I only have faint memories of fighting my first Gravios in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on the 3DS sometime in 2015, but I'm sure it involved a lot of impotent flailing with weapons that couldn't penetrate its rocky hide. Since then, my hunting craft has improved enough that, in Wilds, I can crack open the wyvern's stone-plated underbelly and have it hunted, carved, and turned into slacks in just a couple minutes.
To me, that's a proficiency I'm content with. To Monster Hunter speedrunners, that's toddler times. It's baby numbers. I might have been hunting monsters for the last 10 years, but I've been doing it in kindergarten. Need proof? Here's YouTube hunter aco obliterating a Gravios in 37 seconds:
Watching the video, I have a couple thoughts. The first is an overwhelming, instinctive terror. The second is embarrassment. See, when I fight a monster, I tend to do a lot of superfluous stuff like "dodging" and "counterattacking" when I could be casually obliterating it with a heavy bowgun whose numbers have been juiced with enough damage boosting skills to kill God. My mistake.
It takes some doing to piece together everything that enables aco's impressive display of raw Monster Hunter lethality, because we only get a brief glimpse at the build and skills in question at the end of the video. And it's in Japanese, which I can't read.
But from what I'm seeing, aco's got a fully-reinforced Artian heavy bowgun with affinity infusions and water element, letting it pump out critical hits using ammo that Gravios is weakest to. That's paired with enough pieces of Gore Magala armor to get the full Black Eclipse set bonus, which raises attack against large monsters and inflicts you with Frenzy.
Because aco's pumping out so much damage, that Frenzy is almost immediately cured, providing its usual bonus affinity upon recovery. Aco's also tossed on the Corrupted Mantle, provides increasing attack and affinity bonuses with repeated attacks. (It also decreases your health, but that's not an issue when you can basically delete a monster by looking at it intently.)
Filling out aco's decoration slots are jewels providing the Water Attack skill to increase inflicted water elemental damage, the Critical Element skill to increase elemental damage inflicted with crits, the Critical Boost skill to make crits deal yet more damage. Also maxed out is Agitator, which increases both attack and affinity when fighting an enraged large monster—like, for example, a Gravios that's understandably angry about being ambushed with numerically unprecedented violence.
Topped off with a couple attack-boosting consumables, the result is a heavy bowgun firing water ammo in an increasingly destructive hailstorm. aco starts the fight—if you can call it that—by launching a flash pod to stun the Gravios, and then proceeds to hammer it with water bullets so hard that it can't do anything but stagger until it's trapped and captured 37 seconds later.
There's been a lot of discourse following Monster Hunter Wilds' release about whether it's an easier game than previous entries, and I'm not sure where violently expunging a tempered Gravios in under a minute fits into that conversation. This kind of buildcrafting isn't exactly approachable for the majority of players. If this proves anything, it's that a hunter's most dangerous weapon is applied mathematics.
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