Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Hammer Guide By TheYashasama Version 1.10 Date: 20-05-2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents 1 - Introduction 2 - Basics 3 - Controls 4 - The Fight 5 - Trivia 6 - Changelog 7 - Credits ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- 1 - Introduction --------------------------------- Welcome to my Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Hammer Guide! First things first: this is the first guide, so please be patient with me. I write this guide because of two reasons: First: There is no Hammer Guide right now. Second: I am using Hammers for roughly 300hrs and I think I know what I do. Here's a little information about me: I started playing Monster Hunter with Monster Hunter Freedom for the PSP and since then I have played every Monster Hunter game that came to Europe. This means I have played Freedom, Freedom 2, Freedom Unite and Tri before this game. I think that would be about 2000hrs of Monster Hunter. In Freedom I played almost exclusively Greatsword, sometimes Sword and Shield. In Freedom 2 and Unite my weapon of choice was the Longsword. In Tri I started the game with Greatsword but switched to Hammer pretty soon. Now this makes ONLY 300hrs of hammer playing because I didn't really like Monster Hunter Tri. I don't really know why, but I just couldn't fall in love with the game the way I did with all the previous Monster Hunter games and now Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. On another note: I have NOT finished Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (I haven't even reached G Rank). So I have no knowledge about anything above High Rank. This will of course change and if I find it necessary to change something in this guide when I finished G Rank I will do so. Now without further ado: the actual Guide: ----------------------------- 2 - Basics ------------------------------------ Why would you choose the hammer? Because you can hurt monster pretty bad with it. I don't know anything about DPS and if the hammer is the best there is to do damage, but I can do pretty bad things with it and that is enough for me. First of all: you can stun monsters. Similar to a Flashbomb, if you hit a monster often enough on the head (it makes a different sound and you see a yellow "shine" when you hit the head) the monster will see stars and lay down a bit so you can hit it to your heart's content. The difference to a Flashbomb is that it won't randomly throw attacks at you but just wiggle a bit. You can even maximize this by stunning it when it's trapped in a Pitfall. If trapped and stunned a monster will just stop moving all together for a time. For both of the above you should keep in mind: If you stun a monster in rage mode it will recover faster, if it has no stamina left and is hungry, the stun will be longer. Cutting a monsters tail or doing other drastic things with its body will cancel every stun! Now to the weaknesses of the hammer: First: it has a very short reach. If you want to hit a monster good you have watch where you stand, how the monster will move and keep in mind what attacks you want to use. More to this in the Controls and The Fight sections. Second: you can't block with a hammer. Because of this you have to aim at EVADING all attacks if possible. You can evade to the front, left and right at land and underwater you also can evade up and down. You can NOT evade to the back! Third: the hammer is an impact weapon. This means you can NOT cut tails with it. I know there is an exception (which will be covered in the Trivia part) but you have to accustom yourself to the fact that you won't be able to cut tails. I personally to mind it that much because I play often with at least one friend who has a cutting weapon, but if you like to play alone or have to play alone the hammer is somewhat lacking. Of course you can kill all monsters, but there are some materials that you will not obtain alone if you use a hammer (Yes I'm talking about tails). The last, in my view not so important, downside of the hammer is that it uses your stamina. You can do a variety of attacks by charging your hammer, which costs stamina. I don't really suffer from it as long as I have a full or almost full stamina bar (meaning 125 / 150) but if you have problems with it you can just use Dash Juice or Mega Dash Juice to stop your stamina bar from depleting. You can move while charging, but if you have no stamina left you start to attack. ----------------------------- 3 - Controls ---------------------------------- Here are the basic controls of the hammer: There are three ways to unsheathe your hammer: Standing still with the hammer sheathed, pressing X will unsheathe it. You will not swing it, just unsheathe it. I have to say I don't use this at all. If you move and use the X button with the hammer sheathed, you will unsheathe it and swing it upwards. I use this a lot to start the fight. If you press R+X+A you will start to charge your hammer. If you do it standing still you simply start to charge the hammer. If you do it while moving, the hunter stops for a moment and then continues to run. When I use this instead of the one above will be talked about in The Fight. If you keep on pressing R after this, you will enter the charging mode, if not you will do a simple and not really powerful swing. Now that you have your weapon unsheathed you can start to use the hammer in different ways: X "Pounder" You pound the ground in front of your hunter. Does good damage. A "Slap" You do a short swing from the right to the left, stopping midways in front of your hunter. Does little damage. You really shouldn't use this because it has A: very little damage and B: it is too slow and it takes you too long to get into your usual triple X attack (further information below) that will most likely do your main damage. X -> X or A -> X both do a Pounder as a second hit. From the second pounder as well as from the Slap you can go straight into charging your hammer by pressing and / or holding R. Press X again and you will do a "Golfswing". You Swing the Hammer from the ground to the air and do massive damage. You immediately enter the R branch below after this. R "Swing" You Swing the hammer from behind your back to the left side of your hunter. If you point your stick (Analog Pad) in a direction you can cover 1-2m while hitting. A very good move to start the fight. Does little Damage. R -> A enters the Slap branch R -> X does an upward swing and then you can enter the Pounder / Slap R (Holding) If you hold R you start charging your hammer. You now have some options: stop holding it BEFORE the first "flash" and you do the Swing. Loose R before the first flash but before the second and you do an upward Swing that stops somewhere in front and above your hunters head. If you wait for the second and last flash, you again have two options: You can either loose R when you stand still, doing a massive Pounder (the highest single hit damage move the hammer has. WARNING: YOU WILL SEND OTHER HUNTER FLYING WITH THIS or loose it when moving, resulting in you turning around a few times while hitting everything around you. This turning can be cancelled by pressing X a few times (you can also just press it once but it is hard to get the timing right) or by just waiting for you to fall over little bit. This results in you being vulnerable to all kinds of attacks for awhile and I would NEVER do this. You can however press X while turning and do a Golfswing kinda move. After both ways to end the charge you can NOT enter the R branch again. You can cancel charging by evading (B). WARNING: Charging consumes stamina! If you don't have enough stamina left to evade, you can only start attacking to cancel it. B With B you can evade. As mentioned above you can evade to the front, to the right and left and underwater above and below. You evade always in the direction the your stick (or Analog Pad) is pointing, if it is pointing backwards on land you will evade to the front, underwater below. If your stick points to the front underwater you evade upwards and if you want to evade to the front the stick has to be neutral. You can evade after almost all of the attacks I mentioned above. It saves a LOT of time to evade right after the big charged pounder. After waiting too long while turning around or after a Golfswing you will be trapped in the animation for some time before you can evade or move again. You CAN'T evade if you did nothing before a Pounder, if you did another Pounder or a Slap before however you can evade. Underwater you can do more or less the same as at land. The evading is a little bit different, but the attacks are the same. They do look a little different but don't let that fool you! ----------------------------- 4 - The Fight ---------------------------------- How do you use all the above to kill a monster you ask? I have a simple plan for each fight (some fights are an exception, for example Jhen Mohran): Destroy the monsters head (Almost all monsters have a horn or something similar on its head that can be destroyed) and stun it. Then destroy everything else that you can destroy with a hammer. Especially if you are alone it is not always easy to do this. I always use the time the monster is stunned to destroy other parts than the monsters head, because I know I will be hitting it there long enough to destroy its head ten times. If you have teammates you can even concentrate on the head for the whole fight and let the rest of the team take care of the remaining stuff. In solo fight I almost always manage to stun the monster at least once, sometimes even twice, and still destroy everything but the monsters tail. In team fights the norm is more to two stuns and sometimes even three. This however is based on team fights being me with the hammer and a guy with a Switch-Axe, both accompanied by Cha-Cha or Kayamba. This will differ if you have more people with you because the monster is dead earlier, therefore taking away time to be stunned. Still I personally would hate to pass on the one guaranteed stun that you should always manage. How do I really fight? I concentrate on a simple combo: Tap R -> X -> X -> X-> X -> Tap R and the whole thing again. You have a long distance to cover I open the fight with R+X+A and then do my combo (R+X+A being the first Tap R). If the monster does something and I know it will soon be directly in front of me (e.g. the Duramboros jumping in the air and falling down directly in front of you) I will charge up my hammer to do ONE devastating Pounder. You can do a turning thing too, but I can't really say when to use a Pounder and when to use a turning thingy because I just to whatever I feel like. I don't think there is a lot difference in damage. Most of the time I prefer quantity over quality, meaning I use a lot hits before I use one strong hit. I do this because if I get hit while trying to land the fully charged Pounder, all the time is wasted. If I get hit after I got maybe to Tap R -> X -> X, I still have hit three times. The trick with the hammer is to know when you have to stop comboing hits into your opponents head and evade so that you don't get killed. You often only get R -> X in before you have to evade again. If you paid close attention you realize that R -> X does less damage than X -> X would do. The reason I use R -> X is that you can cover a great distance when you point your stick in a direction when tapping R. If you stand right in front of your foe feel free to start with a Pounder right away (X). If you have difficulties hitting the head of your monster friend you can use Shocktraps to make it easier. Pitfalls work too, but there the monsters move their heads more and make it harder to hit it. The reward for a stun in a Pitfall is GREAT! A Monster that doesn't move at all for about 20 seconds is just fodder for your hunter. If you stun the monster in a Shocktrap, the trap gets cancelled. One thing to keep in mind is the sharpness level of your weapon. There are a lot of monster parts that you bounce of even if you have blue sharpness, so you can hit these with Golfswings, turning thingies or charged Pounders since these things don't bounce off monsters scales. Because you have a pretty long recovery after bouncing off you should really sharpen you hammer whenever your sharpness level drops below green. ----------------------------- 5 - Trivia ------------------------------------ Here are just some interesting bits of information that couldn't fit anywhere else: There is at least one tail you can cut / destroy with a hammer: The tail of Duramboros. You first have to damage it and can then blow off part of the tail the same way you would do with a cutting weapon. You can also help with damaging for example the Nargacuga’s tail, also you can't cut it off. What comes now was contributed by oblivion_ty_7 and tells you why you should use raw power hammers instead of elemental or status ones. I rewrote it a little to resemble the rest of the guide but the contents is still all his. With a long experience with hammers he can say without a doubt that status hammers are awful. The only exception would be the Grongigas Hammer (about 1500 raw power) who gets the slime element if you use the Awaken skill with it. Still it is only a bonus since it stays the best raw power hammer. Now to elemental hammers: Even taking Sharpness +1 (A skill that improves your weapons sharpness) into account, Grongigas will beat any Elemental Hammer when it comes to damage output. The same can be said for the Naruga Hammer (also a raw power hammer) with the correct Skills (such as with the Miralis Armor gemmed for Latent Power +2, CE +2, and Atk Up Lrg). Element isn't a deal at all for Hammer, as is shown in the example below: The Rathalos' head takes 70% damage from raw power and 35% damage from Dragon. Let's say you have a high raw power hammer that has 1400 atk compared to 1250 atk with 250 Dragon element. Now the dragon option sounds better just at a glance, right? We skip some steps in the damage formula just to make this simple and straight up use those numbers.... The raw power hammer would do 980 damage, the dragon element hammer would do 875 (the raw part) + 87.5 (with the dragon element) = 962.5 Conclusion: Raw | Elemental 1400 | 1250 + 250 980 | 962.5 Element isn't worth it with how slow and strong Hammers are ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- For now that's it. If you have anything to tell me, if I got something wrong or you have some new information feel free to contact me via my gamefaqs account: TheYashasma or via E-Mail: yasha.cookie@web.de ----------------------------- 6 - Changelog --------------------------------- 1.0 - Original Version 1.1 - Added / changed a little information about which hammer to use since my information was wrong ----------------------------- 6 - Credits ---------------------------------- A big thanks goes to oblivian_ty_7 for helping me improve my guide :)