If you’re new to Monster Hunter World or an experienced hunter who just wants to do more damage, this article might just be for you. Monster Hunter World affinity along with the skills, weapons, and armor that can improve it can be the key to some major numbers. From someone who has bested almost every monster in the game, I find boosting your affinity can the game to be almost crucial to late-game builds. A friend of mine, who has been playing through CAPCOM’s beloved series since he was 8 years old might just say the same thing.
However, the key to improving something is understanding what it is first, and understanding affinity might be tricky for some. This especially goes for the hunters experiencing everything for the first time ahead of Monster Hunter Wilds. If you’re one of those people, there’s no need to fear. I’m here to help.
What Monster Hunter World Affinity Is
The simple definition of Monster Hunter World affinity is the percentage you are likely to score a critical hit on a monster for some extra damage. That damage applies a bonus of 25% to your weapon’s physical damage, which is also referred to as raw damage. Your base physical damage can be seen in the Attack section of your weapon’s description. It also can be applied to your elemental and status damage, but to accomplish that, you’ll need a certain skill attached to your equipment. I’ll go into more depth with skills a bit later on.
Combining high affinity and good weapon sharpness is quite an effective combo in MHW. From early to late game, it gives you a chance to get those powerful swings, shots, and slashes to really show a monster who’s boss. The only real downside is that you might end up doing too much damage during a quest meant to be a capture mission only to realize it during the final and fatal blow. It happens to the best of us, so there’s no judgment here.
How to Boost Your Affinity
When you start your journey, you have 0% affinity, which means there won’t be a chance for you to get those critical hits. There’s no need to worry though because boosting your crit chance is just a matter of taking on the right monsters and paying attention to the skills each armor set has. In fact, you can get a weapon with boosted affinity quite early on in the game.
The weird and wacky big chicken known as Kulu-Ya-Ku offers some good weapons early on. Each weapon you can make from it will have an affinity of 10-20% depending on which one you target. Remember that not every weapon is under a certain monster’s tree. A piece of Kulu’s armor also has a skill known as Critical Eye. Having level 1 of that skill will improve your affinity by 5%. You can level up Critical Eye by either getting more armor pieces with it or by putting Critical Eye decorations on your armor and weapons.
Speaking of skills, many of them can improve your affinity as a baseline or when certain conditions are met. Some of my favorite of those skills are as follows: Weakness Exploit, Agitator, Critical Element, and Critical Status. There’s also a skill known as Critical Boost that increases the power of your critical hits, which feels really good when you see those high numbers after landing a solid hit.
The Effect of Negative Affinity
Now that we’ve covered positive affinity and how to boost it, it’s time we discussed what happens when a weapon has negative affinity. When you use a weapon like that, you have a chance of landing attacks that do less damage than your normal hits. Just like with positive affinity, the higher the negative affinity, the more likely this will happen. Those less damaging attacks are known as blunders.
You may be wondering just why someone would use a weapon with negative affinity, and that would be understandable. I don’t prefer to use them myself, but I know there are many who don’t mind them. That’s because negative affinity can actually be countered by armor skills and decorations as I explained before. Since these weapons tend to have higher raw damage than high-affinity weapons, one can make a build that has slightly lower affinity but with constant powerful attacks.
Wrapping Up
It’s all up to you when making your build. It’s a task that is both fun and requires a lot of grinding. There’s an abundance of skills that you can use to create the most fun experience for yourself. I encourage you to experiment and try out different skills and weapons to your heart’s content. However, you do get bonus points in my book if you decide to bring a Switch Axe into battle. No matter what weapon I try out, I always want to return to it.
In all seriousness, making a custom build is one of the best parts of the Monster Hunter series. Experimentation and player creativity in games should be valued in any RPG that allows them. It gives the player an extra sense of adventure as they battle giant creatures with some that look straight out of a horror game. The crazy weapons and armor you can craft are the cherry on top.
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