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The best Gotham Knights abilities for each hero

Everything you need to know about the best Gotham Knights abilities for each of the four masked heroes, no matter if you prefer melee or ranged combat

Best Gotham Knight abilities: Red Hood is shooting at a target off-screen. A car behind him is exploding.

Want to know the best Gotham Knights abilities worthy of your valuable action points? Each of the four Gotham Knights characters has a drastically different play style in the superhero game: Red Hood is a heavy-hitting bruiser, while Robin uses deception and stealth to eliminate threats. Abilities you can unlock go a long way in defining how best to play them, so while Batgirl has ways of helping her bring down tougher foes alone, Nightwing is more of a support character whose abilities can benefit everyone.

These standard abilities are not to be confused with Momentum abilities, which you get by completing challenges and automatically allocate themselves to specific button combinations. No, these are the Gotham Knights abilities you can buy for each character by spending action points (AP). Since there are only a finite number of ability points you can allocate to a character without having to find all of the Batarangs, landmarks, and street art collectibles, you need to spend them wisely.

Best Gotham Knights abilities

Here are two of the best Gotham Knights abilities per character:

Gotham Knights abilities: Batgirl's ability tree. A window on the right side of the screen shows the Exploding Elite Beatdown skill in action.

Batgirl

Piercing Beatdown

  • Type: Justice
  • Requires: Perfect Evade and Elite Beatdown
  • AP cost: 1

Beatdowns are Batgirl’s primary way of dealing with larger enemies. By using Momentum Segments to activate Beatdown, both Elite Beatdown and Piercing Beatdown ensure that the attack can’t be interrupted and, in turn, also interrupts armoured attacks from larger enemies.

Second Wind

  • Type: Grit
  • Requires: HP+ and either Enemy Counter Focus or Unflinching Heavy Strike
  • AP cost: 2

Sometimes, you may find the enemies are just a little bit too much to handle. Second Wind not only revives Batgirl after being knocked out by enemies but also restores 50% of her total health. You can augment this effect further by adding the number of uses to two with Vigilante Resolve or recovering a Momentum Segment and increasing the chance to land critical hits for 15 seconds by 10% with Second Wind +.

Gotham Knights abilities: Nightwing's ability tree. A window on the right side of the screen shows the Exploding Momentum Regen skill in action.

Nightwing

Assassin’s Mark

  • Type: Raptor
  • Requires: Perfect Evade
  • AP cost: 2

By simply marking an enemy, which you should always go before engaging in combat, you and your allies get a permanent 10% damage boost against the target, allowing you to make fights against even the strongest foes that little bit easier.

Momentum Regen

  • Type: Pack Leader
  • Requires: Family Ties and Health Bolstered Defense
  • AP cost: 2

Nightwing’s main gimmick is that he builds Momentum faster than any other character, thanks to a variety of abilities such as Momentum Gain + and Evade Chain Momentum in the Acrobat tree. However, even when the going gets tough, Momentum Regen refuels a bar of Momentum whenever you gain a little chunk through combat. It might take a while to charge a segment fully, but you don’t need to do anything other than survive to get it. Once filled, if you still have a Momentum Segment to charge, punch an enemy once to reactivate it. The best bit is if you’re playing in co-op, your allies can help increase the regeneration speed.

Gotham Knights abilities: Red Hood's ability tree. The image on the right side of the screen shows Large Grab in action.

Red Hood

Critical Expertise

  • Type: Marksman
  • Requires: Perfect Evade
  • AP cost: 1

A 20% increase in critical damage dealt to enemies may not sound like a lot on paper, particularly as everyone gets this ability, but considering that Red Hood’s whole schtick is to deal as much damage as possible, it all adds up. Combine mods with increased chances to inflict critical hits and deal more critical damage to wreck the opposition entirely.

Large Grab

  • Type: Brawler
  • Requires: Human Bomb
  • AP cost: 1

This ability makes encounters against those pesky larger enemies rather trivial, such as the Mob Godmothers. Simply beat up all the other criminals and leave the mini-bosses until the end.

From here, you can use a couple of heavy attacks to break their guard and knock them to the ground. Then, while they’re down, grapple onto them and perform a Grab Strike to deal heavy damage, then hit them with another heavy attack to leave them vulnerable to grabs once more.

You can repeat this strategy until they’re unconscious, and it’s very consistent for most enemies in the game. Combine this with Extended Grab Window to make large enemies grabbable at any time while at half health or less.

Gotham Knights abilities: Robin's ability tree. A window on the right side of the screen shows the Exploding Decoy skill in action.

Robin

Exploding Decoy

  • Type: Slugger
  • Requires: Perfect Evade and Elemental Decoy
  • AP cost: 2

What’s better than tricking an enemy into smacking a decoy to inflict lots of elemental effect damage? How about a decoy that leaves behind a residue that deals elemental damage to any enemy stupid enough to walk through it? Combine this with damaging elements such as poison or fire to do damage over time, or alternatively use freeze or stun to leave them vulnerable to follow-up attacks.

Turnabout Takedown

  • Type: Shadow
  • Requires: Light Footed
  • AP cost: 1

Using takedowns and stealth strikes on large enemies makes Robin one of the more powerful characters in the game. These foes generally take several minutes for other characters to defeat, so eliminating them in seconds with takedowns is a welcome ability to have. Of course, it doesn’t always work because sometimes you can’t avoid it when these big enemies spot you, so you will need to fight them the hard way. However, if there are some rafters on the ceiling, you can always use a smoke bomb to make a quick getaway and set up a future ambush.

And those are the best Gotham Knights abilities. While you’re here, you may wish to learn how to unlock fast travel in this rather big open world game. There are also plenty of Gotham Knights styles you can get for completing some of the many side missions, all of which are in the Gotham Knights missions list, together with details on how long the main campaign takes to finish. We also have an explanation of how fusing mods works and recipes for upgrading to higher rarities.