How A Forgotten Mechanic 'Broke' Monster Hunter

Monster Hunter Wilds is coming sooner than I thought! So with that in mind I wanted to go back and beat some of the superbosses from Monster Hunter World Iceborne like Fatalis and Alatreon. (but not safi cuz he's mutli only) When fighting Alatreon though I was reminded of this weird mechanic that I totally forgot about, so I wanna talk about it here!!!

Some of the music in the video is by @Bluerith !!! (specifically it's the misty peaks song around 7 minutes) Their stuff is great you should go give it a listen!!!

#monsterhunterworld
#monsterhunterworldiceborne
#mhswoocer

[Bluerith]

Another great video! I agree with your sentiment regarding Alatreon, keeping the player's agency and allowing them to tackle challenges their own way is one of the main reasons I am addicted to the series lol. I hope with Wilds we will have more encounters that encourage you to strategize your approach towards things!

Also, thanks for the credit and shoutout! 💙

[phantomxwolf]

“Vaal hazak is my favourite elder dragon”
“I main switch axe”
“I play super aggressively”
Me: I have found my people

[nword]

Some people just ignore defense, earplugs, wind pressure, etc; and slot evasion 3 and that is all they need.

[Zomboy]

"You have to think about your committal"

Me - *Furiously chugging Dash Juice*

[jerome]

Farming Chamelos for Kushala is the real og shit

[pcrl-HH]

honestly, at first i was a bit sceptical about what that vid was going to be (basically the typical "escaton bad, remove dps check") but i wish capcom thought about your solution, i think it's great and could've also been a fun challenge (maybe we could've even got mods that would keep him in this phase throughout the entire fight like a devilgen nergi), nice vid man

[Toasti]

Wait that's a great idea. I think it's dumb that Escaton Judgement CAN still kill you if you break the element. Putting in this phase is sounds way more flexible while being harder.

[myew]

Awesome video and nice job on the cuts. :3 I love your 'Primordial Malzeno' style solution to the Alatreon dilemma. Alatreon was my biggest struggle and wall in World/Iceborne. With my ADHD, it took me literal years to reach the point that I finally accepted and understood it would take me weeks of planning, preparation, augmenting, farming Safi/Kulve and testing out different builds as well as weeks of practice with over 50 attempts before I could finally solo that assignment, and I committed myself to returning to World to finish it. I had mostly used Charge Blade in World/Iceborne, but after trying Insect Glaive, Bows, CBs, and various others, I finally ended up having to use the Switch Axe as well. (which I mained in Tri/3U/Rise) It forced me to make a massive shift from my usual playstyle due to the mechanics and I really had to think deeply about my strategy while at the same time having to rely on muscle memory to dodge his skills from practicing so much. It certainly made me a better hunter in the end.. but the amount of sacrifice was in some ways so high for me individually that it really soured my personal experience of Iceborne overall. Again, I love your ideas on how to solve the issue, and I'm hoping that the dev teams took the feedback they got from Alatreon and used it in how they designed Primordial in Sunbreak and also going forward into Wilds.

[pitfallseed]

I just think it sucks that the best elemental set for ala, full safi with kulve weapon, requires two exclusively timed quests and that kulve has no guarantee to drop the weapon you need so the rng is just unreasonable. If you use that set you kinda feel like the difficulty of alatreon goes to the same level as the rest of the game before it. It's also not really clear that any other elemental set super sucks in comparison unless you're in the know that these things are in the game and the full ramifications of stacking their buffs

[KnottyTulip]

And then there's the mad lads who out healed the full power judgement

[UmbrumE]

I really liked the alatreon fight outside of that elemental dps check, the fight just felt incredibly well but meeting the elemental quota was kinda hard for me since I pmuch only use hammer and was used to going for raw dmg builds.

Regarding preparation, I feel like there's a lot less on world compared to older games and I worry it'll keep going away.

[Gigantheus]

Love your idea for Alatreon new phase in place of ES. It makes the fight doable even after 2 horn breaks ( cuz even with reaching dps check, and horn being easily breakable. That thing still has 50k HP ).

That phase would be fun as hell, and an absolute HEAVEN for lance mains like myself.

Love yo vid, man.

[zeroiscubed]

A couple discussions off this. First, preparation being forgotten. Certain gameplay styles and mindsets can be promoted or hindered through game design, but ultimately the player is going to do what they want to do most, with an increasing cultural expectation that games will support them to victory regardless of what that way is. MonHun grew with the dominant community mindset being that a clear is a clear, so prep as much as you can to clear as often as you can. The meta mindset was still around, especially in whatever the charm farm mission was, but it had minimal impact on community experience, and therefor design decisions. World included so many tiny choices and mechanics for the slow and preparing player, and yet the community it found was addicted to high damage numbers and low hunt times, out-skilling any and all attempts to force "inferior dps" into their builds. It's an equally valid way to approach the game, has always been around, and World's design supports it well, but the huge shift in the "common" approach had ripples on the community and the devs designing new content.
Alatreon was the apex of this struggle. The devs wanted to encourage non-meta thinking, but the community resisted so much it pushed them to Escaton. Even through Escaton, many people still resist the entire notion of an elemental check to this day. And despite all this, the people who were trying to prep for Ala as intended found themselves extremely limited, caught up in this design war not meant for them.

There is a second path through Ala that feels intended: dragon solo or thunder/water group and not requiring the horn breaks. This is how my group cleared Ala when it first came out, however that created a different design problem. We kept failing element checks on really good runs. The reason? The head takes less element damage than the legs, so "good runs" with everyone crowding the head during downs actually resulted in barely missing the checks. The moment we looked up this hitzone knowledge we started winning consistently, but being the first and only hitzone we ever researched made it a somewhat bitter victory. So even doing the fight as prep-focused as possible, with everyone all having a unique build for a specific role in a coordinated team of 4, the experience the devs so badly wanted, it still fell short by being too strict and unclear. The simple knowledge of how close to passing we were would have meant a lot for groups like mine.

The extremely high quality of Ala's back-and-forth pacing and hitboxes finally made me start to hate the clutch claw. Not tenderizing, not wallbangs in an arena with dubious walls, but the actual act of attaching to the monster. So many valuable turns have been wasted or turned to carts because of attaching to the wrong part and having no control where you end up after getting off. Any earlier fight you have enough options and low enough punishments that I didn't mind the jank, but it's my one frustration with the solo Ala experience.

[obambagaming]

Another problem with Alatreon is (thats just my guess) that its elemental DPS check mechanic exists solely just because of the insane powercreep Iceborne had.
This powercreep at that time peaked with Raging Brachy Armor and Weapons.

Like dont even get me started how bad the powercreep was.
Just as an example: as Iceborne came out, the Acidic Glavenus GS was considered "too op" by many. Now compare it to any other DLC GS.


So to stop players from using the completely op powercreep sets, they introduced a mechanic that forced players to use Elemental weapons.

Now there are multiple problems:
First of all the best Elemental Armorsets at that time were Safi and Silverlos Armor.
Safi is high risk high reward. But many didn't want to use it for such a dangerous monster.
Silverlos armor is just horrible. Basicly no room for customisation.

To be fair, they also added MR Kulve Taroth before it, including the weapons with crit element, which is a bit weaker than the crit element of Silverlos armor.
But to get those weapons you have to do the extremely horrible RNG raid with Kulve.
So yeah... definitely not great.

In regards of weapons, you could atleast use some like the Safi ones.
Again a raid boss, but atleast better.


So now they leave you little room with customisation, atleast you will be able to play your favorite weapon type, right?
No.

Even tho they changed the elemental multipliers of each weapon type specifically for this fight, buffing some and nerfing some, its still not enough.

Despite big buffs, GS still makes barely any elemental damage compared to DBs or Chargeblade.

So... thats great...


They wanted players to stop using the new op powercreep meta, a problem the developers themselves created!
And to achieve this, they forced players to play another very specific and limiting meta...
Great.

Also everyone just abandoned that meta after Alatreon 😂
So it didn’t even help.



I think an easy fix would have been that instead of that bs DPS check that can wipe an entire team, Alatreon just becomes more unstable and stronger if you didn’t hit the DPS check.
Similar to Fatalis, but in a way were its still fair.

Even tho Fatalis one hits you with every fire move in its last phase, if you didn’t destroy a horn, you can still break it in this last phase.

I would make it so, that when Alatreon becomes more unstable and stronger, because you missed the DPS check, you can still knock it out of that stronger form by dealing enough elemental damage or breaking a horn.

This way the fight doesn't instantly punish an entire party at once.


Btw i wrote this comment before watching your vid to the end, and your idea to fix it is quite literally almost the same 😂

[HonestGhost]

I think the problem with Alatreon isn't that it forces you into a playstyle. I think it's the fact that there's very few monsters that you have to prepare for before that point. There should be a clearer build up for using different playstyles against different monsters. Why should one play style work against everything? Yeah sure it's player choice but should the player always have that choice? Sometimes you are facing an elder dragon of legends with full control of the elements. I don't think you should be fighting on your terms at that point, they are far too powerful for that. Adapt and overcome, such is the nature of monster hunter.

[carstan]

Could not possibly agree more! This is exactly what I've been saying from the moment the fight came out. The number of specific hoops you have to jump through to deal with that one single mechanic is ridiculous.

You have to build element, you have to play aggressively, you have to hit the hitzones that actually take good elemental damage, you have to break the horns (which btw aren't the best place to deal elemental damage), and then even after having done ALL of that correctly (while fighting a fair, but still difficult boss) you still have to heal through an unavoidable attack that will kill you no matter what your defenses are. That's the most infuriating part of it for me though, that even after doing everything correctly, your reward is being hit with an attack completely unprecedented in the history of the series that you cannot avoid at all and will kill you. That should be the PUNISHMENT not the REWARD. Even BS like Lunastra's supernova can be avoided by chaining panic dives.

Speaking of Lunastra, despite the amount of raw hatred much of the player base rightfully has for World's incarnation of this monster, it does still reward the player for preparation while giving leeway to find different solutions. Of course, you can build for fire/heat resistance or evasion, but also, the most valuable utility to have against Lunastra in my opinion is wind resistance. There are a lot of small winds that naturally occur during the fight that will inevitably combo into getting hit by otherwise avoidable fire attacks, but also, wind resistance makes it SO much easier to chain panic dives during the supernova. I definitely wouldn't say that the Lunastra fight executes this design philosophy well, but it still does it so much better than World's Alatreon fight, and I think that's a horrible shame, because like you said, I absolutely love everything about World's Alatreon EXCEPT for Escaton Judgement. It completely baffles me that the same people who complain about Lunastra will sing the praises of the Alatreon fight including Escaton Judgement. I simply do not understand.

[GTsvetkovski]

This video made me go to Steam and install MHW again. I never managed to beat Alatreon on my own (had a friend help me) and never got around to doing Fatalis as I didn't feel like I earned it. I'll do another full playthrough with my beloved, the longsowrd, as I didn't fully click with Greatsword when I tried it a few months back (let's ignore the fact that I missed more TCSs in 5 hours than Helmbreakers in my 200 hr first playthrough)

[GeatShadw]

My favorite memory of preparing for a hunt was against Hyper Jho in GU. I was being absolutely destroyed and if I didn’t triple cart I couldn’t beat it in time. My solution was to take my trusty Swaxe and add Evade Extender, Tremor Resistance and Mushroomancer. Whenever It would do the stomp move I’d Elemental Discharge. Something I could only pull off with Tremor Resistance. And infinite stamina from Mushroomancer as well as Evade Extender helped me get there in time. Beating it felt really good.

The music choice at the end is a little cheeky this time. Yes, it is a black dragon( ironic since it’s all but black) but not the one you would expect. Quite the interesting choice.

[AKAMarco]

Nice video, I just wanted to add that Fatalis doesn’t just phase into high damage only, phase 3 brings three new attacks, much faster attacks, and of ofcourse, the blue flame INSANE damage as a punish for you for not breaking its horn(s) in time. What I do like about Fatalis is you still can beat it without breaking its horns if you are precise and careful enough, just like a souls boss if I may say.

[justsomejerseydevilwithint]

4:10 alright hear me out: LANCE. Every one of those attacks is an opening for a quick jab, rotate, and the next one is too. All you have to look out for is the orbs of lightning, and that you can just backstep away from.