Monster Hunter World Archives - Page 9 of 15

Rocket-Swords and Pig-Bees

April 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent some time in Monster Hunter World because the Spring Blossom festival launched about halfway through my evening offering up a ton of things to do. It is this weird blended festival that includes a ton of repeat chances to get items that were offered before as well as several new items including the Greatsword I am rocking in this image and the Megaman/Rockman Pallico Armor that I will ultimately have to get my hands on. I will talk more about the Greatsword a little further down the list… but first I want to talk about how generally happy I am with the pacing of events in this game. It feels like every single week there is a reason for me to log in and do content, and while I am largely stalled out at 49 behind Tempered Kirin there seems to still be a constant deluge of things to do. Granted I have pulled back my playtime a bit given my recent infatuation with Project Gorgon and the return to doing stuff with people in World of Warcraft… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am completely disconnected.

I really love the flow of this game because it feels like I can log in any night and feel like I have interesting options to do. There are also things on the horizon that I have to look forward to, like the Devil May Cry collaboration that brings a brand new Charge Blade into the mix. This week however was all about the new fan designed Greatsword and helping me to fill in a weapon slot that I really had not put any effort into. While I don’t think they necessarily have the intention of giving us an event weapon for every slot… so far I have gotten a really nice Bow and a really nice Greatsword with what felt like minimal effort when it comes to farming all of the missing bits I need to get from point a to point b in the crafting tree. Sure the Greatsword and Bow both require a Wyvern Gem which is annoying to farm… but that is one part out of a whole list of parts that might be a pain to get. I wound up using the Gold Wyverian print I had laying around to craft the Greatsword last night.

Like I said before I was ultimately missing a decent Greatsword from my weapon lineup, and while it is an extremely cumbersome weapon… it is one I want to learn how to use because it seems very much a “me” weapon. In order to get this weapon you need to start running the low rank 5 star quest… Every Hunter’s Dream. This involves taking down a Paolumu and a Rathalos… which enter the fight staggered a bit so you can get a significant amount of damage in on the Lumu before having to deal with the poison and fire asshole. I ran the first one of these solo and then grouped up with Thalen who also happened to be on to get the last few kills. I think in total it took us four attempts to get the five Master Craftsman’s Blueprints needed to craft both steps of the weapon. As far as the other items needed… here is a list form breakout even though I crudely photo-shopped it all together above.

Master Craftsman’s Blueprint – 5 – Event Only Item
Dragonite Ore – 7 – I believe any zone after Low Rank Coral Highlands but not 100% sure
Paolumu Webbing – 2 – Low Rank Paolumu
Rathalos Marrow – 2 – Low Rank Rathalos – Green First Wyverian Print
Elder Dragon Blood – 2 – Kill an Elder Dragon – Nergigante, Vaal Hazak, Kushala Daora, Teostra, Xeno’jiiva
Firecell Stone – 2 – Found in Elder’s Recess
Wyvern Gem – 1 – Most High Rank Paolumu, Tobi-Kadachi, Lavasioth, Jyuratodus, Barroth, Radobaan, Diablos
40,000 Zenny – yeah…. you are going to want to farm some cash

I have not really done anything serious with this weapon… but in theory were I to use it regularly I would wear my fire longsword set of gear… make sure I have some Handicraft and figure out a decent item to wear that gives me the hidden elemental damage. 510 is a lot of fire damage to leave sitting on the table with this weapon, so I need to sort out a decent item to slot to give me that back since I am no longer regularly wearing the Zorah Magdaros gloves. I did a few minor quests last night with the weapon and really dig it… even though it is just about the slowest thing in the world. I had already started getting into the practice of sheathing my longsword anytime I was going to be moving for awhile just because the draw attack is really nice. This training has served me pretty well for the greatsword given that you cannot move at more than a snails pace with it drawn.

If you are interested in the timing of everything going on you can check out the official Capcom PDF of events… or better yet check out this site called 28 Games Later that has a really nice full breakout of everything.

Fast Boat

March 22, 2018 by Belghast

One of the interesting things that has happened over the last few days is that I apparently got invited to the Battle for Azeroth expansion alpha. I happened to notice this Tuesday night when I opened my battle.net launcher and found the World of Warcraft tab was trying to patch something. Sure enough upon further inspection I did appear to have access to the alpha client in my version selector drop down. I also noticed from social media that a few other people seemed to be indicating the same, so I am guessing there was a whole new wave of folks entering the testing. The thing about alpha testing that is legitimately an alpha… is it is as much a burden as it is a privilege. Yes you have access to something that most people don’t and that in some ways is inherently cool… but also it becomes your responsibility to go out into the unfinished world and help stop bugs that you will encounter.

First off let me get this out of the way… Battle For Azeroth Alpha is in fact an alpha in functionality and in name. I’ve been in so many different versions of Alpha programs over the years and even in Blizzard terms occasionally those Friends and Family Alphas feel “almost finished”. This time around BfA feels very much a work in progress and with significant functionality either missing or not entirely working. For example I spent the beginning of my evening testing an area of the game where quest tracking was not functional at all, and I sorta had to wing it given that I could not really see what was required to finish any of the quests. One of the more interesting things of note is that the Kul Tirran side of the house appears to have a flight path system that is in truth a series of extremely high speed boats, example is the one I am on above.

After spending some time bug noting Alliance side I rolled a Horde character and the Zandalari areas seem to be a bit more finished. Those areas had a proper quest flow with tracking working and advisement of where I should be going for the next quest. In truth that probably means that I should not be spending too much time in Kul Tiras until they have had a bit more time to flesh it out. I did however report a ton of instances where things were clipping oddly, or in one case where my camera was being pushed up through a when I stood in a certain spot. I guess that is part of the responsibility side of Alpha testing, that you need to vary your feedback based on what phase in the zone development they are in.

Sure I bug noted the fact that quest tracking was not working… but after doing that it seemed nonsense to keep reporting it each time I turned in a quest in that area of the game. Instead I started working on reporting the base pop and terrain anomalies, since they are likely the parts that are being worked on at that very moment. Ultimately my goal is to spend a little bit of time each night working on testing content, because I feel like since I have eyes on the game… I should be helping to make it better for launch.

The gaming for fun side of the evening was spent over in Monster Hunter World which received a patch. I did not actually defeat a Deviljho last night, but I saw several of them as they interrupted my other hunts. It is in fact as nonsense as everyone seemed to make it out to be and I am hoping that maybe tonight I can devote some time to actually purposefully hunting one or two of them to get used to how those fights go. The focus of my evening last night however was finally getting Thalen through Nergigante. It has been a goal to make sure that everyone gets off high center with this fight in part because it seemed to take me so long to do that myself. Everyone was more than willing to lend a hand in my hour of need so I feel like it is only right to keep paying that forward.

Additionally I like the fact that I now feel pretty comfortable with this encounter and could always use more monster bits. While waiting around for Thalen to finish up a hunt we started talking about our stats… at which point I joked that I changed my guild card title to Pure Long Sword at some point. I really have in fact been focused on only this one weapon for awhile as you can see by the fact I have done 253 hunts with Long Sword and the closest second is hammer with 7. Both Tam and Ashgar have way more spread graphs when it comes to weapons, and in truth I probably should as well. I should make a point of trying every weapon and seeing if there are hidden gems out there that I might ultimately like. My biggest problem has been that I just didn’t want to take resources away from my current longsword crafting projects to create other weapons.

Indigo Blade Get

March 21, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I engaged in some serious nonsense, which is not super surprising if you follow this blog in the least. For whatever reason I got it stuck in my head that I would really like to have the Wyvern Blade “Indigo”, which is an alternate line of the poison weapon I have been using off and on for some time. This unfortunately would involve starting over from scratch and building a new base weapon and upgrading it completely. I had no clue what exactly that mean’t part wise so I created a little hit list adding up everything.

To craft the Wyvern Blade Indigo… and all of the precursors I would need…

05 – Rathian Shell
01 – Rathian Plate
10 – Machalite Ore
04 – Poison Sac
03 – Rath Wingtalon
02 – Flame Sac
03 – Rathalos Marrow
02 – Rathalos Shell
06 – Rathalos Scale+
04 – Rathalos Carapace
02 – Rathalos Wing
01 – Rathalos Plate
14 – Azure Rathalos Scale+
04 – Azure Rathalos Carapace
03 – Azure Rathalos Wing
01 – Rathalos Medulla
02 – Teostra Horn+
03 – Azure Rathalos Tail
01 – Rathalos Ruby
120,000 Zenny

I spent some time yesterday streaming and originally thought I would be just clearing out optional content like I have been doing the last few days. However rapidly that descended into madness as I started chasing the bits and pieces needed to craft the Indigo weapon. This meant a significant amount of farming Rathalos and Azure Rathalos… neither of which are necessarily super difficult encounters, but also not exactly quick farms either. Because I am weird and me… I opted to mostly farm these using my method of SOS roulette and in truth this rapidly allowed me to get down to a single item needed.

The core problem there however is that “gems” from monsters seem to drop super infrequently… if you actually want them to drop. I have a string of bird wyvern gems for example, but now that I actually need one it would not drop. I am not honestly sure how many Blues I took down during the stream, but after stopping I continued the madness… and by the end of the night had probably defeated at least eight… potentially more. It was around about this time that Ashgar came in to alter my thought patterns.

This theory was that it would be simply faster for me to knock out the five elder dragon kills needed to do the weekly, than continue farming Azure Rathalaos over and over forever without getting a drop. It turns out you can take the Gold Wyverian Print that you get from the weeklies and turn it into a guaranteed gem from any monster. So this lead to me farming Xeno’jiiva over and over until I had knocked out the five kills. Ultimately according to Ash… Zorah Magdaros, Nergigante, Teostra, Kushala Daora, Vaal Hazak, and Xeno’jiiva all count. The low effort versions would have been to just farm Zorah until I got my five kills but I figured I might as well work on something that had a chance of giving me useful monster parts.

As a result before I went to bed I managed to farm up all of the bits needed to craft the weapon, and then took it on a ceremonial trip to High Rank Great Jagras to see how well it works. The final clock said just a second or two over two minutes for the kill, but I also wandered around aimlessly collecting herbs and honey at the beginning of that fight so I am guessing I actually finished the kill a little under a minute. All in all I am super happy with the end result in spite of the process itself being a little nonsense. Why exactly did I do this thing? Mostly because Kirin is weak to fire… and I will have to ultimately do Tempered Kirin to uncap my level again.

Optional Cleanup

March 20, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent a good deal of time roaming around in Monster Hunter World cleaning up all of the things I had been ignoring. One of the problems with this game… if it can be called a problem at all… is that you get so many missions that you can run. At any given time I have 250 investigations constantly swapping themselves out for newer investigations and a seemingly endless number of optional quests opening up as you do things in the world. So yes… I just called too much content a problem, which is ultimately why I backpedaled that a bit because so often we complain about not having anything to do. The game is an endless generator of things you can do.

My play style is apparently not normal, and as a result I have ended up with tons of optional quests left unfinished and I am working through them slowly. Last night for an hour and some change I hung out with my friend Ashgar as we tackled various missions that had been sitting there waiting. The only problem is I am not sure which quests I am missing… because a good number of the star ranks are giving me the indicator that I have in fact finished all of the quests I have available… but that there are more I have yet to unlock. Ash explained that these are probably quests for which I have not actually captured the monster opening up the special arena version.

The truth is… Low Rank was a bit of a blur as I attempted to push forward to start doing the big kid content that I thought at the time was High Rank. Additionally I have played like some sort of a maniac in doing my SOS Roulette thing way more often than actually soloing any optional quests. Occasionally this finishes up missions but more often than not it is simply rerunning content I have already seen. I tend to open up the SOS menu and pick out whatever looks to be the most interesting… which tends to be the combo monster quests so oddly enough I have almost all of those finished.

What I am lacking in a major way however is anything that requires a capture… or anything that requires me to take something and run it back to camp. The delivery quests are maddening, and I just find it so frustrating to carry something slowly across the map only to get derailed by some nonsense along the way causing you to drop whatever you were transporting. I should in fact make a set of Kulu gloves so that I can do this nonsense faster because I have a couple more sitting in my optional quest menu that at some point I will need to deal with.

So you might ask yourself… why do I even care? Well the true end game in any title is the cosmetics… and at the end of doing every single optional quest is quite possibly the most nonsense of cosmetic items. Apparently in Monster Hunter there is a proud tradition of a special rainbow pigment that you can die your gear with. Upon completing all of the optional content you get another quest that ultimately rewards this thing, and apparently while using it your gear constantly cycles slowly through all of the colors of the rainbow. Why do I want this thing… I honestly have no clue… but knowing it exists makes me want to collect it.

In truth I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I would have liked last night. I ran around eight missions before needing to take a break… and I have untold more to go. It was more entertaining to do with a friend, but most of what I have left is not exactly extremely challenging. The hardest part with low rank content is making sure you get the capture instead of just getting the kill. There was a point last night when I thought I was just severing the tail off a Rathian… but at the exact same time I wound up getting the kill in. I mean I could in fact dig out a lower rank weapon… but I am not going to. Hitting things for big numbers is fun, and it will at the very least be a source of enjoyment while I retread this mountain of older content.