MMORPG

The other day Mailvaltar asked question in a comment on another post about whether I think Monster Hunter World can be enjoyed by someone who generally dislikes grinding.  Ultimately the core loop of monster hunter seems to be… take down big monsters in an epic boss fight, carve off items with varying degrees of rarity, take those items to craft new gear…  to enable you to take down bigger monsters.  The degree to which this becomes a gear collection game is entirely up to you, because I believe almost every single monster is beatable in the gear you start the game with…  it just becomes significantly more challenging as time moves on.  However even with better gear… there are going to be times you fail completely like the glorious screenshot above of my death.  Ultimately I got swiped by Black Diablos, which dizzied me…  which then lead to a full force charge for the rest of my health.  Given that other people had fainted at various points during the hunt…  my failure was the one that kicked us out of the fight.

Each monster fight tends to go somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes depending on a bunch of factors, so one of the aspects of the game that no one really talks about… is that you need to be able to shake off the fact that you just spent 30 minutes of time and have relatively little to show for it.  Every so often the stars align however and you get exactly what you need.  When that happens it feels phenomenal…  during this single Black Diablos hunt I managed to pull 2 Black Spiral Horn+ aka the thing I was hunting for one more of…  a Wyvern Gem as well as the Non-Elemental Boost Decoration that I ultimately needed for the hammer I had been working towards.  Basically this final Diablos hunt gave me everything I had been questing for to try and assemble the final form of the Diablos hammer.

So what did I do once I got my hammer all kitted out?  I immediately shifted focus to working on parts from Deviljho.  For me personally it is the grind…. the hunt for parts… that keeps me engaged in the game.  The boss fights all feel great (or at least most of them do) and are definitely a reward in themselves.  However it is the acquisition of gear that is always my guiding force in any MMORPG.  It is why I grind in Diablo 3 or World of Warcraft…  and ultimately why Monster Hunter World clicked with me initially.  It is a gear driven game where your personal skill advancement means often times more than the gear you are hunting…  but the ability to build complex mixed sets with just the right bonus traits keeps me moving forward.  Building a set of gear sorta feels like building a really good deck in Magic the Gathering.

So last night I spent my evening either hunting Black Diablos or Deviljho… and it was a pretty glorious evening.  Is this mechanical loop right for most people?  Probably not…  however I enjoy it greatly.  Were it not for the release of Battle for Azeroth at almost the exact same time as the PC version of Monster Hunter…  I would have likely been doing this since August.  As far as Deviljho stuff… I am largely down to just needing to get lucky enough to loot one of its Gems, which admittedly is a common place you end up with crafting gear.  The Gem seems by far the most rare of the item drops, and seems to only drop when you no longer need it.  I have a stack of Odogoron and Wyvern gems…  but am not actively working on any gear from either…  though at some point I guess I will make the Odog Scythes and Blunderbuss.  That said there are still a ton of Deviljho weapons I eventually want to craft.  For example I think it is one of the better Sword and Shields out there, and that is a weapon I want to shift into playing more of.

The funny thing is… I have the patience to constantly be grinding for loot drops…  but somehow lack the patience to move the quest line forward.  I am still stalled out on Xeno’jiiva because it is generally one of the awful feeling fights in the game.  I might snag my friend Exale and con him into running it with me at some point over the weekend if for no reason other than to just speed the process up.  You have to do a lot more dodging when you are the only player in the arena with Xeno.  I think Monster Hunter World is an amazing game, and especially since it is on steam…  if it goes on Sale I highly suggest you check it out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am deeply susceptible to getting distracted by a side mission.  This is in part why I never found the Thief, Warrior and Mage stones in Skyrim and had to eventually wind back around when I found out I missed something.  I have a bad tendency to wander off the path, and in theory given that I have played through all of this content before…  I should be able to maintain more focus.  However that has not been the case and I keep going off on tangents, like my most recent one of farming Diablos over and over trying to get the pieces for it’s rank 7 hammer.  At this point I need Majestic Horns…  which you only get if you manage to break both of the horns.  I need a lot of these…  some for the Hammer and some for the shoulders as well that grant two ranks of slugger.  The biggest problem I am running into is that Majestic Horns don’t appear to be 100% drop if you break both horns, and instead there is a consolation item that I keep getting.

Additionally I am going to need a ton of parts from Black Diablos so I have been trying to focus on the quest where you hunt both at the same time.  I need 3 Black Spiral Horn+ which I assume also comes from breaking Black Diablos horns…  and I need one more of the Black Diablos Carapace which seems to drop more frequently.  Thankfully I already have the Wyvern Gem needed to craft the weapon so I won’t be stalled out waiting for that to happen.  So last night I spent pretty much the entire night jumping into SOS Roulette with various groups, fighting a bunch of Diablos…  focusing on trying to break the horns…  while watching Ozark season 2 on Netflix on my second monitor.  All in all it was a good night… even though Ozark in general gives me some massive anxiety since there is a bunch of stuff that just aint right going on with that show.

In theory tonight will be more of the same.  I crafted the highest pre-Nergigante metal hammer available because it had a cheap enough material cost, and I figured at some point I could upgrade it into the Nergi hammer if I so choose.  It serves as a decent replacement for the Zorah hammer I had been using until this point.  At some point I need to sort out what I actually want my armor set to look like, given that I am gearing for completely different stats as hammer than I would normally as Longsword.  I also really need to farm a bunch of Nergi to get parts so I can craft the final step of that Longsword after I down Xeno’Jiiva.  Right now I just don’t have the patience to take on Xeno since I really don’t like doing that fight solo…  because it seems to take so freaking long.  At some point I will force myself through it so I can at least start moving up my Hunter Rank again.

This weekend was largely about collecting the final bits needed to unlock the layered cosmetic armor from the Harvest Festival in Monster Hunter World and seeing just how much further I could progress.  As of Saturday night I had managed to catch back up enough to be sitting on the “kill the three elder dragons” quest that you can see in my quest tracker.  On the podcast we talked a bit about how Monster Hunter World supports the acquisition of skills and how that is generally more important than the acquisition of gear.  This is a weird concept for me personally since I tend to be a dyed-in-the-wool RPG grinder, that can seemingly perform repetitive tasks so long as there is a shiny gear payout at the end.  My baseline is always to gather more gear to get over any obstacles that I might be dealing with.

However the importance of understanding how not to die…  is extremely noticeable in Monster Hunter World.  When I managed to get through Pink Rathian without breaking the tale, in one shot with no faints…  and then similarly get through Nergigante on my first shot…  with no faints…  I started to question if I had simply gotten better at the game.  For awhile I thought it was just me having a hammer this go around, but Nergi was sorta the turning point in my opinion.  However the Elder Dragons still served as a bit of a roadblock.  I managed to down Kushala Daora on the first attempt, which doesn’t shock me given I remember taking it down relatively easily before as well.  However I spent the majority of Sunday afternoon working on Teostra and Vaal Hazak.

When I fought the Elder Dragons on the PS4 version…  I did a lot more prep work than I did here.  I rolled into Teostra with a significant amount of fire resist gear…  something I did not have this time.  The challenge with Toaster as I call him more frequently…  is that he just does an awful lot of damage and likes to get in real close to you before ulting.  I believe in the grand scheme of things it took me three attempts to get through Toasty this time around, and I am mostly okay with that…  it was more about not getting hit than it was about dishing out massive amounts of damage.  I think that is part of where I am at mentally now is I know not allowing yourself to get carted is seemingly more important than getting in and unleashing hell upon the monster…  then opening yourself to a single hit attack that decimates your health reserves.

Similarly with Vaal Hazak the challenge was fighting…  while having your health bar constantly shredded by effluvial building.  Eventually I will have the parts to make a few pieces of gear that grants me complete immunity from the effects of the Effluvium, but for now I had to employ a strategy of stick and run…  trying to avoid build up for as long as I could while dealing as much damage as I could.  I think in the grand scheme of things it took me four tries to get through Vaal Hazak this go around.  I’ve now entered the realm where I fairly comfortable feel like I can SOS Roulette my way into content, and that is probably something I am going to take advantage of more as I move forward.

Unfortunately however I cannot SOS Roulette my way through Xeno’Jiiva, because it does not show up in your list of available monsters until you have defeated it at least once on your own.  I mostly got in long enough to unlock him and then bailed last night because I did not have the patience for this sort of fight.  The problem with Xeno is that it is just soul crushingly long…  no matter how well you do there is always going to be a lot of avoiding its movements while banging on its feet…  for a good thirty minutes it seems.  So instead last night I piddled around in World of Warcraft on the Paladin while watching the season premiere of Walking Dead, instead of trying to make progress on the giant blue dragon.  All in all though it feels good to be getting back to around the place where I left off…  I am not looking forward to getting through Tempered Kirin again…  but I will have awhile to deal with that.  I have not been grinding anywhere near as much as I did before, so I expect to defeat Xeno and still have a lot of ways to go until I hit the first bottleneck of Tempered Bagel.