User blog comment:BannedLagiacrus/Monster Appreciation Week: Kulve Taroth/@comment-4969421-20181208182051

You can dislike a monster because you hate its design, or its fighting style, but at the end of the day it all comes down to a matter of opinion. And that is fantastic. If everyone thought the same thing about everything, the world would be left without soul, dull and gray. Subjectivity is a wondrous thing.

Kulve Taroth is objectively the worst monster in the franchise, and I'm going to explain you why.

This monster is presented unlike any other in the form of a Siege fight. This means not that she requires 16 players to hunt, but rather that 16 players are meant to group together and do the quest each in teams of 4. Kulve is the only monster which was made to be hunted online, and in full groups to boot. Not only that, but Kulve is literally built around having an entire lobby mindlessly spamming her. This already brings a plethora of problems no other monster has. Why am I basically forced to play with other people? Why am I forced to babysit literal retards who spend the entire hunt mindlessly tickling the monster without any focus on breaking parts, and who don't even understand the concept of dropping boulders or using cannons? Why am I forced to fake niceness towards dumbasses with a meme support set and Paolumu LBG who do nothing of actual value the entire fight? Why am I forced to put up with people trying to lecture me about how an useless weapon is good? Or people who blaze through phases 1-3, just to choke and triplecart on 4? Or leechers? Those are all problems I have had, but needless to say I am not the most social of players. Still, even if all is right in the world and you manage to find a competent team, someone could DC and make the quest impossible to beat due to Kulve's huge HP pool and the fact that that health does not recalibrate for 3 players when someone leaves the quest. MHW has since then fixed most of its server problems, but DCs are still very common. Or hell, what if I simply don't have have internet access myself? You can solo her, absolutely, but actually doing so is probably the single most tedious thing in the game as for anyone not speedrunning it will require 3 hunts minimum to complete. Soloing Kulve is basically the same as using melee only Bowguns; it's not the way it was intended, and that is a fact. Regardless of what it is, either the lack of internet, or DCs, or simply the fact that people might prefer solo, the game is forcing you to play the way it wants.

And we haven't even begun. Let's assume the Goddess has smiled upon you and you managed to find a Kulve lobby where people are actually doing Kulve (instead of whatever event quest is up at the moment or anything but Kulve which is incomprehensibly common in Kulve lobbies), are competent and servers are actually working as intended that day. You gather a team and start the quest, getting ready for another grind session. The Kulve fight is divided in 4 phases. Phase 1 has her wander around the passages of the first section of Caverns of El Dorado. She starts with one of her three possible patterns and the phase is completely scripted, as she will always follow the same path. You can't really do much with your weapons at this phase so most of the damage comes from cannons and dropped boulders. You just basically wait for her to walk through each spot where they are located. Since it is scripted this stage plays out exactly the same each time, and the most variation you can hope to have is people helping you load cannons so you can fire them several times before she walks away, or unintended boulder drops through wall clipping in one of her patterns.

Once you deal enough damage she rushes to the second area and 2nd phase begins. Her mantle should mollify at this point, and from now on your focus is to break parts. This is by far the worst phase of the hunt. Here she actually starts fighting, and most of her moveset is carried over from the Jagras family without any regard, and it shows. By far her worst move is the roll, a move with garbage hitboxes all over; if you are under her chest you won't get hit (whether this is intentional or not is hard to tell), but if you're anywhere near the tail it will hit (and she's 90% tail). The hitbox itself also remains active for way more than it should be, I can't count the times where the attack was over and I've still gotten hit. It's one of the many moves that wasn't made for her, yet she loves to spam for some reason. The rest of the moveset is really generic, body slams, bites and claw rakes, aside from her signature heat wave which you just move out of the way for. If you're unlucky she can catch you in a bad angle mid combo and kill you, but otherwise the attack isn't hard to avoid. As said before, the objective of this phase is to break as many parts as possible, which can go in two ways: If she's at Pursuit Lv1, they will take forever to break, if she's higher than that, they will break if you do as much as sneeze at them. If you break too many parts faster than the game wants you to she will dig and repair her mantle, making you start all over again. Digging is the way the AI has of setting you back in track, problem is it doesn't fix anything with the increased part breakability of higher levels. Instead she's just digging constantly, making the fight drag out forever. Not only that but it also feels extremely unrewarding since it's basically a "you're broke a bunch of parts? ok now do it again" and makes keeping track of which parts you've broken or not unnecesarily confusing.

Break enough parts/do enough damage and she goes to Area 3. Phase 3 is literally pointless. Period. It is the exact same as Phase 2 except on a worse area. You have stalactites to drop and eruptions to help with more damage, but the layout of the area is horrendous. The zone with the two stalactites is basically a huge lava pool littered with tiny ass ledges that literally serve no purpose other than making you perform attacks you don't want. If you stay over solid ground Gajalaka aggro you. Might as well say now that Gajalaka serve no purpose other than purposely annoy you. Hit you while you're fighting Kulve, healing or simply carving. Often several times in a row. Gajalakas are a deliberate decision to make the hunt worse, just like Bulldrome in Deviant quests. Just gratuitously making the fight worse, just in case you ever think of actually having fun in this quest. If anyone is curious, you're supposed to use the Throwing Knives they drop when you kill them to sleep/para her but they drop Nuggets/Scales 90% of the time instead so they're actually pointless. Back to Kulve, if the Pursuit level is high enough she usually insta Releases the moment she gets to this phase and goes straight to 4. When I said this phase is pointless, it wasn't an hyperbole. There's no reason to have this phase if the objective is the exact same as the one before it. This monster does not need that many phases, specially when two of them are the same. The fight already extends way more than it should, it shouldn't be made even worse. The only difference from this and Phase 2 is that the area is worse, and that random explosions pop up when she does heat wave attacks. Everything else is the exact same. The objective remains the same, break parts and deal damage. When you do that, her mantle finally breaks completely and she goes to the last area.

Except if you're at Pursuit 1 you don't even bother chasing her. At Pursuit 1, once she enters her last phase you stay in Area 3, gather tracks and leave the quest. Continuing any further than this is a waste of time. Her horns are not only practically unbreakable at this stage, but even if you DO somehow break them by some miracle, you won't get max Reward Level. So you just leave and then post the quest again, hopefully this time at Pursuit Lv3+ if people have actually been collecting tracks .This is also why the monster is basically impossible to solo normally, since it is not guaranteed you'll actually level up in one quest. If you want anything other than shit rewards this monster will take, at minimum, two quests to complete. Pursuit Lvl and Reward Lvl increase as you get points by breaking parts, gathering tracks and advancing through phases. The higher the Pursuit Lv, the easier it is to break parts (and it actually becomes defeatable). This is where the "siege" part of Kulve comes into play. If other teams are awarded points, you get points too, athough considerably less. And if someone breaks the horns, everyone gets rewards. And the siege ends for everyone. Meaning your Pursuit Lvl gets reset. There's nothing you can do. If you're on your first quest and someone breaks the horns, you just wasted your time. You finish the quest, get back and get no rewards because your Reward Lvl is low. So it's basically a race to level up your Reward before someone else breaks the horns. We have a monster that takes at MINIMUM two quests to complete, 12-15 minutes each (You can do it in 10 or less but only with a good team and those are very rare). Meaning ONE horn break takes anywhere from 20 to 35 (when every other monster in the game goes down in 15 minutes max) minutes, AND that's only assuming someone else doesn't break the horns when you're at Pursuit 1, or that you actually get her to last phase instead of just repelling her (this happens if you have a bad team).

But let's assume once again that everything went right, against the mountain of odds we have at this point. You take the Pursuit Lvl 3+ quest. The fight is the exact same except easier. Phase 2 drags on forever, mantle breaks off as soon as Phase 3 begins and she goes straight for 4. As expected. Last phase is, of course is the most intense stage of the fight, even though half of her moveset is still ported from Jagras. However, any fight gets boring if you are forced to repeat it several times. And this is inevitable on a monster built entirely around being grinded mindlessly. Here this is also where having a good team shows the most. If your is team good, you usually cycle sleep - mount/para/ko/something else until the horns break, without giving her much chance to actually fight back. Once her horns break, she drops two lootboxes which you can get either Spiralhorns or Weapons from (I can't count the times I've gotten 4 Horns). And the quest ends. Assuming you also got the tail, your Reward Level is maxed out, and the quest ends. Theoretically, the Siege is over as well.

Fool.

The Kulve Siege begins, but it never ends. You talk to the Guild Gal to claim your rewards. Said rewards are Relic Weapons. Much the same as 4U's, except with fixed stats. Kulve Taroth has no weapons of her own. Instead, there's a relic version of virtually every weapon in the game, save DLC. Much like the vast majority of weapons in the game, they are Iron Weapons with parts of monsters duct taped into them. Except this time, the Iron part is retextured into gold as if it were a CSGO weapon skin. Some weapons even look exactly the same, they don't even have the decency to add a slighty different tint to actually differentiate them.

And the weapon designs aren't the only problem Kulve fails completely at fixing. Even if there's a Relic version of most weapons in the game, this does nothing to actually fix the horrid weapon selection in the base game. Every single Kulve weapon is either a straight downgrade or a straight upgrade of the preexisting version, to the point there's no reason to use one over the other. The stat variations are always over either Raw or Element, with no changes to the rest of properties that make a weapon. Not even the awful elemental distribution is fixed, even if Kulve does have a fair amount of Elemental weapons, they all require Awaken and even with it some of them are still trash because they don't even reach White sharpness. There are 0 (zero) good natural Water Lances in the game. Or if I want a, say, natural Thunder Duals with slots, there simply isn't any. You just don't have options at all. Remember how some Tri weapons had different branching upgrades that added either more Raw, or Affinity or slots? Or how other games, by virtue of being actually well designed games, have an extensive selection of weapons so you could choose the weapon you like most or the one that best suits your armor set? There's nothing like that here. World's weapon selection is awful, and Kulve does almost no attempt to fix it.

Instead you only farm her to get superior versions of already existing weapons. As mentioned earlier, the few weapons she has that are good are straight upgrades, which means they often are the absolute best weapon in a category. For example, Taroth Crest "Claw" is a direct upgrade to Garon Dhara II, the previous best Lance in the game. For a slight downgrade in Sharpness, (which is negligible when Drachen, the best set in the game, exists), you get 46 more true raw. With the same number of augment slots and all. Similar cases are Taroth Sword "Fire" vs Divine Slasher, Axe of Demons vs Taroth Axe "Horn", Diablos Tyrannis III vs Taroth Strongarm "Horn" among others. The last two are specially funny because they are an EXACT copy stat wise, except they have one more augmentation slot and +20 Defense, respectively. And because the weapon selection is fucked, it often means there's nothing that can really compete with these weapons. The only time you may ever use something other than "Claw" without a net loss in DPS is Fiendish Tower against something super weak to Dragon (read: Vaal and that's about it).

In some other cases, like GS or HH there are no good Kulve weapons. And this isn't at all uncommon. The vast majority of Kulve weapons are actually hot garbage. On average, each weapon type has 12 Rare 6 weapons. Every single one of those Rare 6 weapons are trash, with the sole exception of, maybe, King Gold Exploder (and even then it's not anywhere close to being the best GL at all). Then there's Rare 7s, with around 9 for each type, and again being shit 90% of the time. Finally, there's Rare 8s, with around 4 for each. Not even those are guaranteed to be good either. So doing some quick math, only around 70~ of the 350 Kulve weapons are actually usable, and that is being extremely lenient and assuming you will actually use them when really there's no reason to use them over whatever is the best weapon in a category. The reason there are so many shitty weapons, is, naturally, to make it harder to get the weapon you actually want. Everytime you complete the Siege, the game will pull around 10~ random weapons from the pool of 350. Sound familiar? That's right, it's literally a gacha. From those 10 weapons, around 80% of them will be Rare 6 which you instantly sell. There's nothing you can do to actually increase your odds of getting better drops. Reward Lvl decides whether you will get either nothing at all (at anything lower than 14), but doesn't even guarantee you will get higher rarity weapons at max lvl (pics related are lv16 and 17). Not only are the lootpools filled to the brim with garbage, but the game itself actually FAVORS that garbage. And even in the offchance you DO get a rare weapon, it isn't even guaranteed to be good or even usable at all. Each time you do Kulve, you roll a wheel to have a CHANCE at the weapon you actually want. And if the game doesn't want you to have it, you won't. There's absolutely nothing you can do. The first time the Siege was available, I got maybe 80% of the weapons. Countless gems and anything else, but never what I actually wanted. I got to a point where I was doing 20 Kulve Horn Breaks a day, and it still never dropped it. And because it's a timed event, you can't just leave it for later. You are forced to mindlessly grind Kulve for the time she is up.

You can say, how silly, just settle for the inferior version of a weapon. But why I should I do that? In any other MH, if I wanted a weapon I would just farm the monster in question until I got the materials needed to craft it. Sure, gems and whatnot can be stingy, but at least you can improve and maximize the chance you have to get one. You break the head, the tail, you capture the monster, and you know you've done everything you could. You might not even get it the first time, nor the second, nor the third... but there was a sense of progression in the whole thing, you could feel yourself getting closer to the goal. And once you did get the gem, you'd rush over to the Smithy and finally craft the desired weapon. You felt rewarded. The grind is an indispensable part of MH, and I wouldn't change it for anything. Make me get 4 rares for one weapon upgrade, like the Narga Lance in 3U. Sure. I don't mind. However, Kulve is not a grind, or rewarding. Kulve is spinning a wheel everytime you break the horns. Kulve is forcefully implementing a MMO drop system in a game that already has a well stablished progression system as the backbone of the series: Kill monster, upgrade your equipment, rinse and repeat.

If I liked the MMO system, I would just play any of the MMOs out there. If I liked gachas, I would just play whatever mobage I can find. But I don't, and that's why I play Monster Hunter, because I like Monster Hunter's formula. Or I did. Since Kulve came out there's no reason to farm anything but Kulve. Why would I farm Legiana if Taroth Assault "Support" is better? Why would I farm Odogaron if Taroth Crest "Claw" is better? Why am I FORCED to settle for the inferior option? What if there's no option at all? There are no Wide 4 GLs in the base game. Taroth Blitz "Support" is just so much better than Karma in every conceivable way, the latter might as well not exist. Same with the other Rare8 Bowguns.

And the worst of all, even if I somehow managed to get what I wanted, this is a story without happy ending. Or without endings at all. The Siege never ends. New weapons are added everytime Banquet in the Earthen Hall returns to the event rotation. I might have gotten Gold Red Rocket, but now I'm trying to get Taroth Blitz "Support" and Taroth Hammer "Sleep". And this will continue for as long as Kulve is in the game. There's that suspicious portion in the map of Caverns of El Dorado. And you don't even kill her. An Arch-Tempered or G Rank version with better weapons is practically guaranteed. You know the game is going to keep being the same gacha kusoge it was turned into. Kulve will keep ruining the game, she's not going anywhere. And they can even add even more Siege Monsters with equally retarded rewards.

I really, REALLY wanted to like World. I truly did. I can't with decisions like this, entirely eliminating what MH on its very core is supposed to be. I'd rather just play any other previous game where I can at least work towards what I want. RNG ruins games. I play Pokémon, I know what I'm talking about. MH's RNG went from being heavy but manageable, to pretty much the only thing the game revolves around in World. You have so little control it's just not enjoyable anymore. There's just no enjoyement in playing a slot machine. And that's what World is becoming.