N1njaSquirrel

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

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Despite the bug staff probably being the most versatile set of attacks in the game, i also find micromanaging the bug very tedious and limiting.

 

As for the longsword, In addition to the lance, the longsword is the other weapon i've primarily been playing at this point, and i like it a lot.

It's a very straightforward moveset, but it has some fun mechanics and a great balance of range and power and speed. You'll probably struggle to get it buffed against highly evasive enemies, so taking advantage of long attack recoveries, exhaustion or stuns, traps, or the topple state caused by mounting attacks to give yourself opportunities to build your buff will be very important. (Remember, you can leap from walls or any ledges to try to set up mounting attacks, you don't need to rely on a weapon's built-in jump gimmick, which the longsword has none of.)

You generally want to open combos with its fast A attack, then do two X attacks, and then another A attack. However you start it though, it'll basically always end up being the same, two X's and one A, back and forth into eachother. (A tends to get deflected easily if your sword loses sharpness, though.) You can cancel out of that chain at any time with the X+A backstep slash, which besides being a useful egress and positioning tool, is important for something i'll get to in a bit.

Once you have your meter filled by landing successful hits, you can start doing your spirit slashes with R, and if you land a hit with the whirlwind attack at the end of that combo, you upgrade your longsword's damage. (The effect stacks until your sword glows red. The damage buff will slowly time out, but hitting the next phase of the progression resets the clock. Unrelatedly, your spirit slash meter will also start timing out after about 30 seconds, and even if you land more attacks, it will not stop depleting until it hits zero.)

Now, starting your spirit combo just with R requires full meter to successfully trigger the whirlwind attack, but if you start the R combo from the X+A backstep slash, it uses fewer moves before getting to the whirlwind attack and therefore needs less meter. (It's also faster, though starting with R generally has more forward momentum and range.)

Another quirk that is worth noting is that the spirit slashes apparently ignore attack deflection. It seems a little unreliable, but you're also generally allowed to sneak one X or A attack into the middle of an R combo to build a bit of meter, if you're not sure that you're going to have enough for the whirlwind attack. (Those attacks will be deflected as normal, so be wary of doing that if you started the spirit slashes after your sword lost its sharpness.)

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I was thinking that I might skip this one after not getting into MH 3 on Wii or Wii U but then I found out you can play dress up with cats with swords and I do need something to play on my New 3DS, so come pay day I'm going to pick this up.

In the meantime I'll keep popping into the demo and try out the weapons to see what I like, I'm leaning towards dual blades and a bowgun of some sort. But the switch axe seems cool as well.

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I've been playing around with multiple equipment sets lately, having various sets of armor keyed to the strengths of paired weapons, and there's a super valuable thing to know that isn't maybe self-evident: So decoration gems are super important, you'll use them to disable active penalties and push other skills into the range of being active, or even up past further thresholds. Moving around decorations manually is pretty tedious though, and it's an issue you'll run up against if you need to have a difficult-to-create decoration in multiple sets of armor. The solution is simple: Save your equipment sets, don't ignore that feature, because the game will automatically shuffle around your decoration gems to the right slots when loading a set.

 

I was thinking that I might skip this one after not getting into MH 3 on Wii or Wii U but then I found out you can play dress up with cats with swords and I do need something to play on my New 3DS, so come pay day I'm going to pick this up.

In the meantime I'll keep popping into the demo and try out the weapons to see what I like, I'm leaning towards dual blades and a bowgun of some sort. But the switch axe seems cool as well.

 

is what happens when you try to dismiss a palico from your party in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. The first scene depicts welcoming them back at the very last confirmation prompt, the latter is what happens with an actual dismissal.

 

The game takes a long, long time to actually open up the palico stuff, you need to reach the third city in the game, but it ends up being a fairly involved set of systems, there's quite a lot to it. Though, don't get your hopes up, because you can only ever actually bring two of them into a fight, and one of them will always be the main palico you created at the start of the game.

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I did it! I defeated the Gore Magahla! Fuck that guy!

 

If it wasn't for my full spider armour, I wouldn't have noticed that it was ripe for capturing, and then with my speedy set-up perk it was a simple matter of luring it towards my trap and then tranqing it.

 

Pro tip: Null berries can lower the virus build up, but it can't get rid of it. 

 

Currently I'm using: Lance, Insect Glaive, and the Hunting Horn just for MP. I love using the hunting horn. The Kelbi Wacker has heal, and it's super fun knocking out that combo and healing everyone at the opportune moment. combine that with the prevent knockback that you can get from playing two white notes and it's a shoe-in. The hunting horn is by far my favourite weapon, it's a lot of fun, even if I'm not good at it.

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I had to farm the Gore Magala for one of my weapons and that was kind of a miserable thing to do, since one of his things only drops if you wound his head while he's frenzied.

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Alright my cat and I are now adventuring around together doing the 2 star quests in the first area while I learn how to use the bow, I didn't expect to enjoy the bow much after finding it terribly confusing in 3 but for some reason it's clicking right now so for now I'll stick with it. I'd still like to find a melee weapon I like at some point. I sort of liked the sword and shield but that feels kind of boring to me for whatever reason, I'll probably try the lance weapons next.

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So, was anybody here actually interested in doing any multiplayer?

 

Alright my cat and I are now adventuring around together doing the 2 star quests in the first area while I learn how to use the bow, I didn't expect to enjoy the bow much after finding it terribly confusing in 3 but for some reason it's clicking right now so for now I'll stick with it. I'd still like to find a melee weapon I like at some point. I sort of liked the sword and shield but that feels kind of boring to me for whatever reason, I'll probably try the lance weapons next.

 

The Sword and Shield definitely seems boring at first, but it ends up probably being one of the more nuanced weapons in the game with its combo trees, in addition to having a few special attacks off of ledges. (Even going -up- them, something no other weapon shares.)

Also, the ability to use items from a guarded state without sheathing your weapon seems like a minor point, but it's a pretty huge advantage. Most significantly, it means you can heal more quickly and more safely. (In multiplayer, it also sort of pigeonholes you as the guy who is going to take care of all the items. With certain armor skills, you can even fashion yourself into an quick-acting and effective healer for the team.)

The Lance, on the other hand, is the weapon to use if you don't mind trading evasion for tankiness and want to have a very broad range of individual attacks to apply as the situation demands, rather than any complicated combo trees.  (Though there are still some extremely straight-forward combos to get a handle on. The general extent of it is 3 X or A attacks and a side dodge to cancel the recovery, back into the 3 X or A attacks.)

 

Also, unlike the Gunlance, you don't give up overall mobility. With the Lance charge, you can move very quickly.

 

Play around with several of the melee weapons, there's no reason to stick to one.

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I'm interested in doing multiplayer too.

 

I just made it to the second village. I've been rocking charge blade so far, and it's been a lot of fun, but i feel like it's going to be a pain for everyone else if i use it in MP, since it has a lot of sweeping combos.

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I'm already doing a bit of multiplayer with some friends but I'm happy to do more. I use the Hunting Horn because I love rockin' out.

 

My friend code is 0920-2627-9307, if you add me send me a PM with yours so that I can add you back. If you added me in the past I may not have you anymore because my 3DS glitched out and I had to get a new SD card and stuff.

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My interest has waned quickly, I guess that's the problem with playing so much of 3 in prep for 4.

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My interest has waned quickly, I guess that's the problem with playing so much of 3 in prep for 4.

 

Keep some forward momentum in the game so you keep running into new stuff instead of the game iterating on what it just introduced a half-dozen times, and definitely get playing some multiplayer with people.

 

The solo stuff stays pretty simple and dull for a good long while.

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I got stuck on fighting the Gypceros. I hate creatures with poison attacks. I felt like I was doing tons of damage, but never got him even down to limping. My bow is already the max upgrade I can get at this point, so I'm looking at either starting a new weapon from scratch or grinding a bunch of Tetsucabra to get a new suit of armor. Times when I got stuck in MH3, I felt like there were a lot of options on how I could handle it (attack/defense potions, better weapon, different cat setups, etc) but here I feel like I'm pretty much stuck where I'm at.

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As i've said a bunch of times, you pretty much always need to have a set of multiple weapons. If that weapon set is diverse, you probably don't even need to go back and grind out a bunch of extra stuff, usually just one or two items. As i noted once before, your bow being maxed out as much as possible for where you are in the game doesn't necessarily mean it's all that good for where you are in the game, the progress curves for the weapon trees tend to be seriously uneven. (Alternatively, Gypceros is apparently crazy resistant to shot damage everywhere except his head, so there's that too. If you've been aiming for body shots, you haven't been doing anything.)

 

The gypceros is a really annoying early fight though, but i think he's pretty easy to take down with a lance or a hammer. (With the lance, you can hide behind the shield to avoid his flash stun. With the hammer, you can actually just break his crest to prevent him from doing in in the first place. I'd say go for the lance though, if you're not confident in your evasion. Take advantage of the counter attack and the advancing guard to both set up high-damage chains.) As for poison, all you can really do that early in the game is just stock up on antidotes. Don't underestimate the cumulative amount of damage from that. If you're near an exit, it's worth stepping out of the area and curing it. Also, unlike many others, Gypceros way more dangerous from behind, his tail attacks are seriously hard to avoid.

 

If you feel like you need a lot of durability, the Tetsu armor is pretty much the earliest choice for tanking through lots of damage, and it's worth upgrading a couple of times. With the right gems it's easy to get significant health/defense buffs off of it without any active penalties. (Try swapping out the gauntlets for konchu vambraces, that's what i did.) You'll quickly run into other armors that offer better base defense and more diverse skills, but the testucabra armor's emphasis on durability is a good crutch to fall back on until you have a clear picture of which skills in which armors will actually benefit your builds.

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The tough thing about using a bow (which I guess initially stalled me out in the MH3 as well) is that you need a completely different set of armor if you want to switch over to melee, which makes it mentally difficult to throw away all the progress you've made and start over. Trying to use a bow in MH3 is what initially killed it for me, before I came back a year later and just went with hammers. I was feeling like MH4 might be different, but I've hit the same wall. It feels like giving up to just switch back to a hammer and brute force my way through the rest of the game like I did before.

 

I guess what I'm saying is that I like the concept of having a difficult fight that requires me to try multiple different tactics and weapon sets, but I expect that more toward the end game, rather than right at the start. *shrug* My love/hate relationship with Monster Hunter I guess.

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I just want to be absolutely clear, are you doing the caravan missions, or are you trying to solo the gathering hall missions?

 

Also, the thing about the armor is... That gunner/blademaster divide is kind of a red herring, because even just among melee weapons, you still want to work towards having armor sets specific to your different melee weapons. Something that boosts your block, perhaps, for a lance, while a hammer would benefit from a buff to knockout damage. (You're also not "throwing away progress", the materials you've been collecting are sort of latent potential, you're probably already most of the way towards building some acceptable gear.)

 

Myself, over a hundred hours into the game, i'm running five sets of armor across about a dozen weapons. Where you are at in the game though, i probably had 3 or 4 weapons and maybe two sets of armor. (Gunner/Blademaster Tetsucabra armor, actually. It was just the easiest thing to do at the time.)

 

Anyways, in my personal opinion, and this is an opinion because i know people who have played huge chunks of Monster Hunter games solo with a gunner weapon, i think the gunner weapons are generally more suited to multiplayer. You will be a hero in multiplayer, providing support effects and being able to step back and adjust your ammo type to help double up on the status effect a blademaster's weapon is dedicated to inflicting, all without fighting for melee space in the dogpile by the monster.

 

Still, if you want to solo with the ranged weapons, which is certainly manageable, there's a few things to keep in mind:

 

1. Don't cheap out on ammo, certain types will be monstrously powerful. (I'll admit that i'm not completely sure how the ammo works out for the bows. I understand the default shot is probably stronger than the the default bowgun ammo, but it's also probably not advisable to rely on.)

2. The ranged weapons can perform mounting attacks as well. (The bowguns do it by reloading mid-air, which turns into a sort of ground pound attack. I'm not sure how the bows do it, i know they actually have a few dedicated melee attacks.)

3. Large barrel bombs exist in the game largely for the benefit of gunners. (Combined with a sleep status effect, you can have plenty of time to set them up and shoot them.)

4. Damage varies a lot by range, and headshots are almost always ideal. (Except when they're not.)

5. Like the melee weapons, you can cancel a lot of move recovery by dodging left or right or forward immediately following an attack. With the bowguns, at least, sometimes blindfiring between these dodges at close range is actually the safest and most effective way to play. (Again, i don't use the bow, it might be a bit different there, but it probably isn't.)

 

All of this said, i generally don't play a gunner, but at least some of this advice comes at me from people who do.

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I'm definitely doing the caravan missions.

 

Your take on things is interesting, I beat through all of the village quests up to 5* in MH2 and MH3 with one or two weapon categories, with maybe a couple weapons in each if I ended up with elemental attack damage on one.that was undesirable for certain fights. MH3U in particular, I beat the whole low tier game on the Barroth Hammer path once I put down my bow. I like the idea of having that much variety to play with, but I fear that I'll end up not really mastering the mechanics of any of the weapons if I don't concentrate on them. I'm also feeling very resource strapped at the moment, but I'm not exactly sure why. There's not a whole lot I even come close to being able to craft right now (weapons, armor, or decent items.) Maybe I just need to run more expeditions or something.

 

Your gunner tips are actually quite helpful.

1) I just recently gained the ability to buy coatings, which has expanded my repertoire a little, but until then I pretty much had access to power and poison coatings from mission supplies, and that's it. Now I have a few other options, but the difficulty is trying to figure out what status effects work against what monsters. How many status effect arrows should I have to shoot before I know to stop wasting them?

2) The A button does a basic slash attack with the arrow, and that can be used to mount. I have not had a lot of luck with mounting so far, the tutorial was somewhat poor, but I'll definitely attempt it more.

3) I used to use a lot of barrel bombs in older games, I don't know why I haven't used them much here. I'll keep that in mind

4) I'm using one of the shotgun bows that I have to be fairly close with, but I haven't even had a fork in the upgrade tree yet so I'm kinda stuck there.

5) Blind fire doesn't do much for bows, since they do significantly more damage when charged, but I'm generally pretty good at being mobile.

 

In the end, I'm kind of aware that bows are more for multi-player, I'm just being stubborn wanting to make it work. This is the second time I've done this to myself, so I guess I should know what to expect  :wacko:

 

Edit: I'm also stubborn in not wanting to check a wiki, and instead learn strengths and weaknesses on my own, which the game doesn't surface very well. I should probably take the 8-4 Play guys' advice (heard on the Bombcast) that if you're not masochistic, you should use a guide.

 

Edit 2:  It turns out the wiki is missing a lot of info anyway, but man you weren't kidding about this being the anti-bow boss. 20 or 30% damage to most of the body, only head, neck, and tail even worth hitting.

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I had to go to New York for the weekend, and haven't been able to touch my 3DS in a few days since being back. I need to get back into playing before I can join anyone for some multiplayer, sorry! I just don't feel comfortable dragging any party down with my exciting MH incompetence. 

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I had to go to New York for the weekend, and haven't been able to touch my 3DS in a few days since being back. I need to get back into playing before I can join anyone for some multiplayer, sorry! I just don't feel comfortable dragging any party down with my exciting MH incompetence. 

 

 

As you can see, you're not the only incompetent one here and I've played three of these things now.

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Finally got this, just tackling the newbie stuff and trying to get a half decent armor set. The charge blade is nuts!

I'd totally be up for some multi, especially with newer players. Is there somewhere people have been exchanging codes or am I blind?

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I've hit this strange point in this game where I get it, and enjoy it, but only when I'm playing it. Once I've started it I have fun but getting up the motivation to just boot up the game and get into a mission is strangely difficult. I'm having fun with the charge blade and I like getting new armor sets but it feels like late game Diablo where even though I'm having fun I feel like I already know everything the game has to show me. I'm sure that's not true, I'm still at the 3 star quests so there's no way I've even seen the basics of what the game has to show me, but I'm not really super excited about any of it. But for whatever reason I don't really feel any need to keep playing this over anything else

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I have pretty much the same feeling. The thing that pushes me to actually play is that I have a couple of friends who do and we end up playing multiplayer quests. That's definitely great fun and I recommend it wholeheartedly, but once I've played with them I don't feel a particular drive to do the solo quests.

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Is there a particular trick to cutting off monster parts? I've been trying to cut off the Jaggi Crown (different name but I can't remember) but I have a real hard time targeting only the head. The bastard moves around so much and I end up hitting the body or legs instead, which results in it dying before I get the part to break off. I've been using the twin blades, longsword, and switch axe.

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Not really, you just have to be accurate. Jaggi's heads are difficult targets, but you could always use shock traps to stun them into position. Another option is to mount the Jaggi to floor him, or eat Feyline slugger, which increases chances to make them flinch. I assume you're after the King's Frill btw? I spent a long time hunting Zamitros, only to find I was hunting the wrong enemy, and should have focused my efforts on the smaller fish things.

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