mhgen OP (some errors)

I main HBG and I like to theorycraft a bit around sets. I’ve been doing a little bit of testing and thinking about HBG usage this time around and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

As I’m sure you are all aware by now, mhgen doesn’t have limiter removal for HBG. In 4u, removing the limiter changed the display raw multiplier from 1.5 to 1.7. This mattered because raw-type ammo uses the display raw in damage calculations as opposed to true raw. This removed the ability to enter siege mode in return for a ~13% damage boost per shot. Because this is unavailable in gen, siege mode is once again going to be the primary means of achieving optimal dps. Off-siege you fire about 1.3 shots/sec, on-siege you fire 1.5 bullets/sec. This amounts to a built-in ~15% damage boost, which you’d be a fool to pass up on.

Now, if we’re talking siege guns, it’s generally accepted that the best non-niche siege guns in this game are La Foi (shagaru magala) and Celestial Tempest (amatsu). With average raw from affinity accounted for, La foi has ~248 and tempest has ~238. Of notable ammo types sieged, tempest sieges pierce 2’s and pellet 2 whereas la foi sieges normal 2, pierce 2 and pellet 2. La foi’s recoil value however, means that you need to get recoil down+1 to fire pierce 2’s. Recoil is not as easy to get in this game as it was in 4u, so tempest is generally the better gun of the two for firing pierce. I’m not going to go into pellet because they’re not really viable in group hunts and can be unreliable even in solo.

The biggest choice then is between normal shots and pierce shots. There’s no silver bullet skill in this game so far as I’m aware, so you generally have to pick either or if you want to make room for more damage skills. Among the best arguments for normal gunning, as always is that you can consistently hit face and get full damage (0.12 motion value) and by extension benefit more from weakness exploit whereas with pierce it may be more efficient to hit an axis through the body to get all your pierce hits (3x0.1 pierce1, 4x0.09 pierce2, 5x0.08 pierce3). However this time around, weakness exploit just gives you 50% affinity on weakpoints, so let’s see how that checks out:

Normal 2 La Foi on rathian head with weakness exploit & normal up, avg damage:
(231x1.25x0.8+231x0.2raw)x1.5critdistx1.1normupx0.12movalx0.7zone = ~38 damage

Pierce 2 la foi on rathian head/neck/back/back with weakness exploit and pierce up, avg damage:
[(231x1.25x0.8+231x0.2)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.7]+[(231x1.25x0.3+231x0.8)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.4]+[2((231x1.25x0.3+231x0.8)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.3)] = ~69 damage

And the kicker, challenger+2 activated on tempest and with pierce up, shooting pierce 2 wing/wing/back/wing (random axis on suboptimal hitzones)
[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.25]+[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.25]+[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.3]+[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.25] = ~42 damage

Same skills and gun as last calc, but once again on head/neck/back/back:
[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.7]+[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.4]+[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.3]+[(261x1.25x0.1+261x0.9)x1.5x1.1x0.09x0.3] = ~68 damage

So from this we can see that pierce can outdamage normals’ optimal hits, even just from stacking attack buffs and hitting wherever. Now, normals do benefit that you can eat for sharpshooter and get 10% extra damage whereas pierce is limited to temper’s 5% and with a deviation downside. Despite this, pierce still generally comes out ahead in a shot-per-shot basis, even if you eat for a defense-oriented skill. I won’t post hundreds of calcs here, but I do them for myself pretty often and from what I’ve seen pierce generally hits harder. Feel free to check me on that on your own, I may very well be mistaken as such blanket statements are of course prone to error.

The other limitation then comes from siege mags. Normals have bigger siege and non-siege mags, in the case of these specific guns pierce has 12 and normal have 15. This is significant during large openings where you fire the entire siege mag because it means that while the pierce dps will typically be higher, the total damage of pierce must be a whopping 25% more than that of the normal per shot to match the normals’ total output per siege. This is still definitely manageable if you land all your pierce hits, but you have to make sure to hit a weak zone along the way as well which can be more challenging. Another thing to take note of is that these guns actually have pretty shitty non-siege mags for pierce, so you’re generally going to end up firing normals if un-sieged, which will deal 10% less damage than they otherwise might. Mizutsune and deviant nargacuga guns have good non-siege pierce mags and other specs but don’t have access to pierce siege. This might suggest that they would be better overall but siege is so much easier to access quickly in this game thanks to adept (I won’t argue style here, adept is the only style that contributes towards optimizing your maximum damage output) that you can spend a significant portion of your hunt in siege, even in solo. The combination of power reload boost and siege’s fire rate is extremely potent and is absolutely worth working it into your hunting flow.

So from this we can determine that pierce siege gunning is ideal dps-wise for hunts on medium/large monsters where you expect that you can regularly siege, which is more likely to happen when hunting in a group or on monsters you can regularly trip/shoot down/stunlock. Normal gunning is ideal for small monsters and monsters with notably weak & reliably available hitzones where you anticipate that you will fire unsieged as often as you do sieged. In solo, the constant availability of the head and the need to fire unsieged fairly regularly as well makes normal gunning preferable.

Obviously monster hunter is not a one-size fits all game, and this is a specific look at a specific aspect of a weapon type that will be rendered moot in various exceptions, so I would still encourage you to draw your own conclusions. You should also consider extraneous facts like how 99 normal 2’s or 60 pierce 2’s is usually not enough to kill a monster, which means you bring combines. Normal 2’s cost 24z per combine and on average produce 3 shots per combine, so combining makes them ~8z a pop. They require 1 combo book for 100% success and you can have an absolute max of 495 per hunt. Pierce 2’s on the other hand cost 40 wycademy points per combine, averaging 2 shots per combine, making them ~20 wycademy points a pop, which isn’t cheap. You also need 4 combo books for pierce 2’s and have an absolute max of 210 per hunt. As always, this makes normal 2’s much more cost-effective, and you also get the benefit of generally having a large normal 3 mag to go with it, which can also deal good damage and at a better crit distance than normal 2’s.

Now obviously there can’t be a discussion about mhg damage without mentioning hunter arts. The best arts for increasing damage on HBG are gunpowder infusion and frenzy fever. As anyone who’s used it can tell you, supernova is stupidly slow, underwhelming and generally a pain to use so I won’t go into that. The other two, however, lend themselves much better to a fast-hitting, accurate weapon like hbg. Their attributes are less situational than the guns or sets, and as such this section is a bit less subjective than the rest. Both frenzy fever and gunpowder infusion take about 3.5 seconds to perform. Both can cancel the reload animation outside of siege if used immediately after hitting x. Pierce shots seem to build up the gauge slower, but I’ve figured out that if you always proc all your pierce hits per shot, it actually works out to be the same number of shots per gauge charged as normal shots. Gunpowder infusion 1 requires 8 shots to fill and gives you 10 shots. Gunpowder infusion 2 requires 11 shots to activate and gives you 17 shots. Gunpowder infusion 3 requires 14 shots to activate and gives you 22 shots. Within the context of siege mode, gunpowder infusion 2 is the superior choice because it gives you 100% infusion uptime once you start it (re-cast between sieges) and has a decent margin of error for missing. Frenzy fever requires 35 shots to fill up and then 10 shots to clear frenzy, which gives you a 15% affinity boost (3.75% damage boost) for a minute. The draw of frenzy fever is that you don’t have to re-cast it for a minute, as opposed to every 11-17 shots for gunpowder infusion 2 (every 8-10 seconds if you’re sieging, or every ~14 seconds out of siege, provided you’re firing normal 2’s with the listed guns since I’m accounting for reload time and mag size). By this reckoning, frenzy fever has an initial 45 shots of initial downtime vs 11 for gunpowder infusion 2. Both can have 100% uptime once started in terms of art availability, but frenzy will always cost 10 shots to overcome. Frenzy fever has ~3.5 sec of cast time/minute once you’ve started whereas gunpowder infusion has 10.5-17 seconds per minute. From this we can conclude that gunpowder infusion 2 is the better hunter art for consistent damage, but frenzy fever is a safer option since you have much less time standing vulnerable using a hunter art.

TL;DR shooting things is fun.