Physically, I’m nearly 100% better. My sleep is all over the map, which is one sign that I’m not as sick. When I’m sick, I sleep a lot (seven to ten hours). When I’m not sick, I get roughly six. My natural biorhythms seem to dictate I sleep in the wee hours of the morning to late morning, but when I’m sick, I rarely make it past midnight. Once, I fell asleep around eight and woke up at four in the morning. My past pattern of sleep was go to bed around five or six in the morning and to get up at noon or one. Now, I go to bed around between one and three.
Anyway, Monster Hunter:World. I’ve been grinding away in the end game, and while I’m deliriously happy there aren’t any loot boxes, I have to admit repeatedly killing a monster over and over to get that rare part has gotten tedious. In the last post, I mentioned it took me twenty times to get the Nergy gem I needed to make the helm. Well, I’ll need another for the final upgrade to my Nergy Switch Axe, which means another twenty times fighting him, give or take a few. I have to remember to use my Lucky Voucher which will give me more rewards which will boost my chance slightly of getting a gem. I have to beat the final boss before getting the necessary materials to make it, so I can wait. Also, the end-game gear is ridiculously expensive to craft. The final Nergy upgrade is over 50K zenny (the monetary unit), which is a hefty chunk of change. I’ve gotten up to over 900,000 zenny (want to get over a million just for giggles), but then I made upgraded some armor and plummeted to exactly 700,000 zenny, which makes me nervous. I did one of the Event Quests, called Triple Threat Throwdown, that gets you a ton of zenny in one go if everyone is wearing the Bandit Mantle, and now I’m back up to 790,000 zenny.
PSA: If you’re doing the Triple Threat Throwdown, bring your goddamn Bandit Mantle. Maybe some people don’t have it yet, but it’s disheartening when I’m the only one wearing it. The Bandit Mantle causes gold shinies to fall off large monsters as you smack them, and they turn out to be shells that are only for trade-in. If all four people are wearing the Bandit Mantle, you can make beaucoup zenny in ten roughly ten minutes. Even when it’s just me, I can score 10,000 zenny or so.
I go back and forth on the grind. I understand and appreciate that the developers didn’t want to go the loot crate route, and I further understand that they didn’t want to make the rewards too easy to get. However, there is a point where the enthusiasm for the fight turns into heavy sighs of obligation. I will say that being able to meld important consumables at the Elder Melder (and gems. Although, rarely the gem I want. To be fair, though, I was able to buy an Odogaron gem to get the final upgrade to my Odo Charge Blade, Odium (which I have yet to do, but at least I have the materials for it!). I would tweak the formula so that the gem drops for the higher-tier monsters was slightly more often. I don’t know how to make it fair, though, and it’s not my biggest complaint about the game.
I mentioned before that taking on each of the monsters is a Big Deal (for the first time. Except for the Great Jagras, poor guy), and I have to be in a certain mood to tackle it. I’ve been feeling much better physically in the past few days (as I mentioned above), so I decided to tackle another Elder Dragon–Teostra. He’s the fire/blast dragon who likes to lurk in the lava areas, so I needed to wear a piece of armor with Heat Guard. It was mentioned in one of the videos I watched, and it’s a godsend. There’s a consumable called Cool Drink that lets you deal with the heat for five minutes, but I’d rather not have to keep an eye on that on top of worrying about everything else. So, if I wear one piece of armor that has Heat Guard (it only goes to Level 1), I don’t have to worry about it until going into Teostra’s lair. I think I remember hearing that you need both Heat Guard and a Cool Drink to deal with that shit.
