Monster Hunter Wilds’ hammer, despite being just as deliciously violent as previous incarnations, came out a little undercooked. It came in at A in our Monster Hunter Wilds weapon tier list, sure, but long-time hammer bros found it somewhat unwieldy. For example, its offset attack is (inexplicably) gated behind the third attack in their combo. Even then, I hear it’s downright hard to follow-up once you land it.
Well, all that’s about to change. Alongside the Street Fighter collab, the new patch has some major balance adjustments—and hammer users are downright being taken out to dinner and courted. Here’s the full list of changes from the patch notes.
- The overall power of attacks has been increased.
- Element scaling for Charge Shot and Overhead Smash has been increased.
- You can now evade while readying an Upswing attack.
- The responsiveness of actions performed while charging has been improved, and sliding has been made easier to perform.
- Enlarged the hitboxes for Upswing and sneak attacks.
- The cancel timing for Focus Blow: Earthquake is now slightly earlier.
- Fixed an issue where selecting an item from the Custom Radial Menu would not automatically use the item after sheathing your weapon.
What’s more, as per the director’s letter, the hammer will be getting even more improvements when the next title update comes around: “the Hammer is planned to receive various improvements in Title Update 2 in addition to the adjustments made in this update, including the addition of offset effects for certain attacks and the addition of a follow-up attack upon a successful offset.”
The hammer isn’t the only weapon that’s gotten some TLC, though. Hunting horn and gunlance received some straight buffs, too. Meanwhile, both bowguns have had some tweaks—typically positive across the board, but both light and heavy bowguns have had their elemental ammo count and elemental ammo damage decreased, with other ammo types being improved.
Another part of this update I’m excited about (besides being able to combo fools as Akuma) is the following systems update: “A confirmation window no longer appears after obtaining an item when your item pouch is full. The obtained item is automatically sent to your item box.”
In case you’re unfamiliar, you used to get jumpscared by a fullscreen prompt asking you whether you’d like to swap certain items out. This was incredibly annoying, so firing the item across to your item box is much more preferable. I can’t stand a cluttered inventory, so I wasn’t hit with this often myself, but I’ll be much more gung-ho about snagging up lots of delicious materials now.
Lastly, us PC users may well be seeing a light at the end of the tunnel to our performance woes. The patch notes promise that the game’s “VRAM usage has been optimized”. Hurrah! All excellent news for a game that just seems to be getting better with each update, and by ‘better’, I mean ‘more likely to push me into a locker and take all my lunch zenny’. Just the way we like it.
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