In this article we’ll explain about the new monster blights. So according to the in-game hunter notes the use of endemic life or sometimes attacks between monsters can have elemental properties these actions can result in one of several abnormal statuses and so far we know of Fire, Water, Thunder and Iceblights. Each of these elemental blights can be applied with an endemic life found on the map, more specifically they are the hunter helpers they are endemic life forms that can be used as items once captured and when you find and capture one they'll be stored in the helper cage and use via the item bar. You can store up to five at once and for more.
Waterblight
The in-game description says a monster's hide will become softer when it's afflicted with Waterblights. This effect becomes more pronounced, the harder the body part is making it a prime opportunity to go after sections that are otherwise difficult to damage. Now, we've done multiple tests with this with several weapons hitting the same spots on different monsters to see how this blight works and have found some interesting results.
Firstly, when it comes to testing non-armored areas such as Mizutsune's head this shows a damage number of 13 with the Light Bowgun normal ammo 2 and 15 after applying the Waterblight debuff. This shows a small increase to damage on a non-armored pot. We further tested this on azure's back with the longsword and the greatsword. We saw a two damage difference with the greatsword from 47 to 49 same as the Light Bowgun but only a one damage difference on the long sword 25 to 26. Keep in mind different weapons have different motion values, this likely plays into this factor. So while not the same it does seem the bonus is fairly consistent across the weapons and is only a very small extra amount of damage to the non-armored part of a monster rather than like a percentage of the damage dealt.
However, we then also went on to test it on armored parts which from Mizutsune. If you have fought it before you will typically know the front claws are notoriously difficult assuming they're still the same. You need the front claws to craft the armor set and they were always the annoying thing to try and break. Now, when you hit mid snakes claws you get white damage numbers with the great sword. The damage number goes from 17 to 29 which is roughly a bonus 70% damage increase.
Our second testing on Mizutsune claws was with the Light Bowgun showing the damage numbers go from 3 to 9 which is a 200% bonus to damage. So all in all this shows a huge damage increase to the armored areas and of course very slightly between weapons whilst also giving you a small damage increase to regular weak points of the monsters. So this is in our opinion definitely a very strong blight. You can apply it on like harder areas like on monsters later on say if you need to break the horn or you need to break like a hard part on the monster that's really where you're going to be using these because that is going to give you a noticeable damage increase. So that is pretty sweet. I definitely really like that and I definitely like the idea that it kind of sends you around the map, it kind of gives you much more incentive to go chasing these blights.
Thunderblight
Moving on from there we then have Thunderblight which is incredibly awesome. The in-game description for this one says a monster afflicted with Thunderblight can also be stunned with non-blunt weapons. A strike to the head is most effective but hitting other parts of their body will still accumulate and trigger the stun with a final blow to their head. Exploiting this state is advised.
We've tested this blight with both the Light Bowgun and the greatsword on Rathian. From our testing we found that it was relatively easy to get a free KO on both greatsword and light bowgun while the blight is in effect. This of course is assuming that you can get hit on the head as the final KO because keep in mind while you can use this blight to attack any part of the body to stack up or rack up the KO threshold in order to actually get the KO hit. You do still need to be hitting the head. So with the Light Bowgun we found that pierce ammo we could easily reach a first KO and almost reach a second KO before the blight ends, requiring only a couple of sticky shots to trigger the second KO. This is a huge bonus to have because it effectively allows any weapon to cause at least one KO with obviously good head hits and potentially even two and we found that this bonus scale pretty well going from solo to duo hunts and is definitely again another powerful blight.
So you can use it on like some of the fast hitting weapons like a dual blade demon dance on the head with this could be pretty nuts.
Iceblight
Next, we have ice blight. The in-game description for this one says a monster will become sluggish when afflicted with Iceblight. Their slow movements will make it easier for the hunter to react and helps in dealing with enraged quick moving monsters but take care when inducing the Iceblight as it does not affect already exhausted targets. This is somewhat more interesting than the wording. It slows the monster down as long as they aren't already exhausted as described. However, the slow seems to actually cause a delay between the monster attacks rather than actually slowing down the monster attack animation speed and you can see this from the Rathian - Tail Spin comparison because they are pretty much the same timing even though one is iceblighted. So this player is more so useful to give you some time to get the damage in between monsters using their attacks. Sometimes they are pretty like angry and pretty sort of a rapid moving around their chain attacks together and not kind of give you too many windows. So this is definitely a way to effectively slow down that pace and kind of give you some of those openings. So it's definitely an interesting blight. However, it kind of seems more useful maybe towards the beginning of a hunt before the monster naturally becomes exhausted will help you get in some damage, maybe early on in the battle.
Fireblight
Finally, we have Fireblight. The description for this one says a monster afflicted with fireblight will temporarily suffer from damage over time. Additionally, it is more likely to flinch which is an opportunity for hunter to target the monsters of various parts and from our testing the tick damage is nice to have. However, the bonus to flinching doesn't seem to be too great at least from what we've seen in the demo. We didn't see frequent or reliable flinches during the blight's duration for both solo and duo hunts. The initial projectile damage hits for around 15 to 30 damage and ticks 10 times once every 1 to 2 seconds with 15 damage each across different monsters. The tick damage is still 15 for a total of 150 damage plus the initial hit. So it's a decent kind of thing to have there passively but it might not be as immediately noticeable. We do know of course from monster history some monsters flinch much easier than others. So if you do happen to kind of have a particularly good setup and you then pair it with this no doubt you will get more frequent flinches. It just doesn't necessarily showcase as noticeably as the others but either way it's fair to say this new edition of the monster blights give it a chance to you know give them a taste of their own medicine is incredibly cool loving this edition and honestly I can't wait to see what else there is we saw from the more recent trailer that you know some of the other maps seem to have their own endemic life. So it may well be there are more blights, more things to discover. So as we get to find those out and test it out I can't wait to see but for the time being that's it.
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