There's a new Elder Dragon in MHW from today, for a limited period: Kulve Taroth.
It's a bit of a change of pace. It takes an entire Gathering Hub to take down - so, four teams of four people. (You can join quests in progress so no hanging around if you're playing with randoms). You have to do as much damage as possible as quickly as you can - if you're not successful then it "escapes" but it levels up a Pursuit tracker so it's easier to find and take down next time.
When it goes down it drops a huge number of special rewards including unique weapons and tickets that can be traded at the Resource Centre for a new feature called "Layered Armour" - essentially glamour items that affect your appearance rather than your stats.
I tried it this lunchtime and it's certainly different - possibly a bit confusing, very dependent on the quality of your teammates but well worth doing both in terms of its rewards and its unique armour sets. Good to see Capcom continuing to try something different and they're really trying to get people to use the Gathering Hub more after they rather dropped the ball with it on release.
Considering this is free and not hyped as long as Deviljho was this is insanely good content. If only Zorah Magdros was this good.
I've still not finished the story so won't be able to access this for a long long time, I've not long beaten Pink Rathian
I'm really struggling with this now, everything apart from Great Jagras (HR) whoops my ass when I'm playing solo, my sos flares rarely get answered and when I search for others via SOS they don't tend to be fighting anything I need resources from
You'll adjust, it's not that hard once you gear up again, that said, any time you need help just let me know! And I mean that, since I don't exactly have a whole lot to do in MHW right now and I wanna show off my Hunting Horn.
I can see why it would be a problem as everyone online is farming event monsters or elder dragons, and the jump from Low Rank to High Rank does kind of invalidate most of the armour sets you'll have been using so far.
That said, a lot of the monsters are actually easier solo than they are in a group, so you shouldn't be struggling too badly. Make the best armour and weapon you can at this stage (you should be able to redo the Zorah Magdaros battle every so often, which is boring but piss easy, and gives good gear) and go to town on the earlier HR monsters like Pukei or Anjarath. Remember to eat at the canteen and don't be afraid to run back to camp mid-battle to restock on potions etc.
Maybe try doing some of the multi-monster event quests? They tend to have weaker, easier versions of the monsters so if you're just farming for basic parts they might be worth a shot.
Hey Alastor - MH Generations Ultimate coming to Switch on 28 August. You can even transfer your 3DS save over 
129 monsters! I'm in.
Yup, already geeked out on Twitter earlier, more monsters, weapons, zones and quests than World….now I'm not dumping on World, but this is refreshing as hell. I was going to stop playing Generations until I heard I can transfer saves, needless to say I'm in.
It's also not that hard to go back to IMO, hopefully World hasm ade a lot of people want to try this.
Gar, heads up, on the Japanesese store for Switch, there's a MHXX demo. It's all in moonrunes but it's easy enough, and the internet will point things out.
So the demo for Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate is out on the Switch now.
It's your typical crappy MH demo, pitching you against three monsters of varying difficulties with no tutorials or explanations and no hint at the actual gameplay loop of the game (upgrading armour and weapons with the items you get from the creatures you kill). It's also firmly last gen, with areas divided into separate zones, more micro-management and far less hand-holding than World. And the single-player and multiplayer stuff is entirely separate. So one for the fans only, really. MHW players might have a hard time adjusting.
I felt immediately at home. Having burned out on MHW when the endgame consisted of fighting the same five monsters in the same five areas over and over, this is a breath of fresh air. The full game will have loads of stuff to do, and I don't mind the last-gen looks at all given that it's effectively (for me) a brand new portable Monster Hunter. I skipped Generations on the 3DS so this is full of new stuff. I'm in, day one.
The new styles are really fun, I recommend people try Adept for the easier dodging but I loved Aerial for Dual Blades and Valour (new style not in Gen) Heavy Bowgun and Valour Hammer. I think this actually has quite a lot over MHW besides the much bigger monster roster, the designs are a lot cooler (weapon esigns on MHW are pretty basic) all around, and the new hunter arts and styles are a bit controversial (since MH fans are purist as fuck) but really fun IMO.
And you can play the entire game as a cat.
And you can play the entire game as a cat.
Pfft. Bubsy did that years ago. :)
Finally played the demo, enjoyed that despite having zero clue what I was doing. Looks and runs good, it's what I remember liking about the PSP version I mentioned but a step up, also I seemed to have a cat 🙀 helper with me.
If you have any questions, ask, I don't know everything (especially about this version as we've only just about got it in the West) but I can help.
Ta, grabbed the game today and so far only done a few of the training missions. Although it's already shaping up to be everything I loved about that PSP game I mentioned.
It’s absolutely glorious. I’ve had no trouble adjusting back to the earlier style from World (in fact I think I actually prefer the separated zones) and the amount of stuff is just overwhelming. I spent most of this afternoon messing around as a cat and I’ve only just realised that there are three other villages I can go to from the starting location. My quest list is groaning at the seams and I’m only on the 2* quests!
Yep, I stay at Pokke Village the most since I started with Freedom Unite. Have fun playing around with the styles, Gar! Especially Valour, which can change how you play Hammer a bit.
Alastor - is there any way to turn off “that fucking incessant miaowing noise” (copyright Mrs Garwoofoo, 2018)? The palicoes are a bit… vocal, I guess.
I find a hessian sack full of bricks, thrown in the river tends to do the trick.
…
…
Wait, what are we talking about?
The only thing I know to stop that is just leave them at home and hunt solo.
I’m not leaving my little buddies at home!
I know how you feel, I love my Palicos! But…sometimes they are very annoying with the way they take monster aggro and make them run far away. -_-
And you'll miss a lot of fun you can have with Palicos in this particular game.
I’ve just opened up the three star quests and spent literally an hour or more going from village to village collecting quests. Not actually doing any of them, just adding them to the already massive list of stuff to do. It’s just ridiculous.
I fought many monsters today, one being the Duramboros and it's the funniest thing I've seen and never seen before now. A giant, moss covered cow thing that uses it's fat club like tail to literally throw itself through the air.* Also finally completed a Rath set and boy I forgot how good it feels to finally farm everything you need for a given set.
*It's fucking huge too,
Actually diversifying from my usual Hammer and trying Dual Blades in this one - very different but good fun. Took down a Frog Bastard (TM) quite quickly with those though haven’t switched from Guild Style yet. Thinking Adept might be quite a good match. So many options. I only need a Dignified Skull now for a complete Frog Bastard armour set which should see me good for a while I reckon.
Dude you should try out Aerial Dul Blades, so much fun and you can do stuff like activate demon mode mid air. It takes a little getting used to (Your roll turns into a little frontflip that makes you jump off anything you touch, even teamates!) but it feels ridiculous, you don't have Demondance on Aerial but it's sometimes good to not have that 'burden' of fitting that in.
Also, have you got the Wolf's Maw hunter art for Dual Blades? It makes every hit you do hit twice and makes you look like you're possessed, combined with Aerial air attack or Demondance all you can hear is attacks hitting like a machinegun.
Back to Hammer. Dual blades are fun but there’s too much stamina micro-management and I just don’t feel I’m doing much damage. Took me ages to take down a Nibelsnarf and it was quite boring. I just like hitting things hard in the face I guess.
Dual blades are fun but there’s too much stamina micro-management and I just don’t feel I’m doing much damage. Took me ages to take down a Nibelsnarf and it was quite boring.
I think you've just summed up why I've never clicked with a Monster Hunter game. I always go Dual Blades and they feel so ineffective. But I'm shit with everything else because I like to dash in and out from the fight, so… well.
It's hard to tell without the damage numbers of MHW on screen but DB can output a lot of damage you just have to be on the ball, Elemental Dual Blade demondance on a tripped monsters weakspot is insane.
The online battles seem easier here than in World. A four-player hunt could still be quite a challenge in MHW, but I was playing the other night and four HR1 players were taking down 1-star monsters within minutes. Is the damage scaling different? I'm sure later ranks will increase in difficulty.
I'm deliberately not looking up key quests for either Village or Online, it's quite fun trying to work out what the most significant threats are and picking up some of the minor quests on the way. The cat gathering quests are very relaxing.
Unlike World this is easier with more randoms online, as it should be imo. I dunno if its scaled different but I think you'd be right in that it doesn't scale exactly per person like World seems to.
Gar…I think this might be one one of the greatest games of all time, it's got so much gameplay, so much content, challenge and it is so so fun to play, I think I tweet clips of it every day because Im just constantly amazed.Farmed G Rank Barroth like 7 times in a row with my regular MH buddy and he was a Palico the entire time I think, it was so fun and I now have 600 defense Lancer set with Weakness Exploit, so good!
I dressed my cat up as a bumblebee. I'm happy.
The multiplayer is so much fun in this. I definitely prefer the way it works in MHGU/older games with set lobbies, compared to the drop-in/drop-out multiplayer in MHW. There's a real sense of camaraderie with everyone helping each other out with different quests and sticking together as a team. Though it is frustrating when you've all been working together for ages then you post an Urgent quest and everyone just bails immediately. That's happened a couple of times now.
Still, HR2! Baby steps and all that. And yet another massive list of new quests to tackle. Back to Village for a while to see what I can unlock, I think.
I made a Nerscylla X set last night and not only do I look like some Evangelion Prototype it makes my Nerscylla Sword and Shield way more effective at putting monsters to sleep and its also really really fast at putting bombs and traps down.
So I'm effectively a SnS main for some fights now, I eat food that gives me 'Felyne Pyro' which makes all my bombs Large Barrel Bomb + and I carry max Large Barrels and Gunpowder to make more. So we fight, monster falls asleep and me (and a friend usually) place 2 LBB+s near him and detonate, I believe the sleeping damage multiplier is 2 or 3 times, I dunno how much damage one bomb does but its fixed and while only one gets the bonus we get 2 or 3 sleeps a hunt so the damage racks up!
We did the 1 out of 9 pages of free dlc for this, the 'Hyper' Gore Magala (hypers are much faster and stronger) for the Magi quest which is something my friend loves. One of the most fun hunts we ever did and now his Insect Glaive looks like a staff from that anime.
Are you using an external app for voice chat? Or keyboard chat?
Discord chat, I play with a shy mute boi. But I myself am not.
So, I finished this last night with my friend. Fighting the last boss of G-Rank and boy, I don't want to spoil it for anyone but it is fucking wild, it probably stretches the limits of what the Monster Hunter Universe should be doing (But I mean, in the MH lore there's a monster that possesses hunters if they kill him and make his armour…) but holy shit is it a fun fight! And unlike the hell that preceded it (Rajang is a fucking dickhead) it wasn't really all that hard.
So what next for me? Well, I still haven't even faced every monster, I've actually missed a lot including my old favourite Kushala Daora. I still have many armor sets to make and upgrade and there's SO much armor in this game that I was looking at the helm section last night and there was 59(!!!) pages of gear. Best thing is that all of these are, exclusively to MHGU, part of a new 'transmog' system where what you're wearing isn't neccesarily what your gear has to look like so if you wanna wear a mixed set and still wear Valstrax's set on the outside, you can!
I still have so many events to do (I want to do the Yugioh one) and I haven't even really touched the Super Deviant system (Monsters that are super hard, basically) so…lots to do basically. :D
You're so far ahead of me it's not even funny, but I guess you had a huge head start with an imported Generations save. I'm onto 4* Village quests (Malfestio was fantastic) and HR2 online. I'd be going quicker but I've been trying to mop up all the villager requests as I go and to be honest I find the gathering quests nice and relaxing so I'm having fun at my own pace.
I see I've unlocked something to do with Special Tickets and Deviants but I assume that's all super hard stuff so I'm not paying too much attention to it right now.
Malfestio is such a fun monster, and afaik totally unique in what it does, it even shows in the little things too like when he flies past you and lands, then turns his head back 180 degrees to see where you are like the oversized Owl he is :D. I like it because it shows that these are 'Monsters' but they are still basically animals part of an (absolutely fucked up) ecosystem, Malfestio can literally look over his shoulder to see if anything is behind him and then if needs be confuse and sleep would be predators, Mizutsune needs to go to areas where Fish are specifically, to feed and Barroth swims in pools of Mud since it uses it to attack.
And yeah, just go at your own pace, nothing stopping you doing Key Quests whenever you want to speed up!
I stopped playing MHGen when it wa announced for Switch but I was like mid High Rank, glad I stopped because it would have spoiled so many surprises. (Much like how me almost posting the screen of the final boss dead at my feet last night would have for you and I stopped luckily! Close!)
So when should I be paying attention to the deviant monsters? I've got a whole bunch of Special Tickets but I'm only HR 2 in Tetsu armour so I'm assuming they're probably well out of my league for now.
I've only done one once, apparently they're quite grindy but you should be able to do like, Snowbaron Lagombi fairly early in HR I think? They start easy and get harder, I don't really get the system except for when they get to Super Deviant level, then they're hard.
Well the online population for this game has really plummeted. I was looking for an HR3 room last night and there were less than 50 people in total in all the rooms in the low-rank Hub. When I did finally find some HR3 players they were all doing 1-star quests like the Great Maccao for some reason and as soon as I posted an actual 3-star quest they all left the room. So I gave up and did something else.
I was going to blame it on the Switch Online service but I think it’s probably more due to a combination of being a niche game and a lot of players having imported their 3DS save and jumped straight to G rank. How is population in the G rank lobby these days, Alastor?
It's nothing compared to MHW of course, but there's a few rooms, and I've generally found it very helpful on the whole. You'll find 'turn rooms' where people take turns at quests (though I wont deny the possibility of one or two people bailing after their turn) and maybe it's because I was doing popular hunts such as last boss farming and whatnot but I always found people to help. Nowhere near as big as I'd like it to be though. :<
A combination of a LOT of monsters, and not as many people as MHW and people on varying stages of the game I can see making it hard to find specific hunting rooms before the endgame level hunts.
I will say this though, in MHW you barely talk to anyone I've found, here I've had nice chats with other players about similar interests, my friend added someone on Fire Emblem Heroes before a hunt, for example. We all added each other on the Switch but since we can't message people on our friends list I can't even ask him for help ahahahahahaaah.
EDIT - I'm always willing to help as well.
Just checked back on the DLC, they've given us MORE, including a pack with 50 Golden Eggs to sell for a Million Zenny, you know…no biggy right? :)
MHW Iceborne expansion is looking pretty good and is arriving in September. I really need to revisit the game before then so I’m not totally lost.
I think when I left it I was about HR 50 and had just beaten the annoying electric horse thing. Most of the game after that seemed to consist of fighting the same 5 Elder Dragons over and over so I drifted away. Has there been much added over the last year?
Eh, A few new monsters such Deviljho, Lunastra and one called Kulve Taroth that is technically new but only shows up every so often and requires several teams to tackle it in their own instances to contribute to a raid wide effort and it drops random weapons and materials (as did Deviljho and Luna of course). It's something akin to the Lao Shan Lung from the old games but not as slow and it gets a bit boring after a while IMO. They've slowly released new higher difficulty Elders called 'Arch-Tempereds' which are even more destructive than the Tempered monsters for more weapons/gear, but they are indeed the same Elders you've fought before just harder.
There's been a few new events but some of those came and went, Devil May Cry, Asassin's Creed (with new gear) the Witcher event was possibly the best executed crossover I've ever seen.
So…in their great wisdom, aside from Lunastra and Deviljho, they basically give us cool new events and hunts every so often instead of just forever for some reason, every so often they have a festival and we get all that content again in case we missed out last time. (Meanwhile MHGU has 9 pages of DLC that you download and you keep it forever….)
It's still a fun game but I haven't played it in ages, if only it was cross platform so I could play with friends.
Anyone downloading Dauntless on consoles? I'm gonna give it a try even though I've recently gone back to MHW
Let me know if it's any good. I've gone back to MHGU so not sure I need another Monster Hunter clone but I'm much more inclined to play this than something like, say, Apex Legends.
Well, I'm not sold on it yet. It's a little too light I think. I know it wants to ease players in to it's F2P model and not be as intimidating as Monster Hunter can be but I've done three hunts so far and it's literally been follow the orbs to the target with little to do on the way then the entire party (it seems to force you into one) unleashes everything on it and then it's all over and back to the town hub to upgrade/create new gear and go again.
It doesn't appear to have the tracking and gradual discovery of the big monster, although that may come later. First impressions are tepid though
I played this very briefly ages ago on PC. Seemed okay, though my first impressions were much more of an action-RPG in the vein of Fable, or even Kingdoms of Amalur.
