Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

The Harvest Festival event is now live in Monster Hunter World on PC and last night I spent for the most part the entire evening doing event quests.  The PC community appears to be significantly smaller than the Playstation 4 one, I am assuming in part because there are likely fewer Japanese players available to group with.  I know a lot of my SOS Roulette nonsense was done with Japanese players…  which seem to have a culture of opening up their events to other players as a matter of course.  There have been many times when I tried to find an SOS for a specific monster and came up completely empty, so instead I have started filtering my session by specific types of quests.  So for example I am filtering for groups specifically doing Event quests during the Harvest Festival, and that seems to give me a session with a bunch of players participating in the sort of events I have been trying to.

I am still not nearly as progressed as I am on the console, but I did manage to get far enough to do the “Every Hunter’s Dream” quest which rewards the crafting bits needed to make Wyvern Ignition…  aka the Greatsword you can see in the above image.  I decided to spend all of my harvest tickets on making the Palico Armor, because not only is it awesome looking…  but it was actually a pretty reasonable upgrade to the Zorah set mine had been wearing.  My goal in coming back and playing a lot is to also get me ready for the inevitable release of the Kulve Taroth siege event.  For whatever reason I was expecting the Greatsword quest to be High Rank… which is why I was pushing lately to get there…  however it is only a 5 star so that last tier before you actually transition into High Rank.

This event also allowed me to catch up on a bunch of the other quests that I had apparently missed…  namely the Wiggler Head, Kulu Head, Eye Patch and Shades.  I need to run through everything available and make sure I have crafted everything, but for now I think my focus is going to be doing the daily bounties so I can gather up enough tickets to craft some of the harvest gear… or at the very least get the layered armor set.  I probably fall in the Fashion Hunter territory in that I tend to be way more interested in Layered Armor sets than pretty much anything else because I can equip them over top of whatever gear I happen to be wearing.

I am still very much digging the Zorah hammer, but also now branching out into Switch Axe and Great Sword.  I need to do a bit of farming because I want to craft a Gunlance and a Lance to play with those as well.  On the PS4 I was pretty much laser focused on only caring about Longsword.  This time around however I am trying to branch out and try new weapons, because it is very clear that certain encounters just work better with certain weapons.  Lance/Gunlance seem rediculously powerful so I want to try my best to figure out how to play each of those.  For whatever reason swapping weapons seems to be easier for me when I am already playing using the much more comfortable keyboard and mouse sort of interface.  So much of my time on the PS4 was me eating up brain cycles trying to remember how to use a controller, since that is not a mode I play in regularly.  Whereas with the Keyboard and Mouse I am in my comfort zone and can sort of dedicate those brain cycles to other things.

If you are around and doing stuff ping me and say hey.  I will warn you though that I don’t regularly play with the chat overlay on through Steam because it has caused graphical issues in the past, and as a result it might take awhile for me to actually respond.