Monster Hunter World Archives - Page 7 of 15

Bad Magic

May 8, 2018 by Belghast

Once again I did nonsense to finish out my weekly limited bounties in Monster Hunter World. The problem is my currently play times seem to be diametrically opposed to the play times of my friends who are currently playing the game. Most nights I start playing early in the evening… around 6 pm cst and am logging out around 9 pm when folks start to show up. As a result I have gotten used to doing things is really silly ways involving a bunch of random players. This weeks was weirdly harder than the 9 star quest in part because at the end of the day… people will likely always be farming Xeno’jiiva for parts and that quest is really hard to fail.

The 8 Star quest however is more or less Nergigante, Vaal Hazak, Teostra, Kushala Daora, and Kirin. All six of those have a pretty high threshold for failure so I feel like more often than not players are just doing them solo… something that I weirdly don’t enjoy that much. So instead I check the SoS Roulette and see what is available and ultimately managed to get all of them done with random players. The easiest was weirdly enough Kirin… which considering how big of a pain in the butt the tempered version was seemed like it would have been the hardest. The most challenging is generally Nergigante because if you get players who legitimately need to fight him… they are more often than not simply unprepared for how much harder he is going to hit them than what they are used to.

The truth is I need to start farming Nergi for parts because there are several weapons I would love to be able to make that require copious amounts of bits. Last night I managed to craft the first version of the Nergi Sword and Shield, because in truth that is probably the weapon I am most comfortable with if I don’t have my longsword. I spent some time earlier in the week playing with Gun Lance because also as part of the weeklies I needed to kill a bunch of Fanged Wyvern… which mean’t I could kill that green punching bag Great Jagras over and over. I think its a weapon I could get used to with time, and I managed to pick up a couple of reasonable options during the Kulve Taroth event. Still very much in love with this game and hoping they give us some more surprise events soon… because I can sorta see an end to what I actually deeply want to be farming.

The rest of my evening last night was spent poking around with my Fauxlgari Exploratic deck which is a tweaked version of Golgari Exploration… one of the stock decks that come with MTG Arena. It is not the most successful thing in the world for me, but I enjoy playing it and if it is not going my way pretty early on I concede out to move on to the next battle. If everything goes as planned you end up with a few really powerful creatures that keep growing each round, combined with Lurking Chupacabra that you can use to start taking out critters on your opponents side. It isn’t perfect and I am sure I should tune it some more. Right now I feel like I am playing with way too much land because I have had moments where all I am drawing is land for way too many rounds in a row. Regardless I find the whole experience of playing it enjoyable and I can lose hours just plinking away at other players.

I think that ultimately is going to the role MTG Arena plays for me… just letting me play magic when I want to play it. For whatever reason MTG Duels and the year branded Planeswalker games always felt really limited in the types of magic I wanted to play. They were shadowboxed in on a specific number of sets and as a result it felt more limited than what we already have in Arena. I like just sitting down and playing, regardless of the win condition. Sure it gets frustrating when you go on a losing streak when you are one win away from being done for the day… but even then the simple playing of cards makes me happy. It is something I have missed more than I realized… simply because I don’t have access to a lot of MTG players right now. I play to have fun and my version of fun is not exactly drift compatible with the meta. I enjoy bad magic.

Rudderless

May 4, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was largely spent cleaning up quests that I have had in my log for a long while over in Monster Hunter World. Since the Kulve event is over… I feel like I don’t have as much of a pressing goal as I previously did. I could of course just farm things like Nergigante for parts that I need to make awesome weapons, but the Kulve event sorta robbed me of a bit of the drive there. Apart from the bow… I have a reasonable weapon option of every type right now. Sure there are things I want to make but the need isn’t there in the same way that it once was given that I have a box full of decent options. At this point I am hunter rank 70 and the meter is climbing extremely slowly on doing normal stuff. In theory I should be engaging in a bunch of tempered fights but I really don’t like soloing in Monster Hunter World that much, and I also didn’t much feel like SOS Roulette last night… so was stuck just wandering around and knocking out things that have been sitting in my log for awhile.

Monster Hunter World has more or less become my MMO of choice right now, and as a result it is making every other MMO feel really weird to play. I’ve largely been checked out of Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, and the Battle for Azeroth changes are making me not that keen on World of Warcraft. I have the desire to play Elder Scrolls Online… but I find myself lacking the focus since that is a game that requires all of my attention. I realize this is an odd thing to say given that Monster Hunter World is way more reactionary than ESO is… but I also have to play MHW upstairs and with Elder Scrolls I can chill out downstairs with the laptop while watching television. I find my mind wandering or paying too close attention to something that is on television and end up in a horrible spot in Tamriel. The other game that is sorta calling my name at this very moment is Star Wars the Old Republic because I really would love to play through the rest of the content I have missed. I have not done any of Knights of the Eternal Throne, in fact the first quest of that expansion is sitting waiting there on my Jedi Knight for me to pick up and start playing.

Lately I have been trying to ease my way back into Destiny 2 given that the new expansion lands on Tuesday. The moment to moment PVE gameplay is still every bit as fun as it ever was… but my current problem with this game is actually a silly one. I have been out of inventory space for a very long time and the pain of having to juggle items between characters or dismantle things immediately upon getting them wears me out. When I have an MMO and my bags are a mess or I am lacking enough bag space in general… I find myself extremely demotivated to play it. This is in part what is going wrong with Project Gorgon at this very moment… I have next to no bag space and as a result I am constantly having to play the inventory management game which is the exact opposite of fun. The expansion is adding another 100 slots and supposedly some of the kiosks we used to have back in Destiny 1 so we will see how this improves my opinion of the game by not having to care quite so closely about what was in each inventory slot. In theory I would love to push my Warlock and Hunter through Curse of Osiris… because that is a sign of just how hard I stalled out on this game. The expansion landed and I only managed to get one character through before legitimately giving up and moving on to other things.

I’m in a really weird space with gaming in general right now and it seems like I spend more time getting ready to play a game… than actually sitting down and playing a game. There is an intangible wanderlust that has effected me and I am not sure what the cure is. It is almost as though I am too stressed on a daily basis to actually sit down and enjoy the things I am supposed to enjoy. I’ve been through these periods in the past and sadly it has also cut off any desire I had to stream or be engaged with other people in any way. It has been a rough several weeks and I have a feeling that at some point it has to let up… and the clouds will part once more and I will feel like a human being. Apologies to anyone who is attempting to interact with me right now because I am sure the experience is lacking.

Red and Gold

May 1, 2018 by Belghast

One of my favorite aspects of Monster Hunter World has been the constant revolving door of limited time events. It seems like at some point we will run out of brand new ones, and that they will begin cycling through the past happenings… but for right now it seems like every time I turn around there is something brand new and shiny to interact with. Starting on April 27th we got the Code Red event which involves fighting four “red” monsters in the standard arena, one after another. So you have to work your way through Anjanath, Odogoron, Rathalos and then finally the Elder Dragon Teostra. Doing this gives you a special currency that looks like a monster gem called a Red Orb. Collecting seven of these and a slew of parts from all of the monsters included in the quest allows you to craft a set of rank 8 gear patterned off of Dante from Devil May Cry.

What makes this set really interesting is unlike past offerings… this is not a complete suit but instead individual pieces allowing for some interesting Mixed Build options. For the unindoctrinated… armor pieces have specific stats on them and by mixing and matching them you can often times come up with really interesting builds that benefit specific weapons. The boots for example have two levels of weakness exploit which I can see very easily mixing into other sets to achieve the desired affinity boost while hitting weak areas. The other special thing about this event is the fact that we get a brand new Charge Blade that is themed after Devil May Cry as well and starts out Rank 8 without any need to do a follow on upgrade quest. Instead of a sword and shield… it is a short sword with a run that serves as the shield… that then turns into a giant two handed sword giving it a very unique appearance and feel while using. A good chunk of my last week and some change has been spent collecting bits for this set and weapon… and last night I finally managed to craft the final piece when Teostra dropped that last piece of webbing.

The other big thing I have been participating in is the Kulve Taroth “raid” quest that drops materials to create a really awesome set of armor that you can see me wearing in the above image. Other than that it is also a chance for a lot of really interesting semi-random weapon drops. During the course of the runs that I have participated in I have managed to get a purple or better weapon for every slot other than bow… which seem to be extremely stingy for some reason. I had enough blue weapons that when I sold them all last night I jumped from 10,000 zenny to just shy of 300,000 zenny. The keepers have been 9 orange rank 8 weapons and 23 purple rank 7 weapons. Like I have talked about before the real benefit of this quest is it gives you a stable of usable weapons that allows you to branch out a bit. Like I have a decent Hunting Horn now… why not try it out and learn to use it?

Among the weapon drops I have gotten one of the more interesting ones is this Rank 8 longsword with 330 paralysis on it. If a monster is at all susceptible to this status effect… it seems to proc quite often. I was clearing out some of my quests last night and took out a Lavasioth and during the short time it took me to lower it to skull territory and trap it… I managed to proc paralysis four times. While these weapons won’t likely ever outdo a truly tuned weapon… because they are spending some item budget on defense… I like them as well rounded general use options that I didn’t have to spend a lot of materials to create. The Kulve Taroth quest goes away May 5th and the Dante quest goes away on May 10th. I am curious to see what replaces each of them which I guess we will start to see late in the evening on Wednesday? The content release schedule is odd and ends up with some things releasing Wednesday night and others releasing Thursday night. I want to get some more farming in of Kulve tonight for more attempts at shiny gold weapons, but in the grand scheme of things I am pretty happy with the progress I managed to make.

Monster Hunter and Destiny

April 25, 2018 by Belghast

While I am not quite ready to throw out a complete post about it… I am swirling around in my head the notion of rebooting Blaugust this year. If I did so it would be a slightly different affair and I am sorting out in my head exactly what that might entail. There was a period of time when we had a bunch of events happening at the same time… Developer Appreciation Week, Newbie Blogger Initiative and Blaugust. None of which really exist today in their current form and have not properly for a few years. So in remixing Blaugust I would be also attempting to fill some of the niches that the others provided as well by laying out a series of themed weeks. The rough idea is it would start with the last full week in July as a sort of “Prep Week” where the remaining elder bloggers would sorta throw out “how to get started” posts from an inspirational, logistical or technical manner. It is still an idea that is incubating however so I will do some sort of a larger post once it has solidified completely in my head.

The other general thought that has been going around in my head is that Monster Hunter World has become my new Destiny: The Taken King. That sounds counter intuitive I know since Destiny 2 is a much closer simulacrum to the original game than Monster Hunter World given that they are two completely different genres. However what I am talking about is more the way I engage with the game rather than the way the game actually plays. Destiny 1… especially during the Taken King era was this game I was completely obsessed with and wanted to know every tiny bit of lore I could find for it. It was this giant box of content that allowed me to engage with it in whatever method I chose to, and also always gave me one more goal to complete once I had finished the previous one. It was this title that I could just log in and play any given night without needing to bring into it a predetermined purpose because there were so many layered purposes available that I could easily latch onto one of them and proceed happily for an evening.

I had a small group of friends playing it, that allowed me to do bigger activities if I so choose like the various raids I completed with Axioma and later Tequila Mockingbird. That said most of my time playing the game was just me roaming around and doing stuff that suited whatever mood I happened to be in. There was always one more obstacle to overcome and one more piece of loot that I was chasing and never quite obtaining. It was a perfect storm of hooks for me personally and kept me entertained right up until the point when my head was filled with daydreams of Destiny 2 and what might be. I realize I can still log in at any point I want and play the game again… but it almost feels tarnished due to the greatly diminished community surrounding it.

Destiny 2 for reasons I cannot fully explain does not contain the same hooks for me that the original did. I tried very hard to stay focused on it, and for some time I have blamed my eventual malaise towards the game on the fact that I tried to play it twice. What I mean by that is that I played the game hard and heavy when it released on Playstation 4 and then immediately turned around and went through the same manic leveling process on the PC one month later. Effectively I ran up six characters to high gear levels back to back, and I had managed to hit 305 the then cap on PS4 before swapping over to PC and grinding up to that point again. That is a lot to ask of any game to sustain interested during that sort of nonsense and I largely explained my fading away from the title as simple burnout.

The problem is there was so much more that I have yet to completely unpack. The moment to moment game play in Destiny 2 feels amazing… but there is a problem with its feedback loop. What was missing was my drive to keep doing more of it once I had obtained whatever shiny baubles I wanted to obtain weapon wise. What was missing was some larger overarching pull that kept me going off and doing individual tasks that ultimately felt like they were adding up to some big payoff. In part the problem is a lot of those items that I used to grind for… now exist as Eververse cash shop exclusives. The other problem is that when they have put in longer grinds like the weapons of osiris… they feel extremely hollow because they are so horribly repetitive and involve you doing the same limited number of activities over and over. I realize they are still trying to fix this broken loop and some of the upcoming changes might help it… but I feel like their over reliance on timed mechanics is going to be a bridge I just cannot cross given now much anxiety they inflict.

On the flip side you have the game Monster Hunter World that I honestly did not expect to get into, given my lousy track record with the handheld versions. However I am engaging with it much the way as I engaged with Destiny during the Taken King era. I find myself looking up lore for the monsters if they have existed in the series before, and if not speculations about their origins and such that are floating around on Reddit. I find myself researching bits and parts for armor and what interesting builds surround them that exploit their specific attributes. I find myself able to log into the game any given night and just find something to do because I have this massive laundry list of things I want to go acquire. I can always use more elder dragon parts…. but similarly can use the gemstones that are rare drops off of almost any creature you can hunt. I became completely ecstatic last night when I got a double gem drop off Zorah Magdaros… that I cannot fully explain why I was bothering to do in the first place.

This is the feedback loop that used to drive me while playing Destiny 1 and it is the feedback loop that keeps me doing nonsense. I have an addiction to SOS Roulette which isn’t even really a thing… just something I made up in my head to relate it to the various roulette’s in Final Fantasy XIV. I like dropping into the middle of an assortment of random events happening that people need help on and trying to push the scenario to a win condition by my interaction with it. Sure there are times we fail miserably like Monday night… but then there are nights like Last night where we somehow managed to win every single boss fight I attempted including Val Hazaak and Nergigante. There will likely NEVER be a time when I cannot use at least one or two things off the elder dragons.

What makes Monster Hunter World so sticky is that eat time I get the parts to craft a new piece of gear, it ends up opening a whole bunch of possibilities to solve other problems… and often times leads me down a path of wanting something else to try some new build out. The way the gear sets interact in interesting ways means I am constantly searching for another piece of gear to complete a specific stat packages that I have decided in my head that I need. This was the same sort of nonsense that happened for me in Destiny 1 where I was constantly seeking out a slightly better stat package that interacted more perfect with the gear I had. I had a vault full of items that I didn’t want to shard because they were useful under certain circumstances and led me to want to keep them. I am having this same problem in Monster Hunter World where I am afraid I will legitimately hit the 1000 item hard cap on equipment.

Effectively what I have realized is that Monster Hunter World is my new Destiny, and hopefully I have explained a bit this morning what that actually means. It is that game that I can pick up and play without any real reason… and find a constant stream of activities that I want to be doing… that also feel like they are working towards some larger objective. Capcom is doing an excellent job of keeping a constantly flow of events and activities happening almost every week to keep us engaged and wanting to do new an interesting things. Kulve Taroth is phenomenal and might go down as some of my favorite content in any game… but the fact that they sprung it on us completely unannounced makes it all the more exciting. While I have had friends who have bounced off of this game… I still maintain an active enough community to be able to do things together if need be. The only problem is that right now I seem to be a couple of hours off what would be prime monster hunting time… given that I tend to wind down around 9:30 my time and that is when folks are getting online.

Ultimately while this might seem counter-intuitive… if you loved the original Destiny but largely have bounced off Destiny 2… you might give Monster Hunter World a try.