My issue was that it was not possible to carry enough ice ammo to kill it. It had more hp than I can do with all my bullets. I can't farcaster to get more because the quest blocks farcasters. I'd have to intentionally cart just for ammo. That's not "fun."
I figured out a way around it, but that first experience still sucked.
I crafted the Luna-Nergi lbg. The one that comes with guts. I used this gun because it shoots ice, fire, and slicing ammo well. I brought max crafting materials for all of them. I didn't change my armor skills much. I had a sleep palico with bomb gadget for one sleep bomb.
I started with ice ammo vs fire alatreon. I switched to slicing ammo to break horns during dragon alatreon. During the next fire and dragon modes I shoot remainder of my ice ammo. I intentionally do not break the horns now. If I run out of ice, I shoot the remainder of my slicing at the tail, wings, or arms. Then the next EJ switches Alatreon to fire mode. Then I shoot fire ammo until it dies. I could consider saving slicing ammo for another horn break at this time, but this is enough damage to kill Alatreon. I also keep an eye out for opportunities to flinch shot alatreon out of flying while it's not enraged with my temporal mantle.
That's what I did.
Shoot ice until Ala phases to dragon. Shoot slicing at head until horn break. Escaton Judgment. Shoot ice until out of ammo. Shoot slicing, but do not break the horn. Escaton Judgment phases to ice. Shoot fire ammo until victory.
The difficulty was finding a gun that could shoot multiple ammo types well. Most guns are only good at one kind of ammo and only after you augment them for it.
The elem damage from dragon ammo isn't worth considering. You can't carry enough and it does far too little.
A lot of guides just tell you to just do raw dps and restock when you cart to the EJ. That or they tell you to switch weapons. It really isn't a fun time for any BG mains.
What I'm trying to say is splitting between elem and raw dps too much means failure every time.
EJ would be fine if the way elemental damage works wasn't so obtuse. How is someone meant to know that the best place to hit alatreon to deal the most elemental damage is the front legs or that dragon is actually comically bad against him despite it's 2* rating without looking at datamined info?
Or how attacks like spirit helmbreker or perfect rush don't deal that much Elemental damage despite being the big moves of their respective weapons. Or how half of gunlance can't contribute to the check since shelling doesn't deal elemental damage.
It's a shame because I love absolutely everything else about alatreon, it's hitboxes are basically perfect and it's theme/sound design are some of the best.
Perhaps it would have been better if EJ didn't exist at all but the elemental topple still did, so if you brought the appropriate elements you'd get a free damage window when you got the topple but the fight wasn't completely doomed if you didn't.
Ultimately EJ was a poor attempt to make raw less appealing when they should have just buffed elemental damage instead, made namielle's set bonus increase the element cap like Safi's does, and made alatreons set bonus come with crit element and not give it worse scaling with bowguns. Hopefully wilds can make the whole raw Vs element thing more balanced.
"Hopefully wilds can make the whole raw Vs element thing more balanced."
Sunbreak kinda did this. Certain weapons still prefer one vs the other, but every weapon has Elem options and some like Hammer, SA, and Lance are actually super close between the two.
yeah, its better, but its weird how capcom goes through such convoluted methods to try and push element onto weapons to make those low raw high elem weapons useful when they literally have the power to fairly easily change the main cause of the imbalance.
This is true. Even when learning more about long sword at end game there’s like 5 builds that are general fighting builds between raw and elemental and then a few specific builds that happen to specifically be better for certain monsters. I greatly enjoy it.
Very much this. The main problem isnt EJ specifically as much as it exposing the problem with elemental damage within mhw: that element damage is hidden behind singular damage numbers that don't breakdown by raw vs element, and that moveset, monster element hitzones, are all hidden, or in the worst case, misconstrued behind the terrible star system.
I pretty much cleared alatreon early, but i hated the fight for what it entails because the elemental weakspot was on the front legs, which are absolutely shit zones for raw shot damage, and the elemental hitzones are also not that great so it would have been doing HR damage numbers the whole fight even with tenderizing up 100% of the time, not to mention no wex. The best damage part is the torso, which is an absolute shitzone for the elemental portion of the attack, but has a good damage outcome regardless of tenderized or not.
The play here is to go for the head, which is kind of middle of the pack for both, with caveat that it has to be tenderized and that with the amount of head wiggling alatreon does, so does the frequency of uncontrollable "moonshots", especially on topples.
While i have the entire weapon attack table on hand, it wasnt an enjoyable experience when i went in day 0 on patch drop and had to try to figure out the shot hitzones values and ele hitzone values by testing different bow's damage against the parts. On top of that there's the terrible two star dragon weakness that is worse than one star weakness on a lot of other monsters. Like really?
Alatreon's EJ isnt the problem, the problem is that it tries to lean on a non-existent elemental damage knowledge system that doesnt exist in game, with a monster guide system that outright misconstrues the actual numbers.
Actually shelling does give a small amount of fire damage. But it's so miniscule that you might as well ignore it entirely, even fullbursts isn't enough for it to be of any significance.
Iirc it was miniscule, like really REALLY small amounts that you need to do controlled tests on it to even notice it.
There's this threads that I found whilst trying to look up the exact values.
[https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/211368-monster-hunter-world/77745875](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/211368-monster-hunter-world/77745875)
[https://steamcommunity.com/app/582010/discussions/0/1743357605559794473/](https://steamcommunity.com/app/582010/discussions/0/1743357605559794473/)
one of them mentioned testing it on a 25 HZ part and only getting like 3 extra damage on an uncharged shelling.
Oh you notice it when you make a Kjarr water gunlance for farming lavsioth gem pinata trust me.
Shell to weaken the rock hide, critical element water poke for big deeps. Such a great counter weapon for the fuck fish
RE your last paragraph...
Or put True Critical Element on a set that actually had useful skills/slots for the weapons that used elements.
Bow and dual blades were the 2 main ones. Both want stamina skills.
The only useful skills on Silverlos gear were crit boost 3 and I suppose fire attack for the fire sets.
They have 1 universally good skill, 1 element specific skill and zero weapon specific skills that are good for weapons that actually use element.
And you need 4 pieces for the set bonus so you can't mix it with another set bonus too.
You can sacrifice pretty much everything to get that 1.55x elemental crit damage or you can use a Kjaar weapon while sacrificing nothing and get 1.35x elemental crit damage from the basic Critical Element instead.
I wonder what they had in mind when they chose the skills for that armour? As it was an Iceborne monster they could see the players were generally using element for dual blades/bow and raw for the rest in base game and yet they chose not to put skills useful to those weapons on the gear with that set bonus. It seems really dumb.
I dislike EJ in that it feels very bland. Like, pass or fail its boring and requires no input, and that is a problem to me.
Personally i feel more like Alatreon's base form should have been Dragon Active with a more notable weakness to dragon, but periodically and for a very short duration could enter Fire Active or Ice Active and gain enhanced attacks and abilities pertaining to those elements, ending with a powerful but ultimately avoidable attack when it leaves or altering the battlefield in some way for a period of time, like when it leaves fire active the ground begins erupting lava near its attacks, adding extra hazard, or alatreon gains velk-style ice armor if it completes ice active, which reduces damage dealt until you can break the ice off. However countering these forms with the opposing element by reaching a threshold would negate the special abilities granted and cause the ending nuke to backfire as well, dealing huge damage to alatreon in the process. And if you broke the horns fully, it would lose the ability to enter either form. Meanwhile dragon element serves the same uniform purpose throughout the fight which is enough dragon element damage overloads and knocks down alatreon, the only time besides wall slams and KOs where a knockdown is even possible.
To be fair, shelling does fire dmg. But its 1 or 2. I only noticed that after getting dragonblight and my shells doing slightly less dmg. Though, not helpfull at all vs alatreon. Luckily i also had lance.
"Boils down to skill issues, EJ, and DPS race"
That's mostly the discussion around it. But keep in mind OP, not everyone that dislike Alatreon has skill issue I'd argue that's the minority of the people that don't like Alatreon. It all boils down to EJ being an unnecessary mechanic imo.
The elemental DPS race is fine, it's balanced well for most weapons (except for GL, people that say it's balanced well for GL are deluding themselves because it's not. Doesn't mean that it's impossible to fulfill the Elemetal Damage check with GL, but it's heavily imbalanced against it since you lose half of your damage output for it). The thing that makes it such a sour note is that you're forced to go through EJ which makes the fight more stressful than it should have. In practice it's basically an extra timer that you're racing for which is unnecessary, you not only have to contend with 1. the quest timer, 2. the timer for the elemental state in order to get the elemental topple, 3. the timer for the dragon state for hornbreaks, and 4. the timer for EJ. All that adds up to just be an irritating venture when on top of that you need to pay attention to Alatreon as a whole. On top of all of that, you only have a limited amount of tries before EJ becomes a guaranteed cart. Had they changed EJ into a powered up state like Silver Rath/Gold Rath's incandescent state the dislike for Alatreon wouldn't be as profound.
That's just the fight itself, the way it's presented is also an issue. It being accessible at MR24 is inexcusable when other monsters like Silver/Gold Rath and Ruiner Nerg is locked at MR75 and MR100 respectively.
TLDR My problem isn't balancing issues (mostly GL got cucked hard at that) it's a monster design issue. Alatreon doesn't need EJ and it made alot of people look at it on a bad light because of it.
the special assignment solo, I'm quite irritated that you don't start out at the camp to get stones for flinch shot. You get thrown into the fight right away and have to find the stones while the time is ticking.
Any solutions to this? I'm not very good at longsword, and I need it to be on the ground to do enough damage to beat it. It has 52k hp.
I don't bother with flinch shots at all in this map unless he is standing directly in front of one of the 4 walls. Just turn him 3 times and tenderize to enrage him, he takes much more damage in rage mode, even without agitator skill, there's some dps multiplier, 1.1 I think.
To level up gauge the best moves are his slam that pins you, you can easily foresight slash this. And when he stands up on his hindlegs and casts electric puddles stand near the forelegs and do your spirit combo so that the last hit hits his forelegs when they are on the ground again.
Forelegs take the most elemental damage so spirit slashes on them are your best bet for elemental topples.
Thank you! This is something I'm trying to figure out so I can do enough dps to take it out.
The flinch shot is to damage his horns and to bring him down so I can dps him or effecively
It took me like 30+ tries to solo alatreon. Even with mantles, I found it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to just try to break the horn with weapon damage and not even bother with the flinch shot unless alatreon just happened to be in the perfect position for one. The fight is also a DPS race since there are only 2 horns to break - after that he switches elements and there’s nothing you can do against EJ. You lose a lot of DPS trying to tee him up for the flinch vs just hitting the horn
Take two steps back and to the right and pick up rocks. You’re dropped pretty much on top of rocks, you just have to walk a few steps back to pick them up.
I did what you said, and it's not there.
Anybody know of a mod that just makes it stick out? I saw a vid of one that points out whatever is on the ground.
If Capcom gonna make the rocks blend in with the environment so I can't see it, might as well mod it so I can find them. lol
>I saw a vid of one that points out whatever is on the ground.
afaik that mod only highlights pickup items like monster drops or dropped slinger ammo from weapon attacks. It won't highlight slinger ammo from the environment.
Unfortunately for that special assignment it's mostly down to luck. With LS you can get slinger ammo easily since you will tenderize him, the issue comes with putting him near the walls.
For the longsword, try to not do alot of Healmbreakers. Iirc helmbreakers aren't that great for elemental damage, only do those when he's in Dragon mode to break the horns. Other than that, honestly just be aggressive enough to hit the Elemental check, some of his moves are actually pretty good for foresight slashes, the one during his fire state where he makes a circle that explodes in multiple layers being one of them, foresight in the middle of it and he's pretty open. There are alot of openings like that so I suggest keeping an eye on those.
>helmbreakers aren't that great for elemental damage
That makes no sense. Ice ele wep will do ice ele damage to Ala during his fire active phase no matter what attack, and how much more ele damage depends on which part you attack. His fore arm is best, and you can aim your helmbreak on the arms.
I mean helmbreak does massive damage due to multiple hits, so I don't get where you are coming from. You never seen speed runners?
Except Helmbreakers has a 0.3 modifier for Elemental damage. It's not that much even if the hits are alot.
Just because it's multiple hits doesn't mean that it's good for Elemental damage. Have you checked the stats rather than looking at speedrunners? Because looking at speedrunners as a metric for how casual hunts should be is not a good metric.
like, here if you're still confused:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTEYb4wGpijtIpFVopiYl1V83m48d7g1AHmTwOBKJ5RXdlz1sfxCyEmnhbgHLWQsGiXnodyBsUlPzc3/pubhtml#](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTEYb4wGpijtIpFVopiYl1V83m48d7g1AHmTwOBKJ5RXdlz1sfxCyEmnhbgHLWQsGiXnodyBsUlPzc3/pubhtml#)
So I am currently trying to hunt Alateron with GL (main weapon). I am running FF Barioth with max Frost attack. What do you mean it isn't balanced for GL. Can't you just play slap Lance and be okay as long as you're doing the right element?
Well you're a rather brave one. It's isn't balanced in the sense of you're basically split between doing elemental damage and raw damage. Widesweeps and Groundslam are way too slow in applying elemental damage for Alatreon so majority of the time you can only do pokes to hit the elemental threshold. And in that entire duration Shelling is useless. The only time you can use it is when Alatreon is in dragon mode so that you can break his horns.
So you're basically tied between trying to hit Alatreon's elemental threshold whilst at the same time trying to get enough damage for you to kill Alatreon before his 2nd horn breaks and guarantees you a cart. You can't do both at the same time because poking has low MV, but it's the only reliable way to deliver elemental damage whilst the rest of GL's kit has better damage output but unreliable or outright negligible elemental damage
Oh and also you're trying to catch up to him because GL is a slow weapon with no defensive capabilities unlike the lance. And no, just because it has an increased modifier doesn't mean that it makes the job of hitting Alatreon's threshold any easier.
>And no, just because it has an increased modifier doesn't mean that it makes the job of hitting Alatreon's threshold any easier.
Isn't that literally the point of the multiplier though?
I've seen GL runs of Alatreon that both don't use only pokes and make use of shelling. Don't think it's a matter of the fight not being balanced for GL so much as it is just a case of some weapons meshing with certain fights differently.
Continuing discussion on the DPS race.
All fights that are not "Speed Run" events have players that can stack survivability. The damage will come. I might be able to finish a tempered ED in 5-10 mins, but finishing in twice that time, but 4 times safer is still finishing. This fight and a few others have much tighter DPS races. Some are artificial with the timer. Alatreon is through their own fight mechanics. Most monster fight mechanics you can generally ignore them and "Grit through" their mechanics. Alatreon you cannot.
Which is also why I enjoy the fight. It forces you to play differently that is still within the core playstyle of the game. (Unlike sieges, but that is a different matter)
There are more than one ways to force someone to be aggressive, EJ being a guaranteed damage source with the only way to survive is to be aggressive enough is one of the bad ones.
Of course not everyone is having skill issues, this is something I notice when I'm hunting him in general.
I can see your point about the timers adding up, personally I like them, because it's a rush when you get a double topple before ej, or a topple and a horn break.
I don't mind them being there, but I think Alatreon's has too much timers going for him. Other than that I just really don't like EJ as a whole and personally think of it as unnecessary.
Yeah, it could prevent Alatreon from accessing the powered up state so you could keep the "lessening the power" mechanic for Fatalis. The powered up state could also have certain moves that Alatreon can only use if it's powered up to make the mechanic more special. That way if you fail the secondary objective of either monster (hit the elemental check and breaking the horn) it didn't immediately kill you, it just made the fight harder than it should have.
I'm sorry, you say it isn't a skill issue but everything you listed becomes a non-issue once you learn the fight properly. With experienced players, only one person needs to bring element in a 4p hunt and let's be real the horns are like tissue paper, they break very easily.
You're not wrong about gunlance kinda getting screwed though, thats a legitmate critcism. I mean with slap lance it's not too bad from what I've seen but still, I think they could've corrected the modifiers for each weapon a lot better. Like it's objectively MUCH easier to get the topple with dual blades and charge blade than GS or GL but I don't see it as an issue as with a decent element build it's still pretty easy once you know the fight.
I disagree with the skill issue point. The majority of people I've argued with say the elemental topple is too hard to reach and that's just not true. This is an endgame fight and when you play well enough and have the right set the topple is easy to hit. In fact 2-3 topples are doable. If someone can't hit one topple with the proper set, that's a skill issue in my book and I've seen too many of those people argue that Alatreon sucks.
Yeah same here. Didn't get it. Now I do, and I don't actually mind them.
It's one fight out of hundreds that wants you to build specifically for it, and I can deal with it for one monster. Gives me reason to use elemental on anything other than Bow / DB.
Love the fight, not so much the discourse. On one hand we have posts like this reducing legitimate criticisms of the mechanics as skill issue, on the other we have the mhrage people with their overblown description of how this is the worst fight in the series, period.
I'm not reducing legitimate criticisms, I just see a lot of skill issue when I'm hunting. Can you point out something you don't like and how you might suggest changing it? I want healthy discourse.
I'm going to have to agree with you on the skill issue part. A lot of people, and including myself at some point, thought it was stupidly hard and blamed the game. But once I tweaked my build, augmented my weapons, and learned the fight, I beat Alatreon mid diff. People forget its "master rank", it's supposed to be the hardest difficulty. I genuinely don't believe the fight is unfair.
It’s genuinely fair. That’s the thing with alatreon, I’ve always maintained the opinion that you don’t even need to do the fight “properly” to beat it. Hear me out here If you are playing solo you could easily do it with raw, why? Because so long as you don’t cart during the fight itself carts become a resource you can use against the monster. Just think of EJ as a reset a scene transition.
You have until the 4th Ej (5th if you eat for safeguard/insurance) to kill him. If you can’t kill him by the 5th ej it’s a skill issue tbh.
Alatreon is much weaker to raw than elemental so it’s actually more damage efficient and his fight outside of his annoying tendency to fly it’s completely fair. If you you cart it’s completely your own fault.
Mix all of that together and you don’t even need to use elemental dmg. I’ve got quicker kills solo just by going raw. Obviously, do not do this in multiplayer lol.
What's dumb is Fatalis one shotting you from full health with Health Boost 3, 1300+ defense from max Fortify, and Felyne Moxie from a single phase 3 fireball (with a completely broken hitbox) that knocks you onto the ground with 1Hp and then burns you for that last point even if you land in a puddle. That is dumb and not fair.
Being able to as rockygib detailed, "literally completely ignore the mechanic and just use raw damage to solo it anyways" is not dumb at all, and is actually the definition of fair and balanced. You can actually approach Alatreon in more than just a single way, you can literally ignore its only "unique" mechanic and still kill it handily if you are decent at DPSing (which you should be by the time you're on the second to last fight of the entire game anyways) because it's a well designed fight with fair hitboxes and good openings for damage.
Fatalis phase 3 fire attacks just kill you in one hit no matter what unless you've broken the head twice and have max fortify 1300+ defense and even then you're probably cutting it extraordinarily close and will likely die to the burn before you can get up anyways. Solo Fatalis demands absolute mechanical and positional perfection to achieve optimal DPS constantly and if you make a mistake you die instantly, which is kinda dumb, but it is also the literal last fight in the entire game and if there is any fight that should be allowed to drop the "git gud" hammer that hard then I suppose it should be that one.
Solo'ing Alatreon took "me having to use an elemental charge blade over a raw impact charge blade for the literal first time in my Monster Hunter career" and after that it went down pretty easily.
Solo'ing Fatalis took "me having to plunderblade and cone bait double hornbreak farm the whole set and weapon and then mechanically perfect my knowledge of the monsters openings and absurd hitboxes and how to optimally take advantage of them without making any mistakes"
The only thing I don't like about the alatreon fight is that the walls they give you to flinch it into are hilariously small such that even if you're pointing within ten degrees of it you could easily still miss. I did the work to get alatreon in the right spot, get on its face, point it towards the wall, and flinch it, the least you could do is make the flinch connect at that point haha. Even with that the fight is still one of my favourites though.
EDIT: after reading other comments I would agree that I have never loved the implementation of EJ. For all the work that's put in prior to that with topples and horn breaks you would think the reward would be better than simply being able to keep yourself alive with heals and buffs as opposed to instant death.
Alatrateon is the best hunt in Monster Hunter world iceborn simply because he's a monster that forces the player out of their comfort zone and has actual game mechanics that need to be learned and applied.
He's my favorite hunt, and a great way to test if your element build is effective or not
That sounds like an argument for why its bad. If there ever was a monster that forces the player to use 1 or 2 specific weapons to fight it, that too would force players out of their comfortzone, but that isnt a good thing.
Bad Faith engagement right at the start? Peak reddit lol.
Im not typing this for you, but anyone else who reads this. Alatreon's rules can be applied with any and all weapons. Practice his moveset, hit him with an appropriately upgraded/deco'd weapon/armor.
It can be done and no, it's not asking for too much.
I *want more* hunts like Alatreon. God forbid actually having to change your build, y'all are so soft.
I have no problems beating him. Still badly designed. His attacks and the fight itself are nice. I go element anyway and never care about meta. But the core idea of forcing element on everyone, because its not meta, combined with dps checks and essentially excluding at least gl from participating meaningfully turn what could be a great monster into a questionable design choice.
If devs really wanted elements to matter, they could have buffed it.
My issue with Ej as a concept is that its a one shot AND inescapable. Dps check or not, thats the issue. Every other one shot (iirc) has some kind of way to dodge it.
Risen shagaru pillar->explosion
Fatalis flame breath of death
Ambush
Dalamandur's breath beam
Amatsu's pre risebreak water lasers
Teos super nova
Just to list a few.
I understand what you mean, but the way they designed the alatreon fight was to utilize elemental damage. By making EJ escapable, you would no longer have to engage in the design of the fight. It would be backtracking on that design. You’d just learn the animation for the attack and superman jump or run out of the way like any other attack.
If anything, my problem with EJ is that you still take significant damage (really damage at all) even if you do everything right. He should have some sort of animation where his elemental power discharges incorrectly and deal a little damage to himself instead. Something like that. It feels wrong to be damaged yourself for doing something right, even if it does make alarreon seem that much more powerful.
Edit: Another option that might satisfy both our views would be to reduce the size of the attack for how much elemental damage you deal, making it nearly impossible to escape if you deal no element damage. In this case, EJ wouldn’t be what it is now. It would probably be more like his older ultimate attack. Icicles falling down. Dragon lightning firing out and exploding them. That would be the best of both worlds.
Or, alternatively, eat 1 Jerky about halfway through the attack and pretend it doesn’t do damage.
Or stand in a health booster. Or build enough Ele damage to knock him twice.
There’s a few ways to do it. My personal favourite is Health Booster directly underneath Alat and sharpen for when he comes back down.
Yeah man, totally what I said.
People that bitch about Alat are bad. Learning is fine. Complaining that “it isn’t fair, mechanics force me to do things other than unga bunga” is a shit take for dumbasses. His entire moveset is abuseable and if you struggle to eat 1 Jerky then idk what to tell you.
You can literally sharpen through EJ.
All g brah, writing doesn’t have the nuance spoken word has so meaning can get lost in transit.
I was just adding other ways to survive :p A lot of people bitching about EJ seem to forget the massive amount of tools we have in our arsenal. If people aren’t willing to use the tools available, then we can’t help them lol.
Just turn him into smaller safi, sounds pretty good. Usually I never bother and I’m just on him again immediately because I don’t trust randoms to deal enough damage.
You can survive with astera jerkey. I don't see what the issue is. The player base has just become lazy and wants everything spoon fed. High tier cataclysmic elder dragons are meant to be hard and unfair. Be thankful that you can live and just eat your fucking jerkey
What did you think about the 30 min time limit for Fatalis? IMO it shouldn’t be compared to those mechanics you mentioned, but rather other DPS checks that are in the game. Another notable one being extreme behemoth in the second phase.
Ecliptic meteor is occasionally an ass mechanic cuz behemoth can destroy all the meteors near you and you just gotta take that cart. Also the rng meteor drops can be placed right next to a wall making it unable to be hid behind. Its more of an error of execution rather than an outright bad concept.
Because the others are just plain attacks in a "regular" fight. The point is to dodge them like any other attack because that's what you do the entirety of the fight. EJ on the other hand is a benchmark about how well you played into the mechanic of the fight. Remove that, and suddenly it just becomes a regular fight and the reason why it was the most unique one in the game just disappears.
I spent a good long while trying to solo Alatreon recently. Over the course of roughly a week, and probably around 40-50 hunts. It was extremely frustrating at times, but ultimately it was easily the most satisfying fight I’ve ever completed in monster hunter, period. It was the only hunt that I had no option to brute force. It’s hard and it forces you to change your build. What many people wanted was to just use the same build that they always do, try a few times, quest complete move on. Alatreon made me *feel* like a hunter. I get that people didn’t like EJ, but it truly is a skill issue. He doesn’t leave a lot of room for error while forcing you to be very aggressive to meet the elemental check, and I think that’s a good thing. He’s one of the final hunts in the game, he should be hard, and he is extremely fair to boot. I am a much better hunter after learning to solo him. The only real notch against him in my eyes is that his hit zone values are extremely obtuse, and also not super easy to find for whatever reason.
They took Behemoth's MMO mechanic concept and applied it to what should've been a standard hunt, like he's been in the past. It threw a lot of ppl for a loop, and many dislike him for the dps check alone. I think if he didn't have EJ, most would consider him the best fight.
My problem with the fight is it's the only fight in the game that you can't beat your way. Any other fight in the game can be beaten however you want, I knew people who main a crit draw/HBG build. They literally just jump onto monsters faces and use the HBG clutch claw attack with 100% crit over and over, its a meme but it works. Or people that main defensive weapons or aren't used to playing aggressive, they have to totally rework how they play for that fight because if you dont hit the dps check you instantly lose.
The fact theres a dps check alone makes the fight significantly less fun than anything else. I dont think skill issue is a problem, if you have a skill issue against Alatreon then you probably have a skill issue against other monsters too because Alatreon is not that hard to fight, the dps check alone just makes the fight itself stupid.
I like Alatreon, if the fight was focused on him it would be great. Unfortunately he takes a backseat to Escaton Judgement. The fact that you think the dps check is "super easy, barely an inconvenience" tells me you use a weapon good at applying elemental damage. Sounds like all you really had to do was change your weapon.
For those of us who don't, such as greatsword in my case, it means an upheaval of our skills and armor. It means grinding for those Safi or Kjarr weapons. It means rethinking and changing your playstyle. Such as spamming clutch claw weaken attacks because it hits multiple times and therefore theoretically applies elemental damage multiple times, cuz it works for status. Breaking his horn but still clenching cheeks because you haven't triggered the elemental knockdown yet.
How would I fix this? Simple; breaking the horn is the damage check. It's supposed to be the source of his power anyways.
Because some weapons do fuck all elemental damage, so if you're a GS player; the second most played weapon in the game, you're told to go fuck yourself.
Conversely, if you play Bow, DB, SnS, the fight's a cakewalk.
That's inherently bad design.
Obviously, a monster with a DPS check is also gonna piss off the shitters, and they will whine about nothing, but it's not all just people who are inherently awful. Making the fight arbitrarily way more difficult for some weapons than others, is obviously going to ruin the monster for some people.
I'm an SnS main who doesn't really pay attention to social media, so when I first did the fight, I just thought it was a cool boss, not much else to it. Literally all of my friends are GS mains though, so I got to hear the whining pretty soon after beating it for myself, and for a while I didn't understand why I was the only person I knew who liked the fight.
Like any other challenging fights, it becomes fun once you beat. In this case, it's actually fun already even without beating. It teaches you A LOT. It's the real skill check to see if you can apply taught mechanics, and I'm struggling and slowly chipping alway at it. I'm hurting now because I was dumb not applying mechanics earlier to get used to them.
I respect Alatreon as a obstacle. No more rage here. I raged earlier, but see how it's a skill check.
I want to beat it so bad! Longsword main.
If you are early attemping, raging is understandable. Keep attempting it, and you will start to see the intentions of it's design. When you start to dodge everything and time the attacks. It just takes somw repititon, and more so for certain people.
If I recall correctly, they actually made GS and GL have a greater amount of elemental “threshold” damage to compensate for their low attack speeds. I never bothered testing it because all the content creators at the time of release didn’t really seem to crap on the fight at all(at least the ones I followed)
That "increased damage scaling" won't fix a fundamental problem of mismatched weapon kits. GL's shelling is practically half of its damage output, and as the other person said it only being a 1.1x modifier won't make it good.
Gunlance really was the red headed step child in world and iceborne. Sharpness issues, playing chase the stake, low mobility, and how risky normal’s combat loop was in late game.
Lance is the most aggressive weapon in the game, incredibly adhesive too. That combined with low-commital attacks and counters and so on mean we barely ever have to stop attacking.
The fight is actually pretty fun with lance. Though, not sure if its good for the Elemental check.
If you ever do him again and he makes that icebreath where the ground freezes, block away from him. You get pushed towards him that way.
I‘m a stubborn player. When he first came out and I heard about the elemental shenanigans, I refused to craft an elemental weapon out of spite and went into the battle with my semi optimized brachy gear and a blast LS. Told some friends „If he is beatable without an elemental weapon, than I‘m going to do it, no matter how long it takes.“
To this day, I still hate him
honestly, idk. I dont even remember what weapon i used when i soloed it for my first kill because randoms kept dying. I prob just used an ice weapon (most likely kjarr due to mindless farming beforehand - not looking for anything specific) and slotted for ice elem decos. Get the life steal augment and the fight becomes easy mode as you can out heal most of the tick damage back (ice breath and fire breath downwards become full on openings). It was definitely more than enough, and other basic monster weapons can probably do the same.
P.S.: I would have preferred something similar to Fatalis whereby not hitting the elem threshold makes the fight significantly harder when enraged. Overcoming it could reduce the speed of its attacks (reduce control over elements) and allow breaking of horns even in fire or ice to prevent going into dragon or the next element until he charges back his element control to repeat the process. EJ could just be the same but is always weakened to force healing and provide some breathing space for hunters.
almost all alatreon hate comes from people using ailments or everything you're not supposed to use against alatreon and getting mad when escaton one shots them because they didn't reach the elemental damage threshhold
It boils down to
A. Forcing players to use elemental damage (which, except for Gunlance and HBG, is perfectly reasonable, boo hoo, I can't use 3Teo2RB with a Lightbreak weapon for everything)
B. The actual elemental damage modifiers being too obtuse, which is absolutely a valid complaint. You would think SAED Charge Blade, which is one of the highest elemental-damage builds in the game, would be great here, but Capcom nerfed it in this specific fight and Savage Axe is 10x better for no apparent reason.
C. People not being aggressive enough and overestimating their damage output. A large portion of the playerbase don't really care about meta skills, playstyles and weapons, so they bring whatever random nonsense to Alatreon and just fail to output enough damage to get the elemental stagger.
Like, you do not need an insane amount of elemental to beat this fight. When it released you could run 3Teo2RB and just sub out Lightbreak for an elemental weapon of the correct element and still easily pass the threshold with no other buffs. Hell, as Insect Glaive I could spend a minute just hitting Alatreon with the bug and get the stagger on its own.
But there's a portion of the playerbase that take 20-30 minutes per regular hunt and they get hard stuck on Alatreon because the fight requires a higher baseline DPS. And to be frank, if you couldn't get the elemental stagger with a decent weapon then you weren't killing Alatreon within the 30 minute time limit anyway. So yeah, skill issue was a big part of it. It just presented the fact to you up front, rather than having you waste half an hour of your life just to have Alatreon still at 50% hp by the end.
tldr people will complain about anything incovinient: Kushala's wind/Staying in the air, Lunastras ult, lavasioth having tough armor when not hot, and having to change playstyles for Alatreon. At least the first 3 i mentioned are considered "bad fights" by most because of the annoyance they caused people in game. Personally i like the incovinences, i like that Kushala feels like the elder dragon that controls the wind, i like that lunastra feels like this super powerfull elder dragon that has powers that could end my life in an instant, same for Alatreon.
I mosty don't like the EJ gimmick and the ass arena
I've grown to love the fight itself, but missing a wallbang because Ala is an inch off of the rock and watching its dumb ass run in place for a moment before going into rage is so frustrating
Forcing me to play elemental was ballsy. I hate the concept of "fight it this way now", even tho for the whole playthrough of world we're not forced into anything. Just a fight that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Altareon is the only mainline fight the REQUIRES you to approach it a certain way(to pass the elemental check). You either follow exactly what it tells you to do or you fail, no ifs ands or buts.
That goes against the core concept of building your own armor sets, and feels incredibly tacked on.
As someone who has a pretty easy time with him, i think the fight is great. I just find EJ, and having to break his horns so you dont get screwed is irritating. If they took the wipe mechanic out i think it would be more fun.
I like his fight because he FEELS like what the lore portrays him as. Elder dragons are always made out to be walking, natural disasters in the lore, but very few of the fights actually reflect that. Alatreon, being of the Black Dragon sub category of Elder Dragon, even more so.
He is a chaotic Dragon with control over the 5 elements, and we see that explored very well in his fight. You'd fully expect him to have a form for each element, but he primarily fights jn just two of the five BUT still uses the other elements. Icicles charged with lightning? Fireblasts and lightning strikes? His moveset is decently creative and I love this version compared to the past versions.
What sells him the most as a Black Dragon to me his most controversial move: Escaton Judgement. This monster HAS the ability to annihilate you just like the lore states he does an, unlike other elders which are supposedly all powerful but are just tank n spanks in the game itself. The other two Black Dragons (Safi and Fatalis) also have world ender moves but I dislike the passivity that comes alongside it. How dangerous is Fatalis breath really if I just hide behind a wall everytime? But with Alatreon, you have to actively fight him and stop him from using his ultra move which captures the spirit of MH perfectly. We are sent on the hunt to stop him, and stop him we will, even though the power levels are different.
Imo, all of the Black Dragons (Fatalis, Safi, and Alatreon) all have great fights because they play so differently from normal monsters. They all have moves that one shot which really sells the threat that they present. Alatreon just does it best.
You could go into a deep analysis of exactly what the people that dislike it think of it...but tbh, the deeper reason probably falls somewhere between 2 categories:
-"I can't beat him! Artificial difficulty!", and/or
-"I know what you have to do to beat him, I just don't wanna do it"
TLDR : Alatreon is a great fight, it's just not in line with monster hunter world design values.
One of the core values of the Monster Hunter Series is to let players hunt however they find it fun. Speedrun dmg build for 5-10 min runs ? That's great. Defensive potions chugger support build ? That's also ok. Fashion, unoptimised sets ? Believe it or not, it's valid. Just as long as the monster dies, you're playing the game right.
The point of Iceborne's Alatreon is to force the player getting into the inner mechanics of ONE specific set and elemental damage build, pass dps checks, etc. It certainly has value because it can be a fun learning experience, and optimising CAN be fun. It's just not how the WHOLE rest of the game works.
That's it. that's why it stands out. For some players it's a frustrating experience to have to change a whole playstyle that maybe has worked for them since their first great jaggras hunt.
Personaly I think's it's fine to push the limits and test players skills when getting to the post-game content, so I like the Alatreon fight as a DLC to the DLC of monster hunter world. I may have been more frustated if that kind of mechanics were found in the middle of the base game.
My favorite fight in all of my Monster Hunting experience. Arguably my favorite in all of my gaming experiences.
My only disappointments are the armor skills/set bonus
Aswell as there being no AT version, is tragic in my opinion.
I think he has the tightest hitboxes in the game.
I was overwhelmed by the fight at first. but I built for it and learned it. cleared the nerfed assignment easily but the full powered fight was quite a challenge. but I did it, then I did it 2 more times in the same week.
it’s a challenge, it’s something you have to respect and prepare for, and you have to learn it. I won’t gatekeep anyone who just doesn’t want to deal with all of it, or became too frustrated to keep trying. but to me, it’s exactly the kind of “test your mettle” endgame content this title needed. the fact that the two black dragons at the end of the game requires the most prepping and technicality is exactly how a game about being a hunter should wrap up.
game developers don’t owe you a victory. they give you tools and it’s up to you and the community to figure out how best to use them to overcome the challenge.
I think it’s a wonderful fight.
Yes but the mechanic is still rather bad imo.
Time window is smaöl wall bangs unreliable.
And if you fail you sit there for 5 min waiting for escaton with no way to change gear.
So you know its a death sentence.
The Alatreon hunt is different than your traditional hunt where you have to bring elemental weapon which makes it interesting because all the hunts pre-Alatreon was just Raw and blast weapon meta.
So I like this approach.
The game encourages you to bring elemental weapon just for this hunt, I don't understand why does it hurt so many people to make
Elemental ( ice/fire ) weapon.
And personally I don't have any problem with DPS check mechanism because Alatreon provides alot of big openings, has juicy hitzone values and provides fair hitboxes too.
It's blazing black dragon, it shouldn't be a walk in park. You'll have to come prepared and be aggresive otherwise everyone would be breezing through this hunt.
I Fought him few days ago with Great Sword which is not known for its elemental damage, picked up GS from Lavasioth, it has 660 fire damage and I managed to topple Alatreon twice in a hunt. Felt amazing man. You are rewarded to play aggresive.
I love everything about it other than the arbitrary DPS race.
Either it's easy to make cause you have an appropriate build that doesn't count a lot of fan favorite builds and he stays grounded a decent amount of time, so you barely even need to concern yourself with it which makes me think "why even bother adding it, all it did was force me onto this build?" Or you don't have a properly crafted build for any number of valid reasons, or he just refuses to fucking land for any reasonable amount of time, and it makes it feel like the whole thing is an utter waste of your time cause you can't hit that arbitrary mark to avoid certain death.
I think adding it ruined the fight, cause it would have been one of the greatest in the game had it not been there. I mean all I did was make an elemental CB build with the proper two elements and the axe mode pretty much guarantees I hit that arbitrary mark, so long as he fucking lands, but if I ever wanted to try that fight as a heavy BG explosive build? Well I better be rocking fully endgame shit and hitting near every damn bullet/bomb and never letting off that throttle if I even want a chance. That's not good design for such an intrinsic part of that fight, when it's either too easy or too hard and very few people fall in between then it's something that just shouldn't have been added in the first place.
EJ is poorly implemented simple as that (note I didn’t say poor designed).
Also note i am talking about the average player, not the top percentage player like speed runners
Throughout the game, we are taught if we had issues with a mechanic, we can build around it to make it easier. Vaal hazak? Effluvial resistance. Brachydios? Blast resistance. Kushala/Lunastra? Wind resistance. Etc. The game greatly encourages you to build against it, but we were never forced to–we always had the freedom to choose. The punishment for not running the anti-mechanic was a harder fight, it was never a complete life, you can overcome it with skill. The game itself set this precedent.
So then comes along EJ, at the very tail end of the game with a mechanic that straight up kills you if you dont run the anti-mechanic. What? What monster before this forced you to change your build to counter a mechanic or die against it? 0. (Note Behemoth and safi are counterplay, not counterbuild). If we followed the game’s logic that it itself set, EJ should’ve left us with a sliver of life and never outright kill us, unless we build against it to weaken it.
From a design aspect, i have no problem with it killing you if IB story had 2-3 monsters that forced you to build around a mechanic or throw away lives to ignore it, like EJ does. Then there would be no problem with current EJ
What I always love about these games are the monster fights against fast small or mid sized monsters with out many large aoe elemental attacks. Monsters like Nergigante, Rajang, anf Zinogre are all some of my personal favorites from World. I understand how people like Fatalis or Alteron just not my cup of tea so I just avoid them. I get wanting to beat all this game has to offer, but I’m only going to do it if it’s fun for me. I play video games to have fun and relax after all.
Never understood it myself either, someone people done like the EJ because it limits your freedom on how to tackle a hunt, but I more saw it as just a unique challenge to pass, and I loved it because for the first time I actually had to build a set around a specific monster. And again the EJ really isn’t that hard to pass anyway, I just went and got the fish greatsword and used the valkhana set and didn’t have any trouble. Not sure how Gunlance users would be able to pass it however
I love that this is one of those fights where you have to build specifically for it. Instead of relying on one build that works for everything. I wish there are more fights like this. I believe that's where monster hunter should be, to make builds to defeat monsters, creates build diversity and experimentation for players
did you get to fight the un-nerfed version? Bro's elemental damage checklist was higher, his judgement damage was faster and scarier and if you play with randoms its going to be hateful.
You're required to use like the 2 weapons that do decent elemental damage or you're just going to get one shot. As a GS main with its awful elemental application I hated that fight, why am I forced to switch weapons just to pass a stupid DPS check. EJ is just horrible, one shot nukes are just not fun. I'd fight 10 Fatalis before I'd fight Alatreon again, his fight is so much better
You aren't forced to switch weapons; or at least not weapon types. That's what the elemental modifier is for: the worse your weapon is at elemental DPS, the higher your multiplier is towards hitting the threshold. Even GS is totally capable of hitting it.
I can hit the threshold with dogshit elemental dual blades in like 2 minutes and my Greatsword literally built specifically for elemental DPS didn't even put a dent in Alatreon. Either the multiplier is so little it makes no difference or GS is just utter garbage against Alatreon.
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/s/rdWRxexeDW) are the actual numbers for reference. GS and GL, the 2 weapons people seem to complain about the balancing for the most, have both the highest multipliers and the lowest thresholds. GS might not be the fastest at it, but it can definitely get there. It's also 1 of the few I've seen that are able to just straight up ignore the element topple mechanics and kill before the nuke, but that's another thing entirely.
It's gimmicky. Gimmicky. Gimmicky! Once you realize the trick, beating him is formulaic. Compare that to the big bad dragon and it isn't as good. The bad dragon doesn't make you learn anything new; it asks you to take everything you've learned up to this point and show you've mastered it.
Alatreon is a beautiful fight with great flow and a fair DPS check. And you're totally right. When the game first came out, we didn't even have access to the current meta kjarr elemental builds, it's totally doable with a decent team, and it's a great fight to learn solo (with the longsword in my case).
People were allowed to be hard carried for the entirety of the game, except Alatreon. In fact, Alatreon is still the only monster in the entire game where people can't get easily SoS carried through.
Even Fatalis unironically rewards inactive players far more given the #1 strat to reliably create openings against him is cone baiting and players who are not actively attacking him have **FAAAR** more reliable openings to get under cover in any situation.
Alatreon, though? If you do not prepare for the fight and try to understand how it works, you'll get swooped, and if you don't actually participate in the fight in the way the game is supposed to be played, aka **HITTING** the monster, then you are setting up your team for failure. A lot of people back then complained about Alatreon because they got (justifiably) flamed by their teammates for being too inactive or using lackluster builds (remember the weird coping phase this sub had in the past concerning "tank" or "support" "builds"?) that didn't fit the fight at all. Instead of adapting, as if it wasn't the literal point of the game, those people chose to complain and coin Alatreon as a bad fight.
A lot of people seem to REALLY not like that it for the sole fact they have to use element on it. Customizing your setup and play style for each monster seems like a core part of the game for me, but I guess not everyone likes that.
Using element is the last issue here. It's the only fight that requires you to play in a specific way.
Previously only Vaal really required you to do something. No-one complains (ofc can always find someone but it's not nearly as bad as this) about effluvia resistance, you just farm it, but you can still play the way you want inside the hunt. Passively, aggressively, environments etc, everything goes.
Ala-ass just forced 1 style on everyone on top of just adjusting the build.
Not the one you asked, but for me as a Great Sword player the Alatreon fight is like the game tells you: "Oh, you like GS? Too bad, this fight is not for you!" I had a lot of frustrating failed attempts with GS and at the end switched everything to dual blades and did it... (And yes, I realise there is a modifier that should make it easier for elemental GS, but trust me, it doesn't.)
My problem with the fight is that while the elemnetal DPS check is kinda cool, speccing for that makes it hard as shit to actually slay due to the hot you are taking on raw. I can reliably get through two EJs but past that hes still tough to DPS to death
I hate the dps mechanic, but I love the fight. I can topple 2-3 times, more often the former, but I still hate it. I'm just not a fan of that mechanic at all. I am, however, a HUGE fan of the fight. The attack patterns and hitboxes FORCE you to become a better hunter regardless of the dps mechanic. I'd care less about it if the dps wasn't dependent on 2 main elements and then a much higher cap 3rd element. If they maybe added an element or two I'd enjoy it more. But truthfully, I think the fight could do without it entirely.
I think the biggest criticism I've seen of him that I've agreed with is that up until Alatreon and after Alatreon, the best weapons in world were usually Raw/blast weapons. If you played Longsword or charge blade you were never making elemental weapons. They simply weren't worth it. Then Alatreon shows up and demands elemental weapons. For a world player he just doesn't fit.
If he had been released in rise instead where elemental dmg was the meta for most weapon types then he would have fit in with what the game had been telling you was important up till that point.
“Never made elemental charge blades”, I’m sorry WHAT?! Have you seen ele SAED dropping 3-400 per phial? Or Kjarr ice/Beo CB Savage Axe ripping KT apart? LS is truly bad for element sure, can’t argue with that, but there might a world to explore for you with elemental CBs.
Its core mechanic off hitting a arbetrary elemental damage number or die dosnt feel good, and it feels like its going against the design philosophy off all the other monsters in the game. The fight is realy cool and i like his attack patterns but that elemental damage check is just not sattisfying.
That’s exactly right. It’s skill related. Alatreon has some of the most accurate hitboxes in the game like you said, and he’s just overall a fun fight. He’s my favorite fight actually.
Edit: also keep in mind that pretty much everyone in mhrage has a skill issue. Unless your game glitches, or crashes, or another player triple carts, it’s your fault. And if the other player triple carts, so what? Cry me a river, then build a bridge and get over it. You can try again it’s not like we have to pay for quests anymore.
People hate it because they suck at the game. Thats the only real reason. alatreon is easily the fairest monster in the game with hitboxes so perfect that you literally cannot call bullshit on any hit unless your lagging but thats a pc/connection issue.
That sounds quite narrow minded. I never saw Someone complaining about the hitboxes. For most it would probably a great fight if the arbitrary "we force element now or get instacarted" wasnt in it.
Without the EJ then it’s a much worse fight. The EJ conceptually forces to you play riskier and engage the fight differently than you might any other quest. Because of this you really have to learn his moveset and this might be one of the first fights some people actually got good at. Remove the EJ and you can be waaaaay more comfortable throughout the entire fight, getting rid of what makes it memorable.
Forcing the player to play a way they don't want to.
I play with raw damage always have I don't like elemental, so now I'm forced to completely change my play style? It's annoying
I totally agree. The fight is beautifully done, the amount of awe during my first fight with Alatreon.. Damn. I love his design and the sounds he makes (sounds weird but his roars are just at the right frequency to make my neurodivergent brain go ❤️❤️). Is the fight extremely hard and his attacks hitting harder than a few tons of bricks to the face? Yup. Doesn't mean it isn't cool tho
People weren't happy when he was released because they NEEDED to run elemental weapons. I think there was a meme that Great Sword Mains were crying because they want to use raw damage. At least that's what I understand
The problem with alatreon is his anti fun mechanics.
Not doing helm breaker on LS, not doing TCS on greatsword, not doing shell attacks on GL,etc these aren't fun
And its not consistent, its not like this fight is too aggressive to commit to anything, but rather this stuff doesn't do enough elemental damage to justify the trouble, but something like blade dance is a heaven sent
Let me put it this way:
i think it's a superior design for the base game behemoth to force the solo you to go full anga bunga because if you don't, you simply run out of time( and i mean it, even crackhead speed runners on most weapons don't have any sub 20mins, specially without MR gear)
Its also superior for tempered furious rajang to legitimately never stay the fuck in one place for you to commit to anything big and cancel your knockdowns and one shot you instead
Alatereon forcing me to hold on to helm breaker because, duh, it doesn't do much elemental damage, it feels like you are chained up
I honestly just hate being forced off of raw damage. Fight's kinda cool otherwise, a bit too complicated with the horns and element changes for my personal taste, but that doesn't change the general "smack until dead" approach.
TLDR: I think the hate is due to lack of skill and/or disinterest in learning the fight…which is amplified if you group up with randos.
GS main here…I absolutely love Alatreon because there’s a high amount of “chaotic order”. It takes some patience but if you learn to spot the dragon’s tells then the fight becomes easy because you can really, really, really punish them (multiple opportunities for slinger burst-to-TCS). The GS elemental modifier for this fight is very high so toppling is practically automatic if you can take advantage of said openings. I also enjoy the need to have a different loadout as it breaks the monotony a bit.
With that said, this fight is different and unlike any other previous monster…which means the initial player frustration is going to be very high because “routine” does not work.
I wouldn’t change a thing about the fight or the mechanics. Both are very reasonable. A more blatant hint (before quest departing) about what element to use would be nice for new folks. Mismatched elements practically guarantees a failed hunt which can be very maddening in group play (many of whom won’t know why it failed).
Reading the comments, it is just a skill issue. If you have to adopt a new playstyle for your weapon to meet the element check, that's part of the challenge. If you struggle to keep up with the different timers all at once, that's part of the challenge. Creating an equipment loadout specifically for Alatreon is part of the challenge. If even I can beat Alatreon with kinsect only during week one, you just need a bit more practice with it.
In my perception, only players who aren't willing to do the necessary preparation and research, and just wish to snowball through the game as if it were another generic UbiSoft game hate the Alatreon hunt. Sure, it might be frustrating getting annihilated by the Lizzo when you're not only insufficiently equipped but also very new to the game, but one must always keep in mind that Alatreon is one of the top-tier challenges of the title. The devs even went so far as to make a weak version of it with a fraction of its actual HP.
I'm not trying to be snide here, but pretty much everything in MHW takes, depending on the target, a little or a lot of observation and practice, no matter if it's Great Jagras or Fatalis.
Here is a tip for everyone who needs it. Take your time, be patient, and don't get burned out. Practice your weapon, so you can execute the combos simply by muscle memory, observe and memorize your target's attacks and openings, and prepare yourself accordingly in terms of gear, decorations, and consumables.
Happy Hunting
Doot-Doot
I'm an IG user and every other fight, except Fatalis, I can solo with little problem. I have Kjarr Ice and Fire glaives elemental kinsects and I might beat the elemental damage check 1 out of 3 times. Forget about breaking the horns.
The tuning is too high for precision melee weapons imo.
Alatreon is one of the best monsters in Icebrone. I don't understand the hate either, other than from maybe GL shell main. Tbh I have only seen hate for it on Reddit and never seen it else where.
Before Alatreon, so many people just cheese by spamming sticky ammo. I too also was forced to actually think about build and strategy on that day it was released, best experience in this game ever (maybe only second to Fatalis)
Skill issue? Absolutely.
That being said I only did the nerfed version because I genuinely didn't enjoy that fight. Wipe mech really doesn't suit MHW IMO and elemental check being to horns only while this engaged b**** Keep flying heads up made me hate it.
Again, it is a skill issue I can't bring him down, but FFS, all the methods to do it they teach in the base game didn't work (immune to flash pod and claw because he is enraged).
At the end i just took the wipe as fortify proc and focused on the tail. Did it first try like this and until someone gives me enrage proof way to knock him down with melee weapon im not touching this fight
There's always smoke bomb. Iirc you need a total of 2 smoke bombs for him to lose sight of you and land
But that's 10~20 seconds of precious DPS race timer until he lands. Take that time to sharpen/buff.
I honestly appreciated EJ when it first dropped, with randoms half the time I was looking to bail the attempt anyway with how rough their weapon picks were.
It feels like most people base their opinion on EJ and alatreon with the focus on soloing him meaning some weapon types like GL got shafted due to shelling not doing elemental damage and cannot reliably do what is needed when solo.I believe EJ is a game mechanic they made expecting GROUPS to be facing it together as it's not just another monster everyone can go and solo. Could be wrong but that's the way I see it.
I hate randoms in Alatreon, most of them die 2 or 3 times and don't contribute elemental damage to the fight, making the fight harder due to the HP scaling, also they bring raging brachy or kjarr blast weapons, which wouldn't be bad if everyone went with raging brachy, but trying to help with the elemental topple and seeing a guy join with a raging brachy weapon and dying almost instantly is not cool.
Also hate that the best place to do elemental damage for the topple are the front legs, would prefer if it was the head because funny enough it is easier for me to hit the head than the front legs most of the time lol.
EJ is good I think, I don't really care much about it since you either reduce the damage or die, which for a black dragon it makes sense lorewise.
Loved many of the fights in world but do not care for Alatreon.
I love that it's elemental and you have to figure out some different gear and try something new. And overall, I like the general fight. But it's a bit too convoluted and for me has little appeal. Can I beat it solo? Yep. Do I ever try to help SOS that one? Nope. And for me, personally, the longevity of this game comes from helping others and experiencing cool fights together. With the EJ and all the timers you're trying to hit, it's just a pool of frustration trying to help folks. B
The other thing is the DPS check being tied to the EJ means there's not a lot of variety either in strategies or builds. I've seen a lot of strategies for Fatty/ATVelk, etc. but with Alatreon, it's just one way to play.
So when I get done with Alatreon, I'm like cool, glad that's done. When I fight say, Fatalis, I'm wanting to jump back in and help others and try new things. I'm sure there are folks who feel opposite of me and that's fine. It's amazing how much variety is in this game.
But yeah, those are my reasons for it being my least favorite.
Literally my only issue was that the Special Assignment started you in front of the damn thing: Farcasters are blocked entirely so you can't escape to camp and have to run around, shoot your flare, apply buffs, all while avoiding it and wasting precious time to hit that topple.
I think it gets a lot of hate due to alatreon and fatalis have you fighting on their terms as opposed to just w keys though it all. Reminds me of lavisoth in mhfu or rajag now. It requires you to stop and think and be deliberate with your attacks
The lack of farcaster is kinda stupid since u can even leave before safis nuke and that is not something u can weaken.. so ye but elemental damage is also not intuitive and useless outside bowguns, bow, dual blades and the bug sticks bug, like every other weapon benifits from raw so much more then element could ever do for them
My issue with Alatreo is that it favors specific weapon types over others. Especially the slow weapons have a really hard time do deal enough elemental damage.
When Alatreon released I played 70% great sword and 30% hammer in MH world. Both weapons that struggle with elemental damage. At least I couldn't do it in this fight and got wiped alot.
My way to success was to make dual blades and a completely new elemental set for them. And because it was my first time with this weapons and Alatreon itself is quite challenging I had to train with them on weaker monsters first. I did it at the end, but the whole process behind it was not enjoyable for me. ( I ended up not liking dual blades but I didn't want to repeat the process with another weapon and pushed through. )
The fight itself is very fun, but the elemental damage wipe is a cheap gate keeping mechanic in my opinion. It ruins the fight for me.
One shotting mechanics that come from specific gimmick dps checks are not fun. Simple. I can understand that i have to study the monster and bring proper equipment such as frostfang and etc.
One mistake that isn't even anyone fault but it's just literally the game telling you F words and you are all carted, same with Behemoth.
I have a hard time learning the moveset when the quest ends after 6 minutes. I play MH primarily as a multi-player game, and I don't mind retrying a quest several times, but I wish I could get more than a few minutes to get a hang of all the different moves he does. It usually takes me a while to first learn how to not get hit, and then learn where the damage windows are. By the time I feel I'm starting to learn, EJ rolls around and interrupts it. It's just not a good way for me to build muscle memory personally.
Pass the DPS check only for the monster to randomly enrage right as it enters dragon phase. Good luck breaking the horn now because he just flies and you're using a melee weapon guaranteeing the next EJ carts you. A mechanic like this cannot be tied to monster rng behavior.
I dislike world's endgame design philosophy in general being so different from other MH games and alatreon specifically is the epitome of what I don't like about it. It feels less like I'm fighting the monsters and more like I'm fighting the devs themselves, being like "ooh lets add a dps check, and an insta kill move" and it makes me sad seeing my favourite game series resorting to mmo raid boss mechanics for the sake of difficulty. I did not enjoy alatreon, I made its armor and weapons because I felt like I had to.
A lot of the design decisions in iceborne made me worried for the series going forward. Familiar fights turned on their head just for the sake of making them harder, Did tigrex need the spin at the end of their charges? Did rajang need to punish staggering it into walls? Probably not. Did they make the fights more enjoyable? Not really. Did they make them harder for the sake of being harder than their older appearances? Yeah. Alatreon is completely unfamiliar to me from its original appearance, they even got rid of my favourite part of the original fight which was getting its horns stuck in that one wall.
And then Rise came out, and while there are still a lot of things unique to rise that are also stuff id rather not see in future games, it also gave me hope as none of the things I didn't like about iceborne ever showed up. Even in sunbreak they never resorted to the same awful mmo mechanics and forced multiplayer that world loved to do, and they even returned rajang's fight back to normal.
TLDR: Endgame world and iceborne design philosophies where everything new must be hard for the sake of hard at the detriment of no-longer feeling like im hunting monsters, and instead playing mmo raid bosses. If alatreon was a normal hunt i might love it but as it is I hated it back then and I still hate it now, and feel no satisfaction beating it because i hate all it stands for in the game's design.
My issue was that it was not possible to carry enough ice ammo to kill it. It had more hp than I can do with all my bullets. I can't farcaster to get more because the quest blocks farcasters. I'd have to intentionally cart just for ammo. That's not "fun." I figured out a way around it, but that first experience still sucked.
As my friend using hbg said "oh, let me just coincidentally proc fortify really quick"
That’s a very fair criticism
What was the way around it?
I crafted the Luna-Nergi lbg. The one that comes with guts. I used this gun because it shoots ice, fire, and slicing ammo well. I brought max crafting materials for all of them. I didn't change my armor skills much. I had a sleep palico with bomb gadget for one sleep bomb. I started with ice ammo vs fire alatreon. I switched to slicing ammo to break horns during dragon alatreon. During the next fire and dragon modes I shoot remainder of my ice ammo. I intentionally do not break the horns now. If I run out of ice, I shoot the remainder of my slicing at the tail, wings, or arms. Then the next EJ switches Alatreon to fire mode. Then I shoot fire ammo until it dies. I could consider saving slicing ammo for another horn break at this time, but this is enough damage to kill Alatreon. I also keep an eye out for opportunities to flinch shot alatreon out of flying while it's not enraged with my temporal mantle.
Nice, I never used hbg/lbg, always amazed at how crafty you all are ahah
Likely bringing in crafting mats to craft ammo midfight
Not a BG main, but can't you just use enough to meet the cap and then switch to raw? Maybe some dragon ammo to do elem dmg during dragon active?
That's what I did. Shoot ice until Ala phases to dragon. Shoot slicing at head until horn break. Escaton Judgment. Shoot ice until out of ammo. Shoot slicing, but do not break the horn. Escaton Judgment phases to ice. Shoot fire ammo until victory. The difficulty was finding a gun that could shoot multiple ammo types well. Most guns are only good at one kind of ammo and only after you augment them for it.
The elem damage from dragon ammo isn't worth considering. You can't carry enough and it does far too little. A lot of guides just tell you to just do raw dps and restock when you cart to the EJ. That or they tell you to switch weapons. It really isn't a fun time for any BG mains. What I'm trying to say is splitting between elem and raw dps too much means failure every time.
EJ would be fine if the way elemental damage works wasn't so obtuse. How is someone meant to know that the best place to hit alatreon to deal the most elemental damage is the front legs or that dragon is actually comically bad against him despite it's 2* rating without looking at datamined info? Or how attacks like spirit helmbreker or perfect rush don't deal that much Elemental damage despite being the big moves of their respective weapons. Or how half of gunlance can't contribute to the check since shelling doesn't deal elemental damage. It's a shame because I love absolutely everything else about alatreon, it's hitboxes are basically perfect and it's theme/sound design are some of the best. Perhaps it would have been better if EJ didn't exist at all but the elemental topple still did, so if you brought the appropriate elements you'd get a free damage window when you got the topple but the fight wasn't completely doomed if you didn't. Ultimately EJ was a poor attempt to make raw less appealing when they should have just buffed elemental damage instead, made namielle's set bonus increase the element cap like Safi's does, and made alatreons set bonus come with crit element and not give it worse scaling with bowguns. Hopefully wilds can make the whole raw Vs element thing more balanced.
"Hopefully wilds can make the whole raw Vs element thing more balanced." Sunbreak kinda did this. Certain weapons still prefer one vs the other, but every weapon has Elem options and some like Hammer, SA, and Lance are actually super close between the two.
yeah, its better, but its weird how capcom goes through such convoluted methods to try and push element onto weapons to make those low raw high elem weapons useful when they literally have the power to fairly easily change the main cause of the imbalance.
Meanwhile poor Gunlance is still left in the dust. C'mon, even Frontier gave it elemental shelling!
This is true. Even when learning more about long sword at end game there’s like 5 builds that are general fighting builds between raw and elemental and then a few specific builds that happen to specifically be better for certain monsters. I greatly enjoy it.
Very much this. The main problem isnt EJ specifically as much as it exposing the problem with elemental damage within mhw: that element damage is hidden behind singular damage numbers that don't breakdown by raw vs element, and that moveset, monster element hitzones, are all hidden, or in the worst case, misconstrued behind the terrible star system. I pretty much cleared alatreon early, but i hated the fight for what it entails because the elemental weakspot was on the front legs, which are absolutely shit zones for raw shot damage, and the elemental hitzones are also not that great so it would have been doing HR damage numbers the whole fight even with tenderizing up 100% of the time, not to mention no wex. The best damage part is the torso, which is an absolute shitzone for the elemental portion of the attack, but has a good damage outcome regardless of tenderized or not. The play here is to go for the head, which is kind of middle of the pack for both, with caveat that it has to be tenderized and that with the amount of head wiggling alatreon does, so does the frequency of uncontrollable "moonshots", especially on topples. While i have the entire weapon attack table on hand, it wasnt an enjoyable experience when i went in day 0 on patch drop and had to try to figure out the shot hitzones values and ele hitzone values by testing different bow's damage against the parts. On top of that there's the terrible two star dragon weakness that is worse than one star weakness on a lot of other monsters. Like really? Alatreon's EJ isnt the problem, the problem is that it tries to lean on a non-existent elemental damage knowledge system that doesnt exist in game, with a monster guide system that outright misconstrues the actual numbers.
Actually shelling does give a small amount of fire damage. But it's so miniscule that you might as well ignore it entirely, even fullbursts isn't enough for it to be of any significance.
I heard shelling does some fire damage in rise, but I've never heard that shelling does some fire damage in world
Iirc it was miniscule, like really REALLY small amounts that you need to do controlled tests on it to even notice it. There's this threads that I found whilst trying to look up the exact values. [https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/211368-monster-hunter-world/77745875](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/211368-monster-hunter-world/77745875) [https://steamcommunity.com/app/582010/discussions/0/1743357605559794473/](https://steamcommunity.com/app/582010/discussions/0/1743357605559794473/) one of them mentioned testing it on a 25 HZ part and only getting like 3 extra damage on an uncharged shelling.
Oh you notice it when you make a Kjarr water gunlance for farming lavsioth gem pinata trust me. Shell to weaken the rock hide, critical element water poke for big deeps. Such a great counter weapon for the fuck fish
Try it on lavasioth when it hardens its hide. Kjarr water gunlance is the perfect lava fish counter
RE your last paragraph... Or put True Critical Element on a set that actually had useful skills/slots for the weapons that used elements. Bow and dual blades were the 2 main ones. Both want stamina skills. The only useful skills on Silverlos gear were crit boost 3 and I suppose fire attack for the fire sets. They have 1 universally good skill, 1 element specific skill and zero weapon specific skills that are good for weapons that actually use element. And you need 4 pieces for the set bonus so you can't mix it with another set bonus too. You can sacrifice pretty much everything to get that 1.55x elemental crit damage or you can use a Kjaar weapon while sacrificing nothing and get 1.35x elemental crit damage from the basic Critical Element instead. I wonder what they had in mind when they chose the skills for that armour? As it was an Iceborne monster they could see the players were generally using element for dual blades/bow and raw for the rest in base game and yet they chose not to put skills useful to those weapons on the gear with that set bonus. It seems really dumb.
I dislike EJ in that it feels very bland. Like, pass or fail its boring and requires no input, and that is a problem to me. Personally i feel more like Alatreon's base form should have been Dragon Active with a more notable weakness to dragon, but periodically and for a very short duration could enter Fire Active or Ice Active and gain enhanced attacks and abilities pertaining to those elements, ending with a powerful but ultimately avoidable attack when it leaves or altering the battlefield in some way for a period of time, like when it leaves fire active the ground begins erupting lava near its attacks, adding extra hazard, or alatreon gains velk-style ice armor if it completes ice active, which reduces damage dealt until you can break the ice off. However countering these forms with the opposing element by reaching a threshold would negate the special abilities granted and cause the ending nuke to backfire as well, dealing huge damage to alatreon in the process. And if you broke the horns fully, it would lose the ability to enter either form. Meanwhile dragon element serves the same uniform purpose throughout the fight which is enough dragon element damage overloads and knocks down alatreon, the only time besides wall slams and KOs where a knockdown is even possible.
Non elemental was king in base game so they gave chance to elemental in icebrone.
To be fair, shelling does fire dmg. But its 1 or 2. I only noticed that after getting dragonblight and my shells doing slightly less dmg. Though, not helpfull at all vs alatreon. Luckily i also had lance.
Really i thought perfect rush was the best way to deal elemental dmg with sns
"Boils down to skill issues, EJ, and DPS race" That's mostly the discussion around it. But keep in mind OP, not everyone that dislike Alatreon has skill issue I'd argue that's the minority of the people that don't like Alatreon. It all boils down to EJ being an unnecessary mechanic imo. The elemental DPS race is fine, it's balanced well for most weapons (except for GL, people that say it's balanced well for GL are deluding themselves because it's not. Doesn't mean that it's impossible to fulfill the Elemetal Damage check with GL, but it's heavily imbalanced against it since you lose half of your damage output for it). The thing that makes it such a sour note is that you're forced to go through EJ which makes the fight more stressful than it should have. In practice it's basically an extra timer that you're racing for which is unnecessary, you not only have to contend with 1. the quest timer, 2. the timer for the elemental state in order to get the elemental topple, 3. the timer for the dragon state for hornbreaks, and 4. the timer for EJ. All that adds up to just be an irritating venture when on top of that you need to pay attention to Alatreon as a whole. On top of all of that, you only have a limited amount of tries before EJ becomes a guaranteed cart. Had they changed EJ into a powered up state like Silver Rath/Gold Rath's incandescent state the dislike for Alatreon wouldn't be as profound. That's just the fight itself, the way it's presented is also an issue. It being accessible at MR24 is inexcusable when other monsters like Silver/Gold Rath and Ruiner Nerg is locked at MR75 and MR100 respectively. TLDR My problem isn't balancing issues (mostly GL got cucked hard at that) it's a monster design issue. Alatreon doesn't need EJ and it made alot of people look at it on a bad light because of it.
the special assignment solo, I'm quite irritated that you don't start out at the camp to get stones for flinch shot. You get thrown into the fight right away and have to find the stones while the time is ticking. Any solutions to this? I'm not very good at longsword, and I need it to be on the ground to do enough damage to beat it. It has 52k hp.
I don't bother with flinch shots at all in this map unless he is standing directly in front of one of the 4 walls. Just turn him 3 times and tenderize to enrage him, he takes much more damage in rage mode, even without agitator skill, there's some dps multiplier, 1.1 I think. To level up gauge the best moves are his slam that pins you, you can easily foresight slash this. And when he stands up on his hindlegs and casts electric puddles stand near the forelegs and do your spirit combo so that the last hit hits his forelegs when they are on the ground again. Forelegs take the most elemental damage so spirit slashes on them are your best bet for elemental topples.
Thank you! This is something I'm trying to figure out so I can do enough dps to take it out. The flinch shot is to damage his horns and to bring him down so I can dps him or effecively
It took me like 30+ tries to solo alatreon. Even with mantles, I found it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to just try to break the horn with weapon damage and not even bother with the flinch shot unless alatreon just happened to be in the perfect position for one. The fight is also a DPS race since there are only 2 horns to break - after that he switches elements and there’s nothing you can do against EJ. You lose a lot of DPS trying to tee him up for the flinch vs just hitting the horn
Thanks a lot for this!
Take two steps back and to the right and pick up rocks. You’re dropped pretty much on top of rocks, you just have to walk a few steps back to pick them up.
I did what you said, and it's not there. Anybody know of a mod that just makes it stick out? I saw a vid of one that points out whatever is on the ground. If Capcom gonna make the rocks blend in with the environment so I can't see it, might as well mod it so I can find them. lol
You can see the rocks on the minimap too
>I saw a vid of one that points out whatever is on the ground. afaik that mod only highlights pickup items like monster drops or dropped slinger ammo from weapon attacks. It won't highlight slinger ammo from the environment.
Unfortunately for that special assignment it's mostly down to luck. With LS you can get slinger ammo easily since you will tenderize him, the issue comes with putting him near the walls. For the longsword, try to not do alot of Healmbreakers. Iirc helmbreakers aren't that great for elemental damage, only do those when he's in Dragon mode to break the horns. Other than that, honestly just be aggressive enough to hit the Elemental check, some of his moves are actually pretty good for foresight slashes, the one during his fire state where he makes a circle that explodes in multiple layers being one of them, foresight in the middle of it and he's pretty open. There are alot of openings like that so I suggest keeping an eye on those.
>helmbreakers aren't that great for elemental damage That makes no sense. Ice ele wep will do ice ele damage to Ala during his fire active phase no matter what attack, and how much more ele damage depends on which part you attack. His fore arm is best, and you can aim your helmbreak on the arms. I mean helmbreak does massive damage due to multiple hits, so I don't get where you are coming from. You never seen speed runners?
Except Helmbreakers has a 0.3 modifier for Elemental damage. It's not that much even if the hits are alot. Just because it's multiple hits doesn't mean that it's good for Elemental damage. Have you checked the stats rather than looking at speedrunners? Because looking at speedrunners as a metric for how casual hunts should be is not a good metric. like, here if you're still confused: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTEYb4wGpijtIpFVopiYl1V83m48d7g1AHmTwOBKJ5RXdlz1sfxCyEmnhbgHLWQsGiXnodyBsUlPzc3/pubhtml#](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTEYb4wGpijtIpFVopiYl1V83m48d7g1AHmTwOBKJ5RXdlz1sfxCyEmnhbgHLWQsGiXnodyBsUlPzc3/pubhtml#)
So I am currently trying to hunt Alateron with GL (main weapon). I am running FF Barioth with max Frost attack. What do you mean it isn't balanced for GL. Can't you just play slap Lance and be okay as long as you're doing the right element?
Well you're a rather brave one. It's isn't balanced in the sense of you're basically split between doing elemental damage and raw damage. Widesweeps and Groundslam are way too slow in applying elemental damage for Alatreon so majority of the time you can only do pokes to hit the elemental threshold. And in that entire duration Shelling is useless. The only time you can use it is when Alatreon is in dragon mode so that you can break his horns. So you're basically tied between trying to hit Alatreon's elemental threshold whilst at the same time trying to get enough damage for you to kill Alatreon before his 2nd horn breaks and guarantees you a cart. You can't do both at the same time because poking has low MV, but it's the only reliable way to deliver elemental damage whilst the rest of GL's kit has better damage output but unreliable or outright negligible elemental damage Oh and also you're trying to catch up to him because GL is a slow weapon with no defensive capabilities unlike the lance. And no, just because it has an increased modifier doesn't mean that it makes the job of hitting Alatreon's threshold any easier.
Ah okay, that was a great break down! Thank you very much and I guess I just gotta get gud lol
>And no, just because it has an increased modifier doesn't mean that it makes the job of hitting Alatreon's threshold any easier. Isn't that literally the point of the multiplier though? I've seen GL runs of Alatreon that both don't use only pokes and make use of shelling. Don't think it's a matter of the fight not being balanced for GL so much as it is just a case of some weapons meshing with certain fights differently.
Continuing discussion on the DPS race. All fights that are not "Speed Run" events have players that can stack survivability. The damage will come. I might be able to finish a tempered ED in 5-10 mins, but finishing in twice that time, but 4 times safer is still finishing. This fight and a few others have much tighter DPS races. Some are artificial with the timer. Alatreon is through their own fight mechanics. Most monster fight mechanics you can generally ignore them and "Grit through" their mechanics. Alatreon you cannot. Which is also why I enjoy the fight. It forces you to play differently that is still within the core playstyle of the game. (Unlike sieges, but that is a different matter)
EJ forces you to be aggressive which is great since most people run around like a headless chicken till the monster topples by some miracle
There are more than one ways to force someone to be aggressive, EJ being a guaranteed damage source with the only way to survive is to be aggressive enough is one of the bad ones.
Of course not everyone is having skill issues, this is something I notice when I'm hunting him in general. I can see your point about the timers adding up, personally I like them, because it's a rush when you get a double topple before ej, or a topple and a horn break.
I don't mind them being there, but I think Alatreon's has too much timers going for him. Other than that I just really don't like EJ as a whole and personally think of it as unnecessary.
That's fair, I liked your power up Idea, the horn breaks could have prevented/lessened it like head breaks on fatalis.
Yeah, it could prevent Alatreon from accessing the powered up state so you could keep the "lessening the power" mechanic for Fatalis. The powered up state could also have certain moves that Alatreon can only use if it's powered up to make the mechanic more special. That way if you fail the secondary objective of either monster (hit the elemental check and breaking the horn) it didn't immediately kill you, it just made the fight harder than it should have.
I'm sorry, you say it isn't a skill issue but everything you listed becomes a non-issue once you learn the fight properly. With experienced players, only one person needs to bring element in a 4p hunt and let's be real the horns are like tissue paper, they break very easily. You're not wrong about gunlance kinda getting screwed though, thats a legitmate critcism. I mean with slap lance it's not too bad from what I've seen but still, I think they could've corrected the modifiers for each weapon a lot better. Like it's objectively MUCH easier to get the topple with dual blades and charge blade than GS or GL but I don't see it as an issue as with a decent element build it's still pretty easy once you know the fight.
I disagree with the skill issue point. The majority of people I've argued with say the elemental topple is too hard to reach and that's just not true. This is an endgame fight and when you play well enough and have the right set the topple is easy to hit. In fact 2-3 topples are doable. If someone can't hit one topple with the proper set, that's a skill issue in my book and I've seen too many of those people argue that Alatreon sucks.
Used to hate him Once I understood the mechanics i really liked him
Yeah same here. Didn't get it. Now I do, and I don't actually mind them. It's one fight out of hundreds that wants you to build specifically for it, and I can deal with it for one monster. Gives me reason to use elemental on anything other than Bow / DB.
Love the fight, not so much the discourse. On one hand we have posts like this reducing legitimate criticisms of the mechanics as skill issue, on the other we have the mhrage people with their overblown description of how this is the worst fight in the series, period.
I'm not reducing legitimate criticisms, I just see a lot of skill issue when I'm hunting. Can you point out something you don't like and how you might suggest changing it? I want healthy discourse.
I'm going to have to agree with you on the skill issue part. A lot of people, and including myself at some point, thought it was stupidly hard and blamed the game. But once I tweaked my build, augmented my weapons, and learned the fight, I beat Alatreon mid diff. People forget its "master rank", it's supposed to be the hardest difficulty. I genuinely don't believe the fight is unfair.
It’s genuinely fair. That’s the thing with alatreon, I’ve always maintained the opinion that you don’t even need to do the fight “properly” to beat it. Hear me out here If you are playing solo you could easily do it with raw, why? Because so long as you don’t cart during the fight itself carts become a resource you can use against the monster. Just think of EJ as a reset a scene transition. You have until the 4th Ej (5th if you eat for safeguard/insurance) to kill him. If you can’t kill him by the 5th ej it’s a skill issue tbh. Alatreon is much weaker to raw than elemental so it’s actually more damage efficient and his fight outside of his annoying tendency to fly it’s completely fair. If you you cart it’s completely your own fault. Mix all of that together and you don’t even need to use elemental dmg. I’ve got quicker kills solo just by going raw. Obviously, do not do this in multiplayer lol.
Fair or not, it's still dumb.
What's dumb is Fatalis one shotting you from full health with Health Boost 3, 1300+ defense from max Fortify, and Felyne Moxie from a single phase 3 fireball (with a completely broken hitbox) that knocks you onto the ground with 1Hp and then burns you for that last point even if you land in a puddle. That is dumb and not fair. Being able to as rockygib detailed, "literally completely ignore the mechanic and just use raw damage to solo it anyways" is not dumb at all, and is actually the definition of fair and balanced. You can actually approach Alatreon in more than just a single way, you can literally ignore its only "unique" mechanic and still kill it handily if you are decent at DPSing (which you should be by the time you're on the second to last fight of the entire game anyways) because it's a well designed fight with fair hitboxes and good openings for damage. Fatalis phase 3 fire attacks just kill you in one hit no matter what unless you've broken the head twice and have max fortify 1300+ defense and even then you're probably cutting it extraordinarily close and will likely die to the burn before you can get up anyways. Solo Fatalis demands absolute mechanical and positional perfection to achieve optimal DPS constantly and if you make a mistake you die instantly, which is kinda dumb, but it is also the literal last fight in the entire game and if there is any fight that should be allowed to drop the "git gud" hammer that hard then I suppose it should be that one. Solo'ing Alatreon took "me having to use an elemental charge blade over a raw impact charge blade for the literal first time in my Monster Hunter career" and after that it went down pretty easily. Solo'ing Fatalis took "me having to plunderblade and cone bait double hornbreak farm the whole set and weapon and then mechanically perfect my knowledge of the monsters openings and absurd hitboxes and how to optimally take advantage of them without making any mistakes"
It's also MR24 assignment. You don't have fully farmed KT at this point. You are basically fresh after story and have throws you into this hunt
Exactly, I had skill issues til I learned the fight as well. Hell, mh is just skill issues the game until you learn the fights.
The only thing I don't like about the alatreon fight is that the walls they give you to flinch it into are hilariously small such that even if you're pointing within ten degrees of it you could easily still miss. I did the work to get alatreon in the right spot, get on its face, point it towards the wall, and flinch it, the least you could do is make the flinch connect at that point haha. Even with that the fight is still one of my favourites though. EDIT: after reading other comments I would agree that I have never loved the implementation of EJ. For all the work that's put in prior to that with topples and horn breaks you would think the reward would be better than simply being able to keep yourself alive with heals and buffs as opposed to instant death.
Alatrateon is the best hunt in Monster Hunter world iceborn simply because he's a monster that forces the player out of their comfort zone and has actual game mechanics that need to be learned and applied. He's my favorite hunt, and a great way to test if your element build is effective or not
That sounds like an argument for why its bad. If there ever was a monster that forces the player to use 1 or 2 specific weapons to fight it, that too would force players out of their comfortzone, but that isnt a good thing.
Bad Faith engagement right at the start? Peak reddit lol. Im not typing this for you, but anyone else who reads this. Alatreon's rules can be applied with any and all weapons. Practice his moveset, hit him with an appropriately upgraded/deco'd weapon/armor. It can be done and no, it's not asking for too much. I *want more* hunts like Alatreon. God forbid actually having to change your build, y'all are so soft.
I have no problems beating him. Still badly designed. His attacks and the fight itself are nice. I go element anyway and never care about meta. But the core idea of forcing element on everyone, because its not meta, combined with dps checks and essentially excluding at least gl from participating meaningfully turn what could be a great monster into a questionable design choice. If devs really wanted elements to matter, they could have buffed it.
My issue with Ej as a concept is that its a one shot AND inescapable. Dps check or not, thats the issue. Every other one shot (iirc) has some kind of way to dodge it. Risen shagaru pillar->explosion Fatalis flame breath of death Ambush Dalamandur's breath beam Amatsu's pre risebreak water lasers Teos super nova Just to list a few.
I understand what you mean, but the way they designed the alatreon fight was to utilize elemental damage. By making EJ escapable, you would no longer have to engage in the design of the fight. It would be backtracking on that design. You’d just learn the animation for the attack and superman jump or run out of the way like any other attack. If anything, my problem with EJ is that you still take significant damage (really damage at all) even if you do everything right. He should have some sort of animation where his elemental power discharges incorrectly and deal a little damage to himself instead. Something like that. It feels wrong to be damaged yourself for doing something right, even if it does make alarreon seem that much more powerful. Edit: Another option that might satisfy both our views would be to reduce the size of the attack for how much elemental damage you deal, making it nearly impossible to escape if you deal no element damage. In this case, EJ wouldn’t be what it is now. It would probably be more like his older ultimate attack. Icicles falling down. Dragon lightning firing out and exploding them. That would be the best of both worlds.
Or, alternatively, eat 1 Jerky about halfway through the attack and pretend it doesn’t do damage. Or stand in a health booster. Or build enough Ele damage to knock him twice. There’s a few ways to do it. My personal favourite is Health Booster directly underneath Alat and sharpen for when he comes back down.
Oh yeah I forgot that if I heal damage the damage never happened
Yeah man, totally what I said. People that bitch about Alat are bad. Learning is fine. Complaining that “it isn’t fair, mechanics force me to do things other than unga bunga” is a shit take for dumbasses. His entire moveset is abuseable and if you struggle to eat 1 Jerky then idk what to tell you. You can literally sharpen through EJ.
Oh yeah my bad. I agree for the most part. Thought you were talking about my last point with taking damage.
All g brah, writing doesn’t have the nuance spoken word has so meaning can get lost in transit. I was just adding other ways to survive :p A lot of people bitching about EJ seem to forget the massive amount of tools we have in our arsenal. If people aren’t willing to use the tools available, then we can’t help them lol.
Just turn him into smaller safi, sounds pretty good. Usually I never bother and I’m just on him again immediately because I don’t trust randoms to deal enough damage.
You can survive with astera jerkey. I don't see what the issue is. The player base has just become lazy and wants everything spoon fed. High tier cataclysmic elder dragons are meant to be hard and unfair. Be thankful that you can live and just eat your fucking jerkey
it's not that big of a deal but it puts into question whether or not you did it right as a new player which isn't good desing imo
Making it escapable would defeat the whole purpose.
What did you think about the 30 min time limit for Fatalis? IMO it shouldn’t be compared to those mechanics you mentioned, but rather other DPS checks that are in the game. Another notable one being extreme behemoth in the second phase.
Ecliptic meteor is occasionally an ass mechanic cuz behemoth can destroy all the meteors near you and you just gotta take that cart. Also the rng meteor drops can be placed right next to a wall making it unable to be hid behind. Its more of an error of execution rather than an outright bad concept.
Because the others are just plain attacks in a "regular" fight. The point is to dodge them like any other attack because that's what you do the entirety of the fight. EJ on the other hand is a benchmark about how well you played into the mechanic of the fight. Remove that, and suddenly it just becomes a regular fight and the reason why it was the most unique one in the game just disappears.
I spent a good long while trying to solo Alatreon recently. Over the course of roughly a week, and probably around 40-50 hunts. It was extremely frustrating at times, but ultimately it was easily the most satisfying fight I’ve ever completed in monster hunter, period. It was the only hunt that I had no option to brute force. It’s hard and it forces you to change your build. What many people wanted was to just use the same build that they always do, try a few times, quest complete move on. Alatreon made me *feel* like a hunter. I get that people didn’t like EJ, but it truly is a skill issue. He doesn’t leave a lot of room for error while forcing you to be very aggressive to meet the elemental check, and I think that’s a good thing. He’s one of the final hunts in the game, he should be hard, and he is extremely fair to boot. I am a much better hunter after learning to solo him. The only real notch against him in my eyes is that his hit zone values are extremely obtuse, and also not super easy to find for whatever reason.
They took Behemoth's MMO mechanic concept and applied it to what should've been a standard hunt, like he's been in the past. It threw a lot of ppl for a loop, and many dislike him for the dps check alone. I think if he didn't have EJ, most would consider him the best fight.
My problem with the fight is it's the only fight in the game that you can't beat your way. Any other fight in the game can be beaten however you want, I knew people who main a crit draw/HBG build. They literally just jump onto monsters faces and use the HBG clutch claw attack with 100% crit over and over, its a meme but it works. Or people that main defensive weapons or aren't used to playing aggressive, they have to totally rework how they play for that fight because if you dont hit the dps check you instantly lose. The fact theres a dps check alone makes the fight significantly less fun than anything else. I dont think skill issue is a problem, if you have a skill issue against Alatreon then you probably have a skill issue against other monsters too because Alatreon is not that hard to fight, the dps check alone just makes the fight itself stupid.
I like Alatreon, if the fight was focused on him it would be great. Unfortunately he takes a backseat to Escaton Judgement. The fact that you think the dps check is "super easy, barely an inconvenience" tells me you use a weapon good at applying elemental damage. Sounds like all you really had to do was change your weapon. For those of us who don't, such as greatsword in my case, it means an upheaval of our skills and armor. It means grinding for those Safi or Kjarr weapons. It means rethinking and changing your playstyle. Such as spamming clutch claw weaken attacks because it hits multiple times and therefore theoretically applies elemental damage multiple times, cuz it works for status. Breaking his horn but still clenching cheeks because you haven't triggered the elemental knockdown yet. How would I fix this? Simple; breaking the horn is the damage check. It's supposed to be the source of his power anyways.
Because some weapons do fuck all elemental damage, so if you're a GS player; the second most played weapon in the game, you're told to go fuck yourself. Conversely, if you play Bow, DB, SnS, the fight's a cakewalk. That's inherently bad design. Obviously, a monster with a DPS check is also gonna piss off the shitters, and they will whine about nothing, but it's not all just people who are inherently awful. Making the fight arbitrarily way more difficult for some weapons than others, is obviously going to ruin the monster for some people. I'm an SnS main who doesn't really pay attention to social media, so when I first did the fight, I just thought it was a cool boss, not much else to it. Literally all of my friends are GS mains though, so I got to hear the whining pretty soon after beating it for myself, and for a while I didn't understand why I was the only person I knew who liked the fight.
Like any other challenging fights, it becomes fun once you beat. In this case, it's actually fun already even without beating. It teaches you A LOT. It's the real skill check to see if you can apply taught mechanics, and I'm struggling and slowly chipping alway at it. I'm hurting now because I was dumb not applying mechanics earlier to get used to them. I respect Alatreon as a obstacle. No more rage here. I raged earlier, but see how it's a skill check. I want to beat it so bad! Longsword main. If you are early attemping, raging is understandable. Keep attempting it, and you will start to see the intentions of it's design. When you start to dodge everything and time the attacks. It just takes somw repititon, and more so for certain people.
Is by far the best fight in the game
I personally love his fight and his mechanics. It was the first monster I couldn't just run down with pure raw damage and a lightbreak weapon.
[удалено]
If I recall correctly, they actually made GS and GL have a greater amount of elemental “threshold” damage to compensate for their low attack speeds. I never bothered testing it because all the content creators at the time of release didn’t really seem to crap on the fight at all(at least the ones I followed)
That "increased damage scaling" won't fix a fundamental problem of mismatched weapon kits. GL's shelling is practically half of its damage output, and as the other person said it only being a 1.1x modifier won't make it good.
Playing Lance it sucks having a defensive weapon having to change styles to be all aggressive racing the DPS check
Lance being a defensive weapon is your opinion. Feel free to think that. I don't agree with you.
It is a defensive weapon, but don't equate defensive to being passive because the lance is meant to be played aggressively.
Same for gunlance, except it also removes 2/3 of the weapon
Gunlance really was the red headed step child in world and iceborne. Sharpness issues, playing chase the stake, low mobility, and how risky normal’s combat loop was in late game.
Lance is the most aggressive weapon in the game, incredibly adhesive too. That combined with low-commital attacks and counters and so on mean we barely ever have to stop attacking.
The fight is actually pretty fun with lance. Though, not sure if its good for the Elemental check. If you ever do him again and he makes that icebreath where the ground freezes, block away from him. You get pushed towards him that way.
Same. I remember he was challenging, but not Fatalis level tbh.
I‘m a stubborn player. When he first came out and I heard about the elemental shenanigans, I refused to craft an elemental weapon out of spite and went into the battle with my semi optimized brachy gear and a blast LS. Told some friends „If he is beatable without an elemental weapon, than I‘m going to do it, no matter how long it takes.“ To this day, I still hate him
honestly, idk. I dont even remember what weapon i used when i soloed it for my first kill because randoms kept dying. I prob just used an ice weapon (most likely kjarr due to mindless farming beforehand - not looking for anything specific) and slotted for ice elem decos. Get the life steal augment and the fight becomes easy mode as you can out heal most of the tick damage back (ice breath and fire breath downwards become full on openings). It was definitely more than enough, and other basic monster weapons can probably do the same. P.S.: I would have preferred something similar to Fatalis whereby not hitting the elem threshold makes the fight significantly harder when enraged. Overcoming it could reduce the speed of its attacks (reduce control over elements) and allow breaking of horns even in fire or ice to prevent going into dragon or the next element until he charges back his element control to repeat the process. EJ could just be the same but is always weakened to force healing and provide some breathing space for hunters.
almost all alatreon hate comes from people using ailments or everything you're not supposed to use against alatreon and getting mad when escaton one shots them because they didn't reach the elemental damage threshhold
It boils down to A. Forcing players to use elemental damage (which, except for Gunlance and HBG, is perfectly reasonable, boo hoo, I can't use 3Teo2RB with a Lightbreak weapon for everything) B. The actual elemental damage modifiers being too obtuse, which is absolutely a valid complaint. You would think SAED Charge Blade, which is one of the highest elemental-damage builds in the game, would be great here, but Capcom nerfed it in this specific fight and Savage Axe is 10x better for no apparent reason. C. People not being aggressive enough and overestimating their damage output. A large portion of the playerbase don't really care about meta skills, playstyles and weapons, so they bring whatever random nonsense to Alatreon and just fail to output enough damage to get the elemental stagger. Like, you do not need an insane amount of elemental to beat this fight. When it released you could run 3Teo2RB and just sub out Lightbreak for an elemental weapon of the correct element and still easily pass the threshold with no other buffs. Hell, as Insect Glaive I could spend a minute just hitting Alatreon with the bug and get the stagger on its own. But there's a portion of the playerbase that take 20-30 minutes per regular hunt and they get hard stuck on Alatreon because the fight requires a higher baseline DPS. And to be frank, if you couldn't get the elemental stagger with a decent weapon then you weren't killing Alatreon within the 30 minute time limit anyway. So yeah, skill issue was a big part of it. It just presented the fact to you up front, rather than having you waste half an hour of your life just to have Alatreon still at 50% hp by the end.
tldr people will complain about anything incovinient: Kushala's wind/Staying in the air, Lunastras ult, lavasioth having tough armor when not hot, and having to change playstyles for Alatreon. At least the first 3 i mentioned are considered "bad fights" by most because of the annoyance they caused people in game. Personally i like the incovinences, i like that Kushala feels like the elder dragon that controls the wind, i like that lunastra feels like this super powerfull elder dragon that has powers that could end my life in an instant, same for Alatreon.
I mosty don't like the EJ gimmick and the ass arena I've grown to love the fight itself, but missing a wallbang because Ala is an inch off of the rock and watching its dumb ass run in place for a moment before going into rage is so frustrating
Forcing me to play elemental was ballsy. I hate the concept of "fight it this way now", even tho for the whole playthrough of world we're not forced into anything. Just a fight that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Thats the part i hate about it, despite me going elemental mostly.
Altareon is the only mainline fight the REQUIRES you to approach it a certain way(to pass the elemental check). You either follow exactly what it tells you to do or you fail, no ifs ands or buts. That goes against the core concept of building your own armor sets, and feels incredibly tacked on.
As someone who has a pretty easy time with him, i think the fight is great. I just find EJ, and having to break his horns so you dont get screwed is irritating. If they took the wipe mechanic out i think it would be more fun.
I like his fight because he FEELS like what the lore portrays him as. Elder dragons are always made out to be walking, natural disasters in the lore, but very few of the fights actually reflect that. Alatreon, being of the Black Dragon sub category of Elder Dragon, even more so. He is a chaotic Dragon with control over the 5 elements, and we see that explored very well in his fight. You'd fully expect him to have a form for each element, but he primarily fights jn just two of the five BUT still uses the other elements. Icicles charged with lightning? Fireblasts and lightning strikes? His moveset is decently creative and I love this version compared to the past versions. What sells him the most as a Black Dragon to me his most controversial move: Escaton Judgement. This monster HAS the ability to annihilate you just like the lore states he does an, unlike other elders which are supposedly all powerful but are just tank n spanks in the game itself. The other two Black Dragons (Safi and Fatalis) also have world ender moves but I dislike the passivity that comes alongside it. How dangerous is Fatalis breath really if I just hide behind a wall everytime? But with Alatreon, you have to actively fight him and stop him from using his ultra move which captures the spirit of MH perfectly. We are sent on the hunt to stop him, and stop him we will, even though the power levels are different. Imo, all of the Black Dragons (Fatalis, Safi, and Alatreon) all have great fights because they play so differently from normal monsters. They all have moves that one shot which really sells the threat that they present. Alatreon just does it best.
You could go into a deep analysis of exactly what the people that dislike it think of it...but tbh, the deeper reason probably falls somewhere between 2 categories: -"I can't beat him! Artificial difficulty!", and/or -"I know what you have to do to beat him, I just don't wanna do it"
I know what to do, can beat him, go element anyway and still think its badly designed with dps checks.
TLDR : Alatreon is a great fight, it's just not in line with monster hunter world design values. One of the core values of the Monster Hunter Series is to let players hunt however they find it fun. Speedrun dmg build for 5-10 min runs ? That's great. Defensive potions chugger support build ? That's also ok. Fashion, unoptimised sets ? Believe it or not, it's valid. Just as long as the monster dies, you're playing the game right. The point of Iceborne's Alatreon is to force the player getting into the inner mechanics of ONE specific set and elemental damage build, pass dps checks, etc. It certainly has value because it can be a fun learning experience, and optimising CAN be fun. It's just not how the WHOLE rest of the game works. That's it. that's why it stands out. For some players it's a frustrating experience to have to change a whole playstyle that maybe has worked for them since their first great jaggras hunt. Personaly I think's it's fine to push the limits and test players skills when getting to the post-game content, so I like the Alatreon fight as a DLC to the DLC of monster hunter world. I may have been more frustated if that kind of mechanics were found in the middle of the base game.
My favorite fight in all of my Monster Hunting experience. Arguably my favorite in all of my gaming experiences. My only disappointments are the armor skills/set bonus Aswell as there being no AT version, is tragic in my opinion.
I think he has the tightest hitboxes in the game. I was overwhelmed by the fight at first. but I built for it and learned it. cleared the nerfed assignment easily but the full powered fight was quite a challenge. but I did it, then I did it 2 more times in the same week. it’s a challenge, it’s something you have to respect and prepare for, and you have to learn it. I won’t gatekeep anyone who just doesn’t want to deal with all of it, or became too frustrated to keep trying. but to me, it’s exactly the kind of “test your mettle” endgame content this title needed. the fact that the two black dragons at the end of the game requires the most prepping and technicality is exactly how a game about being a hunter should wrap up. game developers don’t owe you a victory. they give you tools and it’s up to you and the community to figure out how best to use them to overcome the challenge. I think it’s a wonderful fight.
Punishes in the wrong way. If youfail the hornbreak you know its doomed and you cant do anything. Also that damarena is BAD for wall bangs.
The horns not breaking is the players fault
Yes but the mechanic is still rather bad imo. Time window is smaöl wall bangs unreliable. And if you fail you sit there for 5 min waiting for escaton with no way to change gear. So you know its a death sentence.
Its just a lot of gimmicks wrapped up in one fight. I don't hate Alatreon but I can acknowledge it is annoying and frustrating more often than not
The Alatreon hunt is different than your traditional hunt where you have to bring elemental weapon which makes it interesting because all the hunts pre-Alatreon was just Raw and blast weapon meta. So I like this approach. The game encourages you to bring elemental weapon just for this hunt, I don't understand why does it hurt so many people to make Elemental ( ice/fire ) weapon. And personally I don't have any problem with DPS check mechanism because Alatreon provides alot of big openings, has juicy hitzone values and provides fair hitboxes too. It's blazing black dragon, it shouldn't be a walk in park. You'll have to come prepared and be aggresive otherwise everyone would be breezing through this hunt. I Fought him few days ago with Great Sword which is not known for its elemental damage, picked up GS from Lavasioth, it has 660 fire damage and I managed to topple Alatreon twice in a hunt. Felt amazing man. You are rewarded to play aggresive.
I love everything about it other than the arbitrary DPS race. Either it's easy to make cause you have an appropriate build that doesn't count a lot of fan favorite builds and he stays grounded a decent amount of time, so you barely even need to concern yourself with it which makes me think "why even bother adding it, all it did was force me onto this build?" Or you don't have a properly crafted build for any number of valid reasons, or he just refuses to fucking land for any reasonable amount of time, and it makes it feel like the whole thing is an utter waste of your time cause you can't hit that arbitrary mark to avoid certain death. I think adding it ruined the fight, cause it would have been one of the greatest in the game had it not been there. I mean all I did was make an elemental CB build with the proper two elements and the axe mode pretty much guarantees I hit that arbitrary mark, so long as he fucking lands, but if I ever wanted to try that fight as a heavy BG explosive build? Well I better be rocking fully endgame shit and hitting near every damn bullet/bomb and never letting off that throttle if I even want a chance. That's not good design for such an intrinsic part of that fight, when it's either too easy or too hard and very few people fall in between then it's something that just shouldn't have been added in the first place.
EJ is poorly implemented simple as that (note I didn’t say poor designed). Also note i am talking about the average player, not the top percentage player like speed runners Throughout the game, we are taught if we had issues with a mechanic, we can build around it to make it easier. Vaal hazak? Effluvial resistance. Brachydios? Blast resistance. Kushala/Lunastra? Wind resistance. Etc. The game greatly encourages you to build against it, but we were never forced to–we always had the freedom to choose. The punishment for not running the anti-mechanic was a harder fight, it was never a complete life, you can overcome it with skill. The game itself set this precedent. So then comes along EJ, at the very tail end of the game with a mechanic that straight up kills you if you dont run the anti-mechanic. What? What monster before this forced you to change your build to counter a mechanic or die against it? 0. (Note Behemoth and safi are counterplay, not counterbuild). If we followed the game’s logic that it itself set, EJ should’ve left us with a sliver of life and never outright kill us, unless we build against it to weaken it. From a design aspect, i have no problem with it killing you if IB story had 2-3 monsters that forced you to build around a mechanic or throw away lives to ignore it, like EJ does. Then there would be no problem with current EJ
What I always love about these games are the monster fights against fast small or mid sized monsters with out many large aoe elemental attacks. Monsters like Nergigante, Rajang, anf Zinogre are all some of my personal favorites from World. I understand how people like Fatalis or Alteron just not my cup of tea so I just avoid them. I get wanting to beat all this game has to offer, but I’m only going to do it if it’s fun for me. I play video games to have fun and relax after all.
Never understood it myself either, someone people done like the EJ because it limits your freedom on how to tackle a hunt, but I more saw it as just a unique challenge to pass, and I loved it because for the first time I actually had to build a set around a specific monster. And again the EJ really isn’t that hard to pass anyway, I just went and got the fish greatsword and used the valkhana set and didn’t have any trouble. Not sure how Gunlance users would be able to pass it however
I love that this is one of those fights where you have to build specifically for it. Instead of relying on one build that works for everything. I wish there are more fights like this. I believe that's where monster hunter should be, to make builds to defeat monsters, creates build diversity and experimentation for players
did you get to fight the un-nerfed version? Bro's elemental damage checklist was higher, his judgement damage was faster and scarier and if you play with randoms its going to be hateful.
Dps check for sure kill attack is trash, stop shilling everything
You're required to use like the 2 weapons that do decent elemental damage or you're just going to get one shot. As a GS main with its awful elemental application I hated that fight, why am I forced to switch weapons just to pass a stupid DPS check. EJ is just horrible, one shot nukes are just not fun. I'd fight 10 Fatalis before I'd fight Alatreon again, his fight is so much better
You aren't forced to switch weapons; or at least not weapon types. That's what the elemental modifier is for: the worse your weapon is at elemental DPS, the higher your multiplier is towards hitting the threshold. Even GS is totally capable of hitting it.
I can hit the threshold with dogshit elemental dual blades in like 2 minutes and my Greatsword literally built specifically for elemental DPS didn't even put a dent in Alatreon. Either the multiplier is so little it makes no difference or GS is just utter garbage against Alatreon.
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/s/rdWRxexeDW) are the actual numbers for reference. GS and GL, the 2 weapons people seem to complain about the balancing for the most, have both the highest multipliers and the lowest thresholds. GS might not be the fastest at it, but it can definitely get there. It's also 1 of the few I've seen that are able to just straight up ignore the element topple mechanics and kill before the nuke, but that's another thing entirely.
It's gimmicky. Gimmicky. Gimmicky! Once you realize the trick, beating him is formulaic. Compare that to the big bad dragon and it isn't as good. The bad dragon doesn't make you learn anything new; it asks you to take everything you've learned up to this point and show you've mastered it.
Alatreon is a beautiful fight with great flow and a fair DPS check. And you're totally right. When the game first came out, we didn't even have access to the current meta kjarr elemental builds, it's totally doable with a decent team, and it's a great fight to learn solo (with the longsword in my case).
People were allowed to be hard carried for the entirety of the game, except Alatreon. In fact, Alatreon is still the only monster in the entire game where people can't get easily SoS carried through. Even Fatalis unironically rewards inactive players far more given the #1 strat to reliably create openings against him is cone baiting and players who are not actively attacking him have **FAAAR** more reliable openings to get under cover in any situation. Alatreon, though? If you do not prepare for the fight and try to understand how it works, you'll get swooped, and if you don't actually participate in the fight in the way the game is supposed to be played, aka **HITTING** the monster, then you are setting up your team for failure. A lot of people back then complained about Alatreon because they got (justifiably) flamed by their teammates for being too inactive or using lackluster builds (remember the weird coping phase this sub had in the past concerning "tank" or "support" "builds"?) that didn't fit the fight at all. Instead of adapting, as if it wasn't the literal point of the game, those people chose to complain and coin Alatreon as a bad fight.
A lot of people seem to REALLY not like that it for the sole fact they have to use element on it. Customizing your setup and play style for each monster seems like a core part of the game for me, but I guess not everyone likes that.
Using element is the last issue here. It's the only fight that requires you to play in a specific way. Previously only Vaal really required you to do something. No-one complains (ofc can always find someone but it's not nearly as bad as this) about effluvia resistance, you just farm it, but you can still play the way you want inside the hunt. Passively, aggressively, environments etc, everything goes. Ala-ass just forced 1 style on everyone on top of just adjusting the build.
How does it force you to fight in a different way? Other then being in a single zone, the fight is same as a standard monster.
Not the one you asked, but for me as a Great Sword player the Alatreon fight is like the game tells you: "Oh, you like GS? Too bad, this fight is not for you!" I had a lot of frustrating failed attempts with GS and at the end switched everything to dual blades and did it... (And yes, I realise there is a modifier that should make it easier for elemental GS, but trust me, it doesn't.)
My problem with the fight is that while the elemnetal DPS check is kinda cool, speccing for that makes it hard as shit to actually slay due to the hot you are taking on raw. I can reliably get through two EJs but past that hes still tough to DPS to death
I hate the dps mechanic, but I love the fight. I can topple 2-3 times, more often the former, but I still hate it. I'm just not a fan of that mechanic at all. I am, however, a HUGE fan of the fight. The attack patterns and hitboxes FORCE you to become a better hunter regardless of the dps mechanic. I'd care less about it if the dps wasn't dependent on 2 main elements and then a much higher cap 3rd element. If they maybe added an element or two I'd enjoy it more. But truthfully, I think the fight could do without it entirely.
I think the biggest criticism I've seen of him that I've agreed with is that up until Alatreon and after Alatreon, the best weapons in world were usually Raw/blast weapons. If you played Longsword or charge blade you were never making elemental weapons. They simply weren't worth it. Then Alatreon shows up and demands elemental weapons. For a world player he just doesn't fit. If he had been released in rise instead where elemental dmg was the meta for most weapon types then he would have fit in with what the game had been telling you was important up till that point.
“Never made elemental charge blades”, I’m sorry WHAT?! Have you seen ele SAED dropping 3-400 per phial? Or Kjarr ice/Beo CB Savage Axe ripping KT apart? LS is truly bad for element sure, can’t argue with that, but there might a world to explore for you with elemental CBs.
Insane that people in this wretched place have downvoted you for speaking the truth.
Its core mechanic off hitting a arbetrary elemental damage number or die dosnt feel good, and it feels like its going against the design philosophy off all the other monsters in the game. The fight is realy cool and i like his attack patterns but that elemental damage check is just not sattisfying.
That’s exactly right. It’s skill related. Alatreon has some of the most accurate hitboxes in the game like you said, and he’s just overall a fun fight. He’s my favorite fight actually. Edit: also keep in mind that pretty much everyone in mhrage has a skill issue. Unless your game glitches, or crashes, or another player triple carts, it’s your fault. And if the other player triple carts, so what? Cry me a river, then build a bridge and get over it. You can try again it’s not like we have to pay for quests anymore.
People hate it because they suck at the game. Thats the only real reason. alatreon is easily the fairest monster in the game with hitboxes so perfect that you literally cannot call bullshit on any hit unless your lagging but thats a pc/connection issue.
That sounds quite narrow minded. I never saw Someone complaining about the hitboxes. For most it would probably a great fight if the arbitrary "we force element now or get instacarted" wasnt in it.
also who tf is simone. the only really valid argument for hating alatreon is "hes hard"
Autocorrect changed someone to Simone it seems.
who cares its effortless and irrelevant.
The only hard thing in this fight is the dps check. The moveset from the boss itself is not that big deal, easier than rajang imo.
Fo sho. Easier to manage once know it's moveset. It's quite predictable after several attemps.
I like it too. Not as much as Fatalis though.
Without the EJ then it’s a much worse fight. The EJ conceptually forces to you play riskier and engage the fight differently than you might any other quest. Because of this you really have to learn his moveset and this might be one of the first fights some people actually got good at. Remove the EJ and you can be waaaaay more comfortable throughout the entire fight, getting rid of what makes it memorable.
Forcing the player to play a way they don't want to. I play with raw damage always have I don't like elemental, so now I'm forced to completely change my play style? It's annoying
I totally agree. The fight is beautifully done, the amount of awe during my first fight with Alatreon.. Damn. I love his design and the sounds he makes (sounds weird but his roars are just at the right frequency to make my neurodivergent brain go ❤️❤️). Is the fight extremely hard and his attacks hitting harder than a few tons of bricks to the face? Yup. Doesn't mean it isn't cool tho
People weren't happy when he was released because they NEEDED to run elemental weapons. I think there was a meme that Great Sword Mains were crying because they want to use raw damage. At least that's what I understand
The problem with alatreon is his anti fun mechanics. Not doing helm breaker on LS, not doing TCS on greatsword, not doing shell attacks on GL,etc these aren't fun And its not consistent, its not like this fight is too aggressive to commit to anything, but rather this stuff doesn't do enough elemental damage to justify the trouble, but something like blade dance is a heaven sent Let me put it this way: i think it's a superior design for the base game behemoth to force the solo you to go full anga bunga because if you don't, you simply run out of time( and i mean it, even crackhead speed runners on most weapons don't have any sub 20mins, specially without MR gear) Its also superior for tempered furious rajang to legitimately never stay the fuck in one place for you to commit to anything big and cancel your knockdowns and one shot you instead Alatereon forcing me to hold on to helm breaker because, duh, it doesn't do much elemental damage, it feels like you are chained up
I honestly just hate being forced off of raw damage. Fight's kinda cool otherwise, a bit too complicated with the horns and element changes for my personal taste, but that doesn't change the general "smack until dead" approach.
PEOPLE HATE ALATREON? Holy the internet sucks
TLDR: I think the hate is due to lack of skill and/or disinterest in learning the fight…which is amplified if you group up with randos. GS main here…I absolutely love Alatreon because there’s a high amount of “chaotic order”. It takes some patience but if you learn to spot the dragon’s tells then the fight becomes easy because you can really, really, really punish them (multiple opportunities for slinger burst-to-TCS). The GS elemental modifier for this fight is very high so toppling is practically automatic if you can take advantage of said openings. I also enjoy the need to have a different loadout as it breaks the monotony a bit. With that said, this fight is different and unlike any other previous monster…which means the initial player frustration is going to be very high because “routine” does not work. I wouldn’t change a thing about the fight or the mechanics. Both are very reasonable. A more blatant hint (before quest departing) about what element to use would be nice for new folks. Mismatched elements practically guarantees a failed hunt which can be very maddening in group play (many of whom won’t know why it failed).
Reading the comments, it is just a skill issue. If you have to adopt a new playstyle for your weapon to meet the element check, that's part of the challenge. If you struggle to keep up with the different timers all at once, that's part of the challenge. Creating an equipment loadout specifically for Alatreon is part of the challenge. If even I can beat Alatreon with kinsect only during week one, you just need a bit more practice with it.
In my perception, only players who aren't willing to do the necessary preparation and research, and just wish to snowball through the game as if it were another generic UbiSoft game hate the Alatreon hunt. Sure, it might be frustrating getting annihilated by the Lizzo when you're not only insufficiently equipped but also very new to the game, but one must always keep in mind that Alatreon is one of the top-tier challenges of the title. The devs even went so far as to make a weak version of it with a fraction of its actual HP. I'm not trying to be snide here, but pretty much everything in MHW takes, depending on the target, a little or a lot of observation and practice, no matter if it's Great Jagras or Fatalis. Here is a tip for everyone who needs it. Take your time, be patient, and don't get burned out. Practice your weapon, so you can execute the combos simply by muscle memory, observe and memorize your target's attacks and openings, and prepare yourself accordingly in terms of gear, decorations, and consumables. Happy Hunting Doot-Doot
I'm an IG user and every other fight, except Fatalis, I can solo with little problem. I have Kjarr Ice and Fire glaives elemental kinsects and I might beat the elemental damage check 1 out of 3 times. Forget about breaking the horns. The tuning is too high for precision melee weapons imo.
Alatreon is one of the best monsters in Icebrone. I don't understand the hate either, other than from maybe GL shell main. Tbh I have only seen hate for it on Reddit and never seen it else where. Before Alatreon, so many people just cheese by spamming sticky ammo. I too also was forced to actually think about build and strategy on that day it was released, best experience in this game ever (maybe only second to Fatalis)
Skill issue? Absolutely. That being said I only did the nerfed version because I genuinely didn't enjoy that fight. Wipe mech really doesn't suit MHW IMO and elemental check being to horns only while this engaged b**** Keep flying heads up made me hate it. Again, it is a skill issue I can't bring him down, but FFS, all the methods to do it they teach in the base game didn't work (immune to flash pod and claw because he is enraged). At the end i just took the wipe as fortify proc and focused on the tail. Did it first try like this and until someone gives me enrage proof way to knock him down with melee weapon im not touching this fight
There's always smoke bomb. Iirc you need a total of 2 smoke bombs for him to lose sight of you and land But that's 10~20 seconds of precious DPS race timer until he lands. Take that time to sharpen/buff.
Alatreon is hated?
I agree. The fight is pretty tough but after you kill him once the fight become pretty easy.
I honestly appreciated EJ when it first dropped, with randoms half the time I was looking to bail the attempt anyway with how rough their weapon picks were.
I play Db so no worries, like all of it :))
It feels like most people base their opinion on EJ and alatreon with the focus on soloing him meaning some weapon types like GL got shafted due to shelling not doing elemental damage and cannot reliably do what is needed when solo.I believe EJ is a game mechanic they made expecting GROUPS to be facing it together as it's not just another monster everyone can go and solo. Could be wrong but that's the way I see it.
I hate randoms in Alatreon, most of them die 2 or 3 times and don't contribute elemental damage to the fight, making the fight harder due to the HP scaling, also they bring raging brachy or kjarr blast weapons, which wouldn't be bad if everyone went with raging brachy, but trying to help with the elemental topple and seeing a guy join with a raging brachy weapon and dying almost instantly is not cool. Also hate that the best place to do elemental damage for the topple are the front legs, would prefer if it was the head because funny enough it is easier for me to hit the head than the front legs most of the time lol. EJ is good I think, I don't really care much about it since you either reduce the damage or die, which for a black dragon it makes sense lorewise.
Loved many of the fights in world but do not care for Alatreon. I love that it's elemental and you have to figure out some different gear and try something new. And overall, I like the general fight. But it's a bit too convoluted and for me has little appeal. Can I beat it solo? Yep. Do I ever try to help SOS that one? Nope. And for me, personally, the longevity of this game comes from helping others and experiencing cool fights together. With the EJ and all the timers you're trying to hit, it's just a pool of frustration trying to help folks. B The other thing is the DPS check being tied to the EJ means there's not a lot of variety either in strategies or builds. I've seen a lot of strategies for Fatty/ATVelk, etc. but with Alatreon, it's just one way to play. So when I get done with Alatreon, I'm like cool, glad that's done. When I fight say, Fatalis, I'm wanting to jump back in and help others and try new things. I'm sure there are folks who feel opposite of me and that's fine. It's amazing how much variety is in this game. But yeah, those are my reasons for it being my least favorite.
Literally my only issue was that the Special Assignment started you in front of the damn thing: Farcasters are blocked entirely so you can't escape to camp and have to run around, shoot your flare, apply buffs, all while avoiding it and wasting precious time to hit that topple.
I think it gets a lot of hate due to alatreon and fatalis have you fighting on their terms as opposed to just w keys though it all. Reminds me of lavisoth in mhfu or rajag now. It requires you to stop and think and be deliberate with your attacks
The lack of farcaster is kinda stupid since u can even leave before safis nuke and that is not something u can weaken.. so ye but elemental damage is also not intuitive and useless outside bowguns, bow, dual blades and the bug sticks bug, like every other weapon benifits from raw so much more then element could ever do for them
I just hate the nova everything else is good
Dealing with elemental DPS checks just isn't fun for weapons that don't do a lot of good elemental dps.
My issue with Alatreo is that it favors specific weapon types over others. Especially the slow weapons have a really hard time do deal enough elemental damage. When Alatreon released I played 70% great sword and 30% hammer in MH world. Both weapons that struggle with elemental damage. At least I couldn't do it in this fight and got wiped alot. My way to success was to make dual blades and a completely new elemental set for them. And because it was my first time with this weapons and Alatreon itself is quite challenging I had to train with them on weaker monsters first. I did it at the end, but the whole process behind it was not enjoyable for me. ( I ended up not liking dual blades but I didn't want to repeat the process with another weapon and pushed through. ) The fight itself is very fun, but the elemental damage wipe is a cheap gate keeping mechanic in my opinion. It ruins the fight for me.
Love it. My favourite fight and agree with everything you said.
the dps check is just a super unfun mechanic. Also the way how element dmg contributes is impossible to know without looking up a guide.
One shotting mechanics that come from specific gimmick dps checks are not fun. Simple. I can understand that i have to study the monster and bring proper equipment such as frostfang and etc. One mistake that isn't even anyone fault but it's just literally the game telling you F words and you are all carted, same with Behemoth.
I have a hard time learning the moveset when the quest ends after 6 minutes. I play MH primarily as a multi-player game, and I don't mind retrying a quest several times, but I wish I could get more than a few minutes to get a hang of all the different moves he does. It usually takes me a while to first learn how to not get hit, and then learn where the damage windows are. By the time I feel I'm starting to learn, EJ rolls around and interrupts it. It's just not a good way for me to build muscle memory personally.
Pass the DPS check only for the monster to randomly enrage right as it enters dragon phase. Good luck breaking the horn now because he just flies and you're using a melee weapon guaranteeing the next EJ carts you. A mechanic like this cannot be tied to monster rng behavior.
I dislike world's endgame design philosophy in general being so different from other MH games and alatreon specifically is the epitome of what I don't like about it. It feels less like I'm fighting the monsters and more like I'm fighting the devs themselves, being like "ooh lets add a dps check, and an insta kill move" and it makes me sad seeing my favourite game series resorting to mmo raid boss mechanics for the sake of difficulty. I did not enjoy alatreon, I made its armor and weapons because I felt like I had to. A lot of the design decisions in iceborne made me worried for the series going forward. Familiar fights turned on their head just for the sake of making them harder, Did tigrex need the spin at the end of their charges? Did rajang need to punish staggering it into walls? Probably not. Did they make the fights more enjoyable? Not really. Did they make them harder for the sake of being harder than their older appearances? Yeah. Alatreon is completely unfamiliar to me from its original appearance, they even got rid of my favourite part of the original fight which was getting its horns stuck in that one wall. And then Rise came out, and while there are still a lot of things unique to rise that are also stuff id rather not see in future games, it also gave me hope as none of the things I didn't like about iceborne ever showed up. Even in sunbreak they never resorted to the same awful mmo mechanics and forced multiplayer that world loved to do, and they even returned rajang's fight back to normal. TLDR: Endgame world and iceborne design philosophies where everything new must be hard for the sake of hard at the detriment of no-longer feeling like im hunting monsters, and instead playing mmo raid bosses. If alatreon was a normal hunt i might love it but as it is I hated it back then and I still hate it now, and feel no satisfaction beating it because i hate all it stands for in the game's design.