This is the whole reason I absolutely adored AT Velkhana's set. Frostcraft made for some super competitive builds that required you to play a bit differently since you had to manage your frostcraft gauge. It helped to add a bit of variety in that post game in my opinion
@@CeraCymmetry I'm still not over the first time I saw the damage numbers from Frostcraft SNS speedruns. I really want Velkhana back in game for this armor skill alone
Froscraft is what made me love GS. Not only did it made Hit-n-Run GS fun but it looked so slick too. That's something I kinda miss from World/Iceborne is the sound and VFX design. I miss Off. Guard's amazing FWOOM effect whenever you'd get a perfect guard. Made you feel powerful, especially as Lance.
It seems like they are trying to make more unique damage skills, like rapid morph or offensive guard. The only issue is that generally the meat & potatoes skills that aren't situational are still what you want to prioritize on most sets, and everything else you can squeeze in is just a bonus. Depending on the weapon, you might barely be able to fit the essentials because of skill tax, ie; gunners needing shot type up, bows need that + stamina skills and charge plus, gunlance and phial spam charge blade need artillery etc. The generic boosting skills should be the weaker ones that you add in as a little extra bonus, and the situational stuff should be what makes your build shine. The skill balance feels very backwards and centralizing.
@@CaptainCFalcon it was way too easy to cram them on before. I think the idea is for you to debate whether you want to cram in attack/expert but there still isn’t enough competition with other Lvl 2 skills for some weapons.
@@CaptainCFalcon Because they wanted to discourage people from stacking loads of attack boost and crit eye without putting in the work to rebalance the skills by making them less cost effective. It's like upping the price of gas because it's the most efficient when you put it in the engine. Some people are gonna pay more and some people are just gonna have less gas.
@@CassieCarryd okay, but having them be level ones makes all of those level 2 slots suddenly much more than "attack/expert goes here," freeing level 2 slots as the place for all of your "check this shit out" decorations. Level ones are just run of the mill shit that lets you do what you already do, but just better. Take less damage? Level 1. Sharpen faster? Level 1. Heal quicker? Level 1. Ailments? Level 1. Farming? Level 1. So why not "Just hit harder" as well? There's nothing special about attack & affinity, they shouldn't be treated like they are.
The more skills that shift away from passive stat increases towards playstyle adjustments, the better. Counterstrike and resentment are interesting skills that reward risktaking; latent power encourages attacking frequently for uptime that rewards play during a window; crit draw encourages specific playstyles; peak performance, heroics, and maximum might rewards specific play; resuscitate turns debuffs into partial buffs. The more skills like these, with more extreme niches, the more diverse meta options become. More ways to play with it being behind the curve let’s people more easily play as they want without pressure internally or externally. Even then, there will always be a most meta strategy, but the smaller the difference between off-meta and meta… the better it is for the players!
i'd argue that we need playstyle adjustments that do not offer concrete damage boosts. take the weird, semi-transformative skills that exist like bubbly dance and hellfire blight and up them a bit. If bubbly dance 3 gave you full bubbleblight sliding and speed boost without the stumbling after a roll it would definitely see use as a playstyle pick. hellfire blight is 1 knockdown a hunt from being a completely valid skill for dual blades in rise too.
Late reply but I agree with your comment a ton. A recent example I loved is the lifedrain for safi because even if it was somewhat popular we had people that thought it was way to much of a risk and wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. I think Risk should be one of the biggest factors when it comes to the highest damage. In sunbreak there’s also an armor combination with the same mindset (Archfiend x Arc combo) I just wish we had more gear with these little quirks. Hell, I’ll even take armors that boost specific moves only. They did try with some sets that require you to stay on one scroll but some like rajang’s feel overly limiting and we have the other issue of no current set actively encouraging scroll swapping even when it’s an optional playstyle supported by the devs via swap evade and redirection.
Wow what a blast to the past. I remember when these "hame" runs used to be mocked on TH-cam and gamefaqs forums back in 08 lol (see the akantot Boyz). Now trap/status chaining while wailing on a monster with some pop music is the most popular monster hunter TH-cam content with Team Darkside. Also, surprised you didn't mention the game changing meta of mantles in world btw. It essentially allowed every weapon to have evade +3 /auto evade and KO status for free.
Good point, mantles were very powerful, but not something I often engaged with, playing as a TA runner, but yea, along with environmental trap locking, ground dunks, Ledge strats, World really had a lot of ways going for it!
0:00 - Intro 2:10 - 1st Generation 3:23 - 2nd Generation 5:13 - 3rd Generation 9:26 - 4th Generation 13:18 - The "Weakness Exploit Talk" 14:55 - 5th Generation and Outro Meta sets or weapons in Monster Hunter are a funny old thing, aren't they. Everyone has an opinion on them regardless if they use it or not. Well I wanted to cover how the most effective sets and weapons have changed through each generation, and cover what I'd like to see in the future! Lemme know what you think, Lads! (comments help the algorithm too and we've made some SERIOUS gains on the channel lately so I wanna keep this going >:) ) x
When it comes to the intro I think evasion is usually pretty aggressive and can lead to more damage openings. You know like dual blades etc. great video thanks for the recent content!
My own personal "easy mode" in World was Bow. Around the time Kulve came out it became possible with Wex to get 100% Affinity with some bows, combined with Critical Element that became an insanely easy way to dish out huge amounts of damage provided you brought the corresponding element to a fight. Also the community developed combos with the bow that utilized 3 points in Constitution and the Quick Shot/Power Shot that were essentially infinite with minimal to zero stamina loss It only got easier and easier after Iceborne, with even higher base affinity bows, craftable high affinity elemental bows, and Silver Los armor. The playstyle is the epitome of Glass Cannon though, since Master Rank monster attacks without the Blademaster defense bonuses are literal death sentences.
At this point I'd even be content with a single meta set unique to each weapon type, like raging brachy seemed to be tailormade for GL and Bowguns (even if everyone still ran it because agitator is just that good). That way we'd at least see *some* variety...
@@gamecavalier3230 Bazel armor is that one armor that basically the only option if your weapon benefitting from shield and/or artillery. It has plenty Lv2 Slots which is necessary for basically slotting any skill that we need. It's the meta for Gunlance, Chargeblade, HBG, LBG, and many more.
@@muhwyndham Honestly, that weirded me out the most. I've started Rise a week ago and I've been dying to finally get some gear that's worth the time I put in. The game instantly throws defender weapons and free HR armor at you from the start, so, stubborn as I am, I always used the normal weapons and constantly felt bad about how much worse it is than the "cheat" gear. HR hits and you get an update that adds even stronger defender options, oh and here's a free armor set stronger than what you have, because Sunbreak came out. It's like they don't want you to actually play the game, right from the start. But the actual point: Even once I got into "endgame" (currently grinding to 100), most weapon sets and armor are just vastly underwhelming. Every good skill in the game is a 2slot and you get like a single 2slot on any given set, even on something like an Elder Dragon armor set. And then I hunted Bazel finally and suddenly his armor has like 4 2slots, I mean what the fuck. I guess I'll hope the last monster has good slots, because currently it feels like the game wants me to gamble 20 years for a charm that has useful skills and slots, while I ram pointless resistance decorations in the flood of 1slots the game throws at me, all while brandishing my terrible sharpness (or massively lower damage) weapon at monsters; thinking about how it would be nice to test out skills like razor sharp or mind's eye, but literally being unable to even slot that.
i think the best way to diversify the meta would be for skills that aren’t “blanket”. i look at the black set and how it’s tailor made for GS and think that we need more of that for each of the weapons instead of skills that are just universally good. we need more skills that component or expand play styles instead of just provide blanket buffs
I've been interested in learning about the meta throughout the series for a while now. I've been playing since Tri but I was never really into playing optimally, I'd just play whatever weapon or invest in whatever armor or skill that would get me through a hunt. World was the first game in the franchise where I'd get sweaty about the meta and I even dabbled in speedrunning some tough hunts like Extremoth, Alatreon and Fatalis. Thanks for making this, it was a joy to watch and very informative!
Making sets for Iceborne post Safi patch was easily one of the most fun times I've had with the series. Even after Fatalis, there's a lot of room to experiment with 3p safi and frostcraft sets, even though 4p fatalis is so comfy you dont need anything else in theory even for elemental weapons.
I think this is a great video that talks about the meta over the course of the series, but I feel like there is some information/nuance that was left out (perhaps on making this video more digestible) that I wanted to add. 7:33 Weakness Exploit getting nerfed doesn't really make it bad, but actually making how you approach specific monsters differently. Adding 5 to a hitzone can actually be very significant damage boost. For example, adding 5 to a hitzone of 45 will increase your damage by 11% which is slightly lower than the 12.5% from the P3rd version of Weakness Exploit. Of course, as the hitzones increase Weakness Exploit becomes less effective, but in certain matchups where you'll be hitting 45-60 hitzones Weakness Exploit will be better than or equal to Attack +20 (mostly depends on the raw of that weapon). 8:03 Slime was very strong in 3U, especially in High Rank. Though, eventually you would see a slight drop off in G-Rank and element (and the rare poison) on a few weapons would start being preferred in a few matchups. 9:45 Honed Blade existed in 3U and was used in some sets. Getting the skill then isn't as easy as 4U since IIRC only Abyssal Lagi's set had the skill and due to the Charm Tables situation not everyone could get a good Edgemaster charm. 9:53 IIRC 1.44 is the Purple Sharpness modifier for 3U, and in 4U the Purple Sharpness modifier was 1.45. 12:11 This White Sharpness modifier change was done in Tri. 12:24 I wouldn't say Handicraft fell off. There were plenty of powerful weapons that needed Handicraft like Elderfrost, Fatalis, Bone GS, Drilltusk, and I can go on. There was also a popular G-Rank set called JhoCena that gave Sharpness +2, Razor Sharp, and a few points away from Critical Eye +1 and had a ton of slots and gave incredible flexibility. It's just that Handicraft isn't required anymore (not that it was required in 4U anyways since there was a few meta weapons like the Bounding Dalamadur that didn't need it).
Fair comment, allow me to respond (: Good comments about WeX and Slime, that's fair, slime still was a very good universal option I think! Honed Blade was left out in the 3U section, for exactly the reason you said, it was good but so limited. You're right about purple in 4U and 3U, my apologies, small difference but still an error! The reason white was mentioned when it was is that purple was accessible in Tri, and I felt like that white wouldn't have been significant compared, you know? The Handicraft comments were more for Gen than GU, yeah, I use JhoCeana myself, wanted to draw attention more towards the closing of the gap between white and purple! Hope that clears up some of those observations, but thank you for thoroughly watching man! (:
Feel like the Fatalis set from World is exactly what a true final endgame monster set should be. Insane and powerful purely for the fun of it, something the player can enjoy from the final monster added into the game and well earned from a very challenging fight. A set meant for the player just to build however they want and be overpowered because they earned it from potentially hours of grinding a ball shattering fight.
Personally, I absolutely despise Fatalis armor in World. Not only do I not like Fatalis in the first place (in my opinion he's super bland and there are so many more visually interesting monsters in the series, including both Crimson and White Fatty), but his armor being bar none the best in the game is a really bad move in my opinion. Even just going back to Gen U, Ahtal-Ka's armor fulfilled the same niche that Fatty does in Iceborne (slots galore), with the major difference that Ahtal-Ka armor doesn't obsolete every single other piece of equipmentin the game. One monster should not have a monopoly on every single armor piece in my opinion. It's much better if you still had actual options once you best the hardest boss in the game.
@@conorb.1901 I understand finding Fatalis bland, but that's the reason Fatalis stands out. In a series meant to have monsters that could realistically be possible, Fatalis is one of the few who aren't possible, and is just a Dragon rather than a Wyvern. An unrealistic yet simple Dragon stands out against the contrast of wonderfully unique yet realistic Monsters. That's how the MH team designed the original Fatalis, though if you think it isn't executed well, I understand that completely.
@ItIsSasha it's less that I find Fatalis bland and more that I find every other blatantly unrealistic elder dragon to be more interesting. Kirin is a unicorn who summons lightning from the heavens, Teostra is a manticore looking thing whose mere presence turns deserts to glass, Dalamandur is a snake so large and dangerous that its simple muscle twitches can flatten a mountain. I just find Fatalis being "just a dragon" to be kind of boring compared to his elder dragon peers. Crimson and White are significantly more interesting than the basic black in my opinion.
A few things you missed. Tri meta was different to P3RD so it's worth mentioning, Alatreon and Deviljho weapons had purple sharpness in tri and were a big part of the meta, as well as dragon shots being arguably more cooked in 3 than in P3RD. Honed Blade was introduced in MH3U with the Abyssal Lagi set and was a huge part of the meta for most blademaster weapons, including Brachydios weapons.
Very interesting video, thanks for sharing! I had heard of the kelbi shot but seeing you guys just stand there repeating the same motion and watching Narga stagger over and over again made me laugh so hard
I think removing or changing Weakness Exploit then either removing or reducing Critical Boost to the same level they reduced Critical Element to would even out the non-Dragonheart playing field. Yes, at the top end you would still have people smashing 7 Attack Boost and 7 Critical Eye into every set, but the difference between that and running a few comfort skills instead would at least be negligible outside of speedrunning. The problem with the crit meta is that raw, affinity, and critical boost are each multiplying into eachother to make a huge gap in power. Every ARPG with multiplier scaling has this problem.
For GU, Silverwind and Hellblade weapons weren't (besides SW LBG) your best options. Hayabusa also get's outcompeted by most endgame mixes with it's usage being very charm dependant. The meta weapons for each type are: GS (Ahtal/Jaggi, Bone Nakarkos sometimes wins out on dragon weak monsters, Ketcha for severely water-weak monsters ) LS (Rustrazor/Ahtal/Drilltusk) SNS ( Dreadking, Soulseer, Elderfrost/Permafrost, Zinogre/Thunderlord, Valstrax/Alatreon, Crimson Fatalis is an option that exsists) DB (Hyper Agnaktor, Ludroth, Elderfrost, Hyper Lagiacrus, Valstrax, Hellblade for some multi-mon hunts) Hammer (Gore/Crimson/Ahtal) HH (Redhelm/Bone, Grimclaw online) Lance (Elderfrost/Ahtal, sometimes Rustrazor) Gunlance (Ahtal, Blango and the Dreadqueen meme) SA (Elderfrost/Ahtal, Hellblade is an option that exsists) IG (Crimson Fatalis, Elderfrost, White Fatalis, Rare 3 Black Fatalis, Soulseer) LBG (Narga/Silverwind) HBG (Hyper Zinogre/Kushala) Bow (Yekla/Hyper Nerscylla, rarely Ahtal but it's an option that exsists)
When i started playing back in Freedom Unite i never cared for the best stats, it was fun because Great Sword hit hard and i barely cared about the rest. Playing the rest of the games was quite the same, even on 3rd Portable, but it was only when i got into 4U that i learnt was really was "meta" and what wasn't. And boy, what a journey! Farming decos, guild investigations, and above all, geting my SeGaSeGaRa set, even i ventured with the double apex monkeys with the Hame Runs! Metas are definitely good because they teach you what skills and weapons work together, and they expando on your ability to make your own sets, playing outside of meta stuff but still understanding what your skills do and how do they synergize with your weapons. The best example is the Para Builds and Froscraft GS on World
I'm a SnS user in both FU e World, I totally feel what you're saying here about just going into what's fun. But I kinda don't get a lot from the Meta people, I like to fight with calm and take time and all Meta tutorials are about speed killing. In the end Im left with the responsibility to make my own sets without much of a help beside the Wiki
my issue with the WexTouch Crit meta was never Meta = Bad but as you also elaborated on. you get free 40% (probably its more or less idk too in depth) universal damage bonus and no sharpness drain for not turning off you brain whilst playing the game thats it. things like stylish assault, frostcraft, dragonvein awakening chaos gore weapons/rust bow in GU allowed for much more unque playstyles and yet its the same old wex crit spam weve seen ever since generations with occasional outliar here and there i do tho have the feeling either capcom wants to reward players for not playing completely braindead or they are oblivious to how some of the skills shape their game, yet im unable to tell which of the 2 it is
for rise, anti-aquatic is an amazing ramp up skill for the right matchups. the ramp-ups really help make different weapons good against different matchups in a way other than just element.
I would agree and likewise for Anti-Aerial, they play into specific matchups pretty well, I really enjoy the Ramp up system as it feels like a more extended version of the honing from 4U which only gave you 3 options on every weapon. My only exception is, some weapons seemed to live or die by the ramp-up system. Some weapons like the Bowguns are rather piddling with their Ramp-Up choices, more ammo for a certain type is certainly useful at times or some extra damage to go along with my barrel choice, but nothing really game-changing. Meanwhile, I couldn't for the life of me find any good Power Phial weapons for my Switch Axe in Rise until I custom-built my Rampage S weapon for it, but once I did and gave it the Ramp up skills for non-elemental boost with a good sharpness pattern, affinity and raw along with the Power Phial, and built a set around it, it seems to have blown every other axe out of the water without question, including Nargy. I suppose that's the point of Rampage weapons, to build your dream weapon after all. But until that point, I personally felt like playing SA was meant to feel mediocre outside of the fact it combos really well now in Rise thanks to the Wirebug system. I get that Exhaust/Element/Status phials all have their uses and I do like having those for mid-game progression or messing around, yet when I wanted Power specifically for endgame damage, I felt like I had only one real choice which thankfully the Ramp up skills was able to provide. Sorry for the mini-rant.
From the games I played, and excluding gunner weapons: MHTri: Alatreon/Deviljho weapons with Helios/Vangis armor to get purple sharpness. MH3U: Brachydios weapons with Honed Blade or other blast weapons with Awaken. MH4U: Relic weapons. Different combinations of armor that provided Handicraft, Razor Sharp, Challenger and Attack+. Shoutout to the Star Knight set. MHGen: Hellblade Glavenus weapons with Silver Rathalos armor for the WEx + CritBoost. MHGU: Depends on the weapon type, but the ones from Ahtal Ka were pretty busted overall. Armor skills were focused on crits and sharpness management. Most sets were made of parts from Hyper Deviljho, Hyper Ceanataur and Silver Rathalos. MHRise: Narga/Tigrex or Rampage weapons. Full Valstrax armor for Crit meta + Dragonheart.
Wonderfully concise and constructed video, Cera! If there's one thing I have to add it's that I'm surprised you didn't mention Star Knight at all in the 4U segment. While it wasn't the absolute pinnacle of strength, it was by far the best meta set in terms of ease of obtaining and building around. Everyone and their cat wore the thing. Rodeo God also made it comically busted with IG. So many fights (the elders and Gog especially) could be completely trivialized by a party of four IGs in Star Knight just spamming mounts.
Thank you! And yeah, great point about Star Knight, it was very good for beginner players to start looking at powerful sets at endgame, personally I think I’d do things a little bit differently if I were to do this again, because I missed the section on Aerial strats in World, too! Glad you enjoyed buddy! 🤙🏻
This was fascinating to listen to. Meta is something I try not to pay too much attention too but when you play solo you tend to need to up your damage output. I was happy to hear Ceanataur's armor was a good choice in FU because I worked my brain hard figuring out a good set for G rank ! Thank you for your hard work Cera. 😉
In generations the "balance" with hyper offensive crit sets was the Hayabusa feather and other integral pieces lack of defense. With high end monsters being essentially 1 shots even through moxie, running a full crit boost set was very risky unless you had complete confidence as a hunter. Other safer options had comparable damage and nice utility.
I think the desire to want to be strong, while also having the need to make multiple sets and weapons is why I play dual blades, and when element is more viable on it: Bow. I was so sad in 4U when there was the Seregios bow as the "one to rule them all" situation.
As GS main, both Valstrax und AT Velkhana are amazing sets to me. I remember using Dragonheart on a Valor GS in GenU very fondly, and Frostcraft Crit Draw was the only way for me to actually be able to get Fatalis down solo. I hope there's more sets like these, that award different playstyles. Rise seems to be on the right track for that, with negative crits becoming a viable playstyle.
and this is why i love WEX (Iceborne addition) in a vacuum. 30% base was acceptable, and extra 20% for engaging in wounding made u upkeep the wound. However, people treat clutch claw wounding as a 100% uptime thing and got frustrated, so in the end people got angry at wex change too.
it was capcom inflating HP numbers incredibly high, putting damage tresholds to be met during a certain time frame in fights like Alatreon and Fatalis, got rid of every weak hit zone on the body of Rajang etc that made wounding feel like a 100% thing. People weren't treating it that way for no reason. There is no way you will kill Fatalis with pre Fatalis gear without wounding as a normal player. There is no way you don't get tired from fighting a Rajang with the World AI without wounding. It's not just the players, it is also the developers deciding to design the fights around it that made woudning feel like a 100% uptime thing.
Happy to see how Sunbreak made the elemental meta more relevant to other weapons other than DB or Bow. And even made it competitive if not better for some playstyles like Courage Hammer or Surge Slash GS
I love the introduction of damage skills that aren't simply just boosting crit chance and attack in rise, but I still wish crit wasn't such a nice boost period. There's so many skills that get ignored every game because if you want to do a lot of damage, you just go for attack, agitator, crit boost, wex, etc. Not playing crit meta means you deal noticably less damage and the hunts become longer obviously, which isn't a fun trade off IMO.
First I've heard latent power is a good offensive skill, I thought it was just a comisseration if you go hit a lot, you get a slight attack buff and constitution for 90 seconds.
@@Purpletrident oh, no worries. Besides, latent power might be incredibly powerful, it's just I have no idea how it works in all of its appearances, how it interacts with blocking damage and what have you. Worked alright enough bringing Miralis gear vs. hallowed jhen.
This makes the moments after beating Valstrax in Rise for the first time even funnier. We both appear back in the village, sprint over to the smithy, and I let out a big sigh of disappointment and announce "IT'S SO BORING!"
I’ve never liked the monster hunter ‘meta’ since, I think, it goes against how monster hunter was meant to be played. Playing online and seeing all the amazingly unique ways people decide they want to play the game, and how they interact with others is such a joy. Those breakneck games you occasionally get that you win just by the skin of your teeth give you such a rush, and makes the online play so much of a rush, and that’s what keeps me coming back. So when I start a quest with a Chargeblade with friendship, evade window, and jumping maxed out, and the three people who join my quest are all bowguns that sticky spam the whole match and have the exact same load out because the internet told them to.. it can make the game feel hollow. Sure they’re winning, in fact, they’re trivializing fights, but I guarantee you no one on that lobby had fun.
You summed up what I dislike about playing meta. The sheer boring nature of playing and building sets for numbers and not variety of gameplay. I always try to make "dumb" or at least fun sets like using statuses or interesting skills like sliding affinity or slapping evade window on CB and just manual sidehopping. I think Capcom really needs to make more interesting skills with all kinds of conditions or prerequisites rather than just making flat boosts to stats
I agree with wanting to see more unique skills. As for me, I always like fighting at max power possible, so I’ll always try to use majority meta sets as it’s fun to me, but I see where you’re coming from if you don’t really like playing with those skills. Thanks for the great comment!
One thing that would definitely help is making utility skills less expensive to slot IMO. The offensive skills could stand a slight nerf, but whats so strong about them, is that they are always on. Nerfing them too much makes them redundant, but I would still slot passive offensive skills because of their uptime and being able to fit any build. Its bad IMO that when I want to make an "Anti-Monster-Set" that is very comfy, with earplugs, maybe wind and an elemental resistance, I have to sacrifice almost the whole set to these and cant fit anything offensive then. Utility skills are just so underwheling while offensive skills are overwhelming and they need to fix that disparity. Sure, having new offensive skills with more conditions and skill requirements would be cool, but theres tons of utility skills that DO boost damage in theory, just unreliably and at way to much cost edit : another example, if I want to be an unkillable tank with lance for example I have to get 5 guard levels AND guard up twice? and that doesnt boost my defense in any way, just makes my guards very good. takes way too much slots
Or movement focused skills too, faster movement but taking your damage slots would lead to a more skillful and active play style with the survivability being in the hand of the reflex and speed of the hunter. Or maybe I'm too much of a SnS user and would like to run fast around the fight :v
I think there is some merit to nerfing "boring" skills like crit, wex and all that. But I think a primary factor to them being used over everything else is just how consistent they are. You can't fail at using Crit or WEX, it always gives you a boost in damage, that's why its usually in the META, even if you fail a condition on a less boring skill once, that's likely enough to make the more boring always active always positive skills like crit, more effective.
I mean in essence it's "damage up = good". It doesn't matter what name you plop on it. If you add crit chance to a game, then that will be a damage increase sought after by players. And if you artifically make it impossible to gain a substantial amount of crit chance, it feels like a shit skill, that's wasted. The solution isn't to nerf the good skills over and over, the solution is to introduce other skills that stand on par with them, without being necessary. To make necessary skills easier to slot/use, rather than massively harder. After the max might nerf, literally no one used max might anymore. That isn't delicate balance, that's just taking a shotgun to the meta. With crit eye and atk (and like every other good skill in the game) becoming 2slots in a game that barely has 2slots, you don't "achieve balance" you annoy the players into having shit sets, no variety and playing the charm gacha, probably fueled by the "not MH" tower defense nonsense. Make skills easier to slot and more varied and you'll see a more diverse meta. If there's a skill that enhances TCS or gives it some new properties/a second hit when you get hit during it etc., then GS users will use that. If you make offensive guard not absolute ass to fit into a build or create a skill that lets them transform their normal counter into a cross slash, then that'll be taken. If you add a skill that lets you guard counter an additional time consecutively, then that'll change up Lance play and make it more interesting. It's very easy to cry for nerfs, but nerfs in the hands of an unexperienced balance team, tend to make a game colossaly worse.
Well so far in sunbreak, GS builds are starting to forego some levels in focus for offensive guard as strongarm stance procs offensive guard, giving 15% attack on the follow up TCS or Rage. The timing for it is kinda tricky, as you need to parry right at the beginning of strongarm for the skill to proc, but the damage put out is insane. New skills like charge master have given element GS and Status GS their first viable showcase, particularly Auroracanth, Narwa, Chameleos, and the odd dragon slayer parasol some potential. There’s a huge demand for chain crit on element builds now as it applies an attack, element and status boost over the affinity of GenU chain crit. The new Foray skill brings incentive for using poison or para more offensively for the damage boost, and the new Arc set from Shagaru could be paired with the Abyssal weapons to counteract the negative affinity of them to abuse critical boost and their high raw
Critical damage is something that plagues so many games when devs don't really know how (or don't try) to balance around it. In most games these days you can reach pretty high critical strike chance (usually 75% or higher) and at that point critical strikes become less of an RNG proc that temporarily increases your damage and more of a strait up flat damage multiplier. This becomes extremely apparent when you start adding critical strike *damage* multipliers on top of 100% critical strike chance. There are ways to balance around crit to have more competitive build variation but most games choose not to implement them. Things like: - Dot damage that can stack (poison, acid, bleed, ect.) - Ramping damage that goes up with either consecutive hits, or time spent since you last go hit (up to a cap of course) - Conditional damage (an example could be, for 20 seconds after breaking any body part you do 25% increased damage) - Low HP damage (giving the player increased damage for sustaining low HP. This could be considered conditional damage) To be fair I believe all of these do exist in some form in the Monster Hunter games, just not to the extent that they really compete with the all mighty critical damage. And even if they did, often times critical damage would just be combined *ontop* of these other forms of damage to then increase them even further.
forgot how crazy valor hbg was in gen ult lol. though i’d also add valor long sword to that broken tier, it was everywhere online and the counter + combo was ridiculous
As someone who got into monster hunter with iceborne a few years ago and has been trying to learn anything and everything about the old world this was a really cool video idea!
I'd love to see other interesting sets to come back I personally loved Frostcraft and the set i enjoyed playing most was my Frostcraft Crit/Punishing Draw (needed a safi weapon for it) playing solo hunts with Slugger 5 was hilarious seeing the monster just flip over on its ass when it got ISS'd (much prefer the older way it worked) Every now and then i think about going back to World just to play that set again
Honestly if there was a skill that unlocked internal ammo for the bowguns in gen 5 I would max that out in a heartbeat. Really missed the internal ammos that made some bowguns very unique other than the types of ammo they could use
I subscribe to playing lance, so aside from GU where striker lance charge poke was STRONK, and technically FU, I play to mine my own sad meta of making lance DPS. Love it! Thanks for the video!
To be fair with regards to purple sharpness in Portable 3rd, purple sharpness was usually reserved for G-rank/Master rank, and not high rank. Except for in Tri, which wasn't covered in this video, but had a comically focused meta around the Deviljho and Alatreon weapons, which just for some darn reason did get it. And that was with the old Freedom Unite multipliers that had carried over.
Before it got nerfed Heavy Bowgun was also dominant in the early days of MH World as well. With builds focusing on pellets and cluster shots you could dish out absurd amounts of damage.
Something I'd like to add about 4U Charge Blade is that there's a handful of weapons that basically cover 98% of situations you might want: Brachy and the other Blast CBs are your general utility ones and perfect for solo play as you don't have to worry about the blast explosions knocking around other players, Akantor is your pure damage output spam super CB since impact phials scale off of raw only, and the Tigerstripe Zamtrios and Shrouded Nerscylla CB's are for para and sleep spam usually seen with MiKuMi(cham/kush mixed sets for status builds) or UKaU(de-facto honed blade with tons of skills like my main set having a fairly high tier talisman but not top 1% or anything getting AuL, Mind's Eye, S+1, Wexploit, Art Novice, Guard+1, and Tremor Resist). Keep in mind that the Akantor CB not caring about sharpness or affinity means your core skills drop to only Guard+1, AuXL, and Art Novice with whatever you feel like you can get left over and if you're running a set with mind's eye then you'll never have to sharpen as pretty much all of your damage comes from phials anyways. Art Novice is a 30% buff to phial damage in 4U and the gems are 1 slot +2's meaning you can throw it on practically any build with little sacrifice if any. GU I'd also like to say basically every weapon is incredible in their own ways and the only one I feel isn't worth the effort is Gunlance
Thanks for the content! I am a newborn hunter to the series (started in MHW) and videos like this helps me a lot to understand everything! Keep up the good work :)
Really enjoyable video, and I think Capcom has been starting to diversify skills a lot, especially from Icebrone onward. True Dragonvein Awakening is probably my favorite skill in the entire franchise and things like Rapid Morph and load shells make sets feel more custom made to each weapon. There's also some really fun stuff like Bubbly Dance and Hellfire Cloak which, while by no means ultra powerful, at least show a willingness to push boundaries with how skills impact playstyle. All that's left is to keep expanding on it
Fantastic video! I'm actually curious as to the discussion on why Weakness Exploit is so despised. I see it as the perfect armor skill since it rewards players who are skilled at the game while providing no benefit to unskilled players.
While it benefits good play, 50% bonus to crit kinda leads to gemming in crit boost to add onto damage, which eclipses most other damage skills you can add. Rise at least has more skills give percentage damage boosts, but wex is still a no brainer since having a 3 point skill is better than gemming 7 points in
It rewards you too much for how little it costs, for doing what you should be doing anyways. It's still providing a good chunk of benefit to unskilled players - the big yellow numbers that show larger amounts mean most people will end up going for weakpoints once they figure out what that monster's weakpoints are, maybe with some attempts at breaking, and those who are truly unskilled won't be paying attention to skills at all. In both World and Rise, it would have been an exceptionally strong skill at a flat ten points per level, better than any other affinity skill. That you don't get it if you go wide, or on some of your pierce procs, or if you're bad at the game (like me) is honestly irrelevant - it'd still be the best decoration/skill per point at nearly half the return it currently is. It means other sources of affinity are pointless most of the time - why deal with latent power, for example, when you can immediately get half your hits to be crits with Weakness Exploit? This reduces potential build variety - and also means inherently high affinity weapons (like Narga) are either stupid strong or not worth bothering with (due to being able to just get huge affinity anyways).
This is why I play chargeable in world, while it's not the best I have too much fun using offensive guard to parry monsters and gain a reward of affinity and attack boost along with typical parry benefits as opposed to blocking. I started playing a lot differently when I learned that I could get 15% more affinity after parrying I stopped dodging small bites and swipes and it felt fun. While I run critical eye on my gems and such I always spare space for offensive guard decos, because it's more interesting than equip and forget about.
It's a shame that it was so overtuned, but I really liked the Valstraxsz set on principal, with how it all synergises. I personally ran it with a few Rathalos pieces, and some Heroism gems to really go for some High damage at low HP scenarios, since with the stupid high armor of the set, and all your resistances being set to 50, I felt pretty comfy being able to tank a stray hit at that HP as Charge Blade.
The Black Dragon Spear or BDS in MH1 was the best weapon against the Raths because they would get headlocked from pretty much just spamming the standard up poke combo. That said, almost every player I knew had a dedicated gunner set for use against Fatalis. Headlocking was also not as effective against Diablos, Gravios, and other monsters. Due to the need for Rath Plates to make the Fatalis set and the super low drop rate of plates, headlocking sort of was the meta though because most people would endlessly farm them praying to get the plates they needed and most endgame players were aiming for the Fatalis armor set as the best armor set in the game.
Meta is something that you adapt into the further you get in the game. I recently got Sunbreak and just entered the M tier quests. After spending 800+ hours into MH:W I finally learned how this is part of the game design as well. Very simply put, the difficulty of this game has a very steady climb, but it is ever so consistent. You can manage just fine with your standard starter weapon and kit, until fights start taking 30 minutes and you don't have enough resources to keep up. You are nudged to improve your skills, damage and toolset to survive the hunts. Now once you hit M-Rank things start to shift a little. This was the same in Iceborne, and the same in Sunbreak. Monsters start to hit REALLY hard. The your HP-pool is starting to lack and you get hungry for better defenses to keep you alive and not to get one-shot. So at low tier M-Rank you aren't better off building towards endgame gear yet, it is actually smart to take skills that help your survive as well. Does this hurt you playing solo? Yes. But these games are meant to be played in multiplayer. And in multiplayer, as long as 4 people do okay damage and survive, you still finish faster than playing solo. But once you het the true endgame. Where elder dragons are just a regular monster, and you get hungry for their upgraded versions. At that point defenses do so little compared to just killing the thing faster, so you survive as well. It means you HAVE to learn the fight. You HAVE to learn the moves. What players don't realize is how good they actually are at that point. So instead of survival, putting everything into being as deadly as possible -> actually makes the game easier. Welcome to the Monster Hunter gameloop. It is VERY addictive.
I wanna point out the madness that was OG tris bowgun system. It was the first time rapid fire sticky came to be and single handedly nerfed both sticky ammo and cluster ammo capacity down to 9 from 15. the madness that were the 4 man groups doing sub 5 alatreon hunts. clip size 5 rapid fire stickies. the god damn madness was real.
@CeraCynnetry im absolutely amazed u didnt cover the bow and bow guns in rise as the bow is one of the most ridiculous weapons in the game as it has innate scaling issues
You had a few mistakes here and there like when talking about sharpness modifier changes (eg: 1.32 white was from Tri on, not 4U on, while 4U buffed purple after 3U nerfed it, then GU nerfed it back) and some of the strats, but good video nonetheless! However, you missed the point a lot of people are making about the "meta", it's not that they don't hit good hitzones to take advantage of the skills and whatnot, it's that later games MASSIVELY bloated monster health, to the point you are forced to run tons of DPS skills instead of just fun sets if you don't want to take 40 minutes on a quest. Basically later games just assume you are running min-maxed full DPS sets rather than be properly balanced, it's how you end up with things with more health than multiplayer-balanced G/M rank from previous games range solo in high rank Rise! This effectively kills any semblance of running fun or funny weapons, like a pizza cutter sword or a hammer that heals any allies you hit with it and so on, which is why most people hate the "meta". It's like from World and on, Crapcom started catering more to the 1% min-maxing rather than the average person wanting to have fun, it's good to have a tough challenge of a fight, but there's much better ways to do hard fights than tons of HP and attack, so it won't make 99% of all equipment useless!
some more information for first generation: before G, the combinations of armor pieces that give skills are hardcoded in a table. Lance is very strong not only because of its defensive capability and precise attacks, but it also has a mechanic where it always uses the weaker of sharp or blunt meatzones on a monster (which is still present nowadays though the blunt aspect got a nerf starting in mh2). Bowguns also deserve a mention because pre-MHG has a bug in how bowgun damage is done, allowing you to apply the properties and damage of, say, clust 3 onto normal 1 ammo. for more info, that one's called Lilo bug (lilo short in jp for reload). White sharp was also super important in MHG, and on the subject of sharp, ps2 calcs sharp incorrectly (due to nonstandard Float implementation), and blue sharp will bounce on certain hitzones like Basarios shell or Fatalis tail where on emulator it won't (as intended by the formula used)
element and status were also very effective in 1st gen, where you can apply poison even when the monster is taking poison damage; elemental weaknesses are exaggerated on most monsters, and almost every monster has a high weakness to Dragon to boot; rathian head went from 70% dragon efficacy in the jp release to 35% in international mh1. yet another reason why BDS is such a meta weapon in thesr early ganes
One of the beautiful things about playing Gunlance is that the meta is fairly ill-defined compared to other melee options because the boosts largely suck on it. Like yeah I can take Crit eye but my pokes are already weak and it doesn't help shells at all, so I'll take Evade Extender for DPS uptime.
I wholeheartedly agree, the meta sadly tends to get... pretty narrow and stale. Though I have a lot of personal bias as someone who, for some reason, most of the time happens finds the suboptimal things to be the most fun. Charged Shot GL and Prowlers being the main culprits in this regard.
I think that a lot of the new world games meta design choices are based around "ivory tower" game design (D&D term) in which what the developers intend is not to provide a variety of choices for players, but rather to reward mastery and making the "correct" choice. It's the only explanation for things like WEX and Crit Boost which are simply the optimal way to play and you're wrong for not using them. Ivory tower game design is contentious among any community and Monster Hunter is no exception. It does make some sense if you consider how Capcom probably intends Monster Hunter to be played, in which players teach other players and a base of community knowledge is built. Offmeta skills are not "mistakes"; rather, Capcom and the Monster Hunter design team sees these as a learning opportunity in which players are expected to realize that their choices are incorrect and to instead move towards the optimal setup. Personally I don't mind ivory tower game design. I like that the game rewards knowledge and mastery. However, I can understand why some players, especially more casual ones, might hate it, since it promotes a lack of diversity in endgame builds.
This is a very interesting perspective and it makes a lot of sense. But they could make other skills that require a high amount of skill (Peak Performance, Offensive Guard) be as strong as WEX/CB. The problem with WEX/CB is that their multiplicative effect scales too much compared to everything else and makes a huge gap between comfort sets and optimized sets.
@@Kumoiwa But isn't that part of the point? The *goal* is for optimized sets to outperform comfort sets by a significant margin. The actual goal of ivory tower game design is for there to be a correct choice, not a variety of options. The goal is to reward system knowledge rather than to encourage creativity. Capcom *wants* players to experiment only to find out that WEX and Crit Boost is correct. That's the only thing that really makes sense if you consider how long WEX has been this way now.
I wish they would make those outright more damage skills much weaker and increase the power of existing ones and make more interesting offensive skills like you said. Frontier's skills that would reward you for evading were so much fun imo, but it did feel like it forced a bit to play evade style, and maybe not everyone enjoys that. I'd love more interesting perfect guard skills too. Like Perfect Guards always give you the minimum recoil or something
Up until gen 5, I've been a staunch "I play with full aesthetic sets, screw skills" type of player, so I basically stuck with a single weapon I know exactly how to use for 10+ years (yes it's long sword, no I won't apologize for it). Come gen 5, before the layered system was finally completely opened up well into Iceborne's lifecycle, I still kept playing with full sets, although I did start branching out into other weapons. The set effects felt like the dev team was finally throwing us full-set players a bone (thank you Legiana set for saving my never-get-might-bow-jewel bad luck), but in the end a lot of them still felt underwhelming - so many set effects were literally just old skills that were removed from the main skill system in gen 5 (e.g., punishing draw from Barioth, crit element from rath). I really wish more sets had interesting set effects like Safi or Shara. Now that the full layered system basically removing the fashion from the gameplay and Rise not having strict set effects (the elder sets' Soul skills and Dragonheart are analogous to set effects, but I find them existing as mere points make going for full sets less rewarding), it's all but certain that mixed set will always have a leg up in the meta just because of their flexibility
I wanna see if peak performance ever touches meta, it's a fun skill, least it was back in 4u. I put it on my medic build versus Fatalis once, did not go how I thought it would. Fire, very good at dealing chip damage you see.
The problem with it in rise is the percent increase on attack boost 4/7. With Anj waist and ingot boots giving 4 automatically, it's makes squeezing in 3 peak weird over pushing 7 ab. I miss the point base system where it was a puzzle to fit 5-7 functional skills together.
Really the true ideal would be if status, raw and element all had good matchups. Like there should be a monster that is still best fought with a raw weapon, some sort of elemental based monster that just sort of absorbs it. It should be an interesting choice to go for one or the other, not always element or always raw. I like Kushala in the older games because you basically have to use a poison weapon. Poison is basically useless outside of that, but it's so good in that particular fight
The problem is that elemental damage is just flavoured raw damage. There will be no fundamental difference between a raw meta and an element based meta with how the damage and skills currently function. Until the change the philosophy behind elemental damage it will stay as the worse option.
@@domp2729 well the biggest difference is that elemental favours multistrike, while raw favours crit, but yeah I see what you mean, but it would still be better than the slime meta.
You forgot to mention Auto reload HBG on MHFU! It made your clip basically infinite and you could go a full hunt without reloading. It set your recoil to max but you could still shoot elemental ammo, which in FU had piercing effect. It was so ridiculously strong it never came back lol.
You missed a lot of meta in mhgu. It’s a really big game with probably the most monsters and equipment in the series. Valor longsword obviously doesn’t need explanation but here’s a rundown: -striker lance(charge spam) -striker elderfrost sns -ahtal-ka gs crit draw -adept lbg -heavy bow(akantor/ukanlos destroyer) -crimson fatalis glaive -valor switch axe+demon riot discharge spam -gathering prowler(boomerang) All of these are super busted but only striker lance and prowler could match the sheer heart attack valor hbg gives to monsters.
@@CeraCymmetry i mean yes, but you could try negative crit meta with diablos/bloodbath hbg that can outpace normal crit with Zinogre and Daora hbg. Or diablos cb(nice name) running completely raw off of impact phial damage which pairs quite well with full valstrax gear + artillery novice. I know gunlance was pretty lacking mhgu but with also running raw with valor/adept nakarkos gl(the blue one) with skills that improve shelling + dragon’s breath could do some serious damage, and if you want to, add trump card to your set for a 1.4x shelling damage since dragon’s breath is connected to your shelling effectively making as if it was a hunter art.
I have blight resist, earplugs, evade window and stun resist on every set I make. Since I'm not some sweaty speedrunner, I'm not going to dodge every hit. Having these defensive skills saves me more time during a hunt than having a bit more damage.
With certain weapons in xx/gu(refering to valor ls) razor sharp was not needed(it was mostly used on mantis ls and deviant tetsucabra ls set ups) I remember meta skills being Critical eye+3 Challenger+2 Weakness exploit Critical boost
Oh and it was daora's ceti that was op and not daora's delphinidae The meta for hbg revolved around these few guns,namely: Daora's ceti Orcus quarcus(as mentioned In the video) Diablastzooka and ivanus(for longer hunts) Buster lancera Akantor descent Le deluge LA foi
I still remember how it was debated to ban Dragonheart in MHGU from TA, because of its insane bonuses when the game initially released. No bothered to care for Crit Boost for weeks until someone actually started testing and doing the numbers. Then it caught like wildfire.
I think that in terms of variety, GenU still holds the cake. Sure, everyone was still using the crit meta, but atleast it wasn't a matter of only running a single armor set like fatalis armor. The Neset Armor was the go-to cookie cutter armor set, but if you wanted something really good you had to go for a mix set. Beside, Some deviant armor sets were also really good and the RNG charm system, while not prefect, ensured that everyone was using different gears depending on what charms they had. But my favorite thing was that nearly all weapons were endgame viable once fully upgraded. When I look at fatalis weapons in iceborne, it's insane how much better they are from everything else, sometimes being almost 20% better in terms of raw damage than the second best option. In GenU, even the best of the best weapons were barely 5% better than everything else, so you had wayyy more options in terms of endgame weapons, and it wasn't always the same monster for every weapon types. Sometimes it was the final boss weapon that was the best, sometimes fatalis, sometimes it was Rustrazor or Elderfrost and other times it was something unexpected like the blangonga gunlance being really good or the nerscylla bow.
Or just play heal prowler with 2 gathering prowlers in generations ultimate and never worry about having to die too much and have enough materials to craft most weapons and armor in 1 hunt. Also strong elemental damage, or status easily for days. And easy lunge for mounts. There is a good reason prowler was easy mode.
Yeah I honestly wouldn't mind if they removed WEX and Crit Boost completely, it gets boring fast. Might as well get rid of Attack Boost as well, since that'd just be what everyone would use without those two. I'm more fine with Crit Eye since you might wanna use that to get rid of negative affinity, and it'd already be nerfed without CB. I'd be fine with Guard skills being as expensive as they are in Rise if that were to happen. I'd love to see more skills like Rapid Morph and what Quick Sheath does to LS in Rise, that stuff is cool.
I want to add something you miss in gen 4 Mh4u While hame is the meta, for 4 player on guild quest theres a lot of build outside it that i think should be mentiones -stary sky armor is op, literally everyone use it when it come out -meta for weapon is the highest raw relic weapon you can get except for range -for bowgun, steve weapon is good for solo since it reload on roll. I think the required skill for its hbg is recoil 2, evade extender/prudence/feeting fleet(?), And pierce up, then whatever offense option you have -mounting is op
fun fact, critical boost is a skill that originated from Monster Hunter Frontier and came to generations after trying to test how it would turn out in mainline
@@CeraCymmetry yeah, i heard something years about it being some tests but i never saw any confirmation of it but i felt it wasn't an unreasonable reason
The only way I could see crit builds getting nerfed is if Wex got changed to an attack boost or back to 3U where it was a 5% boost to weak spots. Even then, we have so many ways to get to max affinity in Rise and IB that it's not even funny. Between Crit Eye and Narga weapons, you're already pushing 80% affinity. All you need is Challenger 5 and you're at 100%, Challenger 3 at 98% if you augment affinity, with the only downside being it's not a guaranteed crit unless the monster's enraged, which they are 80% of the time. While they did make offensive skills super expensive slot-wise, the charm system completely breaks the 5th gen skill system with how many points you can get for free. Sunbreak is going to make the meta stupid since we'll probably be able to have all this without having to use the lower raw Narga weapons.
It would be "so easy" to fix the meta stuff by just changing element to something that's not just a raw increase. If you would make monsters react to element, make the scared of you or have the ability to cause elemental blight on monsters with the correct element it owuld make it usable outside of just "increasing dps" But ofc the biggest issues are the skills that straight up buff raw, like wex,crit boost, sharpness +1. But back in the day I always felt like handicraft's usecase was to allow you to deal damage to tough monster parts. Where you would bounce on green, you would not on blue sharpness. Mind's eye kind of filled that role as well and since not mnay monsters had tough parts that would make you bounce. Handicraft just became a dps gain. Even there you could just make monsters have tougher parts where mind's eye would work but you would not get the 45hitzone. It would reduce the hitzone to like 35 with minds eye, but if you used handicraft to get better sharpness, then you'd get the default hitzone, but no actual damage gain. Or something. Sometimes I just think Capcom is looking at the game from a very narrow viewpoint. MHTri was the last game we saw actually major monster behavior changes that change the way we approach the monsters. World did it too, but I was hoping they would have added more behavior type of systems that rely you to use certain skills on certain monsters. Meta ofcourse will always exist, even if they'd remove all DPS related skills there would be the "meta" for that game with like Earplugs, WindRes, Tremor Res :D
There's a mod to make elemental weapons apply blights to monster, I'm honestly surprised Capcom relegated such a cool mechanic to some random beetles you find laying around 🤦
This is the whole reason I absolutely adored AT Velkhana's set. Frostcraft made for some super competitive builds that required you to play a bit differently since you had to manage your frostcraft gauge. It helped to add a bit of variety in that post game in my opinion
Frostcraft SnS and Frostcraft Aerial Hammer were insane dude!
@@CeraCymmetry I'm still not over the first time I saw the damage numbers from Frostcraft SNS speedruns. I really want Velkhana back in game for this armor skill alone
@@tinysurvivor4663 Oh yes Velkhana is amazing
Froscraft is what made me love GS. Not only did it made Hit-n-Run GS fun but it looked so slick too.
That's something I kinda miss from World/Iceborne is the sound and VFX design. I miss Off. Guard's amazing FWOOM effect whenever you'd get a perfect guard. Made you feel powerful, especially as Lance.
@@alpha00zero The hit effects on GS from World to Rise feels like such a downgrade tbh, still fun though
It seems like they are trying to make more unique damage skills, like rapid morph or offensive guard. The only issue is that generally the meat & potatoes skills that aren't situational are still what you want to prioritize on most sets, and everything else you can squeeze in is just a bonus. Depending on the weapon, you might barely be able to fit the essentials because of skill tax, ie; gunners needing shot type up, bows need that + stamina skills and charge plus, gunlance and phial spam charge blade need artillery etc. The generic boosting skills should be the weaker ones that you add in as a little extra bonus, and the situational stuff should be what makes your build shine. The skill balance feels very backwards and centralizing.
I agree with that last part yeah, I wanna see attack boost added on as a bonus after the unique skills. I miss Hiden from frontier tbh
I still don't understand why Expert & Attack Boost went from a tier 1 jewel to a tier 2 from World to Rise.
@@CaptainCFalcon it was way too easy to cram them on before. I think the idea is for you to debate whether you want to cram in attack/expert but there still isn’t enough competition with other Lvl 2 skills for some weapons.
@@CaptainCFalcon Because they wanted to discourage people from stacking loads of attack boost and crit eye without putting in the work to rebalance the skills by making them less cost effective. It's like upping the price of gas because it's the most efficient when you put it in the engine. Some people are gonna pay more and some people are just gonna have less gas.
@@CassieCarryd okay, but having them be level ones makes all of those level 2 slots suddenly much more than "attack/expert goes here," freeing level 2 slots as the place for all of your "check this shit out" decorations. Level ones are just run of the mill shit that lets you do what you already do, but just better.
Take less damage? Level 1. Sharpen faster? Level 1.
Heal quicker? Level 1.
Ailments? Level 1.
Farming? Level 1.
So why not "Just hit harder" as well? There's nothing special about attack & affinity, they shouldn't be treated like they are.
The more skills that shift away from passive stat increases towards playstyle adjustments, the better.
Counterstrike and resentment are interesting skills that reward risktaking; latent power encourages attacking frequently for uptime that rewards play during a window; crit draw encourages specific playstyles; peak performance, heroics, and maximum might rewards specific play; resuscitate turns debuffs into partial buffs.
The more skills like these, with more extreme niches, the more diverse meta options become. More ways to play with it being behind the curve let’s people more easily play as they want without pressure internally or externally. Even then, there will always be a most meta strategy, but the smaller the difference between off-meta and meta… the better it is for the players!
i'd argue that we need playstyle adjustments that do not offer concrete damage boosts. take the weird, semi-transformative skills that exist like bubbly dance and hellfire blight and up them a bit. If bubbly dance 3 gave you full bubbleblight sliding and speed boost without the stumbling after a roll it would definitely see use as a playstyle pick. hellfire blight is 1 knockdown a hunt from being a completely valid skill for dual blades in rise too.
Late reply but I agree with your comment a ton. A recent example I loved is the lifedrain for safi because even if it was somewhat popular we had people that thought it was way to much of a risk and wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. I think Risk should be one of the biggest factors when it comes to the highest damage. In sunbreak there’s also an armor combination with the same mindset (Archfiend x Arc combo) I just wish we had more gear with these little quirks. Hell, I’ll even take armors that boost specific moves only.
They did try with some sets that require you to stay on one scroll but some like rajang’s feel overly limiting and we have the other issue of no current set actively encouraging scroll swapping even when it’s an optional playstyle supported by the devs via swap evade and redirection.
Wow what a blast to the past. I remember when these "hame" runs used to be mocked on TH-cam and gamefaqs forums back in 08 lol (see the akantot Boyz). Now trap/status chaining while wailing on a monster with some pop music is the most popular monster hunter TH-cam content with Team Darkside.
Also, surprised you didn't mention the game changing meta of mantles in world btw. It essentially allowed every weapon to have evade +3 /auto evade and KO status for free.
Good point, mantles were very powerful, but not something I often engaged with, playing as a TA runner, but yea, along with environmental trap locking, ground dunks, Ledge strats, World really had a lot of ways going for it!
0:00 - Intro
2:10 - 1st Generation
3:23 - 2nd Generation
5:13 - 3rd Generation
9:26 - 4th Generation
13:18 - The "Weakness Exploit Talk"
14:55 - 5th Generation and Outro
Meta sets or weapons in Monster Hunter are a funny old thing, aren't they. Everyone has an opinion on them regardless if they use it or not. Well I wanted to cover how the most effective sets and weapons have changed through each generation, and cover what I'd like to see in the future!
Lemme know what you think, Lads! (comments help the algorithm too and we've made some SERIOUS gains on the channel lately so I wanna keep this going >:) ) x
When it comes to the intro I think evasion is usually pretty aggressive and can lead to more damage openings. You know like dual blades etc. great video thanks for the recent content!
My own personal "easy mode" in World was Bow. Around the time Kulve came out it became possible with Wex to get 100% Affinity with some bows, combined with Critical Element that became an insanely easy way to dish out huge amounts of damage provided you brought the corresponding element to a fight. Also the community developed combos with the bow that utilized 3 points in Constitution and the Quick Shot/Power Shot that were essentially infinite with minimal to zero stamina loss
It only got easier and easier after Iceborne, with even higher base affinity bows, craftable high affinity elemental bows, and Silver Los armor. The playstyle is the epitome of Glass Cannon though, since Master Rank monster attacks without the Blademaster defense bonuses are literal death sentences.
At this point I'd even be content with a single meta set unique to each weapon type, like raging brachy seemed to be tailormade for GL and Bowguns (even if everyone still ran it because agitator is just that good). That way we'd at least see *some* variety...
@@gamecavalier3230 Bazel armor is that one armor that basically the only option if your weapon benefitting from shield and/or artillery.
It has plenty Lv2 Slots which is necessary for basically slotting any skill that we need.
It's the meta for Gunlance, Chargeblade, HBG, LBG, and many more.
reminds me of the black set in GU for great swords
@@muhwyndham Honestly, that weirded me out the most.
I've started Rise a week ago and I've been dying to finally get some gear that's worth the time I put in. The game instantly throws defender weapons and free HR armor at you from the start, so, stubborn as I am, I always used the normal weapons and constantly felt bad about how much worse it is than the "cheat" gear.
HR hits and you get an update that adds even stronger defender options, oh and here's a free armor set stronger than what you have, because Sunbreak came out.
It's like they don't want you to actually play the game, right from the start.
But the actual point: Even once I got into "endgame" (currently grinding to 100), most weapon sets and armor are just vastly underwhelming. Every good skill in the game is a 2slot and you get like a single 2slot on any given set, even on something like an Elder Dragon armor set. And then I hunted Bazel finally and suddenly his armor has like 4 2slots, I mean what the fuck.
I guess I'll hope the last monster has good slots, because currently it feels like the game wants me to gamble 20 years for a charm that has useful skills and slots, while I ram pointless resistance decorations in the flood of 1slots the game throws at me, all while brandishing my terrible sharpness (or massively lower damage) weapon at monsters; thinking about how it would be nice to test out skills like razor sharp or mind's eye, but literally being unable to even slot that.
I soloed 3U and 4U so i was eagerly waiting that Slime and Insect Glaive section
Hell yeah. I got to play a lot of 3U recently for research in a couple videos and I had so much fun man.
i think the best way to diversify the meta would be for skills that aren’t “blanket”. i look at the black set and how it’s tailor made for GS and think that we need more of that for each of the weapons instead of skills that are just universally good. we need more skills that component or expand play styles instead of just provide blanket buffs
“Perhaps we’ll see something new come Sunbreak.”
Shogun: *Allow me to reintroduce myself.*
Ay yo, I heard you were hopeful for diversity & change, so I went & took that personally.
Not to mention seregios
@@oddbranch9211 seregios weapons were so gooood. And lucent nargas as well
I've been interested in learning about the meta throughout the series for a while now. I've been playing since Tri but I was never really into playing optimally, I'd just play whatever weapon or invest in whatever armor or skill that would get me through a hunt. World was the first game in the franchise where I'd get sweaty about the meta and I even dabbled in speedrunning some tough hunts like Extremoth, Alatreon and Fatalis.
Thanks for making this, it was a joy to watch and very informative!
Making sets for Iceborne post Safi patch was easily one of the most fun times I've had with the series. Even after Fatalis, there's a lot of room to experiment with 3p safi and frostcraft sets, even though 4p fatalis is so comfy you dont need anything else in theory even for elemental weapons.
I think this is a great video that talks about the meta over the course of the series, but I feel like there is some information/nuance that was left out (perhaps on making this video more digestible) that I wanted to add.
7:33 Weakness Exploit getting nerfed doesn't really make it bad, but actually making how you approach specific monsters differently. Adding 5 to a hitzone can actually be very significant damage boost. For example, adding 5 to a hitzone of 45 will increase your damage by 11% which is slightly lower than the 12.5% from the P3rd version of Weakness Exploit. Of course, as the hitzones increase Weakness Exploit becomes less effective, but in certain matchups where you'll be hitting 45-60 hitzones Weakness Exploit will be better than or equal to Attack +20 (mostly depends on the raw of that weapon).
8:03 Slime was very strong in 3U, especially in High Rank. Though, eventually you would see a slight drop off in G-Rank and element (and the rare poison) on a few weapons would start being preferred in a few matchups.
9:45 Honed Blade existed in 3U and was used in some sets. Getting the skill then isn't as easy as 4U since IIRC only Abyssal Lagi's set had the skill and due to the Charm Tables situation not everyone could get a good Edgemaster charm.
9:53 IIRC 1.44 is the Purple Sharpness modifier for 3U, and in 4U the Purple Sharpness modifier was 1.45.
12:11 This White Sharpness modifier change was done in Tri.
12:24 I wouldn't say Handicraft fell off. There were plenty of powerful weapons that needed Handicraft like Elderfrost, Fatalis, Bone GS, Drilltusk, and I can go on. There was also a popular G-Rank set called JhoCena that gave Sharpness +2, Razor Sharp, and a few points away from Critical Eye +1 and had a ton of slots and gave incredible flexibility. It's just that Handicraft isn't required anymore (not that it was required in 4U anyways since there was a few meta weapons like the Bounding Dalamadur that didn't need it).
Fair comment, allow me to respond (:
Good comments about WeX and Slime, that's fair, slime still was a very good universal option I think!
Honed Blade was left out in the 3U section, for exactly the reason you said, it was good but so limited.
You're right about purple in 4U and 3U, my apologies, small difference but still an error!
The reason white was mentioned when it was is that purple was accessible in Tri, and I felt like that white wouldn't have been significant compared, you know?
The Handicraft comments were more for Gen than GU, yeah, I use JhoCeana myself, wanted to draw attention more towards the closing of the gap between white and purple!
Hope that clears up some of those observations, but thank you for thoroughly watching man! (:
Yep that clears up my observations, thank you for the response!
Yes, A frontier meta video would be awesome!
Feel like the Fatalis set from World is exactly what a true final endgame monster set should be.
Insane and powerful purely for the fun of it, something the player can enjoy from the final monster added into the game and well earned from a very challenging fight. A set meant for the player just to build however they want and be overpowered because they earned it from potentially hours of grinding a ball shattering fight.
Personally, I absolutely despise Fatalis armor in World. Not only do I not like Fatalis in the first place (in my opinion he's super bland and there are so many more visually interesting monsters in the series, including both Crimson and White Fatty), but his armor being bar none the best in the game is a really bad move in my opinion. Even just going back to Gen U, Ahtal-Ka's armor fulfilled the same niche that Fatty does in Iceborne (slots galore), with the major difference that Ahtal-Ka armor doesn't obsolete every single other piece of equipmentin the game. One monster should not have a monopoly on every single armor piece in my opinion. It's much better if you still had actual options once you best the hardest boss in the game.
Opinion rejected and invalid.
@@Golden_Hydra aww, how cute, somebody who refuses to hear someone out on a purely subjective topic
@@conorb.1901 I understand finding Fatalis bland, but that's the reason Fatalis stands out. In a series meant to have monsters that could realistically be possible, Fatalis is one of the few who aren't possible, and is just a Dragon rather than a Wyvern. An unrealistic yet simple Dragon stands out against the contrast of wonderfully unique yet realistic Monsters.
That's how the MH team designed the original Fatalis, though if you think it isn't executed well, I understand that completely.
@ItIsSasha it's less that I find Fatalis bland and more that I find every other blatantly unrealistic elder dragon to be more interesting. Kirin is a unicorn who summons lightning from the heavens, Teostra is a manticore looking thing whose mere presence turns deserts to glass, Dalamandur is a snake so large and dangerous that its simple muscle twitches can flatten a mountain. I just find Fatalis being "just a dragon" to be kind of boring compared to his elder dragon peers. Crimson and White are significantly more interesting than the basic black in my opinion.
A few things you missed. Tri meta was different to P3RD so it's worth mentioning, Alatreon and Deviljho weapons had purple sharpness in tri and were a big part of the meta, as well as dragon shots being arguably more cooked in 3 than in P3RD. Honed Blade was introduced in MH3U with the Abyssal Lagi set and was a huge part of the meta for most blademaster weapons, including Brachydios weapons.
Very interesting video, thanks for sharing! I had heard of the kelbi shot but seeing you guys just stand there repeating the same motion and watching Narga stagger over and over again made me laugh so hard
Right? It was ridiculous
I think removing or changing Weakness Exploit then either removing or reducing Critical Boost to the same level they reduced Critical Element to would even out the non-Dragonheart playing field.
Yes, at the top end you would still have people smashing 7 Attack Boost and 7 Critical Eye into every set, but the difference between that and running a few comfort skills instead would at least be negligible outside of speedrunning. The problem with the crit meta is that raw, affinity, and critical boost are each multiplying into eachother to make a huge gap in power. Every ARPG with multiplier scaling has this problem.
Its not a build I'm interested in unless I can fit in earplugs lvl 5.
For GU, Silverwind and Hellblade weapons weren't (besides SW LBG) your best options. Hayabusa also get's outcompeted by most endgame mixes with it's usage being very charm dependant.
The meta weapons for each type are:
GS (Ahtal/Jaggi, Bone Nakarkos sometimes wins out on dragon weak monsters, Ketcha for severely water-weak monsters )
LS (Rustrazor/Ahtal/Drilltusk)
SNS ( Dreadking, Soulseer, Elderfrost/Permafrost, Zinogre/Thunderlord, Valstrax/Alatreon, Crimson Fatalis is an option that exsists)
DB (Hyper Agnaktor, Ludroth, Elderfrost, Hyper Lagiacrus, Valstrax, Hellblade for some multi-mon hunts)
Hammer (Gore/Crimson/Ahtal)
HH (Redhelm/Bone, Grimclaw online)
Lance (Elderfrost/Ahtal, sometimes Rustrazor)
Gunlance (Ahtal, Blango and the Dreadqueen meme)
SA (Elderfrost/Ahtal, Hellblade is an option that exsists)
IG (Crimson Fatalis, Elderfrost, White Fatalis, Rare 3 Black Fatalis, Soulseer)
LBG (Narga/Silverwind)
HBG (Hyper Zinogre/Kushala)
Bow (Yekla/Hyper Nerscylla, rarely Ahtal but it's an option that exsists)
Yup mostly I was referring to Gen lmao
When i started playing back in Freedom Unite i never cared for the best stats, it was fun because Great Sword hit hard and i barely cared about the rest. Playing the rest of the games was quite the same, even on 3rd Portable, but it was only when i got into 4U that i learnt was really was "meta" and what wasn't. And boy, what a journey! Farming decos, guild investigations, and above all, geting my SeGaSeGaRa set, even i ventured with the double apex monkeys with the Hame Runs!
Metas are definitely good because they teach you what skills and weapons work together, and they expando on your ability to make your own sets, playing outside of meta stuff but still understanding what your skills do and how do they synergize with your weapons. The best example is the Para Builds and Froscraft GS on World
I'm a SnS user in both FU e World, I totally feel what you're saying here about just going into what's fun. But I kinda don't get a lot from the Meta people, I like to fight with calm and take time and all Meta tutorials are about speed killing.
In the end Im left with the responsibility to make my own sets without much of a help beside the Wiki
my issue with the WexTouch Crit meta was never Meta = Bad but as you also elaborated on. you get free 40% (probably its more or less idk too in depth) universal damage bonus and no sharpness drain for not turning off you brain whilst playing the game thats it.
things like stylish assault, frostcraft, dragonvein awakening chaos gore weapons/rust bow in GU allowed for much more unque playstyles and yet its the same old wex crit spam weve seen ever since generations with occasional outliar here and there
i do tho have the feeling either capcom wants to reward players for not playing completely braindead or they are oblivious to how some of the skills shape their game, yet im unable to tell which of the 2 it is
for rise, anti-aquatic is an amazing ramp up skill for the right matchups. the ramp-ups really help make different weapons good against different matchups in a way other than just element.
I would agree and likewise for Anti-Aerial, they play into specific matchups pretty well, I really enjoy the Ramp up system as it feels like a more extended version of the honing from 4U which only gave you 3 options on every weapon. My only exception is, some weapons seemed to live or die by the ramp-up system. Some weapons like the Bowguns are rather piddling with their Ramp-Up choices, more ammo for a certain type is certainly useful at times or some extra damage to go along with my barrel choice, but nothing really game-changing. Meanwhile, I couldn't for the life of me find any good Power Phial weapons for my Switch Axe in Rise until I custom-built my Rampage S weapon for it, but once I did and gave it the Ramp up skills for non-elemental boost with a good sharpness pattern, affinity and raw along with the Power Phial, and built a set around it, it seems to have blown every other axe out of the water without question, including Nargy. I suppose that's the point of Rampage weapons, to build your dream weapon after all. But until that point, I personally felt like playing SA was meant to feel mediocre outside of the fact it combos really well now in Rise thanks to the Wirebug system. I get that Exhaust/Element/Status phials all have their uses and I do like having those for mid-game progression or messing around, yet when I wanted Power specifically for endgame damage, I felt like I had only one real choice which thankfully the Ramp up skills was able to provide. Sorry for the mini-rant.
From the games I played, and excluding gunner weapons:
MHTri: Alatreon/Deviljho weapons with Helios/Vangis armor to get purple sharpness.
MH3U: Brachydios weapons with Honed Blade or other blast weapons with Awaken.
MH4U: Relic weapons. Different combinations of armor that provided Handicraft, Razor Sharp, Challenger and Attack+. Shoutout to the Star Knight set.
MHGen: Hellblade Glavenus weapons with Silver Rathalos armor for the WEx + CritBoost.
MHGU: Depends on the weapon type, but the ones from Ahtal Ka were pretty busted overall. Armor skills were focused on crits and sharpness management. Most sets were made of parts from Hyper Deviljho, Hyper Ceanataur and Silver Rathalos.
MHRise: Narga/Tigrex or Rampage weapons. Full Valstrax armor for Crit meta + Dragonheart.
Wonderfully concise and constructed video, Cera! If there's one thing I have to add it's that I'm surprised you didn't mention Star Knight at all in the 4U segment. While it wasn't the absolute pinnacle of strength, it was by far the best meta set in terms of ease of obtaining and building around. Everyone and their cat wore the thing. Rodeo God also made it comically busted with IG. So many fights (the elders and Gog especially) could be completely trivialized by a party of four IGs in Star Knight just spamming mounts.
Thank you! And yeah, great point about Star Knight, it was very good for beginner players to start looking at powerful sets at endgame, personally I think I’d do things a little bit differently if I were to do this again, because I missed the section on Aerial strats in World, too! Glad you enjoyed buddy! 🤙🏻
This was fascinating to listen to. Meta is something I try not to pay too much attention too but when you play solo you tend to need to up your damage output. I was happy to hear Ceanataur's armor was a good choice in FU because I worked my brain hard figuring out a good set for G rank !
Thank you for your hard work Cera. 😉
In generations the "balance" with hyper offensive crit sets was the Hayabusa feather and other integral pieces lack of defense. With high end monsters being essentially 1 shots even through moxie, running a full crit boost set was very risky unless you had complete confidence as a hunter. Other safer options had comparable damage and nice utility.
I think the desire to want to be strong, while also having the need to make multiple sets and weapons is why I play dual blades, and when element is more viable on it: Bow. I was so sad in 4U when there was the Seregios bow as the "one to rule them all" situation.
As GS main, both Valstrax und AT Velkhana are amazing sets to me. I remember using Dragonheart on a Valor GS in GenU very fondly, and Frostcraft Crit Draw was the only way for me to actually be able to get Fatalis down solo.
I hope there's more sets like these, that award different playstyles. Rise seems to be on the right track for that, with negative crits becoming a viable playstyle.
and this is why i love WEX (Iceborne addition) in a vacuum. 30% base was acceptable, and extra 20% for engaging in wounding made u upkeep the wound. However, people treat clutch claw wounding as a 100% uptime thing and got frustrated, so in the end people got angry at wex change too.
it was capcom inflating HP numbers incredibly high, putting damage tresholds to be met during a certain time frame in fights like Alatreon and Fatalis, got rid of every weak hit zone on the body of Rajang etc that made wounding feel like a 100% thing. People weren't treating it that way for no reason. There is no way you will kill Fatalis with pre Fatalis gear without wounding as a normal player. There is no way you don't get tired from fighting a Rajang with the World AI without wounding. It's not just the players, it is also the developers deciding to design the fights around it that made woudning feel like a 100% uptime thing.
Happy to see how Sunbreak made the elemental meta more relevant to other weapons other than DB or Bow. And even made it competitive if not better for some playstyles like Courage Hammer or Surge Slash GS
Meta in monhun is basically the opposite of GL in 90% monhun games
Pain
gunlance shines in your first hunt when WF is most of the monsters HP and never again
I love the introduction of damage skills that aren't simply just boosting crit chance and attack in rise, but I still wish crit wasn't such a nice boost period.
There's so many skills that get ignored every game because if you want to do a lot of damage, you just go for attack, agitator, crit boost, wex, etc. Not playing crit meta means you deal noticably less damage and the hunts become longer obviously, which isn't a fun trade off IMO.
First I've heard latent power is a good offensive skill, I thought it was just a comisseration if you go hit a lot, you get a slight attack buff and constitution for 90 seconds.
@@therighttrousers343 Oh sorry, I meant agitator!
@@Purpletrident oh, no worries. Besides, latent power might be incredibly powerful, it's just I have no idea how it works in all of its appearances, how it interacts with blocking damage and what have you. Worked alright enough bringing Miralis gear vs. hallowed jhen.
This makes the moments after beating Valstrax in Rise for the first time even funnier. We both appear back in the village, sprint over to the smithy, and I let out a big sigh of disappointment and announce "IT'S SO BORING!"
I’ve never liked the monster hunter ‘meta’ since, I think, it goes against how monster hunter was meant to be played. Playing online and seeing all the amazingly unique ways people decide they want to play the game, and how they interact with others is such a joy. Those breakneck games you occasionally get that you win just by the skin of your teeth give you such a rush, and makes the online play so much of a rush, and that’s what keeps me coming back. So when I start a quest with a Chargeblade with friendship, evade window, and jumping maxed out, and the three people who join my quest are all bowguns that sticky spam the whole match and have the exact same load out because the internet told them to.. it can make the game feel hollow. Sure they’re winning, in fact, they’re trivializing fights, but I guarantee you no one on that lobby had fun.
You summed up what I dislike about playing meta. The sheer boring nature of playing and building sets for numbers and not variety of gameplay. I always try to make "dumb" or at least fun sets like using statuses or interesting skills like sliding affinity or slapping evade window on CB and just manual sidehopping. I think Capcom really needs to make more interesting skills with all kinds of conditions or prerequisites rather than just making flat boosts to stats
I agree with wanting to see more unique skills.
As for me, I always like fighting at max power possible, so I’ll always try to use majority meta sets as it’s fun to me, but I see where you’re coming from if you don’t really like playing with those skills. Thanks for the great comment!
One thing that would definitely help is making utility skills less expensive to slot IMO.
The offensive skills could stand a slight nerf, but whats so strong about them, is that they are always on. Nerfing them too much makes them redundant, but I would still slot passive offensive skills because of their uptime and being able to fit any build. Its bad IMO that when I want to make an "Anti-Monster-Set" that is very comfy, with earplugs, maybe wind and an elemental resistance, I have to sacrifice almost the whole set to these and cant fit anything offensive then. Utility skills are just so underwheling while offensive skills are overwhelming and they need to fix that disparity.
Sure, having new offensive skills with more conditions and skill requirements would be cool, but theres tons of utility skills that DO boost damage in theory, just unreliably and at way to much cost
edit : another example, if I want to be an unkillable tank with lance for example I have to get 5 guard levels AND guard up twice? and that doesnt boost my defense in any way, just makes my guards very good. takes way too much slots
Or movement focused skills too, faster movement but taking your damage slots would lead to a more skillful and active play style with the survivability being in the hand of the reflex and speed of the hunter. Or maybe I'm too much of a SnS user and would like to run fast around the fight :v
I think there is some merit to nerfing "boring" skills like crit, wex and all that. But I think a primary factor to them being used over everything else is just how consistent they are.
You can't fail at using Crit or WEX, it always gives you a boost in damage, that's why its usually in the META, even if you fail a condition on a less boring skill once, that's likely enough to make the more boring always active always positive skills like crit, more effective.
I mean in essence it's "damage up = good". It doesn't matter what name you plop on it. If you add crit chance to a game, then that will be a damage increase sought after by players. And if you artifically make it impossible to gain a substantial amount of crit chance, it feels like a shit skill, that's wasted.
The solution isn't to nerf the good skills over and over, the solution is to introduce other skills that stand on par with them, without being necessary. To make necessary skills easier to slot/use, rather than massively harder.
After the max might nerf, literally no one used max might anymore. That isn't delicate balance, that's just taking a shotgun to the meta. With crit eye and atk (and like every other good skill in the game) becoming 2slots in a game that barely has 2slots, you don't "achieve balance" you annoy the players into having shit sets, no variety and playing the charm gacha, probably fueled by the "not MH" tower defense nonsense.
Make skills easier to slot and more varied and you'll see a more diverse meta. If there's a skill that enhances TCS or gives it some new properties/a second hit when you get hit during it etc., then GS users will use that. If you make offensive guard not absolute ass to fit into a build or create a skill that lets them transform their normal counter into a cross slash, then that'll be taken. If you add a skill that lets you guard counter an additional time consecutively, then that'll change up Lance play and make it more interesting.
It's very easy to cry for nerfs, but nerfs in the hands of an unexperienced balance team, tend to make a game colossaly worse.
Well so far in sunbreak, GS builds are starting to forego some levels in focus for offensive guard as strongarm stance procs offensive guard, giving 15% attack on the follow up TCS or Rage. The timing for it is kinda tricky, as you need to parry right at the beginning of strongarm for the skill to proc, but the damage put out is insane. New skills like charge master have given element GS and Status GS their first viable showcase, particularly Auroracanth, Narwa, Chameleos, and the odd dragon slayer parasol some potential. There’s a huge demand for chain crit on element builds now as it applies an attack, element and status boost over the affinity of GenU chain crit. The new Foray skill brings incentive for using poison or para more offensively for the damage boost, and the new Arc set from Shagaru could be paired with the Abyssal weapons to counteract the negative affinity of them to abuse critical boost and their high raw
Critical damage is something that plagues so many games when devs don't really know how (or don't try) to balance around it. In most games these days you can reach pretty high critical strike chance (usually 75% or higher) and at that point critical strikes become less of an RNG proc that temporarily increases your damage and more of a strait up flat damage multiplier. This becomes extremely apparent when you start adding critical strike *damage* multipliers on top of 100% critical strike chance.
There are ways to balance around crit to have more competitive build variation but most games choose not to implement them. Things like:
- Dot damage that can stack (poison, acid, bleed, ect.)
- Ramping damage that goes up with either consecutive hits, or time spent since you last go hit (up to a cap of course)
- Conditional damage (an example could be, for 20 seconds after breaking any body part you do 25% increased damage)
- Low HP damage (giving the player increased damage for sustaining low HP. This could be considered conditional damage)
To be fair I believe all of these do exist in some form in the Monster Hunter games, just not to the extent that they really compete with the all mighty critical damage. And even if they did, often times critical damage would just be combined *ontop* of these other forms of damage to then increase them even further.
forgot how crazy valor hbg was in gen ult lol. though i’d also add valor long sword to that broken tier, it was everywhere online and the counter + combo was ridiculous
As someone who got into monster hunter with iceborne a few years ago and has been trying to learn anything and everything about the old world this was a really cool video idea!
Ah yes first gen, when lance was a meta!
... Was!
I'd love to see other interesting sets to come back
I personally loved Frostcraft and the set i enjoyed playing most was my Frostcraft Crit/Punishing Draw (needed a safi weapon for it) playing solo hunts with Slugger 5 was hilarious seeing the monster just flip over on its ass when it got ISS'd (much prefer the older way it worked)
Every now and then i think about going back to World just to play that set again
Honestly if there was a skill that unlocked internal ammo for the bowguns in gen 5 I would max that out in a heartbeat. Really missed the internal ammos that made some bowguns very unique other than the types of ammo they could use
I subscribe to playing lance, so aside from GU where striker lance charge poke was STRONK, and technically FU, I play to mine my own sad meta of making lance DPS. Love it! Thanks for the video!
To be fair with regards to purple sharpness in Portable 3rd, purple sharpness was usually reserved for G-rank/Master rank, and not high rank. Except for in Tri, which wasn't covered in this video, but had a comically focused meta around the Deviljho and Alatreon weapons, which just for some darn reason did get it. And that was with the old Freedom Unite multipliers that had carried over.
Before it got nerfed Heavy Bowgun was also dominant in the early days of MH World as well. With builds focusing on pellets and cluster shots you could dish out absurd amounts of damage.
Something I'd like to add about 4U Charge Blade is that there's a handful of weapons that basically cover 98% of situations you might want: Brachy and the other Blast CBs are your general utility ones and perfect for solo play as you don't have to worry about the blast explosions knocking around other players, Akantor is your pure damage output spam super CB since impact phials scale off of raw only, and the Tigerstripe Zamtrios and Shrouded Nerscylla CB's are for para and sleep spam usually seen with MiKuMi(cham/kush mixed sets for status builds) or UKaU(de-facto honed blade with tons of skills like my main set having a fairly high tier talisman but not top 1% or anything getting AuL, Mind's Eye, S+1, Wexploit, Art Novice, Guard+1, and Tremor Resist). Keep in mind that the Akantor CB not caring about sharpness or affinity means your core skills drop to only Guard+1, AuXL, and Art Novice with whatever you feel like you can get left over and if you're running a set with mind's eye then you'll never have to sharpen as pretty much all of your damage comes from phials anyways. Art Novice is a 30% buff to phial damage in 4U and the gems are 1 slot +2's meaning you can throw it on practically any build with little sacrifice if any.
GU I'd also like to say basically every weapon is incredible in their own ways and the only one I feel isn't worth the effort is Gunlance
Thanks for the content! I am a newborn hunter to the series (started in MHW) and videos like this helps me a lot to understand everything!
Keep up the good work :)
Really enjoyable video, and I think Capcom has been starting to diversify skills a lot, especially from Icebrone onward. True Dragonvein Awakening is probably my favorite skill in the entire franchise and things like Rapid Morph and load shells make sets feel more custom made to each weapon. There's also some really fun stuff like Bubbly Dance and Hellfire Cloak which, while by no means ultra powerful, at least show a willingness to push boundaries with how skills impact playstyle. All that's left is to keep expanding on it
If I ever hear someone talking about meta
I'm stealing something out of their house
Now that sunbreak has released and shagaru's armor skill exists I've been having way more fun than ever with the pizza cutter
Fantastic video! I'm actually curious as to the discussion on why Weakness Exploit is so despised. I see it as the perfect armor skill since it rewards players who are skilled at the game while providing no benefit to unskilled players.
While it benefits good play, 50% bonus to crit kinda leads to gemming in crit boost to add onto damage, which eclipses most other damage skills you can add. Rise at least has more skills give percentage damage boosts, but wex is still a no brainer since having a 3 point skill is better than gemming 7 points in
It rewards you too much for how little it costs, for doing what you should be doing anyways. It's still providing a good chunk of benefit to unskilled players - the big yellow numbers that show larger amounts mean most people will end up going for weakpoints once they figure out what that monster's weakpoints are, maybe with some attempts at breaking, and those who are truly unskilled won't be paying attention to skills at all.
In both World and Rise, it would have been an exceptionally strong skill at a flat ten points per level, better than any other affinity skill. That you don't get it if you go wide, or on some of your pierce procs, or if you're bad at the game (like me) is honestly irrelevant - it'd still be the best decoration/skill per point at nearly half the return it currently is. It means other sources of affinity are pointless most of the time - why deal with latent power, for example, when you can immediately get half your hits to be crits with Weakness Exploit? This reduces potential build variety - and also means inherently high affinity weapons (like Narga) are either stupid strong or not worth bothering with (due to being able to just get huge affinity anyways).
This is why I play chargeable in world, while it's not the best I have too much fun using offensive guard to parry monsters and gain a reward of affinity and attack boost along with typical parry benefits as opposed to blocking.
I started playing a lot differently when I learned that I could get 15% more affinity after parrying I stopped dodging small bites and swipes and it felt fun. While I run critical eye on my gems and such I always spare space for offensive guard decos, because it's more interesting than equip and forget about.
Not mentioning the insane Seregios LBG in the MH4U segment doesnt do it justice. It was responsible for multiple nerfs in MHGen :(
It's a shame that it was so overtuned, but I really liked the Valstraxsz set on principal, with how it all synergises.
I personally ran it with a few Rathalos pieces, and some Heroism gems to really go for some High damage at low HP scenarios, since with the stupid high armor of the set, and all your resistances being set to 50, I felt pretty comfy being able to tank a stray hit at that HP as Charge Blade.
The Black Dragon Spear or BDS in MH1 was the best weapon against the Raths because they would get headlocked from pretty much just spamming the standard up poke combo. That said, almost every player I knew had a dedicated gunner set for use against Fatalis. Headlocking was also not as effective against Diablos, Gravios, and other monsters. Due to the need for Rath Plates to make the Fatalis set and the super low drop rate of plates, headlocking sort of was the meta though because most people would endlessly farm them praying to get the plates they needed and most endgame players were aiming for the Fatalis armor set as the best armor set in the game.
Meta is something that you adapt into the further you get in the game. I recently got Sunbreak and just entered the M tier quests. After spending 800+ hours into MH:W I finally learned how this is part of the game design as well. Very simply put, the difficulty of this game has a very steady climb, but it is ever so consistent. You can manage just fine with your standard starter weapon and kit, until fights start taking 30 minutes and you don't have enough resources to keep up. You are nudged to improve your skills, damage and toolset to survive the hunts. Now once you hit M-Rank things start to shift a little. This was the same in Iceborne, and the same in Sunbreak. Monsters start to hit REALLY hard. The your HP-pool is starting to lack and you get hungry for better defenses to keep you alive and not to get one-shot. So at low tier M-Rank you aren't better off building towards endgame gear yet, it is actually smart to take skills that help your survive as well. Does this hurt you playing solo? Yes. But these games are meant to be played in multiplayer. And in multiplayer, as long as 4 people do okay damage and survive, you still finish faster than playing solo.
But once you het the true endgame. Where elder dragons are just a regular monster, and you get hungry for their upgraded versions. At that point defenses do so little compared to just killing the thing faster, so you survive as well. It means you HAVE to learn the fight. You HAVE to learn the moves. What players don't realize is how good they actually are at that point. So instead of survival, putting everything into being as deadly as possible -> actually makes the game easier.
Welcome to the Monster Hunter gameloop. It is VERY addictive.
I wanna point out the madness that was OG tris bowgun system. It was the first time rapid fire sticky came to be and single handedly nerfed both sticky ammo and cluster ammo capacity down to 9 from 15. the madness that were the 4 man groups doing sub 5 alatreon hunts.
clip size 5 rapid fire stickies.
the god damn madness was real.
Great video! I learned a lot as someone who started in World!!
@CeraCynnetry im absolutely amazed u didnt cover the bow and bow guns in rise as the bow is one of the most ridiculous weapons in the game as it has innate scaling issues
You had a few mistakes here and there like when talking about sharpness modifier changes (eg: 1.32 white was from Tri on, not 4U on, while 4U buffed purple after 3U nerfed it, then GU nerfed it back) and some of the strats, but good video nonetheless!
However, you missed the point a lot of people are making about the "meta", it's not that they don't hit good hitzones to take advantage of the skills and whatnot, it's that later games MASSIVELY bloated monster health, to the point you are forced to run tons of DPS skills instead of just fun sets if you don't want to take 40 minutes on a quest. Basically later games just assume you are running min-maxed full DPS sets rather than be properly balanced, it's how you end up with things with more health than multiplayer-balanced G/M rank from previous games range solo in high rank Rise! This effectively kills any semblance of running fun or funny weapons, like a pizza cutter sword or a hammer that heals any allies you hit with it and so on, which is why most people hate the "meta". It's like from World and on, Crapcom started catering more to the 1% min-maxing rather than the average person wanting to have fun, it's good to have a tough challenge of a fight, but there's much better ways to do hard fights than tons of HP and attack, so it won't make 99% of all equipment useless!
I wished the day where weird skills like Mushroom Mancer gets to shine, even just for a lolz
some more information for first generation: before G, the combinations of armor pieces that give skills are hardcoded in a table. Lance is very strong not only because of its defensive capability and precise attacks, but it also has a mechanic where it always uses the weaker of sharp or blunt meatzones on a monster (which is still present nowadays though the blunt aspect got a nerf starting in mh2). Bowguns also deserve a mention because pre-MHG has a bug in how bowgun damage is done, allowing you to apply the properties and damage of, say, clust 3 onto normal 1 ammo. for more info, that one's called Lilo bug (lilo short in jp for reload). White sharp was also super important in MHG, and on the subject of sharp, ps2 calcs sharp incorrectly (due to nonstandard Float implementation), and blue sharp will bounce on certain hitzones like Basarios shell or Fatalis tail where on emulator it won't (as intended by the formula used)
element and status were also very effective in 1st gen, where you can apply poison even when the monster is taking poison damage; elemental weaknesses are exaggerated on most monsters, and almost every monster has a high weakness to Dragon to boot; rathian head went from 70% dragon efficacy in the jp release to 35% in international mh1. yet another reason why BDS is such a meta weapon in thesr early ganes
I can't believe this video got made, thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart!
I hope you get enough views/likes for the frontier video :D
lmao, the Portable team hate a lot of things. Handicraft, Gunlance, Charge Blade… they hate all the good shit
Wielding the Grongigas hammer made you feel like a warlord
One of the beautiful things about playing Gunlance is that the meta is fairly ill-defined compared to other melee options because the boosts largely suck on it. Like yeah I can take Crit eye but my pokes are already weak and it doesn't help shells at all, so I'll take Evade Extender for DPS uptime.
LMAO! 00:00 I miss the kelbi bow. It was fun.
I wholeheartedly agree, the meta sadly tends to get... pretty narrow and stale. Though I have a lot of personal bias as someone who, for some reason, most of the time happens finds the suboptimal things to be the most fun. Charged Shot GL and Prowlers being the main culprits in this regard.
I think that a lot of the new world games meta design choices are based around "ivory tower" game design (D&D term) in which what the developers intend is not to provide a variety of choices for players, but rather to reward mastery and making the "correct" choice. It's the only explanation for things like WEX and Crit Boost which are simply the optimal way to play and you're wrong for not using them. Ivory tower game design is contentious among any community and Monster Hunter is no exception.
It does make some sense if you consider how Capcom probably intends Monster Hunter to be played, in which players teach other players and a base of community knowledge is built. Offmeta skills are not "mistakes"; rather, Capcom and the Monster Hunter design team sees these as a learning opportunity in which players are expected to realize that their choices are incorrect and to instead move towards the optimal setup.
Personally I don't mind ivory tower game design. I like that the game rewards knowledge and mastery. However, I can understand why some players, especially more casual ones, might hate it, since it promotes a lack of diversity in endgame builds.
This is a very interesting perspective and it makes a lot of sense. But they could make other skills that require a high amount of skill (Peak Performance, Offensive Guard) be as strong as WEX/CB. The problem with WEX/CB is that their multiplicative effect scales too much compared to everything else and makes a huge gap between comfort sets and optimized sets.
@@Kumoiwa But isn't that part of the point? The *goal* is for optimized sets to outperform comfort sets by a significant margin. The actual goal of ivory tower game design is for there to be a correct choice, not a variety of options. The goal is to reward system knowledge rather than to encourage creativity.
Capcom *wants* players to experiment only to find out that WEX and Crit Boost is correct. That's the only thing that really makes sense if you consider how long WEX has been this way now.
I wish they would make those outright more damage skills much weaker and increase the power of existing ones and make more interesting offensive skills like you said. Frontier's skills that would reward you for evading were so much fun imo, but it did feel like it forced a bit to play evade style, and maybe not everyone enjoys that. I'd love more interesting perfect guard skills too. Like Perfect Guards always give you the minimum recoil or something
The uniform that is Silos in P3rd. It was truly just the best armor set you can get without thinking too hard.
Up until gen 5, I've been a staunch "I play with full aesthetic sets, screw skills" type of player, so I basically stuck with a single weapon I know exactly how to use for 10+ years (yes it's long sword, no I won't apologize for it). Come gen 5, before the layered system was finally completely opened up well into Iceborne's lifecycle, I still kept playing with full sets, although I did start branching out into other weapons. The set effects felt like the dev team was finally throwing us full-set players a bone (thank you Legiana set for saving my never-get-might-bow-jewel bad luck), but in the end a lot of them still felt underwhelming - so many set effects were literally just old skills that were removed from the main skill system in gen 5 (e.g., punishing draw from Barioth, crit element from rath). I really wish more sets had interesting set effects like Safi or Shara. Now that the full layered system basically removing the fashion from the gameplay and Rise not having strict set effects (the elder sets' Soul skills and Dragonheart are analogous to set effects, but I find them existing as mere points make going for full sets less rewarding), it's all but certain that mixed set will always have a leg up in the meta just because of their flexibility
0:50 fine take my subscription geeze
I wanna see if peak performance ever touches meta, it's a fun skill, least it was back in 4u. I put it on my medic build versus Fatalis once, did not go how I thought it would. Fire, very good at dealing chip damage you see.
The problem with it in rise is the percent increase on attack boost 4/7. With Anj waist and ingot boots giving 4 automatically, it's makes squeezing in 3 peak weird over pushing 7 ab.
I miss the point base system where it was a puzzle to fit 5-7 functional skills together.
I hope we eventually get an elemental meta that encourages preparing for the monster you intend to fight instead of just running raw.
Really the true ideal would be if status, raw and element all had good matchups. Like there should be a monster that is still best fought with a raw weapon, some sort of elemental based monster that just sort of absorbs it. It should be an interesting choice to go for one or the other, not always element or always raw. I like Kushala in the older games because you basically have to use a poison weapon. Poison is basically useless outside of that, but it's so good in that particular fight
The problem is that elemental damage is just flavoured raw damage. There will be no fundamental difference between a raw meta and an element based meta with how the damage and skills currently function.
Until the change the philosophy behind elemental damage it will stay as the worse option.
@@domp2729 well the biggest difference is that elemental favours multistrike, while raw favours crit, but yeah I see what you mean, but it would still be better than the slime meta.
Hame just means saddle why you so afraid, mounting a monster over and over again was extremely powerful in 4U though
You forgot to mention Auto reload HBG on MHFU! It made your clip basically infinite and you could go a full hunt without reloading. It set your recoil to max but you could still shoot elemental ammo, which in FU had piercing effect. It was so ridiculously strong it never came back lol.
You missed a lot of meta in mhgu. It’s a really big game with probably the most monsters and equipment in the series. Valor longsword obviously doesn’t need explanation but here’s a rundown:
-striker lance(charge spam)
-striker elderfrost sns
-ahtal-ka gs crit draw
-adept lbg
-heavy bow(akantor/ukanlos destroyer)
-crimson fatalis glaive
-valor switch axe+demon riot discharge spam
-gathering prowler(boomerang)
All of these are super busted but only striker lance and prowler could match the sheer heart attack valor hbg gives to monsters.
Hmmm I wonder what skills all of those sets run in GU 🤔 could it be some sort of Crit meta?
@@CeraCymmetry i mean yes, but you could try negative crit meta with diablos/bloodbath hbg that can outpace normal crit with Zinogre and Daora hbg. Or diablos cb(nice name) running completely raw off of impact phial damage which pairs quite well with full valstrax gear + artillery novice. I know gunlance was pretty lacking mhgu but with also running raw with valor/adept nakarkos gl(the blue one) with skills that improve shelling + dragon’s breath could do some serious damage, and if you want to, add trump card to your set for a 1.4x shelling damage since dragon’s breath is connected to your shelling effectively making as if it was a hunter art.
I have blight resist, earplugs, evade window and stun resist on every set I make. Since I'm not some sweaty speedrunner, I'm not going to dodge every hit. Having these defensive skills saves me more time during a hunt than having a bit more damage.
That Grongigas copypasta reminds me so much of the Magikarp one. Memes back then were just so much better.
Because I like to nitpick, the Bushido DBs in 3U was super popular, as well as Hallowed Armor.
With certain weapons in xx/gu(refering to valor ls) razor sharp was not needed(it was mostly used on mantis ls and deviant tetsucabra ls set ups)
I remember meta skills being
Critical eye+3
Challenger+2
Weakness exploit
Critical boost
Oh and it was daora's ceti that was op and not daora's delphinidae
The meta for hbg revolved around these few guns,namely:
Daora's ceti
Orcus quarcus(as mentioned In the video)
Diablastzooka and ivanus(for longer hunts)
Buster lancera
Akantor descent
Le deluge
LA foi
I still remember how it was debated to ban Dragonheart in MHGU from TA, because of its insane bonuses when the game initially released. No bothered to care for Crit Boost for weeks until someone actually started testing and doing the numbers. Then it caught like wildfire.
I think that in terms of variety, GenU still holds the cake. Sure, everyone was still using the crit meta, but atleast it wasn't a matter of only running a single armor set like fatalis armor. The Neset Armor was the go-to cookie cutter armor set, but if you wanted something really good you had to go for a mix set. Beside, Some deviant armor sets were also really good and the RNG charm system, while not prefect, ensured that everyone was using different gears depending on what charms they had. But my favorite thing was that nearly all weapons were endgame viable once fully upgraded. When I look at fatalis weapons in iceborne, it's insane how much better they are from everything else, sometimes being almost 20% better in terms of raw damage than the second best option. In GenU, even the best of the best weapons were barely 5% better than everything else, so you had wayyy more options in terms of endgame weapons, and it wasn't always the same monster for every weapon types. Sometimes it was the final boss weapon that was the best, sometimes fatalis, sometimes it was Rustrazor or Elderfrost and other times it was something unexpected like the blangonga gunlance being really good or the nerscylla bow.
Or just play heal prowler with 2 gathering prowlers in generations ultimate and never worry about having to die too much and have enough materials to craft most weapons and armor in 1 hunt. Also strong elemental damage, or status easily for days. And easy lunge for mounts. There is a good reason prowler was easy mode.
Solid, nostalgia-invoking video!
Yeah I honestly wouldn't mind if they removed WEX and Crit Boost completely, it gets boring fast. Might as well get rid of Attack Boost as well, since that'd just be what everyone would use without those two. I'm more fine with Crit Eye since you might wanna use that to get rid of negative affinity, and it'd already be nerfed without CB. I'd be fine with Guard skills being as expensive as they are in Rise if that were to happen.
I'd love to see more skills like Rapid Morph and what Quick Sheath does to LS in Rise, that stuff is cool.
In generation 1 the point system is similar to 2 minus deco slots, you can see the points for each armor piece in game.
Not in MH1, points were not displayed until MHG and MHFreedom
How nostalgic, it reminds me that how balance was never MH's strength.
In gen base game light and hope bow aka teo bow was a grank weapon in a high rank game. Was so busted the bow itself was change in future games.
man, now i miss my bleeding blender build with hp regen dualies and safi armor D:
I want to add something you miss in gen 4
Mh4u
While hame is the meta, for 4 player on guild quest theres a lot of build outside it that i think should be mentiones
-stary sky armor is op, literally everyone use it when it come out
-meta for weapon is the highest raw relic weapon you can get except for range
-for bowgun, steve weapon is good for solo since it reload on roll. I think the required skill for its hbg is recoil 2, evade extender/prudence/feeting fleet(?), And pierce up, then whatever offense option you have
-mounting is op
fun fact, critical boost is a skill that originated from Monster Hunter Frontier and came to generations after trying to test how it would turn out in mainline
Idk about that last part but yeah, it was Issen first, I’ve got a couple video on that subject (:
@@CeraCymmetry yeah, i heard something years about it being some tests but i never saw any confirmation of it but i felt it wasn't an unreasonable reason
The only way I could see crit builds getting nerfed is if Wex got changed to an attack boost or back to 3U where it was a 5% boost to weak spots. Even then, we have so many ways to get to max affinity in Rise and IB that it's not even funny. Between Crit Eye and Narga weapons, you're already pushing 80% affinity. All you need is Challenger 5 and you're at 100%, Challenger 3 at 98% if you augment affinity, with the only downside being it's not a guaranteed crit unless the monster's enraged, which they are 80% of the time. While they did make offensive skills super expensive slot-wise, the charm system completely breaks the 5th gen skill system with how many points you can get for free. Sunbreak is going to make the meta stupid since we'll probably be able to have all this without having to use the lower raw Narga weapons.
As always, great video!
Lol to go along with when slime was ridiculous, dual blades has auto razor sharp. I loved dual blades in that meta
It would be "so easy" to fix the meta stuff by just changing element to something that's not just a raw increase.
If you would make monsters react to element, make the scared of you or have the ability to cause elemental blight on monsters with the correct element it owuld make it usable outside of just "increasing dps"
But ofc the biggest issues are the skills that straight up buff raw, like wex,crit boost, sharpness +1.
But back in the day I always felt like handicraft's usecase was to allow you to deal damage to tough monster parts. Where you would bounce on green, you would not on blue sharpness.
Mind's eye kind of filled that role as well and since not mnay monsters had tough parts that would make you bounce. Handicraft just became a dps gain.
Even there you could just make monsters have tougher parts where mind's eye would work but you would not get the 45hitzone. It would reduce the hitzone to like 35 with minds eye, but if you used handicraft to get better sharpness, then you'd get the default hitzone, but no actual damage gain. Or something.
Sometimes I just think Capcom is looking at the game from a very narrow viewpoint. MHTri was the last game we saw actually major monster behavior changes that change the way we approach the monsters. World did it too, but I was hoping they would have added more behavior type of systems that rely you to use certain skills on certain monsters.
Meta ofcourse will always exist, even if they'd remove all DPS related skills there would be the "meta" for that game with like Earplugs, WindRes, Tremor Res :D
There's a mod to make elemental weapons apply blights to monster, I'm honestly surprised Capcom relegated such a cool mechanic to some random beetles you find laying around 🤦