I’m super skeptical about “easy”. My assumption of “easy” is that there may be very few one shot with gear up to par in the beginning like anjanath’s flamethrower until you get to endgame like Nergigante’s crash dive/Toaster’s supernova. Cause to me, I care more if the monster is fun. Valstrax in Rise was really fricken hard for hbg because that monster had long follow up attacks that sucked and was really hard to time with the side hops even with evade extender at pierce range. It didnt help that gunners got one tapped by almost all of his moves. So while blademasters can eat shit, gunners just got obliterated by every attack so learning the fight was too annoying because the punishment from one hit is literal death. It was not a fun fight that I decided to cheese it like all other hbg videos with lightning pierce and kill it in one rotation after being bored of using shield and shotgun.
That is why I assume ranged weapons will now be synced with the same damage taken as melee (I have not confirmed it in beta but I assume so) since it would be weird for someone who swapped from melee to ranged to just get one shotted. It was an old system that didnt make sense since damage reduction of elemental attacks was worse and can be gotten rid of to have more parity. It is way better for all players to experience the same fight instead of all melee experiencing one thing and all ranged experience a completely different thing.
In world, to counter the fact that they removed baldemaster and gunner armour sets, blademaster weapons had an inherant bonus to physical damage reduction, meanwhile gunner weapons had an inherant bonus to elemental damage reduction. The same system is used in wilds.
Why? Balance. Ranged weapons are extremely powerful in every single installment of monster hunter, and in the past gunner armour would have less raw defence to counter this. If blademaster and gunner players had the same amount of defense, all ranged weapons would inherently beat out all melee weapons due to there being no downside at all to using ranged. You're more mobile, you get access to nearly all afflictions and elements, you can do both blunt and slash damage, you get to stay away from the monsters hit boxes, and your dps potential is way higher. The trade off being that you take more physical damage when you are hit.
Honestly i think they made a lot of problems trying to "fix" the "issue" that was gunner armour. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and yet it's exactly what they did and now the new era of fans that started with world or rise or wilds just want both weapons to act the same, irregardless of game balance when the previous armour system worked for over 2 decades with zero issues outside of... checks notes... having to play a game you enjoy for an extra 5-10 hours max to grind out a gunner armour set when you decided after 300 hours that you wanted to try playing a gunner build, and vice versa
Wait, so it used to be that your weapon locked you into an armor type? Sorry, my first was World so I'm not familiar with gunner armor.
having to play a game you enjoy for an extra 5-10 hours max to grind out a gunner armour set when you decided after 300 hours that you wanted to try playing a gunner build, and vice versa
Eh, that sounds fine for the people who play 300 hours. But for those who play for like, 50-80, it would probably be the point where they go "nah" and finally drop the game.
Honestly it does sound like a problem. Design-wise, being able to just grab any weapon without having to grind a whole new armor set seems like the right choice. Locking a chunk of weapons behind a grind is a good way to ensure players don't try them, or just stick to the set their armor works for.
So here's the thing, the people with 300+ hours are typically the majority of players. On top of which, these types of players were the direct focus of the developers until mh world.
Monster hunter is a game that requires a good amount of time sink. It is one of the main pillars of the games design, and this idea of eroding that to appeal to a wider base of players that will touch the game for less than 50 hours over a year and don't like half the game mechanics is frankly ridiculous. On social media however, that take makes you a gate keeper, or someone who despises accessibility.
Monster hunter shouldn't be a game where you can jump on for 45 minutes to an hour a day, win, try anything you like with no cost, and then leave for another day. Monster hunters intended gameplay loop, for japanese commuters with busy lives, is to spend that hour griding for the thing you want, then over the course of multiple short play sessions, sometimes being weeks, you get to the goal. Modern players want that goal reached in 1-2 play sessions guaranteed, which the game will happily provide if you game alot, and can spend 6-8 hours on a session.
The dad with 7 kids and 5 buisnesses who has 24 minutes a day to game can play monhun, and infact is encouraged by the devs to do so since the first game. But the idea is it takes time. It will take that player months to reach his goals. People who are able to play more can reach those goals quicker. Cheapening the experience for people with more free time so that super dad can feel his satisfaction just as quickly, at the expense of the gamers satisfaction, is a selfish and terrible take that too many developers and redditors share, and one i find ruins many games.
If 5 hours of gaming over the course of a week for an optional choice is enough to make someone put down a game, then they should accept the game isn't for them.
Nah times change and so do people absolutely nothing for accounting for that. Be real, alot of the systems in older games were really superfluous. I say that because a lot of those annoying systems have either been streamlined or removed completely. All the stuff talking, is extra fluff that only a small amount of people really enjoyed and if they had kept the games that way, never bothered to improve them in any meaningful way. Monster Hunter would have remained a niche left on handhelds for just the Japanese and the few weebs in the west that were aware of the franchise.
If i had to choose between what we currently ended up with versus where the series just didn't evolve enough. I'd much prefer the former.
So here's the thing, the people with 300+ hours are typically the majority of players. On top of which, these types of players were the direct focus of the developers until mh world.
You know I was going to say that's a bit of a big assumption but... I play Paradox games, so I've been on a similar fanbase and I can totally understand that.
But I'm afraid that... yes, your argument does sound a bit gate-keepy. "If you can't grind the same monster for 5 hours the game is not for you" is... well, from the perspective of someone who hates grinding in general it does sound gatekeepy as hell. Admitedly MonHun is one of the games where I have least felt the grind, but then again I did start with World so I don't have the old ones as reference. I have absolutely modded some materials in to skip some grind at the highest levels though, perks of being on PC.
But anyway here's the main thing: there's a difference between grinding for a power boost and grinding just so you can try a different weapon at your current power level. From a design perspective, grinding for a power boost (or a specific counter to the Mon you want to hunt) feels rewarding, while grinding just to play at your same level feels like the game is wasting your time. Especially when you remember that at level 1, you can just grab any weapon. So you feel punished for not trying new things when you had the chance of doing it without the grind.
And also, you can still grind the right skills on your armor that go with that weapon. So it's not like there's 0 grind at all. You can choose to use all generic skills like HP up so you can switch weapons more easily, or specialize your armor which means using another weapon requires another armor. And choice is good! That puts the choice of how much to grind in the hands of the player and both will feel rewarded.
Ranged users getting hit with more physical damage makes alot of sense for game balance, and is the reason they've done it for over 20 years.
Ranged weapons, in every single entry, have:
-higher dps potential than melee, even after multiple nerfs in every generation
-access to nearly all status ailements and elemental types, far more than a melee user has in a fight
-the ability to stay far away from most monster hitboxes, lowering the chance of a range user being hit by 50% (which is a low estimate, considering a lot of monsters only have around 10% of their move sets as ranged moves)
-access to shields through HBG
-the ability to deal both blunt and slash damage, again ontop of the access to a ton of status ailements
-a huge buff to the effectiveness of status ailements (compare the amount of sleep shot needed vs a melee weapon with the sleep status ailement, or poison shot vs. Poison melee weapons
Now on top of that, as you can see in every single gen of monster hunter, the ranged weapons dominated clear times, speedruns, and challenge runs.
So yes, the extra physical damage is very necessary trade off needed to not make all melee weapons obsolete, and to not make you feel useless with a melee weapon compared to a ranged user who is dominating and ALSO tanking tons of damage.
The "old system" you're referring to was introduced in mh world to counteract the fact they got rid of gunner armour (which would have less defense than blademaster armour), which was in my opinion, a bad choice balancing wise, and it was still better than just making ranged weapons exactly like melee weapons. The elemental buff wasn't supposed to be a buff, it was just added to make range users not complain about "getting the short end of the stick"
Edit: "it is way better for all players to experience the same fight instead of all melee experiencing one thing and all ranged experience a completely different thing." Is an incredibly bad take, the entire point of having melee and ranged weapons is that they experience the game differently, like what???? Insane tourist take.
Just a little correction, I am unsure if this is like that in every game prior to world, but I am currently going through freedom unite and in that game gunner armor has indeed about half the defense of blademaster armor but it also has about twice as much elemental resistance.
So it wasn't a buff/debuff on the hunter, just directly on the gear but effectively (at least in freedom unite) gunners had higher elemental resistances already.
Depends Some attacks having that capability can be fun with how scary they are, so long they are appropriately easy to dodge or block or parry or what have you. With so many weapons having a clash now, it can make for a great risk/reward gamble, where you could just move or superman dive but it would be so sick to clash and whoops I fucked around and found out.
The rest of the moves should be reasonable, though, and the big hype attacks should be thrown out rarely.
On the fence how wilds will go, but we did this whole conversation at base world and base rise already so I'm just kind of rolling my eyes at the people shouting copium. But we'll see.
It is copium, pull the reviews for world and rise and compare them to wilds. Dont see near as many mentions of difficulty or criticism about how easy it is.
hits like that should be more than 99,99% of hp for a build that has fully invested in every means of mitigating damage that is available at that point in the game. Otherwise defensive skills and tankier playstyles will always be playing second fiddle to damage focused, glasscannon builds.
And as we've seen in late-game Iceborne, this tends to build a meta that's extremely toxic and drives a lot of people away because their playstyle isn't the one specific one the game decides is end-game viable. Which would be fine if not for the fact that everything about the skill system, the scaling of enemies for the majority of both base World and Iceborne, and even the open ended combo system that has been at the heart of the franchise since its inception, clearly try to enable a wider variety of playstyles.
I don't care how well telegraphed your move is. Being one-shotted from full hp is never a fun experience. It's frustrating and annoying and invalidates a lot of the possible prep-work that can be done in monster hunter which is so vital to the core of its identity.
Yeah I still disagree. It doesn't invalidate your prep if you still benefit from that prep on every other move, I don't understand that point.
I also think that one shots are especially important in MH games where you have dives and basically infinite heals. The threat from moves that don't one shot you is severely limited by that. Games like Elden Ring are different because you can get worn down by multiple moves over time with limited healing. It's much harder to die to that in MH.
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u/Mallagrim Feb 24 '25
I’m super skeptical about “easy”. My assumption of “easy” is that there may be very few one shot with gear up to par in the beginning like anjanath’s flamethrower until you get to endgame like Nergigante’s crash dive/Toaster’s supernova. Cause to me, I care more if the monster is fun. Valstrax in Rise was really fricken hard for hbg because that monster had long follow up attacks that sucked and was really hard to time with the side hops even with evade extender at pierce range. It didnt help that gunners got one tapped by almost all of his moves. So while blademasters can eat shit, gunners just got obliterated by every attack so learning the fight was too annoying because the punishment from one hit is literal death. It was not a fun fight that I decided to cheese it like all other hbg videos with lightning pierce and kill it in one rotation after being bored of using shield and shotgun.