Still sick. Still dragging my ass around when I can bother to get off the couch. The weather turned cool today, which is a relief. Yesterday was hot, steamy, and gross, and, boy, am I glad I don’t live in the South. I’ve been playing a shit-ton of MHW since I last wrote about it, but I still haven’t taken on the Nergigante. Yes, I know I said I’d hoped I’d have tackled him by now, but I’m still enough under the weather that I didn’t feel I could commit to a fifty-minute Nergigante fight.
I took on Uragon, and he actually made me cart once. I was caught off-guard by one of his falling pods, and then I was stun-locked into oblivion. I find one of the important things about a hunt is to armor up correctly, and I hadn’t had enough fire resistance to withstand the one-two punch. The next time I took on Uragon (by myself), I was better kitted out, and it was easy-peasy. You may ask yourself why I took him on again by myself when I’ve been enjoying the world of multi once I kill a monster solo. It’s because of the opaque multi system, which while I understand mostly how to use it, there are still a few things that make me shake my head. For example, I like to play the story missions by myself. So, there’s no reason I need to play online for that. But, you’re not allowed to play offline in this game so I had to figure out that I wanted to start an online session just to play by myself. In addition, I wanted to make it private so not just anyone could jump into my game.
Fine. Dandy, even. Not a problem once I learned that. Except, when I tackled A Fiery Convergence (an optional quest in which I tackled Lavasioth and Uragon in order to get the Fireproof Mantle), I automatically selected one player, then departed for the quest. Once I got to the Elder’s Recess, I went to fire off my SOS Flare, but it was grayed out. I thought, “Hm. Maybe I need to eat first.” So, I did that and still the SOS Flare was grayed out. I realized at some point that it was probably because I set my session to one player, and I had to decide if I wanted to try it myself or abandon the quest and start again. I think I used a Lucky Voucher (which doubles rewards) for this quest or else I just decided to try it on my own. I could always abandon it later if it went poorly. Spoiler, it did not go poorly. I took care of both within half an hour and never was in any real danger. It was satisfying, I’ll be honest with you.
Next up was Azure Rathalos. I was nervous about him, I won’t lie. I took out a few regular Rathalos in multi so I could upgrade my Rathalos Axe II into the Rathbringer (love the name!) Axe I. I buffed myself out max for the Azure Rathalos fight, including Mega Armorskin), girded my loins, and waded into the Ancient Forest. To my surprise, I took him out fairly easily. Not as easy as, say, HR Diablos, but he still wasn’t as hard as I expected him to be. Immediately afterwards, I took on The Red and Blue Crew (optional quest to take down a regular Rathalos and an Azure Rathalos in the same quest) in multi because one, I wanted to clear the quest, and, two, because I’m still feeling punk, and I didn’t feel up to taking on the duo by myself, even though I had just downed Azure Rathalos.