Boom. First attempt with the lance got him in 31 minutes. I fainted once because I forgot about chip damage and wasn’t paying attention to my health but all in all lance made that much less frustrating.
Not just because I was able to down Barioth, but Lance is definitely becoming my new favorite weapon.
Sweet! Glad you found your “vibe” with the lance. It’s a fantastic weapon indeed.
I’m completely new to Monster Hunter World, and just fired it up for the first time after receiving it as a Christmas gift. I don’t normally play fighting type games, so I’d just like to be sure I’m not missing something. I’m fighting the 2nd monster (the one right after the tutorial), Janka-something, and am using a Katana-type sword (not sure if that matters, but from skimming this thread, seems like it might). I’ve been pounding on this guy for at least a couple of hundred hits for at least 20-30 minutes, and while he’s become weirdly bloated at least a couple of times and I’ve heard my companion say that he’s hurt, he just won’t die. I finally gave up and since it wouldn’t let me quit in the middle of a quest, had to end task to exit the game. Am I doing something wrong? Is there some kind of “finishing move” that I need to do to finally kill him, or are battles supposed to last this long (or longer)?
No, that would be about normal for a first time monster hunter. There is a certainly a learning curve to figuring it all out, but one you do, your kill times will improve drastically.
Do yourself a favour and watch the below video to familiarise yourself with the longsword. Understanding a weapon’s combos is the first step in figuring out how to put more hurt on a monster in less time. Also do the tutorial on the clutch claw, or watch Arekkz video on that as well to get aquainted. Don’t get discouraged, it can be a bit daunting getting started and feeling like the monsters are unkillable, but it is rewarding once it starts to come together.
Arrekz overviews are really a great source of info you get you up to speed.
The Great Jagra getting bloated is a sign he has eaten something and is likely to start using his rolling attack, but it also means his belly should be more vulnerable to damage.
Another thing to keep in mind past what Sharaleo mentioned is that each monster has hard and weak hit zones. You will do less damage when attacking hard areas and more when you hit weak areas. Once you discover a monster and collect scout flies (level up your knowledge about a monster) you’ll see things like this in the built in hunter notes:
So this is saying his head, belly, and front feet are weak points, so you want to focus on those areas for maximum damage. All 3 of those areas can also be broken. So when you do enough damage to them you’ll see a parts broken message. This usually causes the monster to stagger or weaken attacks with those areas (e.g. breaking monsters feet will usually cause them to fall when they do a lunging attack). I don’t actually know for sure if breaking a part makes that part take more damage (I think so?). Breaking parts is also a good way to get materials.
Another important thing after you get past the initial game is:
do not craft armor and weapons labelled as "Defender"
This equipment is overpowered as it’s meant to allow veteran players to get to the expansion quicker. I know several people who didn’t know this and crafted that armor, and it utterly removed all progression from the game, made the game too easy, and dulled the experience enough that they quit.
In general, there’s no need to grind for gear until you get to the higher levels of the base game (and even then, I didn’t craft specific gear until the 2nd to the last monster), but the defender gear literally removes all progression and a lot of the interesting parts of the game.
Thanks for the tips, sharaleo and KallDrexx! Much appreciated! I must say I’m a bit overwhelmed, and did not realize the complexity, but it’s good to know I wasn’t doing anything “wrong”, just not really being very effective. I watched the video and my eyes glazed over quickly, only partially because I’m using K+M, not a controller, but since I have time this week/weekend, I’ll give this an honest try. Thanks again!
If your eyes glazed over, that’s probably normal. Those videos have a lot of assumed knowledge.
A better idea is going to be to go to the training area. I’m hoping that’s available where you are. You can see how to get there from here; How to Use the Training Area | Monster Hunter World (MHW)｜Game8
The training area will give you a whacking post and have a GUI that gives you useful combos to practice with. Likewise, if you go to the in game menu → hunter notes → weapon guide it will give you more information on how to use the weapon.
That might be easier to ease in with, and should show KB+M controls.
World shows available moves in the upper right during gameplay, too, although these may change rather quickly depending on the current circumstances (some moves must be chained from others). I haven’t played a ton of long sword, but my understanding of it, rudimentary though it may be, is that a lot of it revolves around building the spirit meter (the inside of the sword icon in the upper left), and when that’s full doing spirit slashes over and over until the animations are done, which ought to be fairly obvious, which puts your sword into the next higher damage bracket (indicated by the color on the outside of the sword icon). I think this can be done twice? Spirit thrust followed by helm breaker is a pretty good move, too. I can’t remember the exact inputs, but again, look in the upper right.
You can stick with roughly the first 5 minutes of that video for now. There’s a lot of complexity to the weapon you don’t need to worry about until you’re more comfortable.
If you have a good controller handy, you’ll probably enjoy the game more.
oh. I highly suggest you use a controller if you’ve got it. the game is playable on m+KB but it’s… not good. definitely not made for it. controller makes all the moves flow way, way nicer.
longsword needs to be charged up using roundhouse slashs at the end of your spirit combo. it gets a LOT of damage increase from doing this. I know it seems like its taking a long time to kill the jagras but you should be able to kill it in about 5-10 minutes once you know your moveset and all the jagras moves. LS can output a LOT of damage but it does require some knowledge of the moveset. I always suggest people start with Greatsword now because it will teach you the best out of any weapon to look for openings in the monsters moveset
Greatsword pretty consistently ranks as #1 solo weapon, despite being slow as shit.
For me Greatsword is a weapon that benefits from considerable experience in the game. It’s probably the least effective weapon in the hands of a beginner, for me, but I could be wrong.
I’ve always been a huge bow partisan, but there’s no denying lance is a pretty forgiving weapon with a few Guard skill points (and later on Guard Up).
I think that’s true. I think Greatsword is one of the most powerful weapons in the game but it also might have the longest learning curve.
Between all the various Monster Hunter games I’ve played I’m probably about 9K hours of Monster Hunter played in my lifetime and probably 85% of that was using a Greatsword. If I’m honest I was probably around a thousand hours in before I understood Monster Hunter and GS well enough to be really effective with it, I’d say closer to 1.5K hours before I really felt like I had it totally dialed in.
It’s super slow, but you can use a combination of subtle movements from the moves as well as understanding the monster to reposition so you can stay in the pocket (generally up the monster junk) and wail away. Also it requires skills like Focus and Earplugs to leverage it well. Handicraft and/or Minds Eye are probably needed as well. This will allow you to push and get the staggers you need to make GS really pay off.
I think GS is super fun, but it’s not really “pick up and play” friendly and can feel really awkward and clumsy at first since movement is really weird with it. Plus if you don’t loop your attacks right you can spend a lot of time with your sword stuck in the dirt (Shoulder tackle canceling in World changes that up a bit, but its still slow movement for sure).
holy shit
I’ve been playing this again with the ICE mod and it’s pretty great.
I started over from the beginning with a new weapon: Insect Glaive. I didn’t put ICE in until the other night, but I was absolutely destroying things with IG once I got used to it. Just demolishing everything’s face.
ICE has some balance changes, but mostly it unnerfs stuff and nerfs clutch claw. It’s a patch to effectively remove Clutch Claw and make the numbers make some sort of sense, and I’m loving it. Dual Blades and Greatsword as secondaries. Greatsword early on felt unfair. Like I could three shot monsters unfair. Also it gets a little tedious since there isn’t much in the way of variety with the thing. Still it’s nice to bust out for annoying investigations to get that last random claw from something ever so often before that. ICE also adds a new system to GS apparently for variety, but I haven’t tried to figure it out.
Also with the High Res Textures it gives my new system a run for it’s money, mostly because poorly coded console port (though it does look really pretty). And run for it’s money is relative, since I’m talking 100 fps average (though my old system without HRT often stuttered and chugged to the point that I got depressed and stopped playing).
They completely changed the main combos with GS to be about the movement hits rather than the massive charges. i guess it’s called the “combo great sword”
it seems to have a lot more variety than before!!
ICE mod is legit very fun, it really revitalizes the game IMO
Damn, I wish I had this on PC, now.
