An Actual Good Guide for Fatalis: Part 1/2

[ZealousAbsurd]

This post is for noobies. Not for experienced or knowledgeable players who know what they are doing.

This is also going to be useful for newer players in general, as it goes over some fundamentals of the game that will be useful no matter what stage you're at.


I'm making this post because I saw the “tutorials” and “guides” for how to beat Fatalis and was mostly disappointed with what I saw. None of them properly addressed the root of the problem that many players are having with Fatalis. From cringe “anti-Fatalis” builds that has dragon attack on longsword, to “just use this cheese method and plunderblade to get 2 head breaks easily for the evil eye”, none of these actually helped the players who were struggling with Fatalis because they got to him too early.

This is more focused for those who wish to actually learn Fatalis and excel at the fight, If you just want the evil eyes and other materials, and you wanna do that super boring method and just get the gear, and you don’t care about beating or learning Fatalis, that’s totally fine, but this post is probably not going to help in that regard.

Also there is a character limit on steam forum discussions so I'll have to separate this guide a bit.

If you don’t want to read a long post, here’s the short version.

-Go watch some speedruns, they help a lot with learning. Watch lots of them. The slower speedruns are often better for the learning side of things.

-Stop worrying about damage, and get a comfort build. Get skills and armor that will help you stay alive, thus learn more, as well as not be punished so hard which helps with your mental. Armor wise, the Gold Rathian and Kushala armor is good. Mix and match whatever suits your fancy. The main comfort skills I recommend are, Divine Blessing, Evade Window, Evade Extender, Speed Eating and Recovery UP which equals super mega potions (you heal a lot more and drink them instantly), and Health Boost. Some other notable ones are free meal, fortify, tool specialist, and heavy artillery (for the roaming ballista).

-Stop committing to long animations, stay close to Fatty, and focus on actually learning the attacks. It’s likely that you have not really learned how to play MHW. You can ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ your way through the entire game, whether that’s you squeezing on by or getting carried from other players, and thus you never learn. Here’s how to play MHW. Let the monster attack, dodge the attack, hit them in openings, repeat. It really is that simple. Stop spamming attacks, because the monster gets to spam attacks, you don’t. If you want to double, triple, quadruple your damage, then learn the openings and attack there.

Now if you actually want some more in depth details, here we go.

So why are you struggling? Well.

Basically, new players come in, get the defender armor, get carried, don't get punished or rewarded, they get to Fatalis, then die. You can get through the whole game by just brute force or sos flares and getting carried. You get to Fatty, and struggle. I hope to remedy that with this guide.

The Guide:

The Comfort Build: Skills

Now your build is going to vary a bit from weapon to weapon.

For example, Long Sword, Great Sword, and Hammer are going to build very similarly.

Whereas Dual Blades and bow have a focus on stamina economy.

Lance and Heavy Bowgun will make good use of the “Guard” skill, but you obviously wouldn’t run the guard skill on a weapon that has no guard or block ability.

Regardless of what weapon you are using, I highly recommend you go for a full comfort build that’s more suited to staying alive than doing damage. Having a comfort or stay alive type of build will make your mistakes much more forgiving, it will keep you alive longer which means you’ll be seeing the monster attack more and getting more practice in, and you’ll be dying less and feeling less frustrated. It makes no sense to try and put everything into damage when you’re dying every 2 minutes anyway, barely hitting the monster, and often times, I see players getting damage skills that adds very very little to their overall damage.

So what skills should I get?

-Divine Blessing – Gives you a chance to take less damage upon taking damage. This is a big one and it is awesome. Stops you from dying instantly to 1 or 3 unlucky attacks.

-Evade window – Gives you more invincibility frames (or iframes) when you perform a dodge or roll. If you don’t know, your normal roll without any evade window gives you 13 iframes from the very moment you start the roll or dodge. What does 13 iframes look like? Well, when you roll and your character sticks his/her left arm out, by the time the arm is extended, your iframes are gone. This means that your timing for iframing through attacks has to be very precise. This also means that you can’t iframe through some attacks because some attacks last longer than 13 frames. The barrel bomb in the training area is one example. It’s explosion damage frames last longer than 13 frames, so it’s impossible to dodge through the explosion without some evade window.

-Evade Extender – Extends the distance of your dodges or rolls. This makes a world of difference to your survivability. When you’re caught with your pants down, being able to cover a large distance very quickly is extremely useful. This is especially nice to have for weapons such as dual blades, or bow. Also it’s a bit goofy on Long Sword with the foresight slash.

-Health Boost – At level 3, this adds +50 Health to your character. By default, your character has 100 hp and stamina. Eating a meal can increase these stats, consuming certain items, hunting horn buffs, etc, can all increase these stats by up to 50, giving you 150, but as far as I understand it, those do not stack with each other. Health Boost is it’s own separate +50, so the max hp you can have is 200 HP. You won’t always have consumables, meals, or a hunting horn to buff your health, so having an extra 50 health no matter what, even when you die, will help you quite a bit.

-Recovery up – All sources of incoming healing, heal more. Fun fact, I got kicked from a Fatalis mission by a max level 999 who said I was cheating because my health regen augment on my weapon was “healing me too much” because he didn’t know that recovery up increases the healing from health augment. That was fun. If you combine Recovery up with Speed Eating, you will drink potions instantaneously whilst healing much more from each one. Mega potions become super megapotions.

-Free Meal – Gives a chance to not consume an item when you consume it, this does not work work for all consumables, but it does mean you get more healing, you use less resources, and you don’t have to return to camp to restock as much.

-Stun Resistance – at level 3, stops you from getting stunned entirely. If you get stunned, it’s almost certainly a death sentence. If you don’t know how stun works, basically if you get hit 3 times in quick succession, you will get stunned. Some attacks from certain monsters will stun you quite quickly though.

-Tool Specialist – Mantles come back faster. Very nice indeed.

-Handicraft – less sharpening. By the way, the damage loss from purple to white sharpness is minimal, so for the most part, just sharpen before you completely lose white sharpness. White to blue sharpness is a dramatic loss in damage.

-Fortify – When you die, gain damage and defense. Stacks up to 2 times. You might be dying a lot so, yeah, not a bad choice.

-Heavy Artillery – Increases the damage of artillery such as cannons, ballista, and roaming ballista. I recommend putting this on your mantles if possible. More on this later.

-Partbreaker - Head breaks are *kinda* important to this fight. AFter 2nd nova, his fire attacks all basically one shot without a head break. You can get 2 head breaks, each one nerfs his fire damage after 2nd nova.

If you don’t know how to farm decorations, I’ll show you in a minute.

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The Comfort Build: Armor

As for the armor, look at some armor pieces that you can make. Look for armor that already comes with some good comfort skills on them. Feel free to mix and match for all your armor pieces. The gold rathian and kushala armor is very good, so look at those.


It’s up to you if you want to farm these armor pieces or just make the ones you can currently make and roll with that. You’re most likely not going to be able to have all of these comfort skills mentioned, and probably won’t max out too many of them either. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to farm. I also don’t recommend getting your total defence below 850 at the absolute minimum, which would be each armor piece giving you 170 defence each. Keep in mind, you can upgrade the defence of your armor pieces. If you’re around 1k defense, you’re good to go.

As far as resistances go, I ignore them completely. While getting certain resistances may save you in some scenarios, I'd much rather take any of those comfort skills than some fire resist so I can tank fireballs a bit better. Not getting hit is better than taking less damage when you get hit. Also I’m convinced that other than the nullification of elemental and blight effects on your characters, elemental resist does basically nothing regarding the damage you take. I never noticed a reasonable difference in how much damage I took whether I had fire resistance or not.

Though if your fire resistance is high enough (I think 30?) you won't take fire damage, especially after the 2nd nova where he leaves fire all over the floor that ticks your hp. If you have health augment on your weapon, it nullifies that damage.

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Farming Decorations:

If you don’t have any decorations, you can farm level 1 and 2 decorations. As long as you are Hunter Rank 50 or higher. A high rank event quest called “The Greatest Jagras”. You’ll need some traps, a farcaster (though the farcaster isn’t 100% necessary), and if you have any mantles that reduce knockback such as vitality or rocksteady, those will be good options. Also some earplugs will be good if you don’t have rocksteady mantle, as rocksteady mantle nullifies monster roars.


Here’s how you do the Greatest Jagras farm.
Launch the mission at camp 1. There’s a high chance you’ll spawn somewhere else though, and if you’re near enemies and can’t fast travel, use the farcaster, and get to camp 1. If you don’t have farcasters, run away towards camp one or hide in a bush until the monsters lose sight of you, and then fast travel to camp 1. If the giant Jagras spots you, restart the mission.

As soon as you come out from camp 1, put on your mantle if you have one, and wait for the big jagras to kill and eat the aptonoth. This is actually 2 separate scripts, killing the aptonoth, then eating it, so be careful not to approach or attack it until it starts the eating animation.

While it’s eating, go up and place a trap. Start hitting it’s belly as much as possible. Then place a second trap and continue to hit it’s stomach. Stop attacking the stomach before the trap runs out.

What has happened here is that jagras has turned the aptonoth it ate into 30 decorations, and if we partbreak his belly, he will drop 15 of them. By using traps and hitting his belly, we can get his belly to 1 hp, ready to trip whenever we want to, since you can’t belly trip him while he’s in a trap. What you do is you let Jagras do his vomit attack where he throws 5 chunks out. Wherever these chunks land will be a white rock on the floor. Those are your decorations. Let him do this attack 3 times for a total of 15 decorations.

Then, hit his belly until he trips over and starts squirming. Go over to his mouth and he will drop more decorations. Pick them all up.

Once you have picked up all the white rocks you can find on the floor, return from quest, and that’s the farm. You can see all your decorations in the appraisal box. You should get about 30 decorations, but you might get less if you get hit by the vomit attack chunks which stop them from dropping the white rocks/decos on the floor, or if you just missed some.


As for farming level 4 Decorations and combination decorations, most people run the Teostra Arena Event "Day of Ruin" in Master Rank. Or the "Mew Are Number One" Furious Rajang Arena (if you're a sadist).
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Mantles:

As for mantles, I recommend the TEMPORAL (NOT VITALITY LIKE I MISTYPED) mantle and the rocksteady mantle. If you don’t know how to get mantles, google it, and the wiki will tell you or find a video tutorial. One thing to note is that when the wiki or the video says something like “talk to this npc”, and the npc either isn’t there or doesn’t give you the dialogue like the wiki says the npc should, try the npc over in astera instead of seliana, or vice versa, or try restarting, or try verifying that you’ve completed all the steps beforehand. Sometimes, you just need to spam the talk button as well and they’ll give it to you on the 10th try or something. It’s a bit weird, but you can figure it out, I believe in you. I also recommend getting the plus versions, as those allow you to put some decorations on the mantles. Whatever decorations you put on the mantles, they will only be active while you are wearing that mantle.

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Leaning your build into damage:

I should maybe put this part after the "how to fight" part of this guide, but i'll put it here for those are you that are a bit more spicy and wanna get some damage in.

If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re actually running out of time for the mission, that’s a good thing. You have enough skill to actually stay alive while fighting Fatalis. Well done. Now is probably the time to begin trading off some of those comfort skills for damage.

OR.. Keep the comfort build and start practicing more on openings and keep learning the attacks. But if you do decide to start getting some damage, well here we go.


The main 3 damage skills are critical eye, critical boost, and weakness exploit.
As long as you have those 3, you will be good to go. The other damage skills will be attack boost (usually just going to level 4 for the +5% affinity if you want it), agitator, and peak performance.

I will note however, there are plenty of videos out there explaining how these +x amount of attack actually works in regards to the calculations, but I’m not going to bother explaining that. Just know that it doesn’t add a massive amount to your damage, and you will most likely be better off running some comfort skills instead of squeezing that extra +9 attack.


Unless you are playing dual blades or bow, do not build into elemental damage. Basically. You technically can run it on some other weapons.

Here’s an oversimplified explanation of elemental damage vs raw. These are made up and exaggerated numbers for the sake of explaining the concept. Short version: percentage increase vs flat increase.

Say you have an elemental damage build. (and by "build" I mean you have "x element attack" skills). It adds a flat 20 to the damage number that comes out when you smack a monster. If you’re playing bow or dual blades, your damage number is quite low. Lets say with the bow, you deal 10 damage per hit. 10+20 is 30, you just tripled your damage, 200%.

Take that same build on something like Long Sword. Say the Longsword does 200 damage per hit. +20 to that is only 220, a 10% increase in damage.

Basically, other than the Alatreon nova mechanic, don’t bother with elemental damage and matching the monster’s elemental weakness to your weapon unless you’re playing low damage number weapons, such as bow and dual blades. For the higher damage number weapons, critical damage and affinity is a more consistent percentage increase in damage, so it works better with larger damage numbers.


I’m not an expert on this so if I got anything wrong, please let me know, but this is how it was explained to me a long time ago.

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Food Meals:

This one isn’t really necessary, but it’s definitely nice to have. I’m not going to give a tutorial on this as there are lots of other videos explaining how to get these meals, but basically, you can make custom meals so that you always have access to certain food skills. The ones I have bothered to farm for was safeguard, which gives an extra life to the team, and tailored, which reduces the cooldown of mantles, similar to tool specialist.

If you’re not going to bother with the custom meals, go for whatever gives you the most hp and stamina. The chef’s choice is almost always the best option. The damage, defense, elemental resist, and elemental damage bonus is not very significant.

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Items:

If you are carrying the ingredients required to craft an item, and you have that item in your radial menu for that item loadout, you can craft more of that item in the middle of the hunt. Ancient potions or max potions are very nice healing options and you can carry the ingredients for them, effectively letting you have 10’s of them if you have the ingredients.


Part 2: Part 2

[ZealousAbsurd]

I'm currently constantly editing this and fixing/messing up formatting, I'm sorry. Never posted on steam forums before. Such a mess, I'm sorry lol.

[ZealousAbsurd]

Makina is a poopoo head

[ZealousAbsurd]

Not sure if it's against the rules to bump but :3 teehee

[マルコス]

+1

[AkimboWasabiMenthol]

The best guide to Fata in any monster hunter series is the following "Fata is a ♥♥♥♥♥, deal with it"

[DrBonifarz]

Mhm, if like to write a guide, why don't you post it as a guide? Then you won't struggle with the character limit, you get a table of contents, and people are more likely to find it later.

I have not read all you have written, but there is a lot of general guidance in here that is not really specific for the Fatalis encounter. Sure it can help, but it is likely to be covered elsewhere. Also, some of the simplified explanations can be misleading. E.g. "Unless you are playing dual blades or bow, do not build into elemental damage" is all right, but the reasons are a tad more complicated.

And if you want to see less noobs carting from Fatty, why do you recommend the Rocksteady Mantle instead of Fireproof Mantle?

[ZealousAbsurd]

Originally posted by DrBonifarz:

Mhm, if like to write a guide, why don't you post it as a guide? Then you won't struggle with the character limit, you get a table of contents, and people are more likely to find it later.

I have not read all you have written, but there is a lot of general guidance in here that is not really specific for the Fatalis encounter. Sure it can help, but it is likely to be covered elsewhere. Also, some of the simplified explanations can be misleading. E.g. "Unless you are playing dual blades or bow, do not build into elemental damage" is all right, but the reasons are a tad more complicated.

And if you want to see less noobs carting from Fatty, why do you recommend the Rocksteady Mantle instead of Fireproof Mantle?

I did make it into a guide, actually. Someone recommended that I do that. I didn't think anyone actually used steam guides so I initially thought it wasn't going to do much there, but yeah I ended up making it into a guide in the actual steam guides.

As far as "general advice" goes, I think that is what people are missing/lacking and thus why they are struggling. They haven't even grasped the basic fundamentals of the game and are getting to the final boss 500 hours too early.

As far as explaining the math as to why you *generally* shouldn't take elemental damage except on bow and dual blades, I didn't think it was important enough to keep in the guide. Honestly I cut out a LOT of details on almost EVERY section of this, for the simple fact that it's already extremely long.

I figured if people wanted to understand the actual specific reasoning for why "x piece of advice" exists, they could look it up themselves. Knowing how elemental damage calculations works will probably not help them much in beating/learning Fatalis, but knowing when to use it probably will.

Fireproof mantle, according to the wiki, "Reduces fire damage, nullifies fireblight and blastblight, and prevents damage from hot environments." Very little of the damage from Fatalis's attacks, even his fireballs for example, actually comes from "fire damage". And almost nobody is dying due to the dot flame in the 3rd phase.

Even in the extreme case of when people get hit down to 1hp, stand up, and take a tick of fire damage and die, It'd be much better to have 30% damage resistance and no knockback.

In my experience, most people are dying from getting tossed around like a toy from fatalis's attacks, standing up and instantly dying to a 2nd attack for example, or dying in DOT attacks like the crotch spray or cone spray. I don't use rocksteady myself and I think it's pretty bad, but I think it's better than not having a mantle on at all.

[Veritas]

Originally posted by DrBonifarz:

And if you want to see less noobs carting from Fatty, why do you recommend the Rocksteady Mantle instead of Fireproof Mantle?

Not to endorse all of the advise from this guide (forgoing critrate and recommending handicraft in an endgame where most fatalis-ready sets that don't use any fatalis gear are master's touch based and lightbreak weapons already have max sharpness...) but wow fireproof does basically nothing against fatalis. Elemental resistance is dubious at best in general, the way monster damage is calculated their attacks are usually over 75% physical damage or more. Fatalis is an even more extreme case where almost everything is purely physical damage at 90% or more

[ZealousAbsurd]

Originally posted by Snazzy Dragon:

Originally posted by DrBonifarz:

And if you want to see less noobs carting from Fatty, why do you recommend the Rocksteady Mantle instead of Fireproof Mantle?

Not to endorse all of the advise from this guide (forgoing critrate and recommending handicraft in an endgame where most fatalis-ready sets that don't use any fatalis gear are master's touch based and lightbreak weapons already have max sharpness...) but wow fireproof does basically nothing against fatalis. Elemental resistance is dubious at best in general, the way monster damage is calculated their attacks are usually over 75% physical damage or more. Fatalis is an even more extreme case where almost everything is purely physical damage at 90% or more

As far as the "an endgame where most fatalis-ready sets that don't use any fatalis gear are master's touch based and lightbreak weapons already have max sharpness", this guide is meant for those who are literally approaching Fatalis with NO sensible build. Basically NOBODY that I have met and helped with Fatalis (a few hundred people) have any idea what Master's touch is.

I mean specifically, I'm talking about the players who are doing Fatalis at like less than HR <100.

[DrBonifarz]

Nice, I did not expect my grumpy little comment would stimulate a constructive discussion, so thanks for your responses.

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

I did make it into a guide, actually.

Ah, that's nice. I should have checked. But isn't it a big pain to maintain the discussion topics and guide for consistency, instead of linking the guide in the legacy topics? Well, whatever works best for you :)

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

As far as explaining the math ...

Fair point. I cut plenty of detail in my guide as well, even though it gets a bit technical at times. What I wanted to say, is that you could keep even shorter explanations in some spots, while referencing material for further reading. What I found a bit misleasing maybe helps some to grasp the concept more quickly. If you like it this way, that's up to you.

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

Fireproof mantle [...] Very little of the damage from Fatalis's attacks, even his fireballs for example, actually comes from "fire damage".

Ah, that's some interesting insight. Maybe my memory did not serve me well here, as I thought most of the flame or fireball attacks have a considerable fire damage part. Or I can't make sense of the kiranico stats, well possible. I agree that fire resistance is rather useless, but I thought elemental mantles come with an additional damage reduction of 70% (factor 0.3 on remaining fire damage). I had the impression this difference could prevent a KO at times, but maybe I was just stuck with a myth here :)

[ZealousAbsurd]

Originally posted by DrBonifarz:

Nice, I did not expect my grumpy little comment would stimulate a constructive discussion, so thanks for your responses.

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

I did make it into a guide, actually.

Ah, that's nice. I should have checked. But isn't it a big pain to maintain the discussion topics and guide for consistency, instead of linking the guide in the legacy topics? Well, whatever works best for you :)

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

As far as explaining the math ...

Fair point. I cut plenty of detail in my guide as well, even though it gets a bit technical at times. What I wanted to say, is that you could keep even shorter explanations in some spots, while referencing material for further reading. What I found a bit misleasing maybe helps some to grasp the concept more quickly. If you like it this way, that's up to you.

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

Fireproof mantle [...] Very little of the damage from Fatalis's attacks, even his fireballs for example, actually comes from "fire damage".

Ah, that's some interesting insight. Maybe my memory did not serve me well here, as I thought most of the flame or fireball attacks have a considerable fire damage part. Or I can't make sense of the kiranico stats, well possible. I agree that fire resistance is rather useless, but I thought elemental mantles come with an additional damage reduction of 70% (factor 0.3 on remaining fire damage). I had the impression this difference could prevent a KO at times, but maybe I was just stuck with a myth here :)

I have NO idea how to format responses properly in the steam discussions so ya.

"But isn't it a big pain to maintain the discussion topics and guide for consistency, instead of linking the guide in the legacy topics? Well, whatever works best for you :)"

I have no idea what this means :)

"Fair point. I cut plenty of detail in my guide as well, even though it gets a bit technical at times. What I wanted to say, is that you could keep even shorter explanations in some spots, while referencing material for further reading. What I found a bit misleasing maybe helps some to grasp the concept more quickly. If you like it this way, that's up to you."

I could reference material, but this took me long enough and also I'm tired of victim mentality. "How can I eat this pizza without my drink?!?" equivalent when people can't look up stuff on their own.

"Ah, that's some interesting insight. Maybe my memory did not serve me well here, as I thought most of the flame or fireball attacks have a considerable fire damage part. Or I can't make sense of the kiranico stats, well possible. I agree that fire resistance is rather useless, but I thought elemental mantles come with an additional damage reduction of 70% (factor 0.3 on remaining fire damage). I had the impression this difference could prevent a KO at times, but maybe I was just stuck with a myth here :)"

Yes, it seems to be a common myth. Most of the damage from most attacks is purely physical. If you don't have health regen augment or don't want to keep healing or don't want to get 20 (or is it 30?) fire resistance to stop the environmental fire damage ticks, then the mantle isn't a horrible idea. There are definitely situations where rocksteady will kill you whereas not having it on would have meant you lived, but I think overall it saves you more.

[DrBonifarz]

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

I have NO idea how to format responses properly in the steam discussions so ya.

When you hit the quote button, it wraps that reply between a tag like quote=ZealousAbsurd;3806154368650195162 and a closing /quote tag. You can just copy/paste the text snippets to your liking. The ID is only required for the link to the quoted reply. But it's a shame there is no preview button...

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

I could reference material, but this took me long enough and also I'm tired of victim mentality.

Victim mentality? I think that's something for the younger folks out there. When I write a guide, I spend some of my free time because I find it enjoyable to do so. When I reference sources for further reading, I merely point to them for those aspects I don't want to cover in detail. That's all I wanted to say. I think you get the point :)

Originally posted by ZealousAbsurd:

Most of the damage from most attacks is purely physical.

Correct. The myth I would like to bust are the flame attacks. Maybe you guys can help me get the numbers from Kiranico's database right.

E.g. if we look at large fireballs like 火球着弾 大, the attack power is given as 120 and the fire part as 80. I naively understood that as the ratio of physical and elemental damage, which are then both scaled by defense factors. If that ratio is 120:80, then cutting the fire damage by 70% gives an overall damage scaling factor of 72%, which would not be too bad. For some of the flamer attacks like 最終 強 広範囲火炎放射 外１ the power to element ratio even appears as 60/60. Can someone share some insights on this?