Slashing Pickles

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Last night I finally took a bit of a break from my vision quest to get the final form of the Diablos hammer.  You can see me in the above photo with the next to last form here, but unfortunately the final revision requires three Black Spiral Horn+ which is proving to be more of a challenge than I realized.  At the time of writing this… I now finally know why it has been so rough and why I keep getting Twisted Horns instead of the component I am actually seeking.  One of the weird things about Monster Hunter World or the Monster Hunter franchise in general… is there are certain components that you can only get by killing a monster and carving it… and others you can only get if you capture the monster.  As it turns out apparently unlike Majestic Horns from the normal Diablos…  you can only get Black Spiral Horn+ by killing the monster and carving it up.  This is unfortunate since the PC culture seems to be capture everything, even when there are similar hammer bros with me trying to get the upgrades.

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Last night however I went down a different path, that is unlocking Deviljho and starting to farm for some of those weapons.  Namely I really want the Lance, as it seems to be pretty freaking brutal.  Similarly I have been working on assembling a guard set…  that is going to turn around and help me farm the pieces I need from Black Diablos a little more efficiently.  Now that I have broken the trend of “Longsword Everything” I am starting to see that the game is more enjoyable if you sorta treat it like MegaMan.  What I mean by that is certain weapons tend to be easier on certain bosses than other weapons, and as I am starting to shift things up and learn new things…  I am finding it way more enjoyable to just switch to the appropriate weapon rather than to force myself down the path of slow and tedious Longswording.  That said…  I do tend to fight Deviljho with a Longsword.

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By the end of the night I had crafted this monstrosity, or Grief Lance the first form of the Deviljho lance weapon.  Essentially now I need Five more Tailfangs, a Gem, and two Scalps…  which again only drop if you kill the monster and carve it.  Functionally I am going to have to get good at soloing Deviljho or else be that guy that breaks traps.  I don’t want to be that guy because the PC community is relatively small in the grand scheme of things and I don’t want to get that reputation.  Alternatively I could just start asking people since text based chat is a thing that works easily on the PC…  even though very few people actually say things in it.  I might simply start asking nicely if we can kill not trap on both Deviljho and Black Diablos so I can get the bits I actually need.  I’ve fallen back into my old ways of really enjoying the SOS Roulette lifestyle, which is in part why I have put off downing Xeno’jiiva if only because it is such a prodding long fight.

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When I say it has a relatively small community, you have to take that with some perspective…  because it still manages to regularly rank in the top five games on steam for concurrent players.  There is no real way of knowing how many players there were on the PS4 but the community definitely feels smaller.  My personal theory is, that we ended up grouping an awful lot with Japanese players… and while they do exist on the PC there are far fewer of them.  It does however feel way more populated than what I have seen of the Xbox One community, so there is at least that.  Over 45,000 players is nothing to sneeze at, but that has fallen off significantly from the all time peak of over 320,000 players.  I have a feeling however that as soon as the Kulve Taroth event opens up… we will see a lot more activity.  There was a big loss of players surrounding the release of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate on the Switch, so I have a feeling a lot of people are still chewing through that game.  Personally… I just like the feel of Monster Hunter World much better.

2 thoughts on “Slashing Pickles”

  1. I’m curious where you got the idea that you can only get those parts from killing the monsters. That’s completely untrue. Drop tables are exactly the same between kill and capture in World, unlike previous games. In order to get the horns though, you have to “wound” the head (65% chance).

    They can also just show up from gold and silver rewards in investigations (18%/14%).
    https://mhworld.kiranico.com/item/black-spiral-horn-plus

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