False wrote:Tried again last night. Switched to the hammer and took the time to try and learn how the mechanics work in the camp, got my cat looking cute at least. Can you change his fur and stuff or is it stuck? I just left it at the default.
I still dont really understand the actual fighting though. I was hitting dudes on the head and occasionally you get a big smash sound effect and they look stunned but there isnt really any option to capitalise on that from what Ive seen, maybe you need more players? Also its very hard to see if you are actually killing the monster or not. I was beating on this Jagra dude for maybe 25 minutes all over the map and the heartbeat indicator was going blue, orange, fast, slow, seemingly at random.
Every weapon plays quite differently. The hammer is all about raw attack power and blunt damage, and repeated attacks to a monster's head with the hammer can stun it. Stunning is obvious and definitely gives you time to wail on them, so possibly you were just staggering them or breaking parts?
I don't even know what the heartbeat indicator is so you're probably safe to ignore it
When a monster is near death it will start limping and return to its den to sleep. Monsters will also try to heal by running away and eating. Otherwise you can keep track somewhat of damage done by the number of parts you've broken on a monster (although I don't think there is any way to cut off tails with the hammer). Monsters can also get exhausted where they'll move slower and stop to catch their breath, and although that's a stamina thing, attacks do both regular damage and exhaust damage so if a monster is exhausted you've likely done a good amount of damage.
I've just looked up the heartbeat indicator and it seems that it changes by both monster health and rage level, so it will spike back up every time the monster gets enraged but otherwise fall a couple of levels as you reach certain health thresholds.
Fade wrote:Some of the monsters seem to take quite a while to kill and sometimes run away twice. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?
I picked the switch axe, such a fun weapon
I wanted to use the bow but it seemed to do no damage and I ran out of ammo really fast, I feel like I was missing something.
Sounds pretty normal, especially if you're not used to the game. It's not unusual to lose quests by running out of time if you're underprepared.
The bow is all about positioning. Different shots have different ranges, but as default you want to be positioned so that your arrows are hitting at the peak of their arc. Too far or too close and the damage will drop significantly. Having actual damage numbers now means you can experiment with this pretty easily to get a feel for it.
In general though the bow is not a high damage weapon, but it should be pretty constant damage. You slowly but constantly chip away at the monster's health with it.
Bows and gunning require you to be more disciplined with inventory loadouts to ensure you have enough ammo too. It's really nice in world that you can set auto-crafting and gather lots of ammo during quests, so that's a definite QOL improvement.
