Monster Hunter World!!!!!

Yep, this is exactly what our group did. And there’s absolutely no way we would have known to do this if one of us hadn’t happened to see it on the Monster Hunter subreddit. We luckily found out about it before we completed the quest.

I’ve got no complaints. :)

But I’ve seen some upset that this game is ‘small’ in comparison to the prior games. And by monster count it certainly is. Bigger than Tri/3, but World has far fewer monsters than the more recent 3DS games.

Of course in the past they’ve kind of been able to just add new ones on, without really needing to rebuild many assets. With World though they would have needed to rebuild everything to a higher standard which takes more time.

Monster Counts by Game
Game Small Monsters Large Monsters Total
MH3 17 18 35
MH3U 22 51 73
MH4 20 52 72
MH4U 23 75 98
MHX (Generations) 34 73 107
MHXX 36 93 129
MHWorld 18 31 49

Looking at the numbers, it reminds me how amazing it was that they got all that game into a 3DS. Plus makes me think about importing XX for my Switch… :)

Okay so yeah they have room to grow. It seems like if they drew from existing ideas, not the actual assets, they could do a proper expansion. That… sounds doable for a non-Japan audience.

Yeah, I’m hoping G rank is an add on/ expansion not just a separate release. They are building on the base game with SF5 instead of doing expanded version releases so I hope they do the same with MonHun. World is a much more modern game than past MonHun titles so I hope they continue in that vein.

As for content in World I’m pretty pleased with the amount we got. It seems about right for a “High Rank” release.

My husband and I both did this with our Switches. We went to the effort to learn the katakana alphabet and look up and learn some Japanese translations for the more common MH terms. We figured that, along with our existing knowledge of the game (recognizing monster and item icons, for example) would at least let us experience some of the content. And while we were able to muddle our way through (with the help of the Google translate app where you can point your phone camera at the text to be translated), it still wasn’t the most satisfying of experiences. Once we got into hunts, it was find, but trying to manage the stuff in town between hunts was difficult.

Now, if you happen to speak Japanese fluently, I’d say go for it. :)

Yeah, I have zero working knowledge of the language so really it’s just wishful thinking! :)

I read an article recently that came to much the same conclusions as you, and it sounds like way more trouble than it’s worth unfortunately.

It was, and I forgot to mention that we didn’t play for very long. A couple of days, in short sessions. Definitely not the way we wanted to play Monster Hunter. It’s upsetting that XX will almost certainly not be released in the west now that MHW is out. We could have gotten a copy of Generations, but we didn’t really want to get the “stripped down” version.

We did our first tempered Elder farming session. The starter was three runs at Vaal Hazak (with three purple rewards). He seemed like by far the easiest to start with, since the miasma is so easy to counter and that’s all he has. Only had one cart in total for those runs. My friend got two Hero’s streamstones, exactly for the two weapon types he is actually using, and one Warrior’s. So that was nice. I got nothing.

Then we tried Teostra, since my only investigation for Kushala was only for two rewards. Didn’t expect it to be easy, but it was even more brutal than expected. Had five carts in less than 20 minutes. So it was back to Vaal Hazak so that I could at least get some kind of weapon augment, even for a useless type. (Armor augments are blocked until that, and are worth about 70 defense for the full set).

Two more runs of that got me a Warrior’s streamstone (for bowguns, blech), and my friend got another one as well. We were playing a lot less carefully, and carted three times total over the two quests. And finally after upgrading most of my Teostra-countering armor set I tried soloing him just to test the armor out. Beat that one with just a couple of minutes to spare.

That was a total of 33 purple rewards among us, and we got 5 augment drops out of them. Obviously this is a tiny sample, but I can’t find any kind drop rate measurments online. So let’s work with the implied ~15% drop rate, and also assume that the Hero’s and Warrior’s Streamstones are equally likely to drop.

I’m looking for one Hero’s Streamstone for the Longsword and two Warrior’s Streamstones for the Charge Blade. The average number of augments I need to acquire to find the ones I actually need is about 25. (Using the median here, not mean). With a 15% drop rate, that’d mean about 160 purple rewards. And to get those, you’d need about 40-50 tempered Elder investigations.

That’s actually not unreasonable, I can totally see doing ten more of each of the non-Vaal Hazak Elders just to learn how to properly fight them. But that might be the end of the road content-wise, and the augments seem to be so incredibly minor that they can’t possibly be the motivation for a purely loot-driven gameplay loop.

Well I had my first you feinted and helped fail an online quest. The guy sent me a don’t worry about it note, and then we played together, by chance since it’s kind of a pain in the ass to keep going with the same group, and did about four more where I actually pulled my weight.

Interesting issuee. One Japanese player, based on the name, decided to be a jerk and basically just kept shooting people who were trying to loot the monster body which knocked them out of the animation and prevented body harvest.

I’m surprised there’s no tutorial post-credits giving any direction. There’s not even a tutorial for the tempered monster thing until you actually do it, which I had barely seen because I ignored expeditions once it gave me enough quests and investigations.

I also echo the point above about tempered monster tracks. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a game use this method for padding when gear-based padding isn’t available, but in this game you don’t even engage with the low level content, you literally run a circle around a zone pressing a button without fighting at all until the game decides to give you the content you actually want (no progress bar, of course). The story investigations at least gave you progress for completing arbitrary quests, why not keep doing that?

I think the game want people to share tempered monsters quest. Also theres some sort of feedback loop that need to be started and then is self-sufficiant.

I have captured the same tempered paloumo 4 or 5 times. It must be escaping from the base each time I capture him. Is super easy because… well… is a paloumo.

I finally killed Nergigante this weekend, and was able to forge the Nergal Lacerator, which is a hilarious beat-stick of death.

I then went through and defeated all the other elder dragons through the end of the game on my first attempt.

I had been running the longsword for a while, but eventually went back to the charge blade, and at this point I pretty much know what I’m doing with it. A big change from how I originally used it, is that I use the shield a LOT more now. I hadn’t realized that you can essentially block everything. I’m running the Uragaan set, which lets you block normally unblockable stuff too, so I think I can block literally everything. I at least have not seen anything that I’ve failed to block.

Once I fully grasped all the combos, and how to easily keep your shield and sword charged up, that changed things quite a bit, since I end up fighting a lot more in sword/shield mode, generally only going to axe mode to dump super amped element discharge attacks on enemies (which wrecks them to hillarious effect).

It’s not just one feedback loop, it’s three totally disjoint ones. It seems that except for expeditions, you’ll only ever get investigations for the same tier of monster that you’re tracking. So there’s not even a natural bootstrap where you work through the lower tiers of monsters to get to the elders. You can do the lower tier tempered investigations, sure. But they’ll get you just crap decorations and won’t help advance the game.

And on the other hand, me and my friend did all but one of the tempered elders before we ever found a single middle-tier tempered investigation. There just wasn’t any reliable source for those tracks. (We finally got it bootstrapped through the Vaal+Odogaron optional quest.)

This meant we got a really stupid power curve, pretty much having to beat tempered elders with normal HR gear, and only then finding the monsters that were supposed to be the intermediate stepping stone that unlocked rarity 6/7 armor augments.

I guess. And that means SOS flares for tempered monsters might have been an option that we just totally missed. But the only thing that matters is finding tracks, completing the hunt is totally worthless. That means that we would have needed to spend a good chunk of the quest trying to find tracks, not on fighting the monster. You can either be a good team-mate to the people who sent the SOS but just get the crap material rewards, or be a total dick and actually get the thing you need.

It’s just shit design no matter how I think about it.

Finally ran into a monster I was too under-powered to face, but I managed to squeeze it out with a couple of minutes to spare. Since balloon with wings didn’t seem that challenging, I just forged ahead to see how much of an upgrade I needed for the next one, expecting to die quickly or at least get enough info to plan my next gear attempt. Instead I battled it out with porcupine hedgehog for about 50 minutes… and won with just enough time to sprint forward and get to the other objective. I used up most my stacks in my push to do it though… intense fight, probably the most intense battle I’ve had in a few years because I was too stubborn to throw in the towel.

This is my favorite monster thus far. I farm this guy a ton simply because I like smashing him to pieces so much.

I’ve only faced him once because I am… so slow doing this game at most an hour a night, but it seemed like he armored up a couple times chased him around, and this led me to breaking his tail twice… I think. I know it broke off twice, but i wasn’t sure how.

So I have not had the same luck as @jsnell with the hero stones. I’ve killed over 50 temper elders so far, and have not yet received a single hero stone. I have plenty of warrior stones, but none for my favored weapon so far. I think this game tracks my voice chat, and does super secret voice recognition and then denies me the decoration and gem drops I am looking for =) After 220 hours played, I don’t think I have much more decoration/augment grind in me. At this point everything in the game is pretty easy to kill and there is just no rhyme or reason to the endgame grind.

Love the game, had a blast with it. definitely got my 60.00 worth out of it and would play again… But the endgame seems a bit lacking of drive for me

P.S. if you are playing on the PS4, hook up with @merryprankster and @Chaplin ! Great group of guys playing in the “Squad” squad! (Yes, the official name of our squad is “Squad”)

Yeah, you really are on the “long grind” at this point and it’s entirely dependent on just liking to hunt stuff for the heck of it. Over the course of 800 hours or so you would end up with better and more fine tuned gear, but I can certainly understand not wanting to march on this far past the point of diminishing returns.

Personally I’m sure you will continue on just because I like the hunts so much and I enjoy rounding out my gear and getting things just so.

One thing I think is emerging as absent in the endgame is “turns” rooms (basically 4 players in a lobby taking turns posting quests). I used to spend hundreds of hours doing that. You can do something similar with friends, but there was something about being in a random room just hunting random stuff that was pretty fun.

Turns rooms were a fun way to hunt a bunch of random stuff and just enjoy playing. Doesn’t seem like the game is really set up to be conducive to that though.

I have found that it is fun to just hop in to SOS flare calls. Fight with some randos, and get out.

This is what I do. I usually go for a specific request to improve my Rank or work towards as Rank, and then I build up my gear by doing quests in my online session, if there are any of my Rank, or I just SOS the rest of the night. It’s how I’ve learned to work in groups… assuming I do that well at all. I’ve played with some folks over and over again, so i assume I’m not terrible or they would not accept me. heh.