User blog comment:BannedLagiacrus/Monster Appreciation Week: Alatreon (4th Gen)/@comment-26963229-20170304113736

The online final boss of MH3, Alatreon is a perfect Elder Dragon: It is powerful, intimidating and challenging.

The King of the Darkness definitly seems like one of the Strongest monsters you'll ever face. It appears to be a large Elder Dragon covered in sharp scales in which each of the four Elements lie.

Alatreon's theme greatly fits it. It sounds both apocalyptic, ominous, as if the world is doomed and will soon feel the Blazing Black Dragon's everlasting wrath.

Its equipment is awesome ! The armor is really cool-looking and offers great skills, and the weapons have pretty good stats overall. The Alatreon is one of the most challenging monsters to fight in my opinion.

Thanks to its scales, Alatreon possesses the unique ability of controlling all Elements (except Water). However, it can't use them all at the same time. Instead, Alatreon has 2 modes: a flight mode and a ground mode. While in ground mode, it uses Fire and Dragon. It can perform Dragon Claw swipes, Dragon Charge and shoot powerful fireballs. It can also do more basic attacks on the ground such as horn swipes, tail swipes or a spin attack. In flight mode, Alatreon uses Thunder and Ice. Thanks to its inequalled flying skills, Alatreon is more agile and fights more aggressively in the air. It's capable of perfoming a powerful aerial Thunder rush that can knock you back because of the strong wind pressure, as well as dangerous series of electric forelimb slams. Alatreon is able to breath an Ice beam capable of encasing you in ice similarly to Kushala Daora, and can go sky high to call down multiple Ice crystals like White Fatalis' Thunder summon. In 3rd Gen, Alatreon's horns could get stuck against the ledge walls of the Sacred Land. You could also prevent it from summoning Ice crystals by using a ballista binder.

To conclude, Alatreon is undoubtly one of the best Elder Dragon. It has a great design, is challenging and gives great equipment. I sincerely hope they'll include the Shining Blue Dragon in the future.