How to Git Gud: The Guide

Introduction and Summary

Common advice given to struggling Monster Hunter players is to "git gud", but how does one "git gud"? I believe that personal improvement starts with something important: the player's mindset. As positive, self-mastery attitude towards improvement is necessary to succeed in Monster Hunter. Improvement is smooth and exciting when one wants to improve and puts emphasis on analysing their own ability and successes instead of repeatedly and mindlessly hunting the same monster over and over.

Like many other players, I've had to find my own improvement into the game, digging through many resources and testing my own ideas. The product of this is in the Bow guide on this website. Instead of simply just telling you to "git gud", I'm going to spend this resource showing you how you can find improvement in Monster Hunter that goes beyond knowing more about the game's technical mechanics. The idea here is not to directly make your mechanical skills better, but to encourage you adopt a different way of thinking to the game. The below ideas are from where I find my fastest improvement.

Before I begin, please note that this guide will not go through ideas like upgrading your armour with armour spheres to raise their defense or what kind of weapon you should use for which monster. This guide wants you to take a step back from the minutae of hunting and to take a broader, wide-angle view towards hunting in general.

To briefly summarise, I think there are three broad steps to finding improvement in Monster Hunter on a more generic level. I will go into these more detail with my own personal experience underneath these core points, which are the following:

  1. Self-Evaluation
    • Self-Evaluation is introspection. It is about evaluating your own play honestly, focusing on both the weaknesses and strengths of your skill as a player. Evaluating your own performance is important to find weaknesses you can improve on and the strengths you can use to exploit to your advantage.
    • Reflecting upon your own abilities beyond things like kill times and damage is critical in improving as a player holistically.
    • This is best done by asking questions. For example, after each hunt, ask yourself what you thought went well and went poorly during the hunt. Did you get hit a lot? If so, what attacks kept hitting you? Do you think you can avoid them and if you can, what do you think you should do to do so? Use these kind open-ended questions to identify your strengths, weaknesses and areas to improve on for future hunts.
  2. Research & Observation
    • After identifying your strengths and weaknesses, you position yourself well in learning more about the game. Part of this is in learning more about weapon mechanics and monster traits; knowledge that you will require external resources to obtain, like Kiranico's MH4U database or any of the existing Weapon Guides on the Monster Hunter Subreddit. I am not personally endorsing any of these resources, but merely stating that they exist.
    • However, the bigger portion of this is learning more about the game on a holistic level. This means making personal observations about the game and its mechanics that are not readily apparent from just reading a guide. Such observations may be monster patterns in relationship to your preferred hunting strategy.
    • For example, no guide is going to effectively tell you how you should move around a monster; this is something you must learn yourself after self-evaluating your play to make observations about monster attacks, patterns, terrain and how it applies to your weapon choice, armour choice and play-style. This is a holistic learning approach, combining different variables together, instead of isolating a hunt's components into damage formulas and sharpness levels.
  3. Experimentation & Practice
    • It is important to take the knowledge you gain from self-learning and self-evaluation into the field. If you made an interesting observation that leads to a hypothesis, go out and test it. Record the results and then adjust your actions to see if it improves the result.
    • Guides will often tell you specific ways of doing things, but guides are not always right. Player improvement is immediate when you go out of your way to test things and see how they apply to you on a personal level. Opinion does not change what is proven by math, but math is not the end-all-be-all for each individual player.
    • For example, you notice that standing in a particular position results in the same attack hitting you. What happens if you stand a little left or right? No guide will tell you the answer, but you can come to your own conclusions through experimentation and practice. Practice will help you use the knowledge you gained from self-evaluating your own play into tangible benefits in kill-times, game enjoyment and other factors.

The final point to make here is goal-setting. Setting measured, tangible and feasible goals for yourself not only makes Monster Hunter more interesting, but also improvement more effective. If your goal is to finish a quest, your next goal maybe to finish it faster. Goals set you specific markers by which you can apply the above ideas to your play.

Ultimately, Monster Hunter is not the kind of game that you can find quick improvement in from just repeated practice. Success in Monster Hunter requires more than just mechanical skill, but good decision making and situation appraisal. The latter can be quickly improved with some honest, self-critical introspection to identify areas for improvement, then working on these specific areas. Experienced Monster Hunter players make observations and appraise complicated situations in the midst of a hunt very effectively, and the pool of information they use during hunts comes from their own self-analysis. Experienced MH players are like scientists: neither stop asking good questions in the search for something new and important.

With all that said, everything beneath this paragraph is optional reading but goes in great detail in how the above ideas were applied to my own play in a specific senario. You don't have to read any of this if you opt not to, but I wanted to show exactly how the above ideas can result in player improvement.

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Self-Evaluation

Self-Evaluation is effectively self-introspection. In general, it is about asking questions about your own play and using the answers from those questions as leaping boards for more questions and more self-awareness of your abilities as a player.

The best way to do this is after each hunt. After finishing a hunt, start evaluating your own performance by asking yourself questions that are similar to these:

  • What did you do well during the hunt? What were you happy with that you want to keep doing?
  • What did you not do well during the hunt? What mistakes did you make?
    • Why do you think you made those mistakes?
    • What do you think are some of the ways to correct them?
  • What was unpleasant about the hunt? Were you missing a lot of attacks? Taking too much damage?
  • What do you think you need to improve on before taking on the same hunt again?

The penultimate point here is that asking yourself questions like the above will help you figure out your strengths and weaknesses. It is important to chain questions together in this way to really get into more detail about your playing ability as a whole.

For example, the first question you ask yourself is Why am I getting hit so much? and your response might be "I tend to get hit while attacking". The next question may thus be What attacks am I making that I tend to get hit in and your response could be "When I am charging up my GreatSword". With this information in mind, you can then ask yourself Do I need to charge every hit with my Greatsword? or Can I play safer by being less overcommittal?. Answers to these questions can lead to additional questions that help you piece together your strengths and weaknesses as a player.

These kind of questions help you make observations about your play. Knowing these aspects of your play is important for improvement because it is difficult to improve without knowing your limits as a player.

* * *

Let me go into detail. Like many players, I got stuck a lot in the Caravan High Rank Pink Rathian quest. Pink Rathian hit hard and fast, and as a Gunner with litle armour, this was a difficult quest to deal with. I was not very good at the controls at this point and I was fairly obstinate in wanting to make progress. After failing the quest two to three times, I sat back and asked myself a lot of questions. For example, I asked myself what I was getting hit most by, why I was carting a lot and what were aspects of my play I should put more emphasis on. From these questions I learnt a lot about my strengths and weaknesses:

  • Strengths
    • Each successive hunt, I was lasting longer and longer, suggesting that I was picking up her moveset and getting better at the hunt
    • I was getting hit less and using less potions, but I was still carting a lot
  • Weaknesses
    • A lot of attacks kept hitting me. For example, normal Rathian has this forward bite attack that you are safe from if you stand a little off to her left. Pink Rathian adds fire to this bite, making what was once a good safe-spot for me into something dangerous. It was difficult to break my habit of standing in that spot whenever Pink Rathian did that attack. Other painful attacks were the tail flip.
    • If I got hit once, I would almost invariably cart. The only reason why I was taking longer with each hunt was probably because I was putting more emphasis on avoiding damage in the first place.
    • The slopes were detrimentally impacting my play; I was still not good enough with the Bow to account for them.
    • Many of the areas that you fight Pink Rathian in were difficult terrain. Areas 2 and 3 were sloped, while Area 10's area, because it was split into an upper and lower portion, did not have a lot of movement space. None of these areas were conducive to Bow use.
    • I did not feel like I was doing enough damage and wasn't sure of Pink Rathian's hitzones

With all of these strengths and weaknesses in mind, I knew I had to address many of those weaknesses in order to clear this quest. For example, I had to gain a better understanding of Pink Rathian's hitzones, figure out how to deal with the sloped areas and be more aware of her attacks. I used my self-evaluation to formulate a plan for progress.

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Research and Observation

In general, knowing about your strengths and weaknsses will lead you into a good position in improving your play by looking up more information about the game. Research resources will augment the depth of your knowledge about Monster Hunter, and such resources are the many weapon guides on the Monster Hunter Subreddit, in places such as GajinHunter's weapon introduction videos and in database-resources like Kiranico and Ping's Dex. There are also many videos of players hunting monsters in Monster Hunter that can be good reference points for things to do and not to do when hunting the same monster yourself. These resources can teach you a lot about mechanics you may not be aware of and should be used to augment your abilities as a player. It is a good rule of thumb to try Googling your Monster Hunter related questions to see what resources exist to clarify any doubts or questions you have about the game.

For example, if you've identified a personal weakness as taking too long during a hunt, you can use the above resources to figure the portions of a monster you should be hitting to maximise your damage, or what they are weak to elementally so you can bring the appropriate weapon. You can use these resources to learn how your weapon and armour contributes to your damage output.

However, there are aspects of the game that you can't learn by using most of these resources. These are things like where and how to stand near a monster to get off one of your strongest attacks, or whether a Yian Garuga is merely resting or is actually going to charge at you. Many of these things are only gained from self-reflection and experience in the game. In this regard, self-learning becomes very important; you are not going to be hand-held through many nuanced mechanics without diving head first into them youself.

For example, if you notice yourself getting hit a lot, it is easy to say "git gud and avoid damage". However, no guide out there is going to tell specifically you should avoid Yian Garuga's attacks. If you notice yourself being hit by the same attack, make observations about how the attack works. Does it hit specific areas? Does the first hit and second hit have different reach? Use these observations to learn more about Yian Garuga and use the knowledge gained to adjust your play-style accordingly.

* * *

In my attempts to clear the Caravan HR Pink Rathian Quest, I did a lot of research into Pink Rathian and made a lot of observations about her behaviour that would not have been otherwise known to me just by looking up guides and videos. Firstly I did a lot of research into her hitzones, then made a lot of observations with each successive attempt I made at the quest:

  • [Research] Pink Rathian's largest shot hitzones were her belly and legs, not her head, which was contrary to normal Rathian. This meant I had to adjust my shooting to better exploit Pink Rathian's weaknsses.
  • [Research] I noticed she was weakest to Dragon, then to Thunder and Ice. I did not have a Dragon Bow, so I considered using the Thunder-Spread Bow for this hunt to exploit her elemental weaknesses instead of a Rapid-Bow.
  • [Observation] Watching her moves made me realise that she would do her tail flip if she hovered over me. I could avoid this tail flip by rolling perpendicular to the direction she was facing. I used this observation to great effect in avoiding damage.
  • [Observation] Knowing that I would invariably get hit by her forward fire bite, I made efforts to increase the distance I kept from her head and tried to stay more to her right instead of her left, because this attack largely hit the area in front of her and to her right.
  • [Observation] I knew I would struggle on the slope-heavy areas of the fight, so I thought about using Dungbombs to chase her to different areas and forced myself to play more cautiously when she was raged to avoid carting.

Armed with this information, both from existing knowledge on the game and from self-experience, I could then start formulating a plan to take Pink Rathian down. I increased my use of traps and flash bombs and focused more on playing safe and defensively than offensively. I knew which areas I would have trouble with her at and tried my best to avoid fighting in those areas or playing in specific portions of those areas to minimise how badly the sloped terrain affected me. These were all strategies I employed, but unfortunately knowing all of this still did not help too much more: I needed to practice and experiment with different strategies to figure out what worked best and what did not.

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Experimentation & Practice

Research, observations, knowledge and understanding helps you form new ideas and strategies you can use in a hunt to increase your effectivenees, but theoretical idea and strategy does not always translate well into the hunt. Learning something new, like knowing how hard a weapon can hit, is not very useful if you cannot get that hit off as a player. As such, it is important to experiment with these new ideas by testing them out in the field.

For example, your self-evaluation suggests that you always get hit by the same attack from Yian Garuga. Your observations lead you to notice that Yian Garuga always does his attack in a specific pattern, and you formulate a plan to roll away from it in a specific direction. Experimentation here involves taking this plan into action and figuring out if it is effective or not. If it works, then that's great! If not, it is back to the drawing board, but at least now you know it does not work.

The more you test and experiment with new ideas and new strategies, the more opportunities you have to evaluate these strategies and to make observations about them. These evaluations and observations in-turn inform future strategies and ideas you may employ on a hunt. You can go one step further and generalise these strategies into more and more monsters, such as turning what works for certain monsters into a tactic that can work for many more.

Through experimentation, you gain practice and experience at the game. In Monster Hunter, repeatedly fighting a monster as a form of "practice" is not always the most effective way to get better at the game. It is like throwing yourself head long into a wall hoping that your result will change with each successive attempt.

Rather, the best way to practice is to combine the things I've already mentioned: self-evaluate your play to identify your strengths and weaknesses, then use those strengths and weaknesses to make observations and learn more about the game. Take all that you've learned to experiment with strategies and ideas that may work for you, then evaluate those strategies and ideas. Keep practicing with the strategies you've deemed effective and eventually you'll succeed.

* * *

Back to the Pink Rathian example. With all I learnt about Pink Rathian, I experimented with different strategies and ideas. Some worked out very well while others were not very effective. Some of the things I did from experimenting and practicing with what I learnt from self-evaluation and observation is as follows:

  • I brought different Bows out onto successive hunts to test their effectiveness before deciding on a Bow to use for the rest of the attempts. I figured from this testing that my issues had more to do with how I was playing than with the weapon I had brought with me.
  • I tried to make her move into different areas with Dungbombs, but none of the areas were all that conducive due to all the awkward terrain.
  • In response to the previous observation, I put more practice into learning how to aim and shoot effectively on slopes. I noticed that I was more accurate shooting down than shooting up. I experimented with positioning myself on the upper end of slopes so that Pink Rathian was downslope and that made my life a little easier.
  • Repeated experimentation confirmed that I would struggle very much if I got hit, so I reduced the risks I took and adjusted my strategy to put more emphasis on playing defensively.
  • In area 10 specifically, I noticed that moving up and down the upper and lower areas of the map resulted in Pink Rathian following me up and down. I used this to my advantage by positioning myself on the upper ledge to fire down at her while she was killing my Palicos.

After about three hours of attempts I finally managed to kill her and move on. The attempt that succeeded was not very pleasant, but I knew that each successive attempt was getting me closer and closer to finishing the quest. I knew this because after each hunt, I evaluated my strategy and focused on each attempt's successes, using them to adjust my strategy into the next attempt.

If I had gone in blindly, I figured I would not have made much progress. In between attempts I took short breaks to look up information and talk through to myself exactly all the things I had to do. I got frustrated and took longer breaks to cool down. I focused less on all the game's annoyances and more on adjusting my play to accommodate for it, knowing very well that at the end of the day, I can finish this quest. It was ultimately a matter of when, not if.

Consequently, many of the things I got out of this experience informed a lot of my future play. I got better at dealing with slopes. I use Dungbombs liberally to chase monsters into more favourable areas when useful, such as moving monsters who start at Frozen Seaway's Area 3 into Area 6. Area 3 had a lot of sloped ground where Area 6 was completely flat and incredibly favourable for the Bow. My observations about Pink Rathian's tail flips made it very rare for me to get hit by it when I hunted her online in the Gathering Halls.

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