Monster Hunter World: IceboRnE (II)

[Cyn]

high rank drachen armour has 88% armor mitigation (500 armour) and the top tier master rank sets have 92% defense mitigation (1000 armour)

defense is far and away the most useless stat in the game. get health boost 3 and divine blessing 3. those skills will actually improve your survivability

By your very own explanation, having 500 defense means taking 50% more damage with every attack than 1000 defense. That's... not useless at all.

[Myrrh_Quetz]

Thus is the Rajang Buff armour with some decos tossed in. Thoughts?

[Rhyis.]

By your very own explanation, having 500 defense means taking 50% more damage with every attack than 1000 defense. That's... not useless at all.

you don't go up by 500 armour when you start master rank, you go up by 200, which is about a 20-25% decrease. which sounds cool and all until you actually see it laid out in front of you stacked up beside simply having 3 points of divine blessing and 3 points of health boost

lets say that a monster does the same attack, 5 times in a row, doing 200 unmitigated (naked) damage with each attack:
wearing the starting and mid-tier master rank gear, with 90% defense mitigation, you will take about 20 damage, 20 damage, 20 damage, 20 damage, and 20 damage equating to 100 total damage (you're dead)
wearing drachen/kaiser with divine blessing 3 and health boost 3, with 88% defense mitigation, you will take about 24 damage, 24 damage, 24 damage, 12 damage (divine blessing), and 24 damage equating to 108 total damage (you're alive)

this is the lazy mans formula but you get the idea

on top of that all the low/mid tier master rank gear only gives you access to roughly around 15 total skills... and most of them aren't even good so you will struggle to be able to put 3 health boost and 3 divine blessing on your build while also being able to put offensive skills on at all. on the flip side if you wear drachen/kaiser you will have roughly around 30 total skills and all of them are good, allowing you to easily put 3 health boost and 3 divine blessing on to your build while also having access to weakness exploit/critical boost/etc (and a resistance too actually).

if you play without health boost 3 and divine blessing 3 at any point throughout the story of iceborne, you would have been better off wearing drachen/kaiser to make sure you have those skills. skills are what are important in this game when it comes to both damage mitigation and damage. that's what makes the endgame iceborne gear so overpowered, and honestly why the iceborne endgame is so much easier than the base game was. you have access to 10+ more total skills compared to high rank, easily allowing you to slot in all the best offensive and defensive skills on every single build. we all walk around with 40+ total skills on our builds now and that shits broken.

[silverdragontyr]

That's something I'd like to see addressed in future games. Make more skills not useless. People complain about meta builds shoehorning everyone into one to two builds but it's because so many skills in this are so ineffectively bad it just makes sense to stack all offense skills except very unique skills on very few weapons. Defense as a stat is so laughably bad the augments and even maxing skill boost does effectively nothing.

[Cyn]

I get all of that, but there is definitely a point about halfway through Iceborne where you start to get decent 4 pip decos and armor begins to have some offensive skills on it while being able to be boosted to about 900 defense. Basically around where you fight Narga and Brachy. It's definitely worth pausing there and moving into MR gear because everything past there is going to have potential to 1 shot you with 500 defense and HB3 (Divine Blessing is more a QoL skill because of RNG).

[Rhyis.]

That's something I'd like to see addressed in future games. Make more skills not useless. People complain about meta builds shoehorning everyone into one to two builds but it's because so many skills in this are so ineffectively bad it just makes sense to stack all offense skills except very unique skills on very few weapons. Defense as a stat is so laughably bad the augments and even maxing skill boost does effectively nothing.

there's a definitely a clear and massive divide of which skills are what i would call s-tier skills and all other non s-tier skills. it's pretty staggering tbh

everything past there is going to have potential to 1 shot you with 500 defense and HB3

i beat the entire iceborne story in drachen/kaiser with hb3, dp3, fortify, and a resistance throughout the entire story and i am not a skilled player. i defend shit with my face. this statement is inaccurate

[Krandor]

I stuck with Drachen Armor (without Divine Blessing) up until I could fight Master Rank Teo

[Rhyis.]

yeah that's when i made the change too, which was after i beat shara ish

[Corrderio]

I think I swapped off Drachen around the time I got close to Velk

[Cyn]

I mean, if you want to use 8 mega potions every fight I'm sure anything that doesn't simply outright kill you is just fine.

[Cyn]

there's a definitely a clear and massive divide of which skills are what i would call s-tier skills and all other non s-tier skills. it's pretty staggering tbh


i beat the entire iceborne story in drachen/kaiser with hb3, dp3, fortify, and a resistance throughout the entire story and i am not a skilled player. i defend shit with my face. this statement is inaccurate

Yes, using Fortify as a crutch is definitely the way to go. /s

[Rhyis.]

fortify is the 2nd or 3rd best offensive skill in the game. single best if you take into consideration it's a single slot. when i was talking about s-tier skills before, fortify is one of them

[silverdragontyr]

I never understood the crutch idea here. Yes ideally never getting hit is the way to go. However getting free attack and defense for one slot is very nice. Dying faster and having to go back and redo mission isn't going to help you learn the monster faster. In fact dying slower will help you learn faster as more chances to learn Dodge in case you screw up.

That said everything I've read is upgrade armor to MR around Bell. That's when there is enough MR armor to have the skills you want and the extra defense is just a nice bonus.

[Cyn]

Well you can't really use Fortify in MP outside of Grinding Lands, so it's better to learn to not get hit to start with, and the time that it takes you to die twice and then restock and eat in the quest has to be weighed against the time it saves you by gaining 20% attack. In solo where monsters die in 10-15 minutes even the first time you fight them, it's a hard sell on that being a S ranked skill. I've used it in sets before, but only when I didn't have something better to put there, and it was the first thing dropped for ele resist or w/e. In my opinion Resuscitate is a better all around single pip skill because it lets you ignore water and ice blights and gives you a boost to evade window while they're active, as well as allowing you to quickly roll out of fire blight or blastblight. In fact, resist 1 and crisis combined together pretty much lets you ignore gearing for anything specific at all outside of miasma.

[Myrrh_Quetz]

Someone really needs to fix the wiki for proper drop rates and how skills work. I think FFXI spoiled me in that regard. Like, theres low rank drops, high rank drops, Master rank drops, tempered drops, guiding lands drops, and tempered guiding lands drops.

And then for skills, trying to find any consistent information on certain things is damn near impossible.

[Rhyis.]

https://mhworld.kiranico.com/

[Myrrh_Quetz]

Thats great for drops but still has alot of bare bones info when it comes to skills. So many pages just copy/paste the games words with no proper descriptions or numbers. Not saying that site isn't great. Its super helpful and infinitely better than that awful wiki

[Corrderio]

Sadly there isn't a reliable resource for MHW. I wish I had the time and knew how to datamine then maybe I'd attempt one.

[Myrrh_Quetz]

Sadly there isn't a reliable resource for MHW. I wish I had the time and knew how to datamine then maybe I'd attempt one.

My friends and I were debating this but I’m way too stupid to be of any help. You’d think with the PC release, some group would have done it by now. Like I said, FFXI spoiled me on information

[Khajit]

Sadly I'm still too noob to actually beat behemoth since I don't know a way past the stupid tornado casting. Meteor and everything else is extremely easy to deal with as it's not a very spontaneous monster, but that all means nothing when any attempt to even get close to it destroys my HP.
My gear is generally sorting itself out since just being able to wear a crappy mixed set gives me major mitigation compared to what I had before. I went from 2 carts easily when I first went to Iceborne into no longer having to worry about carting unless I was ultra lazy.
The initial FFXIV crossover quest consisted of my being stalked by an enraged Ajanath for 90% of the fight and having to dodge it while I fight the actual target. Then I proceeded to be unable to find any quest progression because the NPC had moved over to another continent and nobody bothered to mention that on the wiki or elsewhere.

My next project is probably gonna be upgrading my charms to lv 2-3 (Need at least a legiana gem) before I farm power/armour talons. After that I'm just gonna slaughter my way through anything I find fun and that has a "..." until I get a decent weapon. A pair of dual blades without element/status is just trash and that's the only weapon upgrade I was able to make with what I had on hand.
I got 6 guild tickets which gave me some decent decorations from the melder and I'm now on the lookout for some earplug and protection jewels since not getting stunned by roars was a joy until I sacrificed it to make room for a handicraft decoration.

Once all of that is done I'm gonna take on that dumb Viper Tobi Katachi that likes to wreck me.

Edit: And handler cleans up nice. I was shocked when the game changed her gear on me.