MHW: Understanding Affinity

A brief descriptive guide on how Affinity work and if it's good or bad to have it.

Affinity and how it works!

Affinity is just a fancy term for Critical Hits in MHW

All weapons in the game have some form of natural Affinity that affects a weapon's performance one way or another. Here's the numbers for you to understand!

Having Weapons with positive affinity will increase your Damage by 25%(125%)
Having Weapons with negative affinity will decrease your Damage by 25%(75%)
Having Weapons with no affinity will not increase/decrease your Damage(100%)

Question on your mind is: "Shouldn't Affinity % equal your crit Dmg?"
Answer to that is:NO

Affinity is the amount of times you will crit with the weapons.
Here's an example:

If I have a weapon with 35% affinity that means:
35% of hits I will be dealing 25% extra damage to the monster
and
65% of hits I will be dealing standard damage to monsters

"So having positive affinity is good right?"

Actually the Answer to that is a bit more complicated than having postive or negative affinity.
The next thing we will be getting into is raw Damage!

Raw Damage and how it ties to Affinity!

In MHW there are trade-offs to having High Positive/Negative Affinity!

Here's a basic version of Affinity trade-off's

A weapon having High Positive Affinity will have weaker Raw Damage

and Vice Versa

A weapon having High Negative Affinity will have Higher Raw Damage

and lastly

A weapon having No Affinity will have standard raw Damage based on it's level and tier

As you can see their is a trade-off to having positive/negative affinity attached to them. Does that mean having a lower raw damge is bad? No of course not! You can make different types of build based on these stats however there is one important thing to note:

Affinity does not affect Elemental Damage!

Any weapon with Elemental(Fire/Water/Thunder/Ice/Dragon) will not benefit from Affinity! Affinity only for RAW DAMAGE
Infact it's a drawback if you are using Elemental attacks since you will not benefit from Critical hits!
(However there is a skill that lets you benefit from it but its considered a waste of a skill if your not invested in pure Elemental DMG)

This does not affect abnormal attacks(Poison/Sleep/Paralysis/Blast/Stun). Using a weapon with abnormal status will benefit from Critical Hits as it will cause monster's to reach the threshold for status effects much faster!

Examples of Raw Damage Stats and Affinity!

We are going to be taking a look at some weapon stats in the Charge blade Tree
Screenshots were taking from the Monster Hunter World Wiki. Link will be in the end of the guide!

Lets take a look at weapon with High Affinity but Low Raw Damage!

This is the Weapon Odium under the Odogaron Tree for the Charge Blade final upgrade. It has 25% Affinity, one of the Highest for natural Affinity and a Low Raw Dmg of 576 with Natural White sharpness! This weapon gets a 25% increase on top of a White sharpness which adds X1.32 Multiplier for your Raw Damage. Lots of benefits for using this weapon even though it's Raw Damage is low in it's class.

(As a note this weapon does have Elemental however some weapons will not have it active such as this one so the elemental Dmg will not be in effect!)

Next we can look at weapon from the opposite side of the Spectrum


This is the Weapon Diablos Tyrannis II under the Diablos Tree for the Charge Blade final Upgrade. It has the Highest Negative Affinity but it has a HUGE Raw Dmg of 828 with minimal Blue sharpness.
Considered one of the strongest Charge Blades in the game even tho it has a huge upset in terms of sharpness and Affinity!

(Another note that this weapon does have Elemental however some weapons will not have it active such as this one so elemental Dmg will not be in effect!)

Finally lets look at the neutral weapon with no Affinity!



This is the Weapon Jagras Escudo III under the Great Jagras Tree for the Charge Blade Final Upgrade. It has no Affinity whatsoever and an Average 684 Raw Dmg for it's Tier and Rarity along with Minimal Blue Sharpness. An average weapon overall, nothing noteworthy at all. Will do standard Dmg throughout the fight with no Crits.

With these 3 Examples you can see how Natural Affinity and Raw DMG go side by side but we will be talking about how to modify these stats!

Modify Affinity and Raw Damage

There are a number of ways to Modify Affinity and DMG. Here are some examples!

Skills & Decorations

As you progress into High Rank, you will begin to understand what type of weapons you will be going for. To help you adjust your DMG numbers and Affinity a number of Skills/Decorations you should look into!

Critical Eye- Increases Affinity from 3/6/10/15/20/25/30% for Levels 1-7

Affinity Sliding- 30% Affinity for Sliding for 15 Seconds

Attack Boost- Increase DMG and Affinity from 3/6/9/12/15/18/21 DMG & 5% Affinity starting at Level 4

Weakness Exploit- Attacks that hit weakspots have a increase affinity from 15/30/50% for Lvl1/2/3

Agitator- When monster becomes enraged increases attackk and Affinity from Lvl1 +4 DMG/ +3% Affinity to Lvl5 +20 DMG/ +15% Affinity

Maximum Might- When Stamina is full, increases affinity by 10/20/30% for Lvl 1/2/3

Latent Power- Activates when hunter has taken 180 DMG or more than 5 Mins into fighting. Temporarily Gives 10/20/30/40/50% Affinity and Reduce Stamina Depletion by 10/20/30/40/50%
for Level 1-5

Critical Boost- Increase DMG of Critical hits by 30/35/40% for Level 1/2/3

Critical Element- Allows Elemental attacks(Fire/Water/Thunder/Ice/Dragon) to benefit from Critical Hits

Augmentation

This is into Very late game but you will be allowed to adjust your weapon stats permanently depending on rarity of weapon ranging from 6-8. Augmentation allows you to adjust DMG and Affinity stats by a consistant amount throughout all weapons. Requires massive amount of grinding against Elder Dragons so be advised!

Specialized Tool

This item can only be Aquired in High Rank. It's called Affinity Booster. Active for 60 Seconds and gives the User 50% Affinity on top of the current amount of Affinity for 20 Seconds. Allies also benefit from this. Just like the Health Booster it's an AOE Tool. So you can always go back into the cloud of smoke and re-add/refresh the buff multiple times!

Conclusion

This in-depth guide should cover all your questions about Affinity and Raw DMG stats.

One thing to note however is that there is a formula to Calculate Raw DMG with Affinity. However the formula for it is a bit complicated so i won't be getting to deep into that.
But just to get it out of the way here it is:

Average damage per hit = (Raw damage) x 1 + (.25 x Affinity)

This is the basic formula however there are numerous caluclations if you consider other factors. For that I would recommend a MHW Damage Calculator if your interested in your Weapons DMG. There are a number of them out in the Internet so I recommend a good google search.

This has been a guide for Understanding Affinity

GOOD HUNTING LADS


Sources used:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2018/02/08/monster-hunter-world-how-weapon-affinity-works/#5dc139fd7a52

https://monsterhunterworld.wiki.fextralife.com/Monster+Hunter+World+Wiki

[Aivico]

There are set bonuses "critical element" which lets your element damage to also benefit from the affinity you have (very important for element builds)

[Felix]

Is there no benefit from pushing past 100% affinity?

[JPM岩]

I'm just now seeing this, but it's a good guide. Might wanna talk about the skill "Crit Status"

[ScorpionGod]

Thanks for explaining. I noticed I did more damage once someone used an Affinity Booster

[Mittzu]

YOU ARE FAKE NEWS