Hat tierlists

[John m.]

Post your hat tierlists! I used a template I found on this website to make mine quickly https://tiermaker.com/create/platform-ra...-hats-8338 but its missing 2 hats tho

Heres mine, you don’t have to use my labels

[Mia]

[Northadox]

Oh cool, I made this. I don't remember making it but I made it. Maybe I should update it with cheese/jellyfish hats? Ah, who cares...here's my list.



EXP Hat is a stupid design decision, I explain it in the picture.

Since GP is pointless, so is the Kong hat. The act of grinding EXP is pretty trivial but at least it has some sort of effect.

Cowboy hat is stupid. Stupid broken. You can fly straight to the finish and benefit massively from PR2's shoddy physics engine which lets you clip into pretty much everything.

Crown is solid! You're essentially making other players non-factors in normal races and granting the most annoying hazard new platforming applications. While nerfed in Deathmatch, it's still the best hat there.

Santa Hat is probably even more broken than Crown is, given that it has so many insane applications and exploits you can pull off with it. Sure, ice physics are annoying, but for the benefits that the Santa Hat gives you it is worth it.

The Moon Hat isn't as broken as those in its tier but an increase to your jump power and air time is nothing to scoff at, considering it's a platforming game and that it affects your every jump. For precision purposes it's not recommended since it goes against your muscle memory (which is unfortunate since every damn player of PR2 nowadays solely cares about trap/frusts levels) but normally it has little drawbacks. Old Moon hat would be placed firmly with the Kong hat. Maybe even in its own tier because it didn't even have a purpose in-game, or any actual purpose whatsoever. Thank you Jiggmin, very cool!

Propeller Hat nets you even longer air time than the Moon Hat, which can allow you to completely skip over long horizontal sections of levels, and for precision purposes, it's incredible. Too bad that latter thing never sees much use because of the ubiquity of hat machines in those types of levels.

I don't have the Artifact myself (someday!) but I can imagine how it functions - once you get over the reversed lateral controls it's essentially a free Speed Boost which is stupid good. However, a 30 second time limit is a drastic drawback. If you can speed through a longer level in that time it's absolutely worth it, but its drawback is too severe to be placed with the big boys.

Top Hat's good! Well, whenever it can be used, that is. Skipping right through Vanish Blocks laterally is good, well, whenever you can do that. Long columns of Vanish Blocks don't tend to be too common, but hey, if they're there, you can ride up 'em all the way to the top with no physical strain. Vanish Blocks see more use than something like Crumble Blocks so in comparison to the Cheese Hat it's quite better.

Cheese goes in "Solid applications". It's essentially a sibling to the Top Hat, in that they completely diminish the negative effects of a block or change their properties in a beneficial way. Crumble Blocks tend to be infrequently used because, really, their explicit purpose is to waste your time. Which isn't really fun. Breaking a lot of them at once by diving into them is fun though I guess. Laggy particles, ahoy!

Jump Start...it's hard to talk about. If there's a level filled with mines and you think the Crown is too slow, here's your option. In multiplayer races, it gives you, well, a jump start...but that doesn't tend to be all too useful. It has niche uses, but hey, uses are uses.

The Thief Hat is the first hat in the multiplayer tier, and I don't really get it. If you want the powers of another player's OP hat, why not just...use that hat yourself? The only hat that's any difficult to get nowadays is the Artifact. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use this hat, like, ever. It does look stylish, though!

The Party Hat. Yeah, lightning is annoying. But why repel one hazard when you can repel, like, the rest of them? Lightning is scantly used as an item in most deathmatches because it's annoying and arbitrary as hell. I've only ever seen people use the hat on one level, Candy Land, and even then there's better options. And again, this effect only comes into player when there's other players. Cool.

The Jigg Hat is probably better than the Thief Hat or the Party Hat because it has some at least a solid (albeit really niche use, it's definitely better than Thief or Party), and if you can manage it, squashing people's heads is a fun thing to do. You can also do some wicked skips with it if you have a friend, but you will rarely see it used practically in any race unless someone's memeing. And again, it only has use in multiplayer. Cool way to get it, though!

Jellyfish goes in the multiplayer tier. For deathmatches, Crown is still the king, but it's an okay alternative. Better than its multiplayer contemporaries, that's for sure, and you can probably screw over some people in CQC with it.

Overall I'm not really pleased with PR2's hat balance. In the future, I would like to see non-player affecting hats tossed right into the rubbish bin (chiefly the EXP hat, because there's no reason NOT to use it in most races), and the introduction of far more hats like the Propeller Hat or the Top Hat that have some tangible gameplay benefit, with said gameplay benefit not only applying in player-to-player interactions. PR3 did this far better than PR2, with the plethora of hats that did exactly that, although there's always some outliers. You can see some suggestions I've made in one of the threads I posted.

To surmise this wall of text, here's some rankings:
My favorite hat aesthetic-wise is the Jellyfish Hat. So fashionable.
My favorite hat gameplay-wise is the Moon Hat. The gravity change is really fun!
My least favorite hat aesthetic-wise is Kong Hat. Ugly!
My least favorite hat gameplay-wise is the EXP Hat. You know why.

[Mia]

Holy wall of text Batman

[Camer the Dragon]

This won't take into account hat removers cos they just make the hats redundant

TL;DR list:
Scores are out of 10
S - Cowboy (9.5)
A - Crown (8), Prop (7)
B - Santa (6), Jumpstart (6), Arti (6)
C - Top (4), Moon (4)
D - Party (3), Cheese (3)
E - Jigg (2), Thief (2), Jellyfish (2)
F - Exp (1), Kong (0)

Quick Summary of each tier:
S - Broken (I'd rather something this broken not be here)
A - Very Good
B - Good
C - Eh, Situational
D - Very Situational
E - Requires you be near another player (I don't like this especially with the ping)
F - Useless in races, identical to having no hat at all


---

Exp:
Looks cool but aside from that does nothing in-race, good for gaining exp cos it gives +100% which can help you rank up and get stat points faster, although these add up slowly. 1/10

Kong:
Used to be entirely outclassed by the exp hat, now gives 2x GP but GP is used for absolutely nothing, similarly to the Exp hat the Kong hat does nothing in races. 0/10

Prop:
The glide can get you over gaps and sections of levels whilst not being completely broken, it can also give you better control over jumps. 7/10

Cowboy:
Broken. You can fly to the finish and glitch through stuff. only real weakness is lightning or weapons if people manage to get close to you (and if you fly above/below the level this won't happen). 9.5/10

Crown:
Powerful hat, can help a lot on levels such as Redemption by removing the punishment from mines and even possibly making them into a one-time-use platform. Also people can't hit you with stuff that's not lightning in normal races. 8/10

Santa:
Boosts speed by 10 (allowing for 110 speed), allows for very fast acceleration by shooting a laser gun backwards. Major downside in that trying to get into water or vanishes below you takes ages since you have to wait for the ice to defrost but on a lot of levels this isn't an issue or not that much of one. 6/10

Party:
Very situational but very good in the given situation. Protects vs Jellyfish hat and very helpful on levels with a lot of lightning (E.g. 4p Candyland). 3/10

Top:
Situational, also breaks glitches where you respawn in vanishes (classic Jiggmin on Space Station). 4/10

Jumpstart:
This hat is good for like 5 seconds, but that short time could be the key to winning, especially in short levels. It can even be good in longer levels with items at the start because you avoid the chaos. 6/10

Moon:
Used to be useless but now has the effect of x0.85 gravity compared to normal, this can let you put some stats on other things that aren't jump (but watch out, if you lose the hat you lose the jump). Although also messes with timing of stuff. 4/10

Thief:
This hat is basically the trolling hat lol, for if you want to mess up someone else's flow (and a lot of the time this won't really happen). Sure, you can get another hat out of it but if you want that consistency of hat usage then you should bring it into the level with you. 2/10

Jigg:
Would be better if the PR2 servers were better (in terms of ping). This hat also causes some weird desync glitches. Relies a lot on other people being right at your position. 2/10

Arti:
It's either amazing or useless. In short levels like Newbieland 2 it's the fastest hat due to the massive speed-burst you get but in levels over 30s you will have no chance due to the timer being cut to 30s (on non-infinite time levels). I give this a high rating because you will typically use this when you know the level is short and quite a few are. 6/10

Jellyfish:
Basically an auto-lightning on your head for players close. Once again this suffers from the PR2 ping problem and the fact there's no visual (that I know of at least) to say when it's charged up to go combined with the ping issue makes it feel random (even though it's not). Nullified by party hat. 2/10

Cheese:
I like the meme and the potential, but crumble blocks are quite rare in levels so this one is like a less-useful top hat (and it also benefits other players if you break through, not just yourself). 3/10

---

Extras:
Colour (Good, Eh, Bad) of hats in order of release:
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓

Point differential of hat compared to last (e.g. Kong came after Exp and is rated 1 lower, so that's a -1):
-1, +7, +2.5, -1.5, -2, -3, +1, +2, -2, -2, 0, +4, -4, +1

[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.

[Lego-man945]

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.

yes

[Magniloquent]

Trapper/Glitcher/Fruster/etc. perspective

[Different]

Exceptional +2

TRASH +0