so you dont need to hit a mine to steal someone's hat.