Rebalancing Progression G Rank Solutions Other
Recent Changes:
Added vague progress bars and progress notes.
Added more information on early rank gear balancing.
Added some Gacha Coin information.
Clarified some Point Store information.
Clarified some Caravan information.
More information related to Raviente handling
Added plans for transmogs
Added plans for premium cuffs
Added plans for premium armour
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Older Changes:
Added information about handling of premium weapons.
Clearer information on new endgame upgrades.
Added information about changelog handling.
Added information about what Conquests actually were.
Added information about intended Furious changes.
Changed what David Bowie lyrics display above this message.
Zenith Monsters were added in MHF-Z1 in November 2016. Magnet Spikes were added in MHF-ZZ in September 2018.
The design space around Zeniths was not remotely oriented around the use of Magnet Spikes for one very simple, completely objective reason: Magnet Spikes did not exist.
The following Zeniths predate Magnet Spike by up to nearly two years:
The following Zeniths released after Magnet Spike:
Of the monsters releasing after Magnet Spike only Taikun Zamuza has notable stat increases, all other monsters are similar to or weaker than previous Zeniths.
If you are failing Zeniths it's because they are hard monsters and you are not playing well, not because they needed the end of life cheese weapon.
The rest of the page still hasn't been updated in months.
This is going to go over changes which are planned for the game in general in order to give it better structure. It will identify problems in the game and what will be done to tackle the issue.
This will be a lot of words but you should read it all if you actually care about changes being made or have any doubt about the legitimacy of them.
As is mentioned elsewhere; a vanilla server will exist alongside everything else but it is not the focus for what I feel are obvious reasons.
For clarity, most of this details the state Capcom left the game in. Planned solutions to the issues are detailed further down the page.
As always discourse on the planned changes is encouraged, especially if you have differing opinions.
To be clear; not everything needs to be finished immediately and much will be ongoing longer term.
Hunter Rank originally consisted of a Dos style progression where you would unlock new Monsters every couple of ranks and do urgent quests based on that.
The original format had an urgent quest for reaching HR11, HR17, HR31 and HR51. You would then have a non-standard system for reaching HR100 where you could pay a lot of money or solo a specific monster to progress, you had one of these for each 100 Hunter Ranks culminating in fighting Fatalis, Crimson Fatalis and White Fatalis solo as the final challenges for HR800, HR900 and HR999 respectively.
Style Rank was an addition later in Frontier that started at HR300 (originally HR500) and unlocked buffs per weapon class and Weapon Styles for each of the classes you had it for.
Compressed Hunter Rank has 7 ranks total before G Rank and as a result hundreds of ranks were turned into as little as 2 quests total.
The raw rank number compression looks like this:
With each section having the following content:
Outside of the above ranking compression monsters at every point during Hunter Rank were repeatedly nerfed over time. This was not because they were too hard but rather to avoid people hitting any walls before G Rank because it lowered subscription rates.
In general you can assume anything that was turned into a Key or Urgent for the redone compression got hit with a nerf of of around 20% to everything. Meaning 80% of their original health and attack values. Many got far harsher nerfs ending up at below half of their original strength.
As said, these numbers were not outliers. Most were nerfed after being consistent for several years. The changes were purely to push people to the subscription wall and to their advertised new expansion content faster.
Originally all armour in MHF needed materials to have their level upgraded, armour spheres as seen in the mainline games were not a thing.
Armour also was not always crafted directly, with many pieces originating from a parent set. This means something like a Blue Yian Kut-Ku armour would fork from the base Yian Kut-Ku one rather than being crafted immediately at the smith.
As part of their changes to rush people even faster, they replaced any material requirements past initial crafting with armour spheres.
Because the material compression was done in an incredibly lazy manner, a number of carves and breaks no longer have a purpose at at any point in the game as they were exclusively used in upgrade paths that were compressed out of existence.
As part of the compression and later changes they simplified the acquisition methods for various materials.
In general the changes basically amounted to better rates where you would expect them (less chance to not carve a tail on a tail) or allowing for more ways of obtaining parts (moving a gem that was break only onto low% carves).
While these changes caused some loss of flavour (such as Espinas no longer needing to be low health for its horn break or tail cut) realistically most were positive in terms of playing the game naturally.
Functionally the above points thus far result in several problems:
G Rank at its core was a poorly designed mess that solely functioned by virtue of the game being subscription based with new content being added every couple weeks to months.
All monsters were immediately unlocked at GR1 meaning there was never a reason to actually revisit or grind earlier release monsters as their skills were simply weaker due to natural power creep over time in a live service environment.
Early G Rank also had incredibly easy to make armour added over time, this means you could have a set easily capable of taking out the hardest non-event monsters in the series within a couple hours of starting G Rank. with the only thing stopping you doing this solely being that you needed to be G Rank 800 to fight them at all.
To exacerbate the above issues further, MHF-Z introduced Extreme Style which was entirely designed around fighting Zeniths, but which was made immediately available at GR1.
Extreme Styles have incredibly high mobility, buffed motion values, added defensive options and can run at any point including while your weapon is unsheathed.
You unlocked this immediately at G Rank after it was added.
The game had 25 large scale expansions before MHF-Z, with most having smaller expansions before the next large scale expansion was released.
This means that every single one of the monsters added for more than 25 expansions was 100% designed around Hunters being limited to Earth, Heaven and Storm styles.
If you distil Monsters down to their core and HC versions this comes out at what is functionally around 190 different monsters.
If you count G Rank versions separately (as they do in fact have differing hitzones and new moves) and various special variants that aren't formally new sub or rare species the number drastically increases further.
In contrast to this; MHF-Z had 23 Zeniths, 5 challenge monsters and 8 normal monsters during its life cycle including all large scale expansions.
Of the normal monsters, one was delayed from G10 originally, meaning it was designed around a lack of Extreme Style and one was released as GR1 and GSR1 content for MHF-Z during the time when GSR300 was required for Extreme Style, implying it was also designed with non-Extreme styles in mind.
This obviously results in an incredibly low number of Monsters that were designed around Extreme Style and means that the vast majority of things you would fight during early GR are massively outclassed.
Conquests were originally implemented as a roughly monthly event that had quests you could level up.
Levelling up the quests added new moves to the monsters over time and increased all core stats such as Attack, Health, Status Resistance etc.
The monsters available were Black Fatalis, Crimson Fatalis, Disufiroa and Shantien.
Conquest materials were used for upgrading GR Weapons and Armour to full power.
Quests started at Level 1 and would go up a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 15 levels per run with a maximum level of 9999.
Any serious player generally aimed for something around Lv200 minimum for every monster and each monster had a leaderboard with the highest levels getting extra material rewards. Lv9999 was not uncommon for first place on leaderboards.
Conquests were eventually turned into a permanent availability static set of four quests per monster and a pack of mass amounts of conquest materials were given out to all current and future players.
Functionally this meant there was no longer a reason to touch the quests outside of completing the hardest variant once for a transmog unlock.
Hunter's Road was added with MHF-Z's first large scale expansion. It's basically an arcade version of monster hunter where you choose one of a random pair of monsters and fight it to get points.
Road had a points store. It had every standard G Rank carve and break material in the game. You did not have to have hunted the monsters you could get materials for.
This meant you could get materials for everything in the game except Zeniths without ever hunting or even seeing the associated monsters.
Or to be even more blunt, it patched out the core Monster Hunting loop from a Monster Hunter game.
G Rank decorations were originally one of the big long term investments in Frontier, you had to fully upgrade a piece of armour to then convert it into a decoration.
A new smithy section was added during the first large scale MHF-Z expansion that completely removed this grind and made it so you could make decorations with a single material instead.
The materials were available on the Road store.
This meant the best way to get any decoration in the game that wasn't an event one was to run road.
To put what this actually meant in terms of the core loop into perspective; you could make the strongest decorations from the strongest Elder Dragons by killing five Kut-Kus.
Zeniths were added in the MHF-Z update. They have four variants that increase in power, these are generally referred to as GR200, GR400, GR600 and GR800 or ★1 through ★4.
They were initially pretty well specced but GR200 and GR400 saw some pretty heavy nerfs at the lower end for the MHF-ZZ update. These nerfs were mostly done because the game was already dead at the time MHF-ZZ released and COG were focused on just having people blast through content as fast as possible to see it before the game was closed.
Ultimately this means that without any changes the GR200 and GR400 Zeniths are notably weaker than normal monsters added during G10 and earlier updates. This is in spite the game having power creep pushing your DPS to potentially tens of times that of G10.
Zenith Weapons had their material requirements lowered drastically because people wanted to spend more time grinding Raviente. They went from pretty grindy to nearly grindless.
Outside of their signature break materials (for which all Zeniths had a version exclusive to each rank band) all Zenith materials came from all ranks of Zeniths.
This meant that the best way to approach Zenith equipment was to get your rank locked break materials and then grind whatever rank you could do the fastest. Generally this meant most grinding was done at GR400 where the monster was relatively weak and lacked harder moves.
To put it bluntly; the game was Pay to Win.
For raw gearing it was generally a temporary power boost that newer non-paid gear would replace but the simple fact is that gearing was easier if you paid and the result always objectively better.
All premium armour that was relevant came with a flat damage reduction that applied before anything else. This started at 10% with 1 piece and went to 30% with 5. This means that if you had a Premium and a non-Premium set that had with identical Defence, Resistances and Skill Points the Premium set would simply take 30% less damage from everything in the game than the non-Premium set.
These sets also came with health regeneration, defence boosts and attack boosts depending on the quest taken.
Most grinds could be drastically reduced by subscribing to various paid premium courses.
Some courses reduced all taken damage by 70%.
DS and SnS were especially notable in that their best in slot weapon was premium for most of the game's life.
You could skip grinds entirely by buying Gacha coins and using them instead of doing quests.
The Frontier equivalent of Charms or Talismans had Premium options that were always drastically better than non-Premium.
While marginal in benefit compared to the above, the Japanese version had an additional subscription for using town boxes.
After you hit HR5 you unlocked the option to complete 'My Mission' tasks, these gave various passive defensive boosts but also increased the maximum amount of attack you could have.
They functionally amount to a checklist of monsters you had to hunt in a linear order that got repetitive and wasn't very engaging.
Because you will always need some levels they were basically compulsory and the only way to skip the grind was to pay.
Raviente was the ultimate endgame content in Frontier from MHF-G9 onwards. If your class wanted a Raviente weapon it was always best in slot and nothing else could ever compete with it.
For the few classes that didn't want Raviente weapons, best in slot was either a paid weapon or a Blue Tenrou weapon.
Blue Tenrou weapons needed about 3 actual hunts of materials and the rest came from the Hunter's Road store. These weapons were customisable and eclipsed everything else in the game that wasn't Raviente at a fraction of a fraction of the time investment compared to even Zenith ones.
Solid Determination was a skill associated with Berserk and Extreme Raviente, it had no other sources and the only avenues to get it always required Raviente materials (though you could do Road for these later in life).
The skill itself is incredibly powerful to the point of absurdity, granting the following:
Alone this skill is more powerful than the set an average player with decent time investment would have been using for most of G Rank and would save you in the region of 150 skill points on a set.
Because of the hitzone buffs you can completely ignore elemental weaknesses - anything you use will always be doing at least something - and you can care notably less about always being on top of the best Raw hitzones.
While the skill did not change over time the power of other skills did; this meant that a set without determination might have to drop DPS skills while a set with Determination could stack every single one trivially.
The only downside to the skill was disabling a few crutch mechanics such as Guts and Absolute Defence, this was negligible and only mattered less over time as MHF-Z Zenith level sets could tank the things you'd take guts to survive.
The skill was an excellent aspirational grind (and realistically was solely intended to make people subscribe for several months to obtain it) but fundamentally ruined the balance of the game; there was never a baseline of power the developers could plan around because there was such a gap between people with Determination and Raviente weapons and everyone else.
This will summarise the above and state what is being done to address the perceived problem. It will also summarise problems I didn't mention and state what is being done to address the problem.
The bars underneath the headings are vague representations of progress. This should be taken as a very rough indicator of work to be done as the workload per problem are vastly different.
Not everything needs to be finished immediately, don't take the status bars as 'this is what needs to be done before people can play'. The obvious example is premium equipment; rebalanced trees can be added later with it simply being unavailable until that aspect is finished.
Monsters were heavily nerfed over time
Restoration is complete. Final stats will need manual tweaking.
Get monster stats from all previous releases of Frontier we have access to in order to extract official pre-nerf stats for them.
Restore these and have people of varying skill levels test the monsters to refine them to the best appropriate value between the original and the overly nerfed versions.
Unlocking Styles comes too late
It's done. Quests may change later with testing.
Unlock Earth, Heaven and Storm Styles from HR1.
Adjust Keys and Urgents to be Hardcore variants of monsters for the closest emulation of fighting them at low ranks of Style Rank.
The new Hardcore quests will have higher tiers of Roar, Quake and Wind earlier
Decorations decided. Creation and addition of quests is pending.
Add access to decorations for Evasion, Wind Pressure, Hearing Protection and Quake Res that can be obtained from HR1 (which is HR1-2).
You do not fight enough monsters during HR and there's no reason to gear
It's done, pending quest list revisions later. Equipment changes pending testing.
Add a much larger variety of monsters during progression as key quests.
Make equipment that is overly strong harder to craft or nerf it.
Having more monsters required to progress and removing the nerfs all monsters faced should be enough to justify gearing for anyone who isn't being carried.
Equipment compression removes reasons to fight monsters
Old requirements restored. New crafting trees and revision of rare materials pending.
Get material requirements from the last version of MHF which had them and restore a ramped down version of the old requirements
Specifically swap out rare materials for equivalent less rare ones where too many rare materials are required for very little power gain.
HR1-2 and HR3-4 is a bad split for Low Rank and High Rank
It's done, pending quest list revisions later.
Have HR1 cover the entirety of Low Rank and HR2-4 cover High Rank.
Low Rank being one section results in a better spread of quests across higher ones and avoids a full menu section devoted to 10 incredibly low power monsters and nothing else.
HR1 covering all of low rank makes the section messy
It's done, pending quest list revisions later.
Expand the number of HR sections to 9 starting, with ★1 and ★2 lacking keys but being the logical area to start gearing.
This is the approach used in guild halls in some of the mainline games.
HR5 Exotics are generally poor compared to GR and cause balance issues
Crafting needs changing to start at G Rank level. Handling of leftover menu sections is undecided.
Move exotic monsters to G Rank exclusivity so that people get the best possible first experience for the monster.
The HR5 versions ultimately only existed because you needed to subscribe to reach HR5 and and people would subscribe to fight something like Zinogre or Deviljho.
Exotic Armours and Weapons are simply so strong within HR5 that it's never worth making any other pieces or exploring the mechanics of them, bringing them in line with other equipment be a nerf of such a degree that it would be tantamount to removing the equipment anyway.
To put their strength into perspective, equipping any piece of Seregios armour at all (e.g. just the legs) will grant you Critical Eye+5, an armour skill that needs 50 points otherwise as well as the skill points on the armour piece.
Some HR5 versions of monsters added during MHF-G are overly weak
Nothing concrete decided so nothing changed so far.
Move monsters that stand out as incredibly poor at HR5 to G Exclusivity.
In testing; everything except Guanzorumu is fine. This means only Guanzorumu (who was exclusively a repel that misses most of its mechanics) will be moved to GR exclusivity (excluding Exotics).
Weapon classes can feel bad without gearing
Decorations allocated, quests pending.
Give access to decorations for the skills that are required for weapons to feel good from HR1 or HR2 instead of HR5 upwards. Currently this is intended to cover the skills below.
* Auto-Reload is Fast Charge for Bow, it basically bricks Bowguns by giving them maximum recoil.
The Caravan or Hunter Gem takes forever to level
Final values undecided pending testing.
Drastically lower the colour requirements for the Gem so you finish levels naturally over time.
It was hundreds of quests to max out colours and if you didn't upgrade you could have overflow which was actively wasted.
Caravan Gem levelling feels terrible without Rainbow Gem
Lower the CP required to trigger a Rainbow Gem (40,000 CP to 10,000 CP).
Hunter Rank Caravan Routes are terrible and repetitive
No final routes decided on.
Update the routes to cover more monster variety and be more enjoyable in general.
I'd avoid using the term 'terrible', but fighting multiple Yama Tsukamis that can only die at the top of the tower and take over 10 minutes to reach counts as terrible.
Caravan Routes give too few Caravan Points compared to Raviente
No final values decided on.
Raise CP granted by all routes.
Add more G Rank Caravan Routes with higher fixed CP rewards at the end.
My Missions are highly repetitive
No final values decided on.
Increase the variety of monsters and sync it with the progression so you will naturally unlock most levels you might initially want.
Have early ranks only need you to kill a single monster per level to avoid repeating easy monsters.
Vanilla had you fight 78 monster types over 250 missions, most of this variety came very late in the process.
G Rank has no progression and all monsters were unlocked at GR1
Key and Urgent functionality created. Pending real testing.
Add Key and Urgent Quests to G Rank.
Convert G★1-7 to G1 to G10 and have progression based on the monster release order.
Not tackling this means there is never a reason to fight a majority of the monsters in the game, even monsters that introduced best in slot skills are replaced almost immediately.
Why would you fight something strong for Fencing when you could get Sword God much more easily?
Why would you fight something strong for Sword God when you can just fight Blue Yian Kut-Ku?
The core monster hunter loop immediately crumbles and devolves into grinding to Exotics and then to Zeniths because you cannot feasibly get anything of worth from monsters released during MHFG1 through G8.
Release order based progression results in weak monsters in later ranks
There is not a concrete plan for this, but this is commonly agreed on to be a good option.
Move outliers that came very late in the MHF-G lifecycle to appear earlier in the game.
Alter decorations of moved monsters to not have skills that came much later.
The biggest outliers are below:
Extreme style ruins early G Rank
Extreme style no longer unlocks at GR1.
Unlock Extreme Style after the G10 urgent so you have to fight monsters released during G1-10 with the styles you'd actually have.
Free G Rank equipment is overly strong
Free quests removed. No trees have been decided.
Remove the free aspect entirely.
Make weapons that are initially crafted at maximum strength instead have actual upgrade trees to reach that level.
Make the armour pieces available only after hitting an appropriate point in progression.
Having these sets available at GR1 gives you end of MHFG lifecycle levels of power creep after somewhere around 10 hunts total trivialising basically all monsters.
G Rank decorations are basically free
Decos swapped to G versions. Armour upgrade changes pending.
Swap the direct crafting at the smith to the G variants instead of GX.
Lower total material requirements for GX Lv7 and restore GX armour conversion as primary source of decorations.
This was revised to G decos during tests as GF was very powerful and disincentivised GX heavily.
Conquests are badly structured but will be actively relevant again
Restore original style of conquests with them levelling up as you complete them with the rewards changing as you level.
This also allows for expansion beyond the scope of the original Conquests with rewards potentially being added for longer term grinds at Lv1000 and higher.
A basic first pass of this is already implemented.
Road replaced everything except Zeniths and Raviente
Materials have been stripped.
Make the Road Store primarily a source of its actual unique materials and special consumables instead of a generic best source of everything.
Only have monster materials sporadically available on road and in limited quantities instead of permanently to avoid it replacing actual hunting.
Point stores became actively detrimental to the core loop
Final items undecided.
Raise prices on, stagger access to or remove materials in point stores as appropriate.
GCP has a very solid niche in Partner upgrades already; losing some material buying power is fine.
N Points will be incredibly scarce in general as there will not be a method of constantly generating them (5 a day from a daily only) allowing for them to serve as a solid mercy system for active players.
Festival Points are not really an initial concern but they have the least use outside of raw material buying of these points.
Guild Contribution Point generation is lacking
Allow trading of rare materials for reasonable amounts of GCP.
GCP is generated at a rate of 1 per minute in quest with additional points coming from everyone who plays with your Rasta. This is not ideal for generating the thousands of GCP needed.
Diva Defence was the biggest source of GCP during end of life and will continue to be a source when implemented fully.
Lv50 G Weapons are not viable both long and short term
No crafting trees have been created.
Add Z Upgrades for all G50 weapons that are powerful early in the Zenith cycle but eclipsed by actual Zenith equipment after GR400s.
Add endgame grind upgrades for after the Zenith cycle.
Most Sigil recipe results are weak, have no niche and are not worth engaging with
Tools exist for function but no numbers have been decided.
Group monsters similar into similar classifications (e.g. Status, Elemental, Raw).
Come up with a generic set of skills for that group (e.g. Elemental, Attack, Affinity, Dowsing).
Balance around a core chase skill at all levels with the rarest material recipes guaranteeing.
Earliest monsters should have high values in useful flavour skills like dowsing (increases rates of rare gathering materials).
Things that alter moves or motion values should be easily available but shouldn't come with any huge buffs to stats.
For a practical example: Gasurabazura and Gypceros are Raw and Status. Gypceros would be more likely to roll utility skills such as dowsing and Gasura would have those removed from the pool and have a higher maximum Attack value.
Zenith materials reward mindless grind
Trivial but numbers haven't been decided.
Lower the drop rates of rarer materials on the easier versions and increase it on harder versions.
Zenith weapons need too few materials
Trivial but numbers haven't been decided.
Set material counts to a midground between the pre-nuke and post-nuke values.
To put this in perspective, weapons went from needing 31 lower rate items to needing 3. You can completely max out every weapon a monster has in less materials than a single one needed to be maxed out originally.
GR200 and GR400 versions of Zeniths were nerfed
Monsters have been unnerfed but all numbers need testing.
Revert the nerfs. Buff GR200 and GR400 versions of monsters added after the nerfs to put them in line with earlier monsters.
They're weaker than a lot of normal Exotics and G Rank monsters. They're not very Zenith in the state they were left in.
Zenith weapons without Skill Slots Up are brick
Nothing decided thus nothing completed.
There is not a concrete plan for this.
Potential solutions are swapping weapons to utility Zenith Skills instead or lowering the power level on anything granting skill slots.
The prior will probably feel better for all involved.
Ultimately there's only two ways skill slots up can go: You either get more power from the extra skill and all other weapons are bricked, or you get more power from the weapon and all skill slot up weapons are bricked.
The Hearing Up and other skills had some niche with things like Hammer, but assuming full access to all gear the Skill Slot Up would still normally end up superior.
Premium armour has an exclusive defence layer making it always best in slot
Damage reduction removed. No crafting trees have been created.
Remove the raw incoming damage reduction from premium equipment so that it functions like all other armour instead.
Make premium armour have traditional upgrade trees instead of needing a single material to hit maximum power.
Assuming identical skills and stats, ZP is always superior to ZX removing any reason to ever craft the latter if the former is available.
Premium armour is crafted too easily
Nothing completed.
Make premium armour have normal upgrade trees and crafting mechanics relevant to their release period.
Things added in G or Z updates will lose their HR versions to enable more appropriate levels of challenge to obtain them, a set designed around exploiting MHF-Z min-maxing is unlikely to have balanced stats during HR.
Premium armour pieces have very high skill points
Nothing completed.
Scale up grinds so they are a bigger investment over a longer period than standard pieces.
Tone down pieces that give absurd amounts of skill points (e.g. 20 points in Focus for an instantly maxed Focus+2) as appropriate.
Premium weapons need very few materials
Nothing completed.
Make premium weapons have normal upgrade trees and crafting mechanics.
Premium cuffs were always best in slot compared to Standard ones
Recipes made for all non-PZ cuffs.
Make the premium cuffs require larger grinds than the standard variants.
Make access to the standard variants easier (they were generally 1% carves and other rare materials yet were notably worse than Premium versions).
PZ cuffs are especially egregious in terms of power creep and should become relatively high investment grinds given their insane power in enabling sets.
This doesn't fix the best in slot issue, but makes it a choice what you want to grind and how hard you want to invest.
Cuffs are basically Frontier's equivalent of Charms or Talismans.
Some skills are only realistically enabled by Premium Armour
Nothing completed.
Add more decorations or create new ZX pieces for skills that have very low availability outside of premium pieces such as Focus or Reflect.
Magnet Spike pin is overly strong and there is a static resistance against it
Magnetic resistance changes implemented. Pin motion located.
Add variance to monsters' magnetic pin resistance value in the same manner they have varying KO, Sleep, Poison, Blast and Sleep resistances instead of having it be a binary value.
Lower the motion value on the pin finisher from 600-750 to something more reasonable like 200-250.
To put Magnet Spike in perspective, the pin completely locks down a monster in the same way paralysis would and then does the full motion value on whatever part you place a marker on at the end, this includes things such as Fatalis' horns which are nearly impossible for normal melee weapons to hit.
In comparison, a great sword charge is under 300 motion even if you invest 20 points in an armour skill to explicitly buff it which can whiff and leaves you open to counter attacks.
Vampirism is best in slot for both offence and defence at only 10 point investment
Pending final values, but they'll probably be 10.
Lower the True Raw bonus from 80 to around 10.
Skills with active negatives generally granted around 50 true raw and skills without them generally need 20 or more points for 50 true.
A 10 point skill that actively heals you while you attack shouldn't provide attack boosts far above actual offense oriented skills.
Furious is an easy to activate 10 point skill that rewards playing normally heavily
Pending final values.
Numbers are not final for this. Generally the idea is to move the (lowered) power to the final stage primarily to make losing stages a real consequence.
Lower the maximum True Raw bonuses: 70/100/180 > 15/30/100
Lower the maximum Affinity bonus: 10%/25%/40% > 5%/10%/40%
Lower the maximum Status and Elemental: 1.05x/1.10x/1.20x > 1.025x/1.05x/1.15x
You gain buffs for a combination of Guarding, Evading and Attacking. You lose one stage on taking a large hit. There are no other downsides.
Hiden grind was either too long or too free
Nothing decided thus nothing has been completed.
There is not a concrete plan for this but a few ideas have been thrown around.
Allow the direct creation of a G Lv1 armour piece to skip the Hunter Rank portion of Hiden grind entirely.
Lower total numbers of Souls, Ribbons and Merits required for completing a piece to convert into a deco.
Completing something arbitrary like reaching G Rank could grant you a single full set of Hiden decorations.
Completing a specific number of quests with a weapon class could unlock access to a Hiden material quest that would contribute a lot of the required materials to speed it up.
New decorations could be added that are easy to get but take up 3 slots and grant no extra skills, this would allow access to the skill but would not be viable for long term set creation.
No one did the Hunter Rank portion before hitting G Rank, this meant it took longer to find monsters you killed than to kill them for that entire section of grind. Without paying for boosts, this was historically around 800 quests.
Raviente is functionally PVP and creates an environment where you actively want everyone else to be worse than your group
Nothing has been done in this regard.
Make the gap in terms of rewards between being the best group and a normal group far lower.
As Raviente gear will no longer be as overpowered not engaging with this grind would be a valid option that does not cripple players as it would have.
Raviente Weapons take over 1,000 hours on average to complete
Requirements are easy to adjust. Alternative sources of Gg gems have not been decided.
Lower item requirement totals so that you don't need to grind Raviente for 1,000 hours.
Add alternative sources for earning Gg Gems.
This is not actually hyperbolic. A Z100 requires 1,500 Extreme Ravientes assuming decent performance on every one. Even spamming premium and getting nothing but perfect Ravientes would come in at over 300 hours.
Raviente or Premium Weapons are always best in slot
Adding weapons and upgrade paths is trivial but no paths or final stats have been created.
Add new endgame weapon upgrade paths for non-Raviente and non-Premium weapons that allow them to hit similar power levels with similar long term grinds.
The intention is to include literally every possible unique model in this over time, including old premium weapons that were never given stats to be relevant. As previously stated, these weapons would also now have normal upgrade trees prior to endgame upgrades.
This would not be 1,000 hours and would be after hitting their vanilla maximum upgrade at GR800 level.
Raviente heavily disincentivises Monster Hunting
Nothing has been implemented as it's a long term thing that's not immediately relevant.
Nothing here is final.
Have Raviente available on a rotating cycle with event quests that grant Raviente related rewards available during downtime.
Raviente should always be the best source of Raviente related materials but people should not actively feel pressured into joining all Ravientes they see while online.
There's not a perfect solution for this, all ideas will inevitably upset someone at some point.
Berserk and Extreme Raviente needs 24-32 people to function properly.
No numbers have been decided.
Practice Raviente already exists as a 4-8 player option sharing the fight of Berserk and Extreme.
Buff the rewards moderately on the Practice Raviente to make them a real alternative to normal Berserk for small groups.
Practice Raviente is a very diluted experience and realistically should remain as a weaker alternative rather than a replacement, its rewards should probably scale based on the schedule aspect above.
Blue Tenrou is overly powerful
Adding new has not been tested, stats are trivial to change.
Drastically lower the power level of all Blue Tenrou weapons.
Add alternative endgame variants of all Tenrou weapons in general, not just blue.1
1This has not been tested to be possible. If it's not, relegating Blue Tenrou to endgame and making them need actual work is also a viable choice.
There's not really an elegant way to handle something that's 80% of a Z100 at 0.8% of the time investment, heavy nerfs are likely the only valid option if you care about balance.
Determination fundamentally breaks the game
Nothing has been finalised here.
Don't have Determination available outside of the hardest challenge content or have a time attack only server.
The server would not be tied to your actual characters and simply exist for a vanilla time attack environment without having to get consumables or do 300 hours or Raviente. It would not be available for accounts until completing some arbitrary tasks.
The server is the most likely option; rebalanced skills would mean even with quests activating Solid Determination you'd never have parity with vanilla on a balanced server.
Raviente Decorations all have Determination
The bar is 0% because there's not been any numbers decided.
Swap Determination points for larger values in Issen as it is a 30 point skill that Determination directly replaced.
Raviente will no longer be the only grind anyone cares about if it doesn't have best in slot everything
This isn't a problem.
A lot of armour never got added as a transmog option
Add all armours with unique visuals as transmog options.
A lot of transmogs were paid or code redemption only
Create events or event quests to get all transmog options or tie them to existing related ones.
This extends to also cover the armours added above which did not get transmog options originally.
Gacha Coins were paid only
Create alternative avenues to earn Gacha Coins; they will never be tied to real money.
The actual uses Gacha Coins will have has not really been discussed. They were used for in a special item store, for caravan colours, for my mission skips and naturally for rolling Gacha.
Partnyaa Equipment was incredibly convoluted for very small gains
Simplify the process of getting Partnyaa Decorations, Armour and Weapons.
Add more than one source for time gated materials tied to incredibly specific functionality that utilises cats.
Add new or enhance existing decorations to allow for better skill spreads on Partnyaas.
The complexity was mostly in having nested decorations which themselves would each need different decorations tied to time gated RNG you could not influence.
The best option with all decorations available was always just using some from an old premium bundle.
Hunter Navigation rewards harm the core loop
Remove rewards that harm other systems such as cheques.
Remove overpowered equipment as rewards.
Hunter Navigation is meant to guide you through steps you should be taking in game, it shouldn't actively cause you to immediately skip ahead.
Time based combinations effectively remove items from the combination pool
Have all combined items available full time on the combiner and have the time based versions as alternative options giving better returns.
Checking an NPC daily just to 'maybe' make some basic items isn't a very engaging system, 'bargain hunting' seems to be a better niche.
Various upgrade trees are complete dead ends
Allow upgrading from the same monster's weapon class into a higher tier version of it directly with less material and money costs.
A good example of this issue is the Rukodiora equipment, the Long Sword ミレス＝アーラ has two upgrades and then hits a dead end. You can then craft the Long Sword ニゲル・Ｒ・アーラ at HR5 which hits a dead end in a single upgrade.
Instead of the HR version hitting the dead end it would instead be able to be upgraded further into the Gou tree which would then itself upgrade further than currently with appropriate stats for the tier.
Gou equipment is especially egregious in this regard, many trees only get one or two upgrades without actually hitting Heavenly Storm or Supremacy upgrade levels.
Absolute Defence nerf was too harsh
Absolute defence blocks all properties of a single hit and then gives you a downtime window within which you have nerfed attack. Originally the skill did not have the lowered attack downside.
Lower the negative multiplier for downtime (0.80x to 0.95x) but make the initial downtime and increases longer (15s to 20s and 5s to 8s). Values are not necessarily final.
Absolute Defence competes with skills like Stylish Attack, Flash Conversion, Rush, Furious, Abnormality etc. later and could never compete when giving a 20% loss of DPS.
Dissolver was rarely worth using
Dissolver is a skill that was added in MHF-G6 and boosted elemental hitzones if you matched element to them.
This had a minimum value of 20 which meant many monsters had awkward spots for the boost or in the worst case none in general. Dissolver Up was added later which lowered this minimum value to 15 but also stopped you using far more powerful zenith skills.
Elemental weak spots do not always match up with raw weak spots and raw damage scaled much more dramatically than elemental.
Monsters (including Poborubarumu - the monster the skill released alongside) do not always have the Elemental values required dissolver to actually function, bricking the skill on those fights.
As an unpopular skill Dissolver wasn't added to many decoration, the most points available was +3 on a single series of festival decoration.
The idea for handling of this skill is to make it more of a general elemental buff that only triggers where monsters have some weakness to a chosen element rather than incredibly high weakness.
To this end the requirement for weakness will be lowered to 5 the buff standardised to +10 with exceptions in Great Sword having +15 and guns having +20 to combat the utter fall off in the viability of Elemental Shots later game.
Dissolver Up will allow for all elements to deal some amount of damage to a monster but will naturally fare far worse than aiming correctly and actually matching elemental weaknesses. It will come with the cost of not letting you using far more powerful skills or zenith skills due to taking up slots.
As with Absolute defence this competed with skills like Stylish Attack, Flash Conversion, Rush, Furious, Abnormality etc. later and could never compete.
This is not to say the skill couldn't be powerful - it could be a major DPS source in very select situations - but the reality is that a highly conditional skill that needs a set built around it and which doesn't always activate is unappealing most people.
Shiriagari is too strong and available early G Rank
Shirigari was ultimately was turned into a pay to win skill. You could buy fruits that gave you significant buffs but were consumed for every completed quest utilising them. The skill was nearly impossible to activate in a meta set without this.
The original skill gave pretty significant buffs over the course of 35 minutes, but only after 15 minutes had already passed. The 'reworked' skill gave them after 1 minute and scaled much faster with extra phases.
The intention with this change is to dial down the power to stop it being a pay to win skill focused on MHF-Z endgame whales and to make it a viable skill that doesn't break the balance of early G Rank when it becomes available.
| MHF-G Shiriagari | MHF-Z Shiriagari | Proposed Shiriagari | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Min | 25 | 1 Min | 20 | 5 Min | 15 |
| 20 Min | 50 | 3 Min | 50 | 10 Min | 25 |
| 25 Min | 100 | 5 Min | 80 | 15 Min | 50 |
| 30 Min | 150 | 10 Min | 130 | 20 Min | 100 |
| 35 Min | 200 | 15 Min | 180 | 30 Min | 150 |
| 20 Min | 200 | 35 Min | 200 | ||
Strong Attack+6 was added in ZZ
Strong Attack+6 is itself far from unreasonable (Strong Attack+5 granted 150 true raw while +6 granted 200) but was something you could get without even changing your set composition.
In earlier updates especially the buff of +50 without needing an extra skill slot is pretty massive.
As the skill isn't actually unreasonable the only change needed is to make need more skill points to activate, bringing it more in line with normal Attack at Hunter Rank level.
The actual numbers aren't finalised but it will probably need 60 points (up from 50).
Gou equipment has excessive numbers of HC carves and small pools of hunted monsters
Add Elder Dragon Jades to the core reward pool for Rukodiora (a base material for all Gou pieces).
Adjust upgrade trees to utilise more monsters so that most of the grind isn't just 'Chameleos'.
Lower the number of HC carves required to encourage gearing.
Two dozen 5% carves in a row from varying monsters is incredibly demotivating when most of these pieces do not notably change until their maximum level of 7.
G Rank weapons are very poorly balanced
The only G Rank weapons really worth making were ones that upgraded to G Finesse, something a handful of weapons saw.
Add G Finesse upgrades to all weapons as a step before Z versions.
Alter earlier G weapons to be more in line with later ones. No one wants to waste 50 upgrades on a weapon just to find out it ends up with 'bad everything'.
G Rank needs a lot of backtracking to Hunter Rank content
Lower the amount of carves needed from non GR bands and remove non-G HCs entirely from the G armour upgrade cycle replacing them with easier items at higher quantities.
G Rank monster materials are designed to promote P2W
Frontier has two options to have a chance at better normal carves. You can use a Caravan Skill that rerolls at a certain rate if you get the most common carve, or you can get a premium course that rerolls at a certain rate if you get the most common carve.
Caravan doesn't work if the most common carve is 51% or higher. Almost all GR tables have their most common item at 51%. The premium course always works.
Hardcore carves at G Rank were fixed at 2% chance. The only way to increase this was to purchase premium courses.
The options for more carves were the skill Carving (you will not have a real set with carving), Carving Charms (Mostly from paid Gacha) and Premium which gave you more carves.
Alter tables so that they fall more in line with the later G Rank monsters that did not have the scummy practices.
Have Carving Charms and Lucky Charms generated as stamp rewards sporadically so they can be used on harder materials but aren't so common as to be default on every quest.
Alter the rate of G Rank Hardcore carves to be 5% (up from 2%).
GHC rate is implemented, new tables are pending.
Minion Carves
Minions can be elusive with quests you'd expect to have Giaprey or Remobra just completely lacking them and getting most insect materials is a very tedious process.
Standardise gathering quests to have much higher maximum spawns of minions so you don't need to repeatedly take a single quest just to kill 3 minions.
Have all minions you'd expect in an area present in dedicated gathering quests.
Give more and fixed rewards for quests which focus on killing large amounts of insects.
Grace has no niche
Grace is a skill that is functionally a full set unto itself. It disables itself if you have too many other skills.
Grace+X allows you to have X skills total, this means with Grace+1 you can only have Grace+1 active and with +3 you can have Grace+2 and two other skills.
Despite being a 'full set' with the heavy restrictions it ends up incredibly niche and very transient, you will only realistically care to use it briefly in G2~G3.
Buff the skills granted by Grace to be slightly more powerful to counter the existence of newer skills slightly and give it a wider potential use period.
Specifically; this is just increasing the levels of Quake Res and Wind Pressure granted and swapping Divine Protection to Marathon Runner to give it a slightly better general use skill pool.
It's still not going to be used for very long but at least it can be nicer while you do use it.
Decorations and Cuffs become irrelevant
Add extra options for upgrading armour and cuffs into later relevancy through some mechanic.
It's not a huge issue, but having later use cases for things will stop things feeling as much like temporary filler content that you can skip. Ideally you should feel like earlier investments end up paying off long term rather than that they were a waste of your time.
Activated skill limits will not be reduced outside of the potential zenith weapon skill changes mentioned above.
There's probably not a way to stop people being carried outside of forced solo quests, which is more likely to upset people rather than actually fix the issue.
There's probably not a way to stop people always wanting specific weapon compositions on a Raviente. Harassment in this regard would not be tolerated.
Phasing out Low Rank or High Rank might happen eventually but pacing seems fine with the existing structure.
If it isn't mentioned and it was a premium feature, you can probably assume it'll be tied to either an event quest or actual normal materials.
There is no intention of anything being tied to real money. If this ever changes it will never be something that actively impacts questing in a meaningful way.
A fully comprehensive changelog is not planned but raw numbers will be given where relevant along with clarifying what changes are actually implemented.
Removing some of the cat decorations would probably be sensible, many only serve as bridging steps on the way to getting real ones.
If something isn't addressed I either forgot about it or there's nothing concrete planned. As always, you can simply ask on Discord about things.
If you actively disagree with something you are encouraged to discuss it on the Discord.