Monster Hunter World

As you know, I got dragged into playing MHW after a concerted harassment/peer pressure campaign by two of my best nerd friends. Now that I’ve had some time to settle in, I have some thoughts and opinions.

As someone who has absolutely no prior experience with the MH franchise, I was totally unprepared for the level of utter nonsense in this game. I’m not just talking weapon design or the grind required to progress. I am talking about adorable cat friends who wear fancy costumes and have adventures and bring back monster parts. Also you can catch and collect tiny animals from your travels who live on your carpet in your fancy church/spa of a room. Also there’s a friendly pig you can pet and dress up. Also there seems to be a proud tradition of event quests that reward ridiculous hats. Basically, for a game that comes across as nothing but boss fights and gear grind, there’s actually a wealth of fun silly side things to do. I am a fan.

Of course this is still a game about murdering giant lizards and things and stealing their bones. There is plenty of that to go around. This game has a very tight core loop. There is not a lot in the way of forced downtime activities. Yes, you can seek the silly side things discussed above, but the game never makes you do boring side jobs to progress the main plot. You’re here to kill monsters and that’s all it asks of you. If you enjoy those fights then it is fantastic. If you were looking for more variety you might have to find your own fun.

I’ve discovered that I enjoy the game most when I don’t force myself to push the story forward, and instead focus on side quests and exploration until I actually feel the need for something new. Right now I have the self-imposed goal of killing every monster I have encountered before I work on the story again. There’s no shortage of things to do if you enjoy the core mechanic of the game.

I also realized that my enjoyment went up substantially when I stopped worrying about catching up to my friends who started playing weeks ahead of me. The game is reasonable about letting us play together no matter where I am in the story, so there’s no urgency. It took me a while to accept this because in the MMO world playing with friends so often feels useless until everyone is at the endgame. Here, as long as I don’t faint too much everybody is happy and we all go home with sundry monster parts to feed into the gear machine.

So all said, I’m still quite happy to be playing Monster Hunter World with my friends, and I’ve mostly forgiven them for dragging me into the game. Now I just hope they stay interested long enough for me to catch up.

Games While I’ve Been Alive

Belghast posted a list of the most important games to him for every year of his life. I decided this would be a fun thing to do too. Little did I know how much I would agonize over some of these choices. There were a couple years where I just could not choose only one game. Conversely, there were a few years where I barely played anything worth remembering. Without further ado here is my list:

1979 Asteroids
1980 Pac-Man
1981 Frogger
1982 Pole Position
1983 Spy Hunter
1984 Tetris
1985 Super Mario Bros.,  Oregon Trail
1986 Bubble Bobble
1987 Space Quest II
1988 Super Mario Bros. 3
1989 Prince of Persia
1990 Dr. Mario
1991 Lemmings
1992 Wolfenstein 3D
1993 Myst
1994 Final Fantasy VI
1995 Descent
1996 Diablo,  Tomb Raider
1997 Final Fantasy VII
1998 Parasite Eve
1999 Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
2000 Icewind Dale
2001 Pikmin
2002 Ratchet & Clank
2003 Beyond Good & Evil
2004 Katamari Damacy
2005 Metroid Prime Pinball
2006 Kingdom Hearts II
2007 Portal
2008 World of Warcraft: WotLK
2009 Dragon Age: Origins
2010 Plants vs. Zombies
2011 SW:TOR
2012 Diablo III
2013 Final Fantasy XIV: ARR
2014 WildStar
2015 Undertale
2016 Stardew Valley
2017 Horizon: Zero Dawn

Necromancer Set Mastery

Necromancer Set MasteryThere is no fancy wing reward for mastering the Necromancer set dungeons, which partly led to me ignoring these set dungeons for so long. Like all of the other classes, there are still two banners to get though, one for basic completion and one for mastery. At this point there’s also the principle of the thing. I’ve come this far, I might as well master all of the available dungeons. Plus it is my secret hope that Blizz will continue to add more classes, and eventually add another cosmetic reward for mastering everything. In any case it’s finally done, and here’s how it went:

The free set for Season 11 was Rathma’s, so that’s where I started. The two objectives were to get a total of 500 seconds of cooldown reduction on army of the dead, and to summon 100 skeletal mages. The summoning part was easy, especially with the ring that summons an extra mage every time. The cd reduction was a bit trickier. On my first attempt I didn’t get anywhere close. The second attempt saw me get the objective but run out of time trying to mop up the required kills. I finally mastered it on the third try. The “trick”, which wasn’t really a trick, was to make sure I was using army of the dead immediately when it came off cd so I didn’t waste any cd reduction. I basically got to a big room full of enemies and let my skeletons swing at them until I got the objective done, then summoned tons of mages and mopped up. I waited to summon the mages since when they’re up the damage buff means things die before they contribute much to the cd objective. Not a bad dungeon at all, and I appreciated that both objectives tied to the set, and weren’t gimmicky “don’t get hit by X” type things.

I worked on the Inarius dungeon next. The objectives also both directly tied to the set bonus: rip the bones from 100 enemies and kill 200 enemies affected by a bone armor tornado. This one was incredibly easy. I had the full set but no other specific legendaries, I just used whatever I had laying around in the season. I went in blind to the map and I got the mastery on the first try. Killing enemies affected by bone armor tornado is super easy, it will pretty much happen naturally. Ripping the bones from enemies required a bit more care, mostly because I was killing things before I could group them up. It was definitely easier than Rathma’s dungeon so if you’re having trouble with that one try Inarius’ instead.

Necromancer Set Mastery

Next up was Trag’oul’s dungeon. This one requires you to spend, and then heal, 1,000% of your life with your abilities. I basically just went at a cautious pace, alternated blood nova and devour, and beat it in one try. The layout of the dungeon has some nooks and crannies for enemies to hide in, but as long as you don’t leave stragglers you should have plenty of time.

After how easy the first three dungeons were, I was pretty nervous that I had saved the hardest for last. In retrospect I should never have worried. It was way harder for some reason for me to actually farm up the full set and bother to try this dungeon than it was to master it. The Pestilence dungeon objectives are to hit enemies with 150 empowered bone spears, and to NOT take 400k damage. The first bit is the easy part, it will pretty much happen with any build that you would want to use in this dungeon. Avoiding damage wasn’t that bad either, I just had to play a bit conservatively and not rush into the middle of swarms and elites. I mastered this dungeon on the first try, with over a minute of time to spare. Easy as bone spear pie.

Necromancer Set Mastery

Overall the Necromancer set dungeons were some of the easiest in the game. The worse of this lot was definitely Rathma’s. I one-shot all of the others, so I guess they were all equally easy. You can find my thoughts on the other classes’ dungeons in this post from September. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to finish the Necromancer, especially with how easy the last dungeon was to master. It felt a bit anticlimactic after the long journey it took to get to this point. At least now I’m officially finished with set dungeons, at least until they release a new class!


Necromancer Set Mastery

Gaming Time

Between the upcoming holidays and various real life happenings, I haven’t been immersing myself in gaming like usual. A lot more of my free time has been dedicated to various creative/crafty things instead and I feel really good about that. It’s relaxing in a different way than gaming is for me, and at the end of the day I have something more tangible to show for it. I will never consider time spent gaming as time “wasted”, but I do sometimes have to think about what I really have to show for all the hours spent.

Playing through the story of a single-player game, or questing through the main story of a MMO are easy to justify. To me that’s the equivalent of watching TV or reading a book, consuming content. Group activities like raiding are more like sports. You’re developing a skill, but also socializing with your teammates. Then there’s the repetitive, grindy stuff I often do in games. I find it hard to find an analog for that in other leisure activities. Leveling that 15th alt is a bit like binging reruns of your favorite TV show I suppose. But grinding? Whether it is gearing for raiding, chasing primal ancients in Diablo, or gaining reputation for a cosmetic reward, grinding is a lot of work and time spent for very small gains. Yet those grindy tasks are the things I gravitate toward toward when I am using gaming as an escape from daily stress.

Leisure activities, by definition, don’t actually have to be productive. Leveling through Outland for the 1,000th time is as valid as writing a novel. But societal pressures put very different values on those two tasks, and personally I get a bit more gratification from creating rather than consuming. I think I’ve got a good balance now that I’ve been doing daily creative things for a few months. Sometimes I don’t have a ton of time for both creating and consuming on a given day, and I’ll devote my time based on how much energy I have.

I’m not entirely sure what the point of all this is, except that creating things is hard work and it’s ok to consume things like games. You don’t have to be productive all the time, but it is nice to feel creative when you can.


Gaming Time