Monster Hunter World Archives - Page 13 of 15

Apex Predators

February 9, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I participated in a little bit of non-game related nonsense. Over the Christmas break I rearranged my set up so that I am essentially sharing a 43 inch 4k display for both console and PC gaming. I still have access to the PC via the secondary monitor to the side, but the main display will be showing my PS4. The idea was that this would give me access to my proper mic while playing console games and allow me to hang out on teamspeak or discord while playing. The only problem there is that my only sound option for console gaming… has been to have it play through the television speakers, which means while streaming… it gets picked up by my microphone. My alternate solution was to try and string a usb headset to my PS4 while playing but it was less than optimal and I didn’t have a long enough cord to route it around where it was not in the way.

So I set forth with a mission… figure out a way to pipe the input from my television into my PC. The television only has optical toslink out and the pc has a 3.5 mm mini jack for input, which meant I needed some sort of a bridge to make the connection work. After some googling I stumbled across this little device that will convert a digital input… like toslink to an analog signal like RCA/Mini. After a bunch of fiddling and some rewiring I got it set up… and once I set my system to “listen” to the line in port… I had console audio coming in through my PC sound card. This left me with the problem of needing some way to have a microphone for PSN chat.

After some rummaging I found my first Blue microphone… the Nessie and decided to give it a shot. This is the point where I am thankful I have a rudamentary system of storage boxes because I needed to find some way of stringing a micro usb cord from the other side of my monitor all the way around the back of my desk and over to my PS4. The final solution was an old samsung charging cable combined with an amazon basics usb extender, but after some fiddling it worked. Now I can comfortably swap between PC gaming and PS4 gaming without having to grab a new headset or do any manipulation. While it doesn’t seem like much… it felt like a major victory to me last night.

As far as my night in Monster Hunter…. I spent a lot of time doing minor content while watching Sushi’s stream and chatting with the other folks in channel on my second monitor. This is the other use case I have found for this setup is letting me hang out on twitch while playing console games, which is a good deal of fun. The only negative is I try and cram discord, slack, hangouts and a twitch window on a 23 inch monitor… that seems ridiculously tiny next to the 43 inch I am playing the game on. I’ve been on this mission to repair my cash flow problem and as a result I have been doing a bunch of investigations that reward around the 4000-5000 zenny mark. Essentially there are two wants right now… being able to craft a new sword from the egg bird line to see how well it works with its high affinity rating. The other is to craft a new set of gear but I am sorta up in the air as to what to go with.

Basically in the coming evenings I should really start doing focused hunts and going after specific monsters to get parts. I hate fighting the Radobaan, but right now… it is one of my favorite armor sets. I need Radobaan parts to complete the weapon I am shooting for as well… so in theory it means in the near future I am going to start going after the tar dragon with seriousness. It was a pretty straight forward fight, but was just annoying getting good hits on it and knocking off bits of the bone armor. I am bad at actually seeking groups for things and instead just end up piddling around on my own most of the time. Regardless… my current set of armor feels like it is starting to be a little dated.

When I finally got back to doing more serious content, I picked up on the quest line that asked me to go to the bottom of the Rotten Vale. I am not exactly sure what I expected down there, but the supposed bottom floor is a lot more survivable than the one that Great Girros roams around. There seemed to be way fewer poison clouds going on, and not much in the way of annoying adds. While down there I ran into my favorite character that I have no clue what she is called… but a wiki is telling me she is called the Field Master. I question if she is actually another hunter, or if instead she is just one of the handlers that decided to break out on her own.

This lead to the appearance of a monster called Odogoron that was honestly one of the more annoying fights I have dealt with in awhile. Much like Legiana, this one can deal a lot of damage in a really short amount of time and I wound up fainting a few times because I simply was not watching my health bar as closely as I should. The other problem I ran into is this thing is insanely fast, so the only times I could really just go to town on it were when my palico had it distracted or I had blinded it with a flash pod. The rest of the time I was constantly in a state of trying to make sure it was not about to turn on me and decimate my life bar. I am not even sure how this works, but once I cut off its tail it seemed to be super susceptible to being knocked down which allowed me to unleash some spirit blade combos.

After wrapping that fight up, I decided to keep going with the story rather than retreating into a chill expedition. After some tracking around I found myself on a quest to essentially kill the Apex predators of the Ancient Forest and the Wildspire Wastes… aka Rathalos and Diablos. I did not have the energy in me to start either of those so I went back to investigations for awhile. I now have two quests in my log ready for me to start the hunts for these two big beasts… and I am guessing I am not terribly far from starting high rank once I knock them out of the skies. I really could use Rathalos parts because I believe they unlock some interesting crafting options. Still very much enthralled by this game and looking forward to venturing deeper into it.

Ice and Frost Dragons

February 7, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was more or less madness. The last few days have been super stressful for a bunch of reasons that I don’t really want to get into, but its a sort of stress that I am not used to dealing with. The sort of stress that takes what should be a super familiar and safe environment and makes everything seem weird and tense. Last night I had a very late meeting that ultimately went over the allotted time, and by the time I left… we had gotten some freezing rain. That meant that driving home was in itself a tense experience as well with everyone poking along at a snails pace. There is this whole judgement game that happens as well, because in theory my normal route is the least populated of the possible routes home. So I question if I should take it or try and stick to the busier route… and as a result more prone to be delayed by wrecks and probably much slower.

Needless to say my normal ten to fifteen minute commute was turned into roughly an hour. When got to town I also needed to make a run by the local grocery store around the corner from my house. Normally this is a massive pitfall because people go insane when there is even the slightest sign of winter weather. We were completely out of coffee creamer however… something I really didn’t want to go home without so I went against better judgement and walked into the grocery store. In truth it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting… there are times where even the lightest dusting of snow can cause the grocery store to look like the apocalypse hit with entire aisles of food missing. This time however it was just about three times as busy as normal, but no frantic rushing around and hoarding food. That said… it had been about three weeks since we had been to a grocery store so while there I decided to pick up considerably more than just coffee creamer allowing myself to succumb to a bit of the madness as well.

I got home and made dinner… which in our case was some piping hot frito chilli pies because I needed something to defrost. The actual temperature was in the 20s but with wind chill factored in… it felt like the low teens, which for the northerners that might be reading this blog is not that big of a problem. However those of us who are used to 115 degree August weather are not exactly designed for this sort of frigid weather. I don’t even have a proper coat because we need one so rarely, which meant I have been roaming around in this in my hoodie. The frito pies did their job however and warmed me up enough to consider actually doing something this evening other than huddling underneath a fuzzy blanket and staring blankly at the television. Considering the late hour… I opted to settle into my office and play a little monster hunter considering I was about an hour late for my other obligation and it would have been weird to drop in at that point.

One of the things about Monster Hunter World is that I seem like I am only really capable of handling one big monster hunt each evening. As a result I am progressing painfully slow through the quest content that ultimately gates everything in the game. Sunday I tackled Radobaan and to a lesser extent Great Girros while roaming around in an expedition. That mean’t a trip back to the Third Fleet Master to once again descend to the bottom of the Rotten Vale. Unshockingly we once again encountered a problem that required my attention. Our path took us straight through the hunting grounds of a Legiana, which is a giant frost dragon of sorts that seems to like to gobble up the flying bird/wyvern things that hang out in the Coral Highlands. We pissed it off… and as a result I needed to go kill it so we could continue downwards.

This is not a terribly easy hunt for a Longsword because it spends most of its time in the air. Sure I can chip away at it slowly by swinging up at it… but that also put me in prime territory for its two main attacks. The first of these is a claw dive of a sort that did about a third of my health bar each time I connected with it properly. The second is the more annoying because it has lasting effects in the form of laying down a line of frost on the ground. Getting hit with the frost itself seemed to take me down two thirds of my health bar, and getting into the frost seemed to have a lasting slow effect that made dodging everything more annoying. The other major problem is this monster runs way more often than your average bear… and like all flyers in this game can travel half a map away in a few seconds forcing you to traverse some truly awkward terrain.

I’ve only actually failed a single hunt so far in Monster Hunter World, and that was the first time I attempted Anjanath. That one I mostly chock up to not paying attention and not watching my health bar anywhere near as close as I should have. Legiana however… was painfully close. When I finally took the monster down I had less than five minutes to go on the hunt, and was down to my last faint. The thing about a close fight like this… is that when you finally defeat it… you feel absolutely exhilarated. I had originally intended to just do the one hunt and go to bed, but instead I needed something to do to sorta come down off the high of the really difficult encounter. As a result I popped downstairs and saw that Sushi was streaming, and hung out there for a bit while roaming around and doing minor things in monster hunter over Playstation Remote Play.

The night did not go at all how I had intended it. I did not intend to be super late getting home, and I definitely had not planned on the painful drive home. I also had not planned on fielding messages and emails throughout the night about a recent promotion at work. All in all however it was still a good night, and I was super pumped to move the story needle at least a little bit in this game that I am rapidly becoming indoctrinated into. Expeditions are still more my speed and I’ve spent a lot of time roaming around the newly unlocked areas like Coral Highlands and Rotten Vale. I believe there are two more areas of the game but supposedly those do not unlock until I officially get into the “high rank” hunt territory.

My favorite part of the night however is that all of my shenanigans allowed me to upgrade my weapon to the Hard Bone Shotel II which with my current gear layout gives me a base attack power of 505. That is honestly the biggest problem I am seeing with switching weapons is the fact that none of them are even close to the attack power I currently have available to me through the “bone” weapon line. I see longsword folks running around with much cooler looking weapons… but ultimately they have not been able to compete with the raw attack power of my bone weapon.

At some point I want to jump ship to the “dragon” line of weapons… but that is going to require silly amounts of farming of fairly difficult fights like Rathian. For the moment I am happy with my damage output and the rather homely looking bone weapon hanging off of my back. I think my big focus over the next few game sessions is going to be trying to farm the ore needed to get the next real set of upgrades over the gear I am wearing. I feel like I am pretty close to the next “big” fight, so I might attempt that tonight as well. All in all still loving this game and still wanting more of it.

Lumu and Watcher Cat

February 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did not do much in the way of gaming because I came home just mentally drained from work, and wound up logging in and out of various things while watching a couple movies. Instead unsurprisingly I am going to talk a bit about Monster Hunter World. This weekend I spent a significant amount of time upstairs playing it and am now in the Rotten Vale area of the map. Weirdly enough the main screen of the game still shows the Coral Highlands, but I do love how it occasionally changes to areas that you now have access to. At this point I have taken down Anjanath, Barroth, Great Girros, Great Jagras, Jyuratodus, Kulu-Ya-Ku, Paolumu, Pukei-Pukei, Radobaan, Tobi-Kadachi, and Tzitzi-Ya-Ku… which feels like a lot of Monsters but ultimately I think the grand scheme of thing I am barely progressed at all.

In fact after my last play session I believe I finally hit Hunter Rank 7 which is just a drop in the bucket compared to past Monster Hunter series games that capped out at like 999. There is an achievement for getting to Hunter Rank 100, so at the very least World goes that high but I have no clue how much higher it continues after that. Regardless… I am a babe in the woods when it comes to this game and nowhere near as far along as a good number of my friends. My play style is just way more meandering I believe than others… and weirdly enough after playing with Tam for a bit over the weekend he wins the bloodlust trophy for this game. He kept getting distracted during hunts by whatever happened to cross our path… whereas I seem to have a laser focus on the beast at hand often times ignoring collectibles long the way when I am in serious hunting mode.

Paolumu or “Lumu” as everyone seems to call it is legitimately one of the weirder hunts I have participated in. This crazy squirrel bat thing inflates an air bladder… and then uses it to bounce up and down on you for insane amounts of damage. I managed to rip it to shreds with my long sword and even managed to completely wreck its wings… which seemed to effect how well it could fly but not necessarily if it could fly. That was a completely different experience from when I fought Pukei-Pukei and somehow managed to actually ground that monster completely once its wings arrived at a similar tattered state.

Tam joined in the fight and got completely distracted for a little bit when Tzitzi-Ya-Ku crossed our path. The worst times were when we managed to be fighting Lulu and Tzitzi at the same time… and the stupid lizard would flash knocking us all out temporarily. Every time Tam would mount the back of Lumu it would end up subsequently taking off and flying away with him in which I wound up running after trying to sort out where it would land. That said when we got Lumu to a point where the wings were ripped and shredded it seemed unable to really go very far and mostly just flew around the area we were in at the time. Regardless… it was a goofy monster to fight and my strategy largely wound up with me trying desperately to hit is air bladder. I do not look forward to hunting them for fuzzy gear because at least with long sword they were super annoying to fight.

I feel like I need to talk about how inconvenient grouping is in this game. On Sunday afternoon we managed to get a four player group of AggroChat folks all together trying to do some of the low level stuff that Kodra needed since he started super late. The biggest problem we kept running into was the fact that in the grand scheme of things… what we wanted to do was just create an expedition and go off and hunt everything currently available in zone. However there really is no good way to do that… and functionally one of two things needs to happen. Firstly you can start a quest and after its completion just agree to stay in zone and return to camp instead of base. The second option is to have someone start an expedition and run and find a monster… allowing you to fire off a SOS beacon… and then hoping that all of the folks you actually intend to group with can find it in the cludgy join quest interface before someone random pops in.

This system just works counter intuitive to everything I expect from grouping in games. My brain works in a mindset of forming a group and then going off and doing a thing… not doing a thing and then hoping people can somehow join you after the thing has already started. We had a PSN chat session going and it would have been so much nicer if we could have simply invited that “fireteam” for lack of a better term to participate in something rather than having to time everything just so. Because grouping is so cumbersome… I largely spend most of my time roaming around the world by myself. After the challenge of trying to get all four of us together in the same group… I am maybe rethinking my decisions before to jump into random games and “help” people out. What if I was the fourth rando that ruined someone else’s attempts to play with the folks they had on voice chat at that moment?

The real victory of the weekend is that I managed to get high enough hunter rank to do the timed event needed to get the parts to craft my palico a watcher suit from Horizon Zero Dawn. I managed to get enough parts on the first outing to craft the suit itself, and I largely decided to ignore the weapon considering it was such a massive downgrade from what I was currently using. The watcher suit itself however has an insane amount of defense and as a result it has gone into my main rotation of palico gear. It does feel a little bit weird to see a watcher cat roaming around with me in the wilds because there are certain instincts I still have from playing Horizon Zero Dawn. At least I am not playing with a bow… otherwise I would potentially keep trying to shoot out my palico’s eye.

In the grand scheme of things I am still really enjoying this game and happy to be getting indoctrinated into the rich world of Monster Hunter. As a closing note… I’ve been seeing something weird happening in the Destiny YouTube and Twitch communities. There are so many of these Destiny-centric channels that have been essentially rededicating themselves to Monster Hunter instead. While this follows my own current evolution game time wise… considering I only actually played a single match this past Iron Banner, it does feel really odd to have my news sources for Destiny turning into a wall of Monster Hunter. On one hand it makes me happy… and on the other hand it makes me frustrated that the state of Destiny has reached a point where folks are abandoning it in droves. At the end of the day you have to play whatever it is that currently makes you happy, and I to have been almost entirely devoting myself to this weird and wonderful universe of Monster Hunter.

Flame Broiled Defeat

February 1, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I met my first real defeat in Monster Hunter World and completely failed a quest. That quest was me attempting to beat Anjanath in the Ancient Forest, which admittedly I am super happy I did the tracking work I already did for this mob in spite of what everyone has told me. I managed to find it super fast and now we get into the part of the show where I talk about my horrible ideas. I have thought this thing was serious business since the first moment I saw it… and as a result I went ahead and threw up a flare to see if anyone wanted to join me. Within moments I had a full party of people tasking on this monster and in the grand scheme I thought it was going pretty well… then I started noticing other players fainting. It was around or about this point that I remembered that you get four faints per party… not per person. So when I finally fainted myself… it happened to be the fourth one our party had gotten and the quest immediately failed out. In theory I should have just tried this on my own because I was managing to land some significant hits in on the big guy but I guess the truth is I just sorta like running with party tactics going on. I have been joining other folks quests and enjoying trying to learn how to play off of the strengths and weaknesses of the other weapons. Mostly I am wanting to learn how not to trip up other players with the Longsword which has been a problem that other people have reported with the weapon. As far as I could tell this was not actually happening because I tend to favor surgical strikes rather than just flailing away with R2 sweeping attacks. My goal for tonight is to seek revenge and down a flame breathing dinosaur.

My enjoyment of this series is way more focused on playing with my Palico than probably any other element. So much so that the first thing I do whenever I drop down on a map is find where the free roaming tailrider Palicos are and go get one. I love the sequence of events that happens when your Palico meets one out in the wild. They get together and then high five and cheer… and moments later you have a new friend following you around and helping you. This is literally the best part of monster hunter and the most purest joy I feel in the game. Last night I found a Palico wearing the Horizon Zero Dawn Watcher suit and I just about lost my mind. It too had the Pukei-Pukei bow equipped so it was an interesting combination of two mostly ranged characters helping me out. My weapon development is sort of stalled out at the moment because I am not exactly sure what I need to get the next ranks as I have been using the Bone Shotel III for a few nights now. I can in theory make an elemental version… but its base attack is slightly lower so for the moment I am sticking with what I have.

I will close out this mornings post with a video of one of the varied Monster Hunter World cooking sequences. I just cannot explain how happy the Palicos and the Felyne chefs make me. I find myself getting a meal cooked even when I am just going to go wandering around in the wastes doing nonsense for an hour completing bounties. There are a lot of people who lament the change in the cooking song, but I never knew the previous one so its not like I am missing anything particular. What I love is the completely over the top cooking sequence… which admittedly was also one of the things I loved about Final Fantasy XV so maybe I just like digitally rendered food? I’ve tried to play Generations again but find it particularly hard to control the game with my existing 3DS XL… which is still way too small for my tastes. As I have talked about in the past… I have large hands and a lot of controllers just feel awkward in them. I play PS4 with the Hori FPS Plus which itself is a way larger controller than the default PS4. It really makes me wish that Generations existed for the Switch because I think I could get into the game there knowing I had the option of playing docked if I want to… which admittedly I play switch docked 90% of the time. Side note… I consider the default Xbox One controller a little small as well and similarly have found an aftermarket alternative that I love in the form of the no longer made Power A Fusion Pro. Thankfully I have managed to pick up a couple of those… one for PC and one for Xbox One off Ebay for way cheaper than that Amazon listing.