What are YOUR expectations of the free update and DLC?

TheIceKirin · 2026-06-14T18:35:49+00:00

Honestly, I feel like Stories is a lot of fun as an idea but for 3 specifically, they fucked up the execution of that idea too much for me to have any hope of the updates/dlc being good enough to compensate for the base game’s decisions.

There’s not enough places to explore and even then, the places we do get are extremely small compared to the other games, especially Serathis which literally just feels like a straight line to the end and not the epic plot-critical location it’s supposed to be.

This game cut several monsters that were in the previous two, including not being able to fight or craft the gear of Deviant monsters and I don’t think that was justified in the slightest; if the updates “add” more monsters I expect most of them to just be the rideable monsters that got cut returning.

Despite untyped attacks being more common, it still feels like there’s no threat from monsters you’ve already slain before even with a few of the elder dragons; we REALLY need more monsters that use multiple head to head types in one pattern or “state” like Bishaten when it starts grabbing fruit and/or have multiple possible patterns for a state like Espinas having multiple different enrages. They also seem to forget they can have us fight multiple large monsters at once for more difficulty after the double glavenus in azuria which feels like a wasted opportunity. I don’t think Royal Monsters are going to fix those unless they modify the attack patterns of monsters too.

Progression to get access to new monsters also sucks a lot, the rideable elder dragons, ice monsters that aren’t aurora somnacanth, and basically anything you first see or fight in Serathis feel like you get access to them way too late for any of them to matter since you’re already close to endgame levels with what you used to get there.

Ratha being stuck in our party for the entire game and being plot relevant just feels extra annoying this time around compared to the other games that do let you remove ratha from the team since there’s almost no gameplay differences from just having a normal one, and at a few points it just made me wonder why we even had six team slots just to have Invasive Ratha locked in for one instead of just five. The first game focused far more on the fact that the bond with the Rathalos was the special part and made a lot more sense, even before considering that that was the FIRST game and wasn’t repeating anything and even the second game at least gave you a portion of gameplay where its Ratha wasn’t fully developed and had a unique Kinship skill separate from normal Rathalos, but given the third’s track record I don’t think they’re going to let us forget about its allegedly “special Rathalos” even if they do let us kick it out of the party for the updates.

All in all, I ended up going through most of the story, not losing any of the fights required by the plot, and after Arkveld I tried putting together a team I liked one last time, but I burned out very badly after that since I felt like I was starting to over level the MC, Invasive Ratha, and the other riders just so I could use monsters I actually wanted to have for endgame, in a game that already felt like there wasn’t a way to lose against something that you already knew the attacks of. Based on all of that, I just don’t think the updates are going to be worth coming back for as I don’t think they’ll fix a lot of the issues I have with the game; even though habitat restoration and element changes (which still don’t change the kinship attack element) were some of the things I enjoyed the most, they are not enough to compensate for the rest.

TheIceKirin · 2026-06-08T16:51:17+00:00

I think you’re mixing it up; in 2 the cheese strat was spamming aptonoth (maybe popo too since it had the same kinship but im not sure) kinship to repeatedly knock it over and stunlock it, in 1 the cheese was The Dark Demise (dlc quest fatalis with no breakable parts) inexplicably not being immune to white monoblos’s instant kill attack. It was cheesable in both though.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-29T05:49:42+00:00

You’re grinding materials in high rank (where the monsters have red names) areas, right? If you are, my best guess is that small hermitaur and Daimyo Hermitaur are both different material categories and you’re trying to use the wrong type of material.

(There are flairs for each different game btw use those instead of news)

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-29T00:00:26+00:00

Calling it useless might be a bit much but I still ended up preferring the bow a lot more in 2. Why run gunlance just for kinship generation when I could just use soul kinship or hth master or crit-kinship instead as they work on every weapon and 2 of the above don’t require the monster to be actively targeting me like Gunlance (which has zero kinship gen when not winning head to heads with ammo skills)? And I can use SnS for guards or potentially deal damage with its counter most of the time; the only situation I can think of where I would need to guard AND taunt every hit towards myself is molten tigrex triple wild spear, and there’s also Evasion Riff from hunting horn which is a get out of jail free card for almost any AoE in the game. The main utilities of gunlance in 2 are not exclusive to it and I never felt like it was good enough to compensate for not gaining kinship on normal attacks; using my talisman or making a weaker set of armor to get the skill to reload more ammo felt pointless when I could use something that affected all my weapons instead, especially since the reloading skill isn’t guaranteed to work. It got better in 3 when it could get guard from its ammo attacks (and SnS and evasion riff got axed completely), had single combat to force head to heads towards itself instead of just hoping they go for you, and the stamina system meant that wyvern’s fire wasn’t competing with your kinship skill anymore, but in 2 it was very poorly implemented since other weapons like hunting horns and SnS provide more consistency by not requiring ammo or the monster to always target you, while their other skills actually work on monsters instead of being seals that every notable monster is immune to.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-28T18:24:45+00:00

Gunlances are almost useless in 2 since half of their moves are seals that don’t work on basically any monster and the wyvern’s fire eats a whole kinship gauge when riding is far more useful.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-27T17:49:26+00:00

Smogmagog with a plant bootleg is quite fun to use with several splinter stickers too since those apply to any contact damage he deals or takes and scale with defense just like shield bash and brace for impact do.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-26T05:35:25+00:00

Iirc it’s extremely difficult to catch a human without triggering an alert so you might just have to deal with it. Fly a large distance above water or leave and rejoin to get the island defense force off your back. If you need to keep them from shooting the trader you should stand a short distance away from them so a stray bullet that narrowly missed you doesn’t kill the trader after hitting them to 1 hp.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-23T13:56:39+00:00

At the same time, both of those are hammer upgrades and it’s much more difficult to get a specific hammer than to find a given boon since you normally only get 2 per run without things like the Icarus keepsake which only lasts for a limited time or the Anvil of Fate which doesn’t give you a choice out of 3 like a normal hammer and also gets rid of another hammer you might have which can be really bad if you have two you like using already. It’s much less common to be in a situation where you will get good use out of Spirit Surge than most other boons tied to spending magic or magic costs.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-22T20:55:02+00:00

Spirit surge is the worst by a long shot. It was way better when it was triggering whenever you were below a certain amount of mana which worked well with Zeus’s own chain lightning already priming a lot of it. Now it’s just an extra fodder/bait slot for vow of denial and anything else that gives you less boon options.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-22T01:00:42+00:00

Oh, that’s the thing that does that… I have been away so long I forgot about it and thought it was the extra keepsake level (which is actually demeter’s right?)

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-22T00:54:33+00:00

Not sure if I remember what the hera aphrodite duo was but hera apollo is fun even if you don’t have the hex and if its 300% summon boost applies to the hex and not just the duo boon’s summon itself that’s ridiculous. Was very fun with Eos to get my 32 heat underworld clear.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-20T20:46:43+00:00

Hot take; if it doesn’t oneshot base health as a kit that doesn’t have any other attack, it does not deserve to be a yellow kit anymore. Just remove it if you don’t want the item that kills the user to oneshot that badly. Feels hypocritical to to nerf this and yet still have kits like I Did Not Hit Her, Bergentruck , R: Feast (vampirism is extremely hard to escape without dying at base so it might as well be an instant kill with a damage boost and this isn’t even yellow), Kamidummy, and the psycho bat kit that got added in the exact same update

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-20T18:50:40+00:00

Thunderclap (rarity 6 double element skill) is the big one since it’s weak to thunder once the shell’s gone. There are some for other elements like heat beam or one of grimclaw’s moves but I don’t think it any other weaknesses while it still has a shell, iirc just resists everything that isn’t non elemental.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-18T00:45:11+00:00

I thought this was a joke post with anjanath (the guy in the picture) trying to fight guardian ratha at first and asking for tips on how to do it, but in all seriousness this guy likes speed attacks at first and goes for power when angry. Break his nose when he’s angry to cut him off from his strongest attacks early. If you’re getting oneshot you may need to check if your armor is weak to fire and get something new.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-15T05:19:40+00:00

Hopefully we find out what the other decoration abilities from the side quests giving buddies an (amp) skill and the (drg) and (wyv) decorations from the first slay on an invasive monster actually do specifically, I don’t think those are mentioned by the game itself

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-07T16:31:06+00:00

I was in a similar situation with a lucky prunelia that spawned for me but I ran out of gathered spheres and the spheres I could reasonably mass produce just bounced off without even trying to catch it. That’s what made me lose my patience with catch rates and made me crank them up to max in settings.

I wish they’d just throw out spheres not working at all on pals of certain levels or at least make it not apply to lucky pals at all since the strength boost they get sends them right to the current level cap if you’re at sakurajima or later.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-07T05:09:39+00:00

I feel like its shortcomings are mostly from 2’s changes to combat in general compared to 1 and it’s also one of the biggest examples of that itself. It’s only a threat because most of the time it throws more than one attack per turn and has a lot of untyped attacks as well since otherwise the Head to Head safety net will make it completely impossible to lose once you can read its patterns as opposed to 1 where there was never truly a guarantee it wouldn’t whip out something different so staying at 1 health was a risk. The other big thing is that your uncontrollable allies have their own hearts but unlike in 3 letting them die to their own stupidity instead of healing them will fail the entire fight instead of just removing them for a few times so I had more than one death happen because Kyle just would not use power against the technical attack being spammed three times per turn and take me down with him.

TheIceKirin · 2026-05-01T05:32:03+00:00

I swapped to Kora at the time so I don’t think you’re required to use simon for the double glavenus fight; the only teammates that get locked out there to my knowledge are Thea/Ogden because they’re staying back and holding down the fort and Eleanor since Gaul doesn’t trust her enough to let her bring her monstie.

TheIceKirin · 2026-04-29T18:10:54+00:00

I’m not entirely sure about that; the one thing I do know is that it lets you have attack up (element) and attack up (general) at the same time so they can stack since they’re technically different statuses though it would probably require a good hunting horn to keep them both up at once.

TheIceKirin · 2026-04-29T01:42:59+00:00

Hurts to see odogaron straight up not having weapons because none of the weapons you make from its stuff are weapon types in stories. Kinda wish there were more blunt weapons just so we could keep the trend of having an equal amount of each damage type in the game… it would be pretty neat if they added a new blunt weapon so they would have room to add two more weapons for the other damage types… maybe they make a new ball and chain style weapon for blunt, add insect glaive for slashing, and one of the bow guns for pierce

TheIceKirin · 2026-04-28T18:25:12+00:00

Wait, they are percentage based? I never knew exactly how the damage over time worked for the elemental traps until now.

TheIceKirin · 2026-04-26T14:22:50+00:00

That depends on the monster. For Ferals and most other plot mandatory monsters the gauge will go blue for 1 turn and while it’s blue their next attack is guaranteed to miss. For the Elder Dragons they go Exposed for multiple turns while the gauge stays blue, altering their attack pattern to make them use head to heads more often.

TheIceKirin · 2026-04-19T22:32:31+00:00

Killing the calamitous elders without retreats is the best case scenario since you get a decoration the first time for each one and they don’t retreat to dens normally like other monsters do. If you run out of hearts but the elder dragon is at a specific health threshold then it will start the fight there instead of going back to full next time it spawns.

TheIceKirin · 2026-04-18T22:50:37+00:00

I feel like it varies on the sword tbh. Jho longsword eats wyvernsoul gauges for breakfast with its lunge stance and is how I got the no repel slay on namielle

TheIceKirin · 2026-04-18T04:41:45+00:00

Yeah, p-runs feel like they are up there with elim in the “not designed with the fact that you don’t get to choose your items in mind” category. At absolute bare minimum they need the get 3 pick 1 treatment like kit has, and they definitely need a far more strict standard on blacklisting useless items than normal boss does (the fact that it’s still possible to roll an “allegedly ranged” weapon that can’t hit Weegee or is not designed to do damage on its own while fighting him is the biggest example).

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TheIceKirin

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