Finishing the story for the base game of Monster Hunter World was something that was in my bucket list for a very long time. It was something I struggled to do for such a long time that at certain points I thought about giving up on it completely. Thankfully I didn’t and this weekend I finally completed the base game’s story! 😀
It wasn’t something I was really planning to do, nor actually expecting it. It kinda of just happened.
Maybe I should back track a little to explain how things turned out like this. I always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the game. Love because hunting giant monsters is fun. Hate because the grind to get new gear to hunt new monsters can be tedious. The frustration with the grind only got worse when I got to the High Rank monsters and the difficulty spike suddenly felt like it went way up. When I reached Nergigante then? It felt like I reached an insurmountable wall I’d never be able to get past.
Then the developers added the Defender set, easily accessible gear to get people caught up to the game’s expansion, Iceborne. That helped a lot with the tedium of grinding monsters to upgrade the equipment. For Nergigante I threw away my stupid pride and asked my friends for help. I am still surprised how flawlessly the fight went considering my skills.
After that there were only a few monsters left to finish the story, some being hard while others not so much. The final boss was definitely on the hard side. My first time with it I was getting near the time limit to finish the hunt when it killed me for good. For the second attempt I decided to check what I could do to prepare better. Turns out I just needed to upgrade my armor and weapon as I forgot I still had one more level of upgrade for those.
With my gear all upgraded and knowing what to expect my second attempt went way better. I didn’t faint once and managed to finish it in about 34 minutes. Still a long time but better than taking almost 50 minutes to do it. 🙂
Hunting with Uncle Geralt
For some reason I thought the Witcher collaboration was some kind of temporary event that I missed. But turns out I just didn’t have the right Hunter Rank for it. The requirement for this one is Hunter Rank 16. Before I defeated the last boss my Hunter Rank was capped at 15 so it wouldn’t even show me the option to do the collaboration.
Once I killed the last boss though the blue quest mark appeared and I was off to hunting a monster as Geralt!
The way this collaboration works is… interesting. I must admit that seeing a slim Geralt is a bit strange. Same with him wielding the giant weapons of Hunters. But otherwise I think they nailed everything else. They even had an optional quest which I failed because it required doing an optional quest with my Hunter beforehand. A quest I didn’t even know existed until I did tried to do this special assignment!
The monster itself also proved to be harder than I expected. Maybe it was because I got too cocky because of my victories over the Elder Dragons and underestimated it. Or maybe it was those stupid bleeding effects which complicated things a lot. Either way I died and haven’t gone for a round 2 yet. I will do soon as I want to see how it ends.
All in all I am happy with this collaboration, unusual and unexpected as it is! 🙂
Current goals
My original goal when I finished the story was to finish all the Optional quests I’ve ignored to get some mantles and other upgrades and then head over to Iceborne.
However I found out that after the story of the base game is done there is a Hunter Rank cap of 29, which is where I was stuck at. To lift that cap we need to hunt two Tempered Bazelguese which I wasn’t very confident about.
So I decided to go to Iceborne instead to get some gear upgrades as I heard everything there was better than anything in the base game.
Well, doing that they lifted any level cap on my Hunter Rank and they made those quests required to lift the level cap into Optional Ones for me. Since I don’t have to worry about that anymore I think I will just do a mix of hunting new monsters in Iceborne and doing old optional quests then.
Speaking of Iceborne, I like what I’ve seem of the new island, the new base of operations and the new NPCs. The two new monsters I fought were also interesting and I already got a new armor set. Still need to upgrade my weapon but I will figure that part soon enough.
For now I am just happy to putter around in Monster Hunter World, doing whatever fits my mood. 🙂
Congrats on getting through the base game!! Some of those fights are real bastids, so nicely done. xD
Keen to hear how you find Iceborne too. Some of the fights have been ridiculous on first pass, but getting there! I think I’m just past the first major sorta-halfway (maybe bit further?) point in the story now. Loving it so much. 🙂
Thank you! The fights after Nergigante didn’t feel that bad for me. I mean, yeah, they were hard but it was the kind of hard I could figure out how to handle. That is more than I could say for Nergigantes. XD
Yes, those first fights felt like a drag. But I was kinda expecting that since it is pretty much like a MMO expansion gear reset. I haven’t gotten too far yet though, only did two or three main missions, I think and fought two new monsters. So far, I like them. 🙂
Teostra is one people sometimes have trouble with. If you can’t flash him out of his supernova fast enough (or the fight continues past when flashes stop working, lol) then it’s another fight where mastery of ‘The Superman Dive’ used in the Nergigante fight comes in super helpful.
Although with Teo the nova isn’t usually a oneshot at least, unlike Nerg’s super move which almost always was, prior to Defender gear at least. I think that might’ve just been enough to prevent it one-shotting?
Anywho, the frost-fishy armor (Bao) is a super good set for a large part of Iceborne if you want it to be. You can also do some expeditions and just mine up a bunch of ore for the early Alloy armor to get started too. 😀
Teostra was definitely one of the hardest Elder Dragons. I think it took me almost the entire allowed time to defeat it. I also had to go back to camp once to resupply on healing items. For the Super Nova though I didn’t even try to flash him since I didn’t even know about it when I went in. I just saw that it looked like it was about to explode and run as far away as I could. Worked well enough. XD
I still need to do some optional quests with Teostra to get another mantle though. But I’d like to see if I can get some anti-fire armor set from Iceborne before I try that.
Yeah, I got the Bao armor set for myself and my Palico. But it seems the game is going to send me towards some non-ice monsters now which I am not sure it will help as much. XD
I still need a weapon upgrade though. I am thinking one of the new alloy ones or the bone one. But I am not having luck harvesting the rare material for either. The Defender one is working so far but it be nice to upgrade it sooner than later. Maybe I should just concentrate on expeditions for a while.