Hey Folks. Last night I hit the first credit roll in Monster Hunter Wilds which marks the end of the initial main story quest. I remember something like this happening in Monster Hunter as well when I transitioned to the High Rank hunts. Essentially my Hunter Rank was uncapped up to level 25 and as soon as I completed the quest I zoomed from level 7 to level 11. I am going to try and keep this relatively spoiler free, even though the Monster Hunter Wilds story is not really anything to write home about. I did get treated to a few really cool cut-scenes as I prepared to fight a boss which appeared to be coated in Plaster of Paris. What made the effect even cooler was the fact that I was essentially decked out in a full set of gear that matched for both myself and my Palico.
This is honestly part of what took me so long before I transitioned to High Rank is that I wanted to craft a full set of Arkveld gear and two matching weapons. Additionally I wanted to upgrade my defensive charm to the next step. This was easier sounding than it actually ended up being, because I had to kill so many Chatacabras and Guardian Doshagumas trying to get one specific part each. I almost had a freakout because when Chatacabras finally dropped a Jaw… I suffered an immediate crash and was scared that the game had not saved my progress. However when I got back in I still had the Jaw and was able to craft the precursors that were required to make the Arkveld Hammer. Similarly it took forever for the Guardian Doshaguma to drop a claw and when it did… I was finally as upgraded as I could possibly get going into that final fight.
I spent some time last night hanging out with my friend Ace on chat, but they lacked the spoons to actually do group content. So instead I fiddled with my various item collection hunts what we chatted about the awful state of the world right now. Hopefully this weekend I can spend some time helping to catch them up on the various boss fights and transition into High Rank hunts. All told the more I play… the more I want to play. Initially I was struggling a bit to reattach to the game, but I kept poking at a few boss fights each night and eventually over time… it started to get in my blood again. If you read this blog in 2018…. you will remember just how into Monster Hunter World I ended up getting. I think I even did some streaming and spent time joining a few streamer friends on their streams doing some group hunts.
I figured I would probably share a few things that I have figured out, since everything in a Monster Hunter games seems to be way more cumbersome than it should. I’ve shared my friend code a few times (3N88N5TP) but never actually shared how you actually friend someone. There might be multiple ways to do it, but the easiest method I have found is to open your Communications menu, choose Member List, and then click the final tab at the top. This will bring up the dialog that allows you to search for a specific hunter and then once found you can throw them a friend invite. You can also do squad invites off this menu. I’ve found a few places that allow for you to search for hunters, but did not seem to allow me to take any actions based on it.
The other thing that makes the game infinitely more enjoyable is to make it so you always have three NPC support hunters joining on you solo hunts. One would think this might be located in the game settings menu, but it is not. Instead you have to talk to Alma and open up the dialog like you are posting a quest. This then allows you access to her settings menu, which has the configuration for various grouping parameters. If you choose Automate SOS Flare it will fire off an SOS any time you get into combat with a major monster. Additionally if you choose “Only Support Hunters” it will fill your party instantly with the NPC hunters making it so there is no delay in them showing up. Often times by the time I get to the monster they will all be there waiting on me to start the fight. If you allow player and support hunters both… the game will attempt to fill your party with players and as such have a significant delay, and when they do show up… they will show up one at a time.
Last night I did the first High Rank hunt, but hoping between lunch and this evening I will make a proper dent in the content. I’ve heard that the Arkveld set can pretty much take you through all of the High Rank hunts, which is part of why I spent time assembling a full set. I really like the heal that procs off the armor, and I have to admit will probably replace it with the high rank version at some point pending it has the same perks. I will likely replace my weapon before I replace anything else, but I am not really share what the next best weapon to go for is. A bunch of upgrades showed up last night when I moved over to High Rank, but not really sure what the early availability is going to be like.
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Good Morning Folks. I should warn you that if you are spoiler adverse, then maybe don’t keep reading because I am going to talk about the flow on the main story quests.
I did my usual play through a few monsters and then call it a night thing with Monster Hunter Wilds, and I think I am creeping up on the transition to high rank monsters. I believe I am just about to head into the final quest monster fight of the first half of the game. I’ve checked a few quest lists just to see where I am in the grand sequence of things and it appears that I am just about to chapter four after the next big fight. This is the point where gear actually begins to be worth holding onto, but also knowing the sizeable jump up in difficulty I want to be able to reach a decent state with my current gear before shifting over.
Yesterday I took down the Guardian Arkveld which opened up a bunch of good gearing options. One thing that I really love about the wound break system in this game is that you wind up getting a ton of materials if you are focusing on breaking things pretty regularly. As such I exited the Arkveld fight with enough components to craft a new sword and shield, and a handful of pieces of armor in that gear set. I’ve also collected enough decorations to be able to outfit my gear with some helpful stats to round out some of the weaknesses. This morning I took out another Guardian Odogaron which allowed me to craft the chestpiece.
Essentially I need to now track down some Guardian Seikret in the open world and then take out at least one more Guardian Rathalos in order to craft the last two pieces of the set. This should put me in a decent place to finish up Chapter three and transition over into High Rank land. So either today over lunch or early this evening I am going to be answering the call of SOS quests to knock out a few more boss fights and collect some more bits. Similarly I probably need to take out a few more Chatacabra so I can craft up the Arkveld Hammer so I have that as a decent backup weapon. I’ve spent almost no time playing Hammer so I should probably do some of that especially as I go after something relatively easy like the Chatacabra. If I can ever connect up with Ace and their game performance improves… I would love to spend some time tagging along and helping them catch up in the quests as well.
Probably the highlight of the most recent quest series is that I found Poogie. This will now become my side mission to keep petting the piglet until I become their friend again. I’ve not found any costumes but I am sure they are available. Poogie is very important to my enjoyment of the game. There was a patch yesterday and it seems to have improved some of my janky performance issues. I expect that we will continue to get regular patches until all of the issues have been resolved. Reportedly there is also a game update coming that Carth and Ammo told me about which will add back in cooking. Mostly I am just ready to move into the proper endgame and begin the process of kitting out my character in a gear set of my choice, rather than needing to wear whatever nonsense I can craft as I level.
I look a bit like nonsense right now, but will look much better once I have a matching set of gear. I crafted Graciebutt my Palico the set of Arkveld gear so that we will eventually match. One thing I need to figure out is how to turn on the Auto-SOS system. I’ve decided that the fights are infinitely more enjoyable when I have the support hunters with me. It just drops the time to kill by quite a bit making the fights feel way less tedious. Additionally I am not left tanking the boss 100% of the time, which is good. I probably need to figure out a place to move my guard bind because right now it is a bit awkward to hit it in time to actually do any good. I can’t say I am actually good at this game, and have lost whatever moxie I once had with Longsword as I shifted away from that weapon. I am however having quite a bit of fun.
Like I said above, I really want to find a time when Ace and I can connect up and do some shenanigans together. I’ve also added a handful of people to the Squad aka Guild, by play times don’t seem to really be synchronizing since I am only really playing early in the evening. I am trying to decide if I care enough to create a Monster Hunter channel in the Super Dungeon Friends discord. I always hate fiddling with the bot commands, but it is probably a good call since this type of game seems to be something that I keep returning to.
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Morning Folks. Essentially each night I am progressing a bit in Monster Hunter Wilds, and then wind up back in Path of Exile for super chill mapping and delve time. There is only so much directed combat that I can take in a single evening. Monster Hunter Wilds is cool but also feels like it has zero chill right now because every quest leads to another big boss fight. I did spend some time last night roaming around and picking up materials so that I could upgrade a few things. It is probably weird that Path of Exile is known for being this obtuse nut to crack… but that I also find it my super chill happy place. I’ve been slowly working my way through unlocking all of the Heist quests, which given that I tend to find two to three rogue caches in each map… it is going pretty quickly.
Over the weekend I recorded another one of my dumb little videos where I effectively documented the state of my Righteous Fire Scavenger build. I personally find these useful because as I look back on various builds it helps me remember exactly what the state of the build was when I stopped playing it. This one was especially important I thought because we will not be getting Scavenger for very long, and the whole chaos explosions thing is really fun to experience. Essentially I zoom into a pack and it more or less explodes and then proliferates out to everything else in the area causing them to either explode or at least get whittled down in health so that my Righteous Fire can finish them off. I still prefer RF Chieftain because it is way more sturdy, but this is pretty damned fun.
Yesterday I bankrupted myself and bought a Putrid Cloister which unlocked the 3 Crafted mods benchcraft. Then I liquidated all of my available chaos to buy two Divine Orbs so that I could take the Sceptre I had been sitting on and turn it into a Damage Multi/Fire Multi setup. When Righteous Fire lost its flat damage the whole gem levels thing became way less important in the long run, and you are generally better off just trying for as much damage multi on your weapon as you can get. The other stats are largely just useless but I had a few exalted orbs sitting on my bank and figured might as well slam something on it. I even used an imprint beast on this just in case the regal orb bricked the item, so that I had one more shot at it. I now have an imprint that is mostly useless, but I would rather use it and not need it than need it and not have used it given that I captured the beast on my own.
While I was in a video recording mood I also took a bit of time and documented the final state of my Pohx League build, which was Ice Trap of Hollowness Trickster. I really do want to revisit this build during a proper league to see how far I can take it. Right now I just lack the evasion to make this feel more comfortable. I would really like to be able to hit 90% evasion chance and the limited trade environment made that difficult… or at least unaffordable. During a proper trade league there would be way more gear available, and I would probably be able to find an Ice Trap Dragonfang amulet. I had a search running for a few days and none of them showed up on the market. If this says viable, I may legitimately start it during 3.26 just to see how far I can take it, given that I already know I can run up a RF character as a backup in a few days without much issue if it crashes and burns.
This morning I got the first Tabula Rasa that I have gotten in a few league events. I think Crucible was the last league when I was getting these constantly. I had a bank full of various corrupted versions because I kept getting them, and kept rolling the dice with Vaal orbs. Not that I plan on leveling anything else during Legacy of Phrecia, but a Tabula is always a good way to start out a build. Though over the last few leagues I think I prefer some of the other starter chests if you can throw enough currency on it to get it up to four links. It is really hard to beat Thousand Ribbons for starter gear.
Last night I took out the Black Flame and then continued on and took out a corrupted Doshaguma and then a corrupted Rathalos. At that point I wandered around for awhile until the itch to play some Path of Exile caught me. I seem to only be able to take about three or four boss fights before needing to do something else for a bit. I looked at a quest guide and it does not appear that I am even halfway through the main story quest yet. I am not exactly in a massive rush, but I do prefer the endgame loop of Monster Hunter games to the story driven leveling process. Mostly I don’t love the whole fiddling around with temporary gear sets and would prefer to invest my time in a final build. It is what it is… and I find it bizarre the games that I enjoy the leveling process in like Path of Exile and the games that I just want a skip button to zoom straight to endgame goodness like Monster Hunter.
Anyways! I figure I will be flipping back and forth between these two games at least until April 2nd when the new Last Epoch Cycle lands. Depending on how engaged I get with Monster Hunter I might swap from Path of Exile to Last Epoch and then alternate between LE and MHWilds.
The post A New Sceptre appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Late Thursday evening Monster Hunter Wilds dropped and I spent a good chunk of time over the weekend playing it. At this point I have racked up just shy of 13 hours and it is weird how fast the muscle memory from Monster Hunter World came back to me. A lot of the controls are different this time around and I have slowly been tweaking things to make them work a bit better. Other than a few wonky performance issues here and there I have mostly had a pretty great time. I’ve been largely focused on the Main Story Quest, but feel like I need to spend a bit more time smelling the roses and exploring the zones. Truth be told my favorite things about the previous game was the expedition zones and tagging in on SOS flares to help folks down bosses. I’ve done a bit of both, but nowhere near as much as I probably should be.
At this point I am down in the third zone and about to fight by my count the fourth major boss. I am not sure if the game is bugged out but I don’t seem to have a quest marker showing me where I should be going next. I roamed around a bit last night and could not figure out where the game was trying to send me. I’ve crafted a bit of gear and trying something that I never really did in the previous game. I’ve equipped a weapon set that causes sleep, so we will see how that bodes for the next major encounter. I took my first death on the Lava Apes and things seem to be ramping up a bit. I think part of the problem was that I did not make a cool drink for the fight, and I think I was taking heat debuffs the entire time. I should probably focus on taking care of those things, which will require roaming around the expedition areas a bit more to collect goods.
One of my only complaints right now is that I miss the Felyne cooking scenes. We have a cute Palico that appears to be wearing a tomato pincushion as a hat… which is pretty great. However I really miss the elaborate cooking scenes and while technically more useful… cooking the food myself is not as fun. Maybe as the game progresses we will get back the kitchen, but I fear that is probably not the case. Even in Monster Hunter Rise they made Dango. Sadly the game peaked at Monster Hunter World and will probably never reach such peaks of Felyne culinary prowess again. This is probably a dumb thing to complain about, but really it was a core chunk of my enjoyment.
I think my new favorite bit from Wilds though are the WudWuds. I have no clue WHAT they are “preslicedly”. Maybe beavers or otters? Whatever the case, I think they are pretty great. So much of my enjoyment of this game come from the non-human characters that we interact with. I had forgotten how much I needed this level of cat adjacent nonsense in my life. We are going through dark times right now, and having a bit of pure escapism is precious. Hunting big monsters with my cat friend that is styled after my own chaos goblin Gracie has been quite a bit of fun. I do sort of get drained by the game, which makes me think I need to spend more time just roaming around the world looting materials. I spent so much of my time in the first game doing that, and I pretty much need to adopt the same stance in this game.
It is definitely a worthy successor to Monster Hunter World. I also dig the ability to be in multiple squads which serve the purpose of guilds. Here is a screen that shows my friend code, if you are playing the game feel free to throw me an invite. So far it seems to be working pretty seamlessly across all of the available platforms. Part of me wants to keep my head down until I hit the end game and then devote the bulk of my time crafting proper gear sets. However I think I will probably enjoy myself if I just mill around a bit and do some nonsense along the way. I’ve yet to actually group up with anyone, and I am contemplating throwing out an SOS for the next boss encounter just to make it go more quickly.
That is really my only complaint about this game is that it continues to provide limited feedback as to how the battle is going. We have a health bar, but what I really want is a boss health bar. The whole system of changing the icon on the mini-map and also getting hints from the guide that follows you along in battle… are fine and all but the game would feel better if you had clear feedback as to how much impact you are actually making during the fight. As it stands now it feels like you are essentially beating a bag of hit points that then randomly falls over and lets you carve it. I get that this is a conscious choice in the design of the Monster Hunter franchise, but I feel like it is the wrong one, especially in the “World” series which is designed to be more approachable.
All in all though I am having fun. I ultimately knew I would because I went completely obsessive about this game series when Worlds released back in 2018. So much so that I played through the progression on PlayStation and then started over from scratch again and leveled everything up on PC when it finally released on that platform. I am very happy that this time we are getting Console and PC releases at the same time with full cross play.
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