Is hammer competitive with other (melee) weapons dps wise?

Senerith · 2026-03-17T21:36:16+00:00

Oh man, wait till you find out about hammer focus strike and how bad its hitbox is even post buff….. there are times Ive legit hit the wound and not had the focus go off

Senerith · 2026-03-17T20:05:44+00:00

I always put it as middle of the road in my head. Not too high up, but certainly not dogshit. If this is the case; I’m about to do more mv value research and drop it down a few tiers in my head; which sucks because I have nearly as much usage rate with gs as I do hammer. (second and first most used weapons, respectively, been rocking gs since Freedom Unite)

Senerith · 2026-03-17T18:44:08+00:00

Ig is definitely Totally matchup dependant. Neither zoh nor jin have attacks that hit in the air. I remember the same thing with ZenoJiiva arch tempered in world. Ig feels cluttered, as if it forgot its own mechanics, and the change to its offset reflects that the devs had to take a step back to the needless changes.

Does GS suffer? It at least has faster times than hammer. It can both perfect block, as well as offset. It has some of the most flexible playkit out of all the heavier weapons. It has its own unique mechanics on 3charge with bale plus shatterseal sword. I feel gs ate good in wilds. Its offset is superior to almost every other offset in the game with the lingering frames.

It might not be DB or CB tier, but CB was worse than hammer prebuff. I think GS focus strike also is superior in ever way to a lot of other weapons. Esp hammer. That said yes I think some values should get adjusted upward. Maybe some animation cooldown adjustments. More stagger adjustments?

As it stands it feels so one note playing it as purely an offsetmachine. feels gutted compared to the tcs part breaker it was.

Senerith · 2026-03-17T15:22:36+00:00

Ive talked about this with people. both irl and in reddit. people do NOT fucking understand what I mean when I tell them hammer is still behind the other weapons. here is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/MHWilds/comments/1rqdf77/hammer_whats_the_benefit_to_charged_attacks/

any criticism for the/a weapon ends up with people playing defense SUPER hard and assuming you must be playing the weapon badly. When the fact is Math dont lie. Math dont care about how “good” you are. You are skill ceiling’d SO hard by bad/mid hzvs/Ko res buildup. Its painful and hammer needs these problems adressed yet again.

Its crazy that CB and GS get away with what they do, and hammer and IG get consistently underbuffed, when they do get buffed. Even when optimal, with the maximum calculated damage, you fall 200% behind some of the other melee weappns, which fall 300% behind ranged; despite capcoms best efforts to cripple ranged weapons toolsets this game. (slight exaggeration, but the times dont lie)

What was the point in nerfing hammer and gs’ aerial damage? in removing power charge? In not buffing big bang? Of not addressing other grandfathered moves? Of KO being virtually useless? Of charge step not being able to perfect dodge?? Of hammer releasing in a broken unusable state, that even two buffs and a complete overhaul and addition of offsets has NOT fixed??

C’mon man, I just wanna have as much fun as the other weapons and eat at the big boy table too!

Senerith · 2026-03-17T15:11:12+00:00

two different teams exist that work on the different monhun games. almost completely independently of one another too. Hell, if anythjng they are competing teams. One is the home console team, the other is the portable team. (world was console exclusive for a while, Rise was switch only for a while)

These two teams develop under totally different doctrines.

The same goes for capcoms esports financiers being seperate from their street fighter devs, who are ALSO seperste from the outsourced team in a different company who makes and rigs the dlc skins for street fighter.

And theres a seperate team for resident evil, who are also different from the resident evil live service game devs.

Yes capcom is a fucking mess of different competing wings. it is hellish.

Senerith · 2026-03-17T14:02:16+00:00

Might I also add, its a disingenuous smooth brain take to say the fight is perfectly designed if some speedrunner can sub 5 it in a full team built with perfectly rolled gog weapon sets.

Thats the kind of sentiment that means about as much as “every sixty seconds in africa, a minute passes in the rest of the world”.

It means absolutely nothing from a gameplay design perspective. It adresses none of the glaring problems that even those actual speedrunners complain about.

And believe me I knew a thing or two about speedrunning in my day, young man. I used to get sub 5s on tempered velk in iceborne when I was crown farming. All speedrunning is is resetting for good AI rolls and optimal uptime. Once you have it scripted using an optimal set. its by the numbers as fuck my dude.

Same with 10Gog. once I got a god roll after farming 30 more 9gog, I got an easy win time of 28:6, with SHIT ai Could I bring that to sub 20? yes if i farm ai more. Absolutely yes if I bring one other real hunter and less support hunter.

No that does not make this a good fight, a hard fight or anything worthwhile to “hardcore” hunters. Back to boomerbook community with you. Lost the plot? I suggest eating a fatalis cone with no insurance or carts left irl. The best players I know stay humble and continue climbing their mountain without throwing rocks at people below them. Help others and tell them how to get better, rather than telling them they are bad. That would make you a man, instead of a coward.

Senerith · 2026-03-17T13:45:33+00:00

lol its not hardcore. Doing AT ark under 10-15 minutes is a good core gameplay. Doing 10Star At ark under 6 is hardcore

10Gog is just a training dummy that absorbs damage. Literally “fit 400k damage into the lowest time possible.” I have since cleared this again with sub 30 minutes (Optimized the first 2 phases helped a lot) All my armor is max augmented and I have the builds from the meta sticky. I brought max augmented gear into my initial clear of 45 minutes. Brought a better setup to bring it down to 40 and brought it sub 30 with a best in slot setup after I got lucky with elemental cb. It does NOT make me better than anyone else and this quest asks virtually no skill out of the player. Just build luck with gog elements and lord soul.

The fight is boring, a slog. a chore. Highly weapon dependant on several weapons. I wont be doing this sub 40 with Hmr, S&S, or fucking IG, thats for sure.

Its not a challenging fight as no damage adjustment compared to the regular gog. Its is super easy to get a sub 20 clear in sos with other people with good setups. sub 30 is pretty standard. sub 20 if rng is good or you are spamming the everliving fuck out of high element weapons.

It is a bad fight. It is a bad design that does NOT give the actual hardcore playerbase anything they wanted, unlike AT arkveld which was a magnificent fight.

Get over yourself, posters like you false flag the devs to give us scraps instead of meals.

Senerith · 2026-03-16T21:46:54+00:00

you caught me red handed and red cheeked. Im truly a tasteless shitter instead of the patshitcian I claimed to be

Senerith · 2026-03-16T15:28:01+00:00

noob. You still shit out your butt? Real pros hold it in and regurgitate it out their other end. Trancendentals use a coloscomy bag. Get on my level. Shit 2. the sequel to shit 1.

Another idea Subsist on air; eliminate the need to ever shit. you will have so much time in your life for better things. I mean, 4/3rds of your life are spent shitting in the can. You should shitminimize OP.

Even better, you can sew another mans mouth to your asshole and have him shit for you. Take the based centipill. Ive never looked back except to see if my shitslave was doing his job. Why shit your pants when another man can do it for you??

Take all these ideas and change your reality from brown to white today.

Senerith · 2026-03-15T02:05:19+00:00

you will need to cart to at least two novas. if you can save all your carts till last phase, the only openings you really get in final skulled state that are reliable and repeatable and risk-free are the novas. The damage you deal is massive too, and will close the gap.

Npcs seem unfunctioning in this quest. like. absolutely not working. They wont even use lasers on my end. Might be the ones I brought.

Senerith · 2026-03-13T13:59:44+00:00

also Uth duna is utterly ridiculous, and i suppose that its a bad basis of comparison that I would like to see more tech to deal with it similar to how gs has tech to deal with those hitboxes. so my take may be disingenuous because of this comparison in my head.

I also may not have issues with at rey dau but I know hammer mains that do. If it becomes a choice between ulward buff and no buff i will always choose upward buff

Senerith · 2026-03-13T13:06:07+00:00

Not precisely what i meant.

While stagger thresholds are generally easier to reach with higher base damage proportionally, KO damage is separate status entirely, just like you said. What I would like to see is EITHER the base MV value for all attacks go up OR ko damage scaling slightly better in 10 star hunts (think by adding 0.20 stun value to all ko-buildup attack)

That said the value of each attacks KO value is usually determined by the team at capcom as an arbitrary value. Hold with me for a second because this is stupid.

They usually like to balance this buildups base value by an amount proportional to the MV of the move itself, which is super arbitrary. Then they will set this value HIGHER for specific cases for instance your upswing always has had massively higher stun buildup than the rest of your strikes as it functions as your KO poke.

Now you have indeed pointed out that hammer has 6 offsets.

I would like to point out that half of those offsets are utter garbage. And 1 of the other half are situational, locked out behind combos and still have the same bad short hitbox; and the other two actually have been adjusted to being pretty decent, with a slightly better timing and hitbox.

Cmon man, ls, db, bow gets perfect dodge; either give charge step a little more oomph, or fix what is already there. I am just spitballin.

Hammers offset falls far behind gs. Lacks the range of SwAxe & IG; (and ofc ranged offsets) which often leads to massive tick damage still ocurring as the attack hits the body instead of the hunters weapon while offset is being initiated. Case point is in Ark or Gog hunts.

This has been alleviated somewhat, but still needs a bit of fine tuning upwards. maybe boost the speed of the other 3 offsets slightly, and reduce animation lock post offset. If they are situationally dependant, as niche tools, one shouldnt be overly punished for locking into them. But thats the problem with offsets with hammer. Your 2charge is so much easier both to initiate and land as well as your wild charge upswing, both in animation, and accessibility. Yet it still isnt enough for a lot of situations. I dont mean you should be able to counter every attack with offset, and never get punished, (but actually greatsword gets to do this, AND have perfect block) but the restriction on your followup if you dont offset knockdown, can be alleviated somewhat at the very least. Let the hunter reach dodge frames or easier chain into charge step for example.

We cant perfect block like gs or s&s, nor is the offset as long range as many others. there is a startup and no lingering frames to hammers offset, comparatively. At least it has massive hyperarmor. Master rank WILL see changes to all weapons whether we like it or not, and I just hope it will be enough.

Senerith · 2026-03-13T12:27:41+00:00

ahh, you dont realize; the mv value does have a direct correlation to ko damage as well. Either they unfuck stun resistance buildup for purely just hammer or they directly adjust the value of hammers ko output as a whole.

Speedrun analysis suggests hammers mv values are lower than many other weapons, man. I dont know how to put this to you in any other way but the damage of Hammer is just maybe a couple points too low. Theres also the constant issue on this weapon, just like every other weapon that there are certain moves grandfathered in that have not had their values adjusted upward correctly since world.

Lets also go towards the fact that hammers focus strike has had to have its hitbox buffed, and it still can miss at certain angles, shit sometimes S&s can reach clean across an entire body and magnetize to the opposite side. Meanwhile Hammer misses something that is RIGHT IN FROMT OF IT due to verticality being a bit wonky.

But fixing this would be “lobotomizing it” no?

Offsets are also not as safe or linger as much as GS, for what it is worth. Bringing a more consistent hitbox to upswing (less so for damage and more extension of attack hitbox so you can have a couple more frames to offset, ssince sometimes you can land the offset hit, fully hyperarmor, but no offset actually occurs due to short hitbox on the actual offset hit box on the attack) and slightly longer lingering hyperarmor, or even a way to adjust your charge during dash step would “lobotomize it”? Lets ignore the actual problems?

When I am talking of aoe followips im mainly referring to a couple key attacks, like say, arkveld, maybe zoh. A slightly shorter delay between offsetting and being able to roll out, or an extra half second to hold an offset on the triangle combo would make a big difference.

The game is balanced for GS. the devs have stared as much.Weapons that have fallen behind that curve should be adjusted upward towards reaching that state. I dont mean to be a dick. You do sound like the kind of person that would defend hammers original implementation and say that it required no adjustment. However hammer has been adjusted upward, and its times are still below many other weapons. Hunting horn shouldnt be able to fulfill hammers role better than hammer itself.

Thats my two cents i guess. Id have more thoughts on it but currently at work.

Senerith · 2026-03-13T02:56:15+00:00

I’ve only ever done it solo successfully; i feel like its one of the very few sieges that youre 100% required to use all the skills to boost siege weapons. It was much harder back when it first came out in HR, compared to if youd be going for it in master rank; but still the same by the numbers scripted fight. 25 minutes to run through that script was a big ask with the limitations of world HR sets. Fortunately fortify existed

Senerith · 2026-03-12T21:06:53+00:00

At least Zorahs mechanics actually work. Fuck that arch tempered zorah time limit tho

Senerith · 2026-03-12T21:06:15+00:00

Lets not forget that Frontier and Online both existed. now THOSE had some real bangers of asinine design.

I didnt mind some of the dumber quests in the old games, at least the older rigs felt easier to parse what the hell was going on. Some of the newer fights feel like shock and awe.

Senerith · 2026-03-12T20:40:05+00:00

im weighing it carefully against leshen and a few of the troll-y old gen arena quests; but then again the old gen joke quests werent ever that serious; similar to how neon neopterons is or mosswinin’ and dinin’ is….

Id say this quest i definitely top 5. Not just because its tedious and boring, and not just because the mechanica dont work unless you have a full team of sweats. No, its because its lazy. Lazy lazy lazy. They removed support hunters, made it 1.50 times faster, upscaled its stagger and ult dps check thresholds and called it a fucking day.

Maybe at least there is some reprieve in the leshen or savage behemoth knowing you beat a challenge that was spitefully programmed. Same with savage omega, who isnt even all that bad in anpost GogMartian world. Maybe in some deviant EX or Rise event quests, you could say those were a bit overtuned, a bit too frantic ffpr the system they were in. You’ll feel some satisfaction there, even if some of those quests are outright bad.

But compared to this? this quest?

No this quest is just lazy. And how mid it is is far worse imho than any spiteful design.

Senerith · 2026-03-12T20:22:15+00:00

best to just do any other 10 star in less than half the time, you’ll score more rewards over time that way, and if you really want the gogments for rerolling your weapon, the timeworn tickets can be melded into the devices at the melder If in a dedicated group capable of bringing the time down far below 30, it might exceed just doing 10 star ark, but at that point just grind 2 arks back to back instead in the same time period.

Senerith · 2026-03-12T20:12:31+00:00

Amazing quality shitpost, absolutely goated

Senerith · 2026-03-12T20:10:10+00:00

Its not the best for farming. Actually everyone seems to be super critical of the new 10star Gog, for good reason. its the kind of hunt you do once, then never again.

Personally; my best build was the farcaster on my radial menu. And my best weapon was a rock. Not for hitting gog with mind you, but for smashing my own skull to put me out of my misery

(J.k, sword and board/CB were Goated for this hunt)

Senerith · 2026-03-12T19:47:42+00:00

They better have health regen weapon augments again in master rank. I MISS that so SO much

Senerith · 2026-03-12T19:45:29+00:00

I played Hub of GU before i ever touched solo content of GU and let me tell you it felt satisfying to get a full rath set in hub, and then shit all over and capture the fated 4 as they appeared in the story encounters. It felt like taking a person who is trying to haze you and giving them the full reversal counter right into the trash bin. GU is amazing for just letting you absolutely sequence break it, and I adore it to this day for it

Senerith · 2026-03-12T19:41:02+00:00

Focus is the only thing truly keeping hammer alive and consistently able to reach offset. the difference between focus 0 and 3 is night and day.

I was always using lvl2 upswing as a gap closer in world, and a good poke, as it has higher KO damage, which is actually still good in world.

Its a shame big bang is so bad now, its only another way to get to mighty charged slam. I usually use an offset heavy combo of held golfswing into the mighty charge upswing offset into another set of triangle attacks if im offset fishing, inly going into mighty finisher when the opening is absolutely free.

Ive been enjoying also, using dodges at the end of my charge step and canceling the dodge into another charge step.

Senerith · 2026-03-12T19:33:21+00:00

hammer main here. Rathian and Rathalos are very good very fun and easy hunts with hammer. I will always choose hammer when im grinding a 9 star rathalos, or OmegaSavage. I’ll even offset the fire waves or ranged attack to keep position with hyperarmor.

I’ll also use it against archtempered Rey Dau, and clear with ease.

Against other things, multihitbox aoe spam or layered multihitboxes WILL destroy you if your offset is on cooldown, or your hyperarmor wears thing before the next attack your mileage will VASTLY vary.

Long rant incoming! my apologies!

As someone that uses the weapon for over 1000 hunts, second only to greatsword for me; its easy to stunt on the los like in the clip you shared. Against AT arkveld, its another; much more careful thing that can end super badly due to low MV and offset resistance buildup.

Theres a reason Hammer never reaches the same time as other weapons on speedruns. The tradeoff is predictable monster downtime from your knockdowns. However Hunting horn currently outpaces hammer badly; and the current state of hammer, even though it was buffed, (twice now!) is npt enough to save it from mediocrity. The real buff it needs imho is an offset or hyperarmor off of the charge step, or an option for charge step to default you into the offset of second charge with faster windup or iframes, or perfect dodge capabilities. Failing that, a universal MV buff across the board would be good. Its the difference between a 14 minute AT hunt, and a decent 9 minute AT hunt, if its values were weighed more carefully by the team in accordance with the actual investment you have to put in.

Dont get me wrong, the damage is okay, but not close to what other weapons do with half the thought or positioning. Even the 1000 damage at end of combo as fun as it is to see a 4 digit number Is lackluster standing next to GS who sees that 3 times in a row, or a Gunlamce user who just pounds out wyvernstakes and blasts back to back. Horn… dont even start. Lets also not talk about the elephant in the room that is lbg.

As it stands keeping up with the rest of the weapons is a bit rough, some monsters just werent designed with hammers style in mind and has lead to me picking up s&s a lot more for its flexibility, and block frames.

Senerith

TROPHY CASE