Meta builds

Last update : 3 october [season 7]

In the beginner’s guide, I gave some generalist sets, working with most weapons to quickly go through the game beginner’s ranks. However, past a certain point, you will want to increase your options and optimize your equipment to increase your damage output.

A meta needed in endgame

Meta means ‘Most Efficient Tactics Available’, aka in MHNow environment, how to clear the combat faster. And it’s important in that game since you have a tighter chrono to respect during the fight and monster’s HP increase a lot in endgame. To demonstrate my words, you can see below a comparison between a Great Jagras HP and a Rathalos weapon attack rank after rank, with the basis that rank 5 is 100% for both.

As you can see, a rank 10 Great Jagras has 2157% of the HP of a rank 5 one while the rank 10 Rathalos weapon only reach 398% of its rank 5 counterpart. With each rank, the gap increase further and further and rank 10 monsters become really hard to kill solo. When you reach 8 star monsters, every damage is important and you’ll need optimized sets.

Element’s importance

[Comparisons here use fire DB as a basis for a no skill tax weapon easy to compare, obviously some nuances will be lost in the process like bowguns ammos or HH songs for instance for the purpose of simplification]

A mistake a lot of beginners make in Now is wanting to rush, upgrading only a single raw weapon. In mainline games, it’s a totally viable strategy. But mainline has 50min hunts, not 1min15. In this game, every second count and you need to optimize your damage.

Elemental weapons are king in Now. When you attack a monster with an element he’s weak to, your attack becomes raw + element. If I attack a fire-weak Jagras with my rank 5 Rathalos weapon, my attack power goes from 361 to 361 + 232 so no less than 593 attack. With this simplified damage formula, affinity and crits also applies to element (unlike mainline where you need a specific skill to do critical elemental damage).

Let’s compare a Rathalos weapon against a fire weak monster with 2 of the most popular raw weapon rush candidates, namely Kulu LS and Diablos bow. The graph obviously also take the Kulu weapon affinity in its calculation and can be used for any of those 3 monsters weapons since the base stats are the same.

No matter the level, the element weapon stays on top. And the cap furthers when the rank increases. And that’s without considering the fact that elemental weapons can use Elemental Attack skills. Where Attack Boost tops at a 300 attack bonus, elemental skills push their own buff all the way to 500, pushing their advantage even higher.

And some monsters like Beotodus or Garangolm also have increased elemental weakness (like 150% fire damage or 200% water or thunder damage on certain parts).

The game evolution and the Crit Ferocity case

Since the game release, some nuance has been introduced to the element supremacy though. The game has changed a lot, introducing new skills through new armor parts and weapons and driftsmelting allowing usually up to 5 bonus skill points.

For fire DB, aside from driftsmelting increasing the set affinity, Slos DB are now replacing Anjanath. The small damage increase at rank 8 is due to the addition of driftstones in the modern set

One of the new options nowadays is Critical Ferocity who allows overpowered negatives crits. These special crits reach all the way to 250% damage but with only 30% chances at best in a fully optimized set, introducing some randomness in the fights.

Fire Attack is the strongest driftsmelting option for Glavenus while Tigrex being pure raw gets a better buff from Burst who increase attack (and not damage). Also note that this simulation is a general estimation, the 30% proc chances of Critical Ferocity meaning it could perfom better or worse

We can see here that if in the end element stays the strongest, Critical Ferocity stays really close (the Glavenus weapon even overpowering on certain ranks) and more importantly that the Tigrex weapon, despite being a raw weapon, is never far behind. At rank 10, it only has 7% less damage than the element option (while being 33% more powerful than a release elemental set). Tigrex weapons under Crit Ferocity are some form of anomaly in the MHNow meta landscape, weaker than the elemental meta but still strong enough to perform well against most of the roster.

But keep in mind that Crit Ferocity is a somewhat unique path: what performs well with Crit Ferocity won’t work as well with an element, Crit Elem, Vital or a more specific option like Pursuit.

A more open meta

As we’ve sawn before, the game evolution introduced some changes in the meta and its logic. The sets becoming stronger, they offer more options to the players. As of the season 7 update of this article, we have 3 main endgame options:

Critical Element (replacing elemental builds passed rank 10) aiming for strong elemental crits
Critical Ferocity who as explained before tries to fish overpowered 250% negative crits (but with the 30% randomness)
Vital skills who like the base elemental skill add to your element but where the buff is linked to your remaining HP (meaning it can be overpowered at full health… And crap if you take a lot of hits)

Aside from the overpowered Vital skills (in the optimal conditions obviously), you can see that all options are pretty strong, some being better or worse at different ranks. Choose your own path!

Learn from the very best

MHNow has a fight approach who looks a lot like speedrunning where you need to kill the monster as quickly as possible, unlike mainline games where you have 50 minutes to do your hunts. So without much surprise, a leaderboard ended up emerging and you can find it at this link: https://mhn-leaderboard.pages.dev/

The main interest of such a ressource is to see how high level players manage to deal as much damage as possible as fast as possible and copy them, which is pretty easy in Now since the AI is a lot more consistent than in mainline. You can note when they use their special, how they place themselves next to the monster or what parts they prioritize.

The builds

The sets are presented here on a Helm – Torso – Arms – Waist – Legs formula, with the talents and driftsmelts, allowing for a quick copy-paste to your phone notes to check at a later time.

These sets are here as examples. It can be good to craft some interesting armor pieces not shown here as we can’t predict what new skills or armor pieces awaits us in the future and what new builds these could allows. Elemental skills, Lock On, Focus… If it seems interesting, better make it during events when it’s easier than having to do some grueling farming later.

I’m also not considering Valor. This skill is matchup-dependant, according a full special charge and 1000 attack… But only after the monster roared. On some cases like Azure Rath who roars as soon as the fight begins, it’s straight up busted. In others like Jagras who never roars, it’s a dead skill. Aside from the fact that it’s basically to get a general value estimation for the skill, there’s the risk that more conditional skills like this one pop up in the future (and I then would have to do 40 variants of the sets). Once again, these sets are examples, don’t hesitate to do some test on mhn.quest and make your own builds (for instance switching 2 pieces to add Valor in your set).