Building an effective Hunting Horn set in Monster Hunter Wilds will likely revolve around maximizing both personal damage output and the utility provided by your songs. While specific armor pieces and decorations are unknown, core skill principles should remain consistent.
Key Skills for Hunting Horn
Prioritize skills that enhance your damage, your horn's unique abilities, and your survivability.
- Attack Boost: A fundamental skill for increasing raw attack power.
- Weakness Exploit: Significantly boosts affinity when attacking monster weak spots.
- Critical Eye: Increases your base affinity.
- Critical Boost: Increases the damage dealt by critical hits.
- Horn Maestro: Traditionally, this skill extends song durations and speeds up recital animations. It will likely be crucial if it returns in a similar form.
- Slugger: Increases the stun power of impact attacks, making KOs more frequent when targeting the head.
- Stamina Thief: Enhances exhaust damage, tiring out the monster faster.
- Evade Window / Evade Extender: Improves dodging capabilities, crucial for repositioning and avoiding damage while playing songs.
- Handicraft / Razor Sharp / Speed Sharpening: Skills to manage weapon sharpness, vital for maintaining damage output. The best choice will depend on specific weapon stats.
- Flinch Free: At least one point is highly recommended for multiplayer to avoid being interrupted by teammates.
Example Build Focuses
Consider these archetypes as starting points, adapting them to the specific songs of your chosen Hunting Horn.
Balanced Raw Damage & Support
This build aims for high personal damage while providing essential party buffs.
- Core Skills: Attack Boost, Weakness Exploit, Critical Eye, Critical Boost, Horn Maestro.
- Secondary Skills: Evade Window, Handicraft/Razor Sharp.
- Horn Choice: Prioritize horns with Attack Up (L/XL), Affinity Up, and potentially a defensive or utility song like Health Recovery (S/L) or Earplugs.
KO & Exhaust Specialist
Focuses on controlling the monster through stuns and exhaustion.
- Core Skills: Slugger, Stamina Thief, Attack Boost, Horn Maestro.
- Secondary Skills: Partbreaker (to help break head parts), Evade Extender.
- Horn Choice: Horns with high raw damage, good stun values, and songs like Sonic Waves, Exhaust Attack Up, or additional Attack Up buffs.
Comfort & Utility Focused
This build prioritizes survivability and a wider range of supportive songs, still maintaining respectable damage.
- Core Skills: Horn Maestro, Divine Blessing, Health Boost (if available as a separate skill), Attack Boost.
- Secondary Skills: Evade Window, Speed Sharpening, Earplugs (skill, if not covered by horn).
- Horn Choice: Horns offering a diverse set of utility songs such as Health Recovery (L), Divine Protection, Earplugs (L), Wind Pressure Negated, Elemental Attack Boosts (if matching team composition).
General Weapon Considerations
- Song List: The songs on your horn are paramount. Attack Up is almost always a top-tier choice. Consider other buffs like Affinity Up, Health Recovery, Elemental Resistance, or status/blight negation based on the target monster and team needs.
- Raw vs. Elemental: Historically, raw damage has been more universally effective for Hunting Horns due to their generally slower attack speed and the impact of Attack Up songs on raw. However, elemental horns can be strong against specific matchups if the elemental values are high and paired with appropriate elemental attack skills.
- Sharpness: Aim for horns with good natural sharpness or those that can reach high levels (e.g., Purple or White) with Handicraft. Maintaining sharpness is key to damage.
Gameplay Tips
Effective Hunting Horn play involves more than just skills and equipment.
- Aggressive Song Play: Weave song recitals and performances into your combos. Many performance attacks deal significant damage and KO.
- Maintain Buffs: Keep your key songs active at all times. Use the encore (double note) system if it returns for stronger/longer effects.
- Target the Head: Most Hunting Horn attacks deal impact damage, allowing you to KO monsters by repeatedly hitting their head.
- Positioning: Learn monster attack patterns to find safe windows for playing songs and attacking. Evade Extender can be very helpful for this.
As more information about Monster Hunter Wilds becomes available, specific armor sets, decorations, and new Hunting Horn mechanics will allow for more refined build crafting. These general principles should provide a solid foundation.
