Salmonids!

King Salmonids

General

King Salmonid health does scale to the current team / room’s difficulty. That does not mean they are easier at lower levels, as will be discussed later the biggest determining factor for really beating a king Salmonid is managing the common and boss Salmonids enough that you have a steady amount of Golden Eggs available through the whole encounter.

Cohozuna

Cohozuna is chonky, though perhaps at this point neither the largest or chonkiest of it’s lot.

It takes after the splashdown, which is available in the single player campaign of the game, as well as the triple splashdown special.

General Tips

Cohozuna has reasonably predictable behaviors, as noted below and on the splatoon wiki. Once you’ve seen Cohozuna a few times you will start to get a good grasp at these behaviors. Use this knowledge to your advantage on Xtrawave shifts.

Out of the three currently known king Salmonids, this one has the smallest health pool at about 40,000 at the highest difficulty. The trade off is that there aren’t any easily exploitable weaknesses like the other kings. It is all defensive wall baby!

Tips from Splatoon Wiki

Each splashdown is set to happen at a specific time (87, 71, 55, 39 and 23 seconds marks) and each lasts for about 3 seconds. Use this information wisely on managing the hordes of Common and Boss Salmonids.

Cohozuna will usually target the nearest player, so use that to your advantage for kiting and baiting the Cohozuna to ideal spots (closer to golden eggs / other players).

Cohozuna is not ideal to try to take down with golden eggs alone. By the calculations on the wiki it takes about 50 eggs to defeat it at highest difficulty, which would be an incredible feat entirely dependent on how well your given team can handle and manage the Boss Salmonids. Health does scale with difficulty but also consider that skill level will also generally scale with difficulty and while it may be easier on paper to defeat at lower levels, if you do not either have enough Boss Salmonids spawning or are having too hard of a time managing the Horde as is it will still be a difficult challenge in practice.

This is to say that it’s very important to still attack Cohozuna even if you don’t have golden eggs, and if you have a weapon with high DPS it is recommended to focus more on managing / attacking Coho than bosses (though use your best judgement; you do not want to completely ignore the other Bosses either).

Anything with a high DPS output (eg crabtank, hydra splatlings, and dapple dualies, there’s a full list on the article on the splatoon wiki) are recommended to focus on attacking and managing the Cohozuna more than dealing with bosses. Use your best judgement however, as you do not want to get cornered by the common and boss Salmonids while attacking the King Salmonid.

Egg Cannon / Golden eggs are free 800 damage with no ink cost! While that is very broken, do also consider that it gives you an important choice. You can either deal lots of damage to Cohozuna, or use it on Boss Salmonids as it will one shot most boss Salmonids (it is not effective against drizzlers, maws, and big shots as they have large health pools. I wouldn’t recommend using it on fish sticks and stingers either as they are unique in how to deal with them, and flyfish usually take two, one for each basket). Be careful though, as time spent using golden eggs on common boss Salmonids is time and damage not spent on Cohozuna.

Horrorboros

It takes after the Booyah bomb special and is a bit like a big flying Steelhead. If you’re familiar with Steelheads, you probably can quickly

General tips

Unlike it’s companions, Horrorboros is a flying King Salmonid, so it will be difficult to do direct damage with weapons that do not reach. While there are weapons that do reach, if a rotation does have a shorter range weapon I’d say if you were on the short range weapon slot to focus more on boss and common Salmonid management and attack it with golden eggs instead.

It is, however, very very long and flying around the map, so compared to Cohozuna it is not as hard to find necessarily on the map.

It does have a somewhat predetermined flight path around the level! I’ve fount it handy to work around the flight path somehow when dealing with “Boris”, as you don’t want to sprint halfway across the map to do egg damage to it or it’s weak spot.

Compared to Cohozuna, Horrorboros does in fact have a pretty exploitable weakness which will be discussed in the Splatoon wiki tips

Tips from Splatoon Wiki

The bomb Horrorboros charges is not immune to damage. It has 2,500 HP, and any damage done to the bomb will also decrease from Horrorboros’s health bar. If you do pop that / destroy the bomb, it’ll deal a whopping 5,000 damage to Horrorboros on top of the pre-existing damage and cancels it’s current Booyah Bomb attack.

Throwing golden eggs is generally recommended for this unless you have a high DPS weapon that also has the reach to hit the bomb

Unlike Cohozuna, Horrorboros does have more HP at a whopping 55,000 HP at maximum difficulty, so you really must focus on dealing damage concurrently to the body and the bomb in order to deal with it. This makes it deceptively difficult at lower difficulty levels as you won’t have enough bosses spawning to generate the golden eggs needed, and on top of that the flying aspect can make it difficult to just simply attack while others get golden eggs.

The splatoon wiki recommends that if you have a Hydra Splatling, Snipewriter, E-Liter, or a Crabtank (or ideally many of these), that you should be focusing on dealing damage to the bombs / the king Salmonid directly, and any other high DPS weapon / Special / other weapons should work on boss and common management.

The 2,500 health that the bombs have is not evenly divisible by the 800 damage a golden egg does. You would need about 3-4 eggs to burst it’s bomb and that’s dependent on if you have the eggs lying around or a way to damage the bomb a little bit before chucking eggs at it.

Megalodontia

General tips

Megalodontia is the largest and the chunkiest of the known King Salmonids, at a whopping 65,000 hp, and the sheer size can mean that “Joe” as people call him (this coming from the Japanese name that means jaws but sometimes got translated into Joe instead), this guy can take up half the map depending on map layout.

Megalodontia is like a Maws but make it much much bigger. If you get how Maws works you can understand the general jist of how Joe attacks.

Megalodontia also has the most pronounced weak spot right on it’s back, though due to the nature of how big this king Salmonid is, that doesn’t always mean you get a clear shot of it (and by comparison it can be easier to hit a Horrorboros’s booyah bomb than the weak spot)

Any damage done to the weakspot will deal 70% more damage than normal, for example a normally 800 damage dealing golden egg will deal 1,360 damage instead.

Megalodontia will pick a player, and you will know because there’s a reticle that will appear around the chosen player, and then after a brief time, will try to snap them up.

Megalodontia is unique in that like a slammin lid, it does PVP damage against other Salmonids to make up for the sheer amount of space it occupies at any given time in the map. You can use this to your advantage.

Tips from Splatoon Wiki

Megalodontia’s will always face away from where it last attacked. This is to say that it’s weak point should always face the direction of where it last attacked. This can be used to your advantage to set it’s weak spot either near players or near golden eggs.

Megalodontia’s PVP abilities can also be exploited and a chosen player can bait it to an area with a lot of Boss Salmonids to make Megalodontia splat them, giving a lot of free eggs.

Be careful with where you stick Megalodontia, as it can be very easy to accidentally trap yourself or your team members between rocks and hard places.

Triumvirate

The triumverate is a rare king salmonid encounter in such that it is literally just all three of them and tends to come out for special big runs, like Big Big run (when salmonids invaded all city stages at once) and Grand Run (when they invaded the grand fest tricolor map).

It's notably more difficult than any one king as a byproduct of the fact that it's managing three of them at the same time

You do, however, get to use your specials twice this time to make up for it!

Tips from Splatoon Wiki

• Each King Salmonid's attack patterns are the same as when facing them alone, so all their strengths and weaknesses stay the same as well.
• The player targeted by Megalodontia should lure it to the location that Horrorboros is moving towards, so that Horrorboros' mouth is hit by Megalodontia's attack. This instantly destroys the bomb and deals huge damage to both Megalodontia and Horrorboros, as well as anything else in the vicinity.
  • Repeatedly chaining this process is the safest way to defeat all three King Salmonids, since it prevents Horrorboros from successfully attacking while simultaneously dealing massive amounts of damage to Horrorboros and Megalodontia.
  • Megalodontia also deals damage to other Boss Salmonoids during the Xtrawave, so if the player targeted by Megalodontia cannot reach Horrorboros’ mouth in time, it may be worthwhile to try to get rid of other Boss Salmonoids.
• Due to the three King Salmonids taking up a lot of space in addition to other Boss Salmonids, the crew must utilize their main and special weapons' advantages to the fullest in order to keep the battle relatively under control.
  • Weapons that deal heavy damage like the Grizzco Charger or Grizzco Stringer should mainly focus on attacking the King Salmonids directly. Make sure to leverage their individual strengths and weaknesses as well; for instance, the Grizzco Stringer can deal enormous single-target damage, but the Grizzco Charger should try and pierce through multiple targets at once.
  • Weapons excelling at turfing and crowd control like the Grizzco Brella, Grizzco Dualies and Grizzco Roller should ensure the floors and walls are covered in the player's ink. The extra mobility is crucial for getting good angles to splat Boss Salmonids and for avoiding the King Salmonids' attacks.
  • Armor-piercing weapons like the Grizzco Slosher and Grizzco Splatana should mainly focus on defeating Boss Salmonids, so that they and the other players can use as many Golden Eggs as possible.
  • The Grizzco Blaster is well-rounded enough that it should adapt according to the situation, to make up for the other weapons' weaknesses.
  • Situationally, the Grizzco Roller can inflict massive amounts of damage on Megalodontia if it is lured to a location where the player can wedge themself between it and a wall, allowing them deal continuous damage by rolling against Megalodontia without being knocked back.
    • On Big Run stages, Horrorboros may emerge from a Gusher, allowing the Grizzco Roller player to use the same strategy after it first appears.
  • The player with the Crab Tank should use both charges to deal as much damage as possible to Megalodontia's weak spot, shooting at the other King Salmonids if Megalodontia retreats into ink. However, if the crew is having trouble luring Megalodontia to attack Horrorboros, the player with the Crab Tank should shoot at Horrorboros' bomb instead. If Cohozuna is left with significantly more health than the other two King Salmonids, it may also be worthwhile to use one or both Crab Tanks to attack it.
  • Most other special weapons do not deal nearly as much damage as the Crab Tank, so use them to attack Horrorboros' bomb to get the most mileage out of the damage, or use them to take out problematic Boss Salmonids like Stingers and Flyfish. Do not hesitate too long waiting for the perfect opportunity, however; using specials inefficiently is still usually better than not using them at all, especially since the crew collectively has eight specials to use in just 100 seconds (or even less time, if things go poorly).