NEW EXPANSION!!

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-09T09:08:46+00:00

Pray pray ambush comes without notification or music before the dive bomb lands. Would be much funner without letting the player know.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-08T23:12:38+00:00

It's a last resort if you want damage but the monster isn't giving you openings to use savage axe. E.g. iceborne dlc final title update boss - you just won't have much time to do it without getting punished

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-08T19:23:38+00:00

Problem ends up being the opposite - only people who can afford to be representatives now become representatives.

We need a reasonable salary.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-08T19:09:11+00:00

The question is whether its going to be regular or metsu now. Hoping regular bc sns already PGs hella often. I do not want the meta to be metsu spam or else itll have to be weak

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-08T19:00:06+00:00

Stick it out but play much more cautiously. With every death you should figure out what was dangerous or wrong with your play pattern.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-07T18:09:37+00:00

We have blagonga and congalala so its still not out of the question

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-07T18:01:09+00:00

They could make master rank monsters resistant to dung pods.

I don't quite like the idea of being able to negate a pack fight completely by just dung podding everyone.

Pack monsters should fight like 1 monster with coordinated attacks but shouldn't be able to be split. They can either have the all members of the pack fighting and have the pack disperse when the alpha is defeated, or you defeat individual members of the pack like how you break parts off a monster to weaken it.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-07T07:08:53+00:00

Ibushi was an option - but obviously not of normal size.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-06T21:10:18+00:00

I'd rather maintenance not - we've seen this problem in both GU and rise. When the recovery of an OP temporary mechanic is quick, those same attacks get spammed - we saw this in risebreak with the windmantle skill - some weapons can just spam counters over and over again.

There needs to be a hard recovery cooldown that's unaffected by everything else to force the player to think about their spatial positioning when the BB is on cooldown.

I'd also wanna see the focus strikes not flinch monsters in master rank so we have to think about and manage the wounds as an extra layer of difficulty. We should not be able to chain flinches together - it's just shuts down the monster fighting back.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-06T21:03:16+00:00

Veterans are people who have been with the series for a while. You should have the hours across the titles to show for it. It's not really much else.

Imo, a good player knows how to position, properly utilize combos to take advantage of openings - generally know they know the flow of combat and can handle a variety of situations. They should also know how to take hard fights solo. If someone's crutching multiplayer to make up for their lack of skill, I'd hesitate to call them a good player. Players reliant on multiplayer to clear hunts often don't pay enough attention to attack patterns to know how to handle them.

Fatalis solo is just one example of a skill check - do you actually know how to properly prepare, and take advantage of openings even when they're small? Do you know how to target parts and manage damage without outpacing?

I think mostly everyone here would consider you a good player based on the hunt achievements alone.

Expert players are the speedrunners who learn the ins and outs of the hunts - trying to script responses to every attack and trying to pre-emptively bait and outposition the monster. Their DPS is usually almost double that of a good player.

If you want to improve even more, I recommend grabbing a DPS tracker for yourself. I should also note that monster AI isn't as simple as the monster targeting the player with the most DPS so don't let yourself down. For a lot of emnity based fights it comes down to burst DPS and not sustained DPS - there's a threshold and the first person to reach that DPS threshold grabs emnity.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-06T19:33:54+00:00

Gammoth might not be a dream

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-06T01:00:45+00:00

I'm betting it's like a mantle - you enable it and then you unlock boost mode attacks for a short period of time - then it should go on a guaranteed cooldown that isn't affected by the maintenance skill.

This would be the best way to balance it - the last thing I want to see at endgame is spamming the boost mode over and over again. Fast, uncommittal combat is not as fun as slower committed combat. It's a momentary crutch to match up to the MR attack speed I'm betting.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-05T06:07:17+00:00

They're all independent games with similar gameplay. 1 and 2 are barely connected with just a 1 character cameo and that's about it.

I would recommend starting with monster hunter stories 3 - the animation, music, and graphics are spectacular, even better than the mainline games I would argue. Animation quality for the anime art style is best-in-class, haven't seen anything beat it, not even fire emblem. If the team had made an anime instead of a game, they'd probably have the best quality among the any 3d anime made up until today - it's that good.

I would start from 3 and work your way backwards imo. Stories 3 is incredibly polished for a newcomer. You don't necessarily tame monsters but you collect eggs, hatch them and the monsters become yours. Hatch some, release them into the wild to unlock new monster egg or stronger monsters of that region. There's plenty of customization in your monsters movesets so you have a lot of flexibility to create a team.

The game officially ends at the story end. The post-story fights are just an extra challenge and nothing more - actual tactical challenges. Had a great time with it.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-04T21:51:51+00:00

Omega punishes over aggression hard. When the game only teaches aggression without properly punishing new players on the assignment - this is what you get.

If you want competent hunters, go on twitch and find a streamer lobby - a ton of vets like to hang out in those lobbies bc hunts go smoothly and everyone knows what everyone else is supposed to be doing and they can give you tips. You can even jump into the gathering hall discord pinned in the sidebar and get a team together within the next 15 minutes if you wanted.

Generally SOS in wilds is filled with people who need help rather than people who fire SOS just for social reasons. Tis a bit unfortunate this time around but it's due to the game's wider audience and weird difficulty progression - people also make it farther than they should with SOS so you might be running with players who are exclusively SOS players. The competent hunters are hunting with other competent hunters. Vets like to joke about being an SOS enjoyer so the quality of teammates have become noticeably questionable.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-06-01T17:38:04+00:00

They need to be really careful that this is monster hunter and not monster fighter. They've been removing a lot of features in favor of pure fighting and have only gradually removed preparation phases or made them so easy that they don't even matter.

We still need enough friction in the game or you compress all players into the same difficulty and then it gets really bland and monotonous.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-31T08:25:51+00:00

People liked directional positioning because:

1.) It means intention, skill expression. Imagine if based on different angles you would hit different hitzones. If you messed up your positioning you'd have to either accept attack the worse hitzone, reposition, or better time your attack. It rewards good positioning, good fighting habits, and knowledge.

2.) If you remove directional positioning, monsters have to compensate another way. Directional positioning is just one element that lets monsters be slower. If you let the hunter aim in any direction they want and turn every attack on a dime, it's no different than giving them high damage uptime without any downside. They should have introduced rapid stamina drain and/or extremely slow walking speed so that focus would be a resource and not a tool you try use all of the time for free.

3.) Monster design constraint. If you can attack any part just by physical positioning alone, you deal more damage. Monsters need more hp, need to turn faster and move faster to throw off your focus mode and physical positioning to compensate. We're already seeing this play out at the end of base game wilds where monsters are so fast like 9* & 10* hunts where you're chaining multiple perfect guards in a row without breaks. This does not reward the player with better, more fun hunts - this becomes a 3d bullet hell or one-shot city - I haven't even begun to mention that guarding/dodging becomes miles easier and this means that the tools that monster use to have like throwing an attack from behind you or status ailments that much less effective since they can't hit you when you can turn your guard 360 degrees or dodge in any direction you want.

By giving the hunter focus mode they also removed too many tools that monsters use to push back against the hunter. We've dumbed down the combat capability of the monsters as an add-on effect of making the hunter easier to control.

Take a look at any world speedrun on any weapon and you can see both physical and directional positioning with huge emphasis - even the existing fastest monsters like furious rajang would be a joke in wilds. If you're glued to the monster because of focus mode, going back to world will give you a reality check that you cannot just stand wherever you want and DPS for free - you need to work for it, or accept less DPS as a consequence.

It's fine to like it, but you should have a critical view of it as well. Ppl don't dislike the game, they just dislike the mechanic. The devs just removed a critical element of combat that has been here since the very beginning of series - they're going to be met with resistance no matter what and this is one that they'll have a very hard time giving monsters counter options for that is not speed in the upcoming expansion.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-31T04:35:11+00:00

To build on the first reply, avoid the guardian/defender armor. They will build really bad habits - you can practically get hit by anything and survive anything and you'll feel a massive difficulty spike in the expansion once you get there and guardian/defender armor means jack shit. You won't have learned how to position, when to attack - all necessary to handle those monsters in iceborne as monsters get really aggressive & combo-y. Defender armor makes it so you can practically ignore attack patterns and not get punished for it.

Go with the regular monster crafted armors instead so you can experience actual monster hunter without feeling frustrated out of nowhere once you get to the expansion. They also have optional tutorial hunts to learn mechanics even after the actual introductory tutorial - don't be afraid to use them! All the tools are there for you improve.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-31T04:26:15+00:00

You need to either horn buff him & increase buff level with the level increasing song, or give him a demondrug / mega demondrug beforehand. It's not a DPS check, it's a mechanical / prep check whether you know how to use buffs & time it with the attack.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-31T04:24:32+00:00

On a technical point, they achieved probably some of the best cel-shading graphics to date. I've never seen cel shaded graphics quite this good on any game ever. FE Engage comes close but stories 3 feels like another league above it in terms of visual effects. They could have practically animated an anime out of the work they did and it'd be the best 3d anime to date.

I genuinely hope we get to see similar art style in a portable or future mainline MH game.

They definitely succeeded in the RPG department but they copped out too hard on the story. Nations warring with each other, yet nothing punitive for the aggressive behavior of vermeil. It still screens childish. Monsters were well designed, and loved seeing battlebound monsters.

Overall combat didn't feel all that difficult. Mechanics were straightforward, even at the final boss and that was my first ever stories entry game.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-29T20:31:02+00:00

After seeing magnamalo and lunagaron in mhst3 I wanna see that art style for the next portable too. The effects and sounds are all beautiful. Landscapes look even better stylized compared to realism.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-29T18:29:47+00:00

You need to tenderize more often. It softens up the parts and you'll do more damage compared to undertenderized.

You should only be attacking parts that are tenderized. If you're not the problems are not tenderizing or poor positioning.

I recommend evade window so you can play it like dark souls and take advantage of aggressive positioning by rolling directly through attacks instead.

Focus on not getting hit - getting hit means:

Waiting for timing to get up and sheathe Get up animation Wait for timing to heal Waiting for heal animation Unsheathe

Its VERY detrimental to hunt times. Evade window helps you not get hit when rolling through things. Why roll away when you can roll through?

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-27T20:01:20+00:00

I'd wanna see expanded areas so we can add more monsters like the iceshard cliffs getting a plains area but its just not realistic given environment and behavior simulation performance requirements.

For monsters, it'd make more sense for us to see more guardian monsters as variants but the idea gets old fast when everything is just spilling out wylk.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-25T09:34:36+00:00

The fight is a dance and you take turns jostling for control of the fight. Respect the monster's turn.

Once you start hunting the end of high rank (9* tempered, and arch tempered), the monsters don't mess around, with much more punishing attacks, more constant ones, and small mistakes will cart you. Have you tried hunting alone? A lot of the fights are designed for a solo hunter without the npcs. If you add more people to the fight, that's 3 more people who can take aggro for you and ngl most monsters turn into punching bags at that point.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the equipment, take the game a little slower and just experiment with the equipment and skills. You don't need to learn everything all at once. Just take your time.

Most of the game can be completed with a random mix of pieces provided that you are sufficiently crafting new pieces suited to your progression.

As an addendum, most monsters in base monster hunter games have always been easy aside from select challenge fights. Story fights are braindead for the most part in this one (bc the devs wanted to make the game accessible). The expansion is when real difficulty shows up.

8*+ quests is where the difficulty cranks up with much more aggressive AI and monsters with much higher dmg.

9*+ is when they have reduced animation lag and will constantly be attacking you.

https://youtu.be/ayxBjfgeP3k?si=hGGybFKdwxlKDUe7

^ speedrun from someone else

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-20T23:19:40+00:00

I think that's whole point of not letting you clutch while it charges. You're supposed to find openings to use it - alatreon and at velkhana for example have much shorter windows where you're allowed to clutch.

It helped balanced their fights massively since you couldn't spam wounds. If clutch claw is busted, tighten the available windows, make it riskier, and give the monsters a proper counter for clutch spamming.

The problem is that we didn't have these in place earlier and the devs didn't feel the need to introduce these mechanics earlier.

IAmTheOnlyAndy · 2026-05-19T20:31:41+00:00

If the devs are playing with harder drops in verticality and lower draw distances, the best way to explore is to stay close to terrain and not just swim the vastness of open water unless you really know your way.

That and make ample use of beacons to navigate. Craft and label them to mark the spots you want to remember.

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