User blog comment:BannedLagiacrus/Monster Appreciation Week: Xeno'jiiva/@comment-4702773-20180826154525

Absolutely love the design of this dude. The phantasmic glow and the tattered look of his frills and wings really bring it all together. When he gets enraged his torso starts to glow red, which looks unnatural. Adding unnatural to an already unnatural creature can be tricky, but in this case i think it only works because it seems so out of place. It sends up a definite red flag, so to speak. Its roar could have been a bit more "alien" in my opinion, but the loud shriek does the job.

Gameplay, that's another story. The first time I fought this guy, nobody responded to my flare, so naturally I started to panic. About 40 minutes later, he was dead, and I only died once because I was out of potions and was tired of relying on the Health Booster for my recovery, so I jumped in front of a laser to restock my supplies. Once you get his movements down,  this thing is no challange at all. The laser is negligable unless he somehow stuns you and then deliberately aims right at you. Even when he's firing it off like mad the pattern is simple and avoidable. His most dangerous attack is simply running forward, but his limbs make him so tall that you can just stand under his belly and be fine. When he flies, just shoot him with one of the hundreds of bomb pods or piercer pods he drops, and he'll be down for some free hits. When you fail this quest, its always because somebody made a stupid mistake. Somebody stood on a heated crystal for too long and then got nudged, or somebody misjudged the hitbox of his crystal crush attack.

That being said, it still happened way too much when I was farming it. The quest is rare and spots fill up instantly on SOS, so people should make sure they know what they are doing before they ruin everybody's chance at some Xeno materials.

Armor is great. Looks pretty good. I'm using a mix of the Alpha and Beta right now. Razor sharp is always good to have, and the added Blight Resistance never hurts. So few monsters use dragon attacks at the moment, so the uber weakness to dragon can be sidelined until Deviljho shows up. *coughDeviljhoOnPCPlease*

Weapons are good. Devent sharpness, good damage, can't argue with dragon element when you need it, which isn't nearly as much as in previous titles. At least not yet.

Has anybody else noticed that there is a bit of an epidemic going on with Xeno quests? People will join the quest just to abandon it immediately. And since the game still counts that as one player, you're now down one person for the entire fight. Sometimes i'm sure its a disconnect, but it happens so frequently at the very beginning that I'm starting to think that people are intentionally locking out spots on the quest just to be jerks. Has anybody else experienced this?