monster hunter world Archives - Page 5 of 6

Delightful Nonsense

February 16, 2018 by Belghast

Last night didn’t exactly go as I had originally planned but what actually happened was probably better. There were a couple of things that I knew I had on my list for the evening, one of which was to run to target and attempt to find clearance valentines candy for my wife’s classroom. There are several candies that she uses in lab exercises like kisses, m&m’s and skittles. The scene in that candy aisle was just insane with random display boxes strewn everywhere and essentially everything mostly gone. We did manage to scavenge some plain old fashioned Hershey’s Kisses in valentines packaging for the 50% off discount.

Prior to going into the store I called in a take out order across the street at Baja Jack’s Burrito Shack, so we picked up our orders… for me a steak fajita quesadilla and for my wife steak fajita nacho platter. I flipped over to Twitch to see if anyone was streaming, and I appeared to be auto hosting Sushi so I tuned in to say hi. I finishing “nomming my tasty noms” and fired up the PS4 when almost instantly I had a party invite waiting on me. Pizza Maid was also just about to fire up her stream and was looking for people to hang out while doing so. So I joined her, SitaDulip, Misiek, and a very drunk Welsh Fox and Wolfy in chat and prepared for an evening of delightful nonsense.

One of the main reasons why Monster Hunter World has been scratching my MMO itch is for nights like last night. While we lost Fox and Wolfy pretty early because they decided they were a little too sauced to be on a stream… we had this great night of just wandering around and doing random stuff. Sure I wasn’t necessarily moving my quest chain forward, but I was still having a lot of fun knocking out random stuff… some of it low rank and some of it high rank. It was this furious blend of investigations, optional quests, and arena missions and a heck of a lot of fun.

I think the only high rank monster we actually took down was a Pukei Pukei at the very end of the night when the stream had whittled down to just me and Pizza hanging out. The best moment of the stream however was when Pizza runs off to use the restroom only to find out that Aria her adorable asshole cat has rolled all the toilet paper off the roll. Props to stealthy for clipping this because it is an amazing conversation happening off screen… but I am chuckling along in my recognition that I have also had this thing happen. Basically it was a really fun night and if you so care to… the entire VOD of our random adventures is available.

Tonight however… I would actually like to make some progress. If that means catching Pizza up to this point in the storyline and then taking down an asshole pink Rathian together then so be it. Last night was all about hanging out with friends and tonight would be lovely if I could hang out with friends and also kill this horrible creature. The other thing I am contemplating is doing a dueling banjos stream of sorts where I am also streaming while Pizza is streaming and then posting one of those links that allows you to see the stream side by side. I will of course have to talk to her about this concept, also also I will have to figure out what PSN chat does to my streaming set up. I am not sure if it is going to be a horribly echoy experience for my viewers.

Regardless if we take down a Pink Rathian or not I would love to engage in some high rank hunt nonsense. Right now I have a handful of pools of people that I have been actively playing with and only time will tell tonight who I end up grouped up with. Regardless though Monster Hunter is feeling like and MMORPG to me in spite of it not really being one. It feels like I am doing all of these epic boss fights with friends and I guess at the end of the day… that was my most important requirement for MMO grouping. I had wished Destiny 2 would feel like this, but for whatever reason the magic sauce just wasn’t there as strongly this time. With Monster Hunter it is all brand new to me having never really gained traction in the series, and with Destiny 2… I just kept thinking about all of the awesome things we had to give up from the first game.

A Social Weekend

February 12, 2018 by Belghast

It was a pretty great weekend as far as hunting monsters goes. I got to hang out with so many different groups of people and do so many varied things. On Friday night it was all about hanging out with Tam, Ash and Kodra as I was finally up late enough to allow our schedules to align. On Saturday it was all about hanging out with Pizza Maid, Wolfy and Rakuno… and then in a little pre-podcast gaming some more with Tam, Ash and Kodra. Then Sunday I streamed for a bit in the morning between editing two podcasts. Then in the evening I spent quite a bit of time in the evening running around with Sushi Geisha and Smashy doing some high rank egg birb killing among other things. The variety and quality of my company was absolutely the best.

The other thing that really happened this weekend is that I spent a ton of time hanging out with various groups of folks on twitch. I’ve never really acclimatized to that community but right now I am spending a significant amount of time with folks connected to the very awesome casual/positive Moogle’s Pom Tavern. They have all accepted me as one of their own and call me a streamer even though I barely qualify as one. Just to give some shout outs… some of the folks I spent time lurking or actively hanging out in are…

Right now my jam seems to be playing Monster Hunter on the 43 inch 4k monitor while trying to cram a bunch of windows on one of the 23 inch monitors. As a result a lot of the time I have spent soloing, has been hanging out in a twitch stream and occasionally throwing random comments. During the shenanigans of Saturday and Sunday I actually wound up on voice chat and as a result “on stream” with Pizza and Sushi. The world got many opportunities to watch me fail at longswording and miss attacks as monsters shifted on me in combat. It was a lot of fun and I need to sort out a time when I can stream for myself more regularly. I had a lot of fun with the little bit that I did this weekend and the whole Sunday morning is starting to turn into a routine.

As far as Monster Hunter itself… I have now progressed into High Rank hunts but have not done a whole lot of them. I’ve taken down Pukei Pukei which is the gatekeeper of sorts to unlock High Rank, and then taken down Kulu-Ya-Ku a bunch of times to farm bits so I could upgrade to this crazy two handed scimitar of sorts called Last Dance I. I am wearing a mishmash of gear because I basically went to the workshop and crafted whatever the hell I could as soon as I hit high rank. As a result I have 1 piece of Zorah Magdaros gear, 2 pieces of High Rank Bone and 2 pieces of High Rank Alloy gear. This shockingly has wound up being a fairly reasonable set of gear to run around and do stuff with, and the added defense helped a lot as compared to the amount of damage I was taking during the Pukei Pukei fight.

I could go into a bunch of detail about the various hunts I did, but for this morning I am not. The weekend as a whole was all about hanging out with various groups of people for me. That is always the problem I have when it comes to online gaming. There are so many different groups that I want to be hanging out with. I spent a lot of the weekend as a sort of fill in, but still had a blast in doing so. Right now the timing for me is just weird in actually hanging with the AggroChat crew given that the majority are now on the west coast. On most nights they are starting to get active around 9 pm… as I am starting to wind down and prep to head to bed. This has made organizing anything in a time other than the weekend a pretty fraught experience.

The whole grouping experience in Monster Hunter does not make this easier, given that for much of the weekend folks were having trouble joining specific sessions. I know last night we kept trying to get a 4th in to help them with some quests… but the sessions kept timing out. What I crave the most for Monster Hunter World is some form of a viable friends list, with the ability to invite to parties from it… and even more importantly have a Diablo 3 style “request to be invited” system. I hope as time passes that the whole cludge that is grouping in this game improves. That said… the core experience is compelling enough that I can look past all of that nonsense as I obsess about getting monster bits to make awesome weapons and outfits.

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.