Monster Hunter

Sorry not sorry for posting such a lot.

Beta is up and I'm having fun. The last Monster Hunter I played was Freedom Unite so the long sword feels right at home for me. I want to use the charge blade but man is that thing confusing.

Haven’t played the World demo yet, but both the games I have played had the Charge Blade, and it’s definitely confusing. I get how it works, but I feel like it’d take a lot of practice to use effectively, and I’m good with enough other weapons that I don’t feel the need to learn.

edited 9th Dec '17 3:26:46 PM by SapphireBlue

I had a bit of a mess around in the training mode, but that's all I've had time for, really. It's probably gonna have to be Monday that I really get my teeth into it.

Went through the first two hunts in the beta. This is my first Monster Hunter game ever, so I'm still figuring things out. I've picked the Double Sword, but I'm thinking of doing something else for the last hunt, like a ranged weapon or something, like maybe the gunlance.

I do really like the Jagras armor, though XD

The bow is hella strong now. It's possible to keep a monster stunlocked by using sidestep combos and Arc Shotting them over and over again. It also breaks parts, too. I admit I haven't played the series since 4 Ultimate, but I don't recall it ever being so effective before.

I love how much more the environment plays a part, evne more than the 4th game and Generations.

Yeah, I was impressed with how I was able to get the Great Jagras tangled up in vines during my fight with it. Not to mention blocking the Barrthos's charge with a plateau.

Yeah, the "technical weapons" are a bit more complex to understand and master. Charge Blade is the most complex to me because of all the combos, when to change modes, the charged attacks, the Guard Points and so on. Insect Glaive is a close second if only because feeding and using the insect is almost a meta in itself. Switch Axe is less complicated because it has less stuff to memorize and can be quite powerful.

Switch axe charges up as you attack, and then you can unleash the stored power in sword mode once it's fully charged, right? That's what I remember from Tri.

I think I'm going to do the first hunt tonight, and the other two tomorrow.

If the mechanics in World are anything like Generations, a Switch Axe may charge on hits, but it also passively charges over time and can get something like 40% charge instantly if you attempt to transform it while under minimum charge. Incidentally, the gauge only needs to be about half full to use the transformation (there should be a marker on the gauge representing this, and the gauge itself changes appearance if you can transform).

In sword mode, the gauge doesn't passively decrease, but attacking at all costs charge, even if you miss. You also get access to the Elemental Discharge attack, although that costs a nice chunk of charge. Also, phial effects only work in sword mode.

In my experience, sword mode is what a SA user wants to stay in it at all possible, partly for the increased attack speed and phial effect, and partly because in Gen, sword mode has innate Mind's Eye.

I've completely forgotten what phial effects are.

For a SA, a phial effect usually boosted the raw power of the weapon, boosted the elemental or status power of the weapon, or granted it a dragon element or poison / paralysis / exhaust effect when in sword mode.

The exact phial effect a SA will have should be in the weapon info, which you might not be able to access in the demo (or it might be hidden somewhere in the menu).

I'm sure I'll get to grips with it once I start playing :P

Regarding the switching weapons at camp, I don't think I'll use that feature. While I've on occasion used different weapons here and there for laughs, I'm a Great Sword man at heart. Great Sword through the original, and then Freedom Unite when I got that and a PSP.

I remember that time in 4U where i started learning Charge Blade to get through the final quest of solo because my great sword wasn't enough, and after breezing thruogh it with a not fully upgraded charge blade, swore I'd never play anything else again.

500 quests later I kinda blanked out on that oath since my greatsword immediately fell right back in my hands.

Soooo i also think i'm gonna stick to a single type of weapon during quest. now if i can switch between five gretaswords to match the element type, yeah, that'd be good.

edited 10th Dec '17 5:56:02 PM by Yumil

Long Swords was the only weapon I used in Freedom Unite. I only used a hammer for Kirin because of his small hitbox.

Greatswords and Hammers have it easy. For those slow, heavy hitters, raw attack power counts more than elemental, so you only really need one weapon anyway.

Alrighty, defeated all three monsters in the beta, my thoughts:

• Still fun
• For all that they've talked about lowering the bar for entry, there's still a lot to get to grips with here (not a complaint, just an observation).
• 20 minute time limit feels just a bit too tight to be fun. Hopefully it's just a beta thing. I want time to gather resources along the way.
• I found it hard to find what the scoutflies wanted me to look at sometimes, I'd see the 'prompt' on the left, but I couldn't see where the flies had actually gone. Could just be a case of developing an eye for it.
• Item wheel works a bit weirdly, it seems to use an item as soon as the cursor rests on it, but it's hard to tell what's what without selecting it. Muscle memory will probably eventually overcome this, but it still feels weird.
• I was worried the handler was going to chat constantly, but it seems like once she's told you something a couple of times, she doesn't say it again.
• Regarding being able to change gear at camp, it looks like you can only store so much in the chest, so you'll probably only be able to take one or two other loadouts, which is acceptable to me :P Also, as was said, just don't use it. Going back to the 20 minute time limit too, I don't think you'd have *time* to go back and change gear, if indeed that time limit is standard (I recall it was 50 minutes for almost everything in Tri)^note Having a time limit always struck me as rather arbitrary anyway, but I guess it stops you from being able to chip away at the monster indefinitely.

Tri was a special case time wise (or rater, became one as time went on and every subsequent game was released on portable devices) because handheld games reduce monsters life to account for shorter game sessions and more limited multiplayer, so even marathon quests can be finished in 20-25 minutes at two, 30 minutes tops, but kept the 50 minutes timer.

I wonder if they'll revert to Tri- like hps now this one's a pc/ps4 game, or if they'll stick to the format they used for the past décade.

edited 11th Dec '17 4:16:23 AM by Yumil

I hadn't considered that, but yeah, that makes sense. It did feel to me here like the monsters weren't as beefy as I remember from Tri, and I would like to have those longer battles again, myself.

It's also be worth noting tri, being a non ultimate/g version and having high rank being restricted to online (that was eventually shut down), suffered from adequate equipment starvation (or at least that's the feedback i got from people who played tri). Double diablos will always take longer if you're stuck with end-low rank gear.

Personally, 4u was my favorite for quest duration. 3u's guild was largely soloable for everything save for Event quests, which made sense considéring multiplayer was local only. 4u having online noticeably bumped up monster hp, with many online endgame quests being more or less impossible to solo for the average player but more because you would run out of heals to properly fight for 50 straight minutes than because monsters had that much hp. In turn, a decent party of 3 people could reasonably get those quests done in around twenty minutes, thirty for things like gogmazios.

If world has something similar, maybe a tad longer so it can push us to do better/use the new features while not becoming "whale on the monster 50 minutes at four and maybe you'll kill it in time", (which is often how people describe tri to me and that doesn't sound very appealing to me), that'd be great.

Generations made me quit somewhere around early High rank when i realized we just killed a friggin High rank plesioth in less than five minutes (with a full party of seasoned veterans,okay).

Haven't tried double cross.

edited 11th Dec '17 5:28:10 AM by Yumil

I've been having fun with the beta. Monster Hunter is a series I've always wanted to play but often didn't have the means. I think the few things I don't like so far are how finicky the lock on camera is and how attacks don't seem to really track enemies.

The weapons and combat are surprisingly more deep than I would have thought. I played Dragon's Dogma before and this feels so much like that game in many ways. Being online really helps the experience too.

I didn't care for the lock-on camera either, and my understanding is it's purely for you to keep the enemy in sight. I probably just won't use it. Attacks themselves, however, have never locked on or tracked in Monster Hunter, as far as I know. You have to actually aim, and pick your moment to strike.

That reminds me, I was watching an official MHW stream last night, and they answered a couple of questions for me:

• Time limits will be longer in the full release, allowing more time for exploration and resource-gathering.
• Monsters will be tougher (they didn't explicitly say that, but they talked about how the beta was balanced around brief quests so that people could get a lot of quests played).

i'd take that last sentence with a grain of salt . every single monster i've ever faced in the demo of a monster hunter ended up being noticeably easier in the full game. It often is due to the fact you are limited to predetermined gear you may or may not like and us generally subpar compared to what you can get at this point.

That, and i suspect them of just straight up buffing monsters in demos un order go make them a decent challenge even though they usually use enemies from early ranks and don't go higher than middle rank. Gotta save the true nightmares for the full game, but here's something tough enough to at least force you to get serious.

Time will tell if this game is different, but demos monsters don't have a record to be any easier than real game monsters.

And yes, the sole purpose of the lock on is to help you keep the monster in sight, because moving the camera in the heat of battle was the nightmare of every single handheld MH game because there was no right stick. The grip you needed to have on the console to be able to move both your character and the camera at the same time was a meme back in those days.

edited 12th Dec '17 4:21:07 AM by Yumil

Can you possibly mean...?