The HARDEST Weapon to Play in Monster Hunter World Iceborne 

I think this topic is so controversial because there's many ways to go about "the hardest": - It could be the most mechanically complex weapon; - It could be the weapon with the highest skill ceiling or skill floor ; - It could be the statistically weakest performing weapon. And there's many more ways to go about it. I think the SnS and the HH are perfect examples of weapons that, at their core, are pretty easy to pick up and use, but require a lot of knowledge and practice for good execution

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, HH is the hardest weapon to use when it comes to properly executing its gameplay. The reason HH has such a low player base is because people often complain that it is too much to maintain buffs and use good attacks to deal decent dps. HH doesn’t have combos like the other weapons, it is very much on the fly and case by case. Along with its weird attack ranges you have to really focus on sniping weak spots with HH compared to other weapons. Plus HH does have quite a bit of mechanical depth, animation cancels like the quick recital, stutter step, and cheating in notes are not things most people who play the HH know how to do, and the fact that almost all of the attacks of the weapon are directionally based adds another level of complexity and I haven’t even mentioned matching specific song list to counter specific monsters. I’ve mained HH since FU and the dance of buffing and doing good DPS is very engaging and fun, no other weapon gives me this feeling. To the people who disagree, I highly recommend soloing Alatreon and Fatty with HH. Also look at the weapon guides done by Deus, Monster Hunter PH, TorpedoSoup, and Griffted so you can see the amount of depth the weapon has. It is a very obvious difference between someone who mains HH and someone who just likes HH when it comes to skill. PS: I am talking about Worldborne/GU/4U HH along with the previous games, not rise/sunbreak "HH". That thing isn't HH imo. PSPS: I play MH games games 95% solo, I am basing my opinion off of my perspective of where it’s just me and my HH vs the monster with no other hunters in the hunt with me. I am aware that this is probably not how most people play HH which is probably apart of why people will disagree, they are thinking about HH in a situation where you have other people helping you. If you haven’t done it before, I HIGHLY recommend soloing a MH game with HH only and you will see where all the mechanical stuff I mentioned at the top becomes extremely useful.

I think that you phrased the question badly in both instances. Your argument seems to basically come down to the fact that Gunlance is just a poorly balanced weapon that was nerfed unnecessarily. If you asked what the *Weakest* weapon in Iceborne was then maybe you'd get the answer you're looking for lol. But phrasing it as "mechanically complex" or "Hardest" sorta puts the discussion on a topic that feels outside of the realm of balance. So I think people are talking more about just general mechanics and whatnot. Mechanically Complex would absolutely be weapons like Charge Blade or Hunting Horn because they have so many mechanics going on. Hardest could easily refer to the hardest to learn or it could refer to how like it's super hard to find an opening to do a True Charged Slash against the faster tougher monsters with Greatsword. It still feels like it focuses on weapon mechanics. Gunlance is just the weapon that has the most BS to deal with because they balanced it wrongly, which is the same reason why people didn't like the Tenderizing Mechanic in the first place, since that basically added such a mechanic to every weapon in the game. Maybe you should have asked "Which weapon is the worst to hunt with in endgame iceborne"

Sorry about this is going to be a long comment 😅 I do main Hunting Horn I can see how many people would say the Hunting Horn is extremely hard. When i first started learning it back before Iceborne was even out, the hardest thing was trying to get songs mid combat while also making sure to not overwrite songs that you want to play later. But having the songs and notes on the screen helps alot For Charge Blade even after soloing Fatalis and Alatreon, it felt the hardest for me to use. Just because theres so much for me to manage. Fill the phials is easy but remembering to keep note of how many phials you have, fill more phials charge the shield, how to saed or aed, charge the sword if you want on top of keeping up with the monster just overloads my brain😅. I probably explain this horribly wrong but I did my best.

I'll have you know, the hardest weapon to use in MHW is the boomerang 🪃. That's why there are literally NO boomerang mains in all of MH community.

Hunting horn on the outside is simple, just do the songs, but mastering hunting horn is extremely difficult if you wanna do the combos whilst also fighting a monster. You have to consider that each move is different based on inputs, so if you push the movement forwards whilst attacking that changes how the move works, you can also do double notes on a single attack etc, theres alot more to the weapon than just surface level. Thats why i think its the most hard weapon to play.

as a HH main the horn is not as complicated as people make it out to be. Very high reach, has the ability to stand on the side of monsters and clobber the head, decent stun, decent exhaust, combine em together and it really does help. The encores are so freaking powerful

Not to mention, Shelling damage is dependent on Sharpness level in World/Iceborne

Cant believe IG is one of the weapons people consider to be the most complex One of the main reason i started maining it (apart from twinspear bias) was because of how simple it was compared to other weapons i had played with previously

I think the video gradually became Rurikhan complaining about other weapons being more powerful than gunlance, AGAIN. He pretty much is saying other weapons may have a tricky mechanic, but they usually have great payoff and utility. "I have one not so complex thing to do, but the payoff is not so good. Therefore, gunlance is complex." You can simply boil down his argument like this.

I'd recommend a Khan's cast with Uno hunter, would be very cool to see and will give you all you need on the doot stick.

The thing about the Hunting Horn is that you do need to really plan out your combos ahead of time, its almost like preparing spells in D&D. Sure you can come up with a basic bread and butter combo like you showed at the start but you might wanna have combos in mind for playing 3 specific songs and then 2 other songs or things like that. Plus each hunting horn has its own song list so you need a different set of combos for each horn that you make and not every horn has songs that easily lead into each other with a lot of overlap. And some horns have instantaneous effects or really short buffs like the ones that heal people so you might wanna work out how you're going to play those songs more often. So you might have a combo that does 1 song + the heal and another combo that does another two songs + heal. There's lots of stuff to work out. And then yeah there's the jab move as well as a flourishing mechanic which can both be used as a shortcut to get songs out more quickly, and then there's 4 different Performances and 4 different Encore moves that each have different advantages in terms of damage, reach, and performance time to consider. So you have all that and of course you need to be watching your buffs to see when they're about to go down so that you can keep track of which ones you need to re-up so you're splitting your attention constantly. If you *just* wanna play songs and get buffs and then start smacking sure that can work but Hunting Horn has a lot of things going on. And I'm a charge blade main! lol

Doing everything you said with charge blade takes alot of time to do instinctively. And that's why I say it's hard. When learning the charge blade I had to do it in layers. It's one thing to do the moves but another to remember what's best to do while fighting. I feel the same for HH since I play that one as well. Certain moves are just learned with instinct and time. By that i mean the different swings of the HH. It looks like a cool dance once your there, but getting to that point with HH takes time. That's why for me they're still the hardest.

The only remotely annoying part about the Insect Glaive is that some Monsters have really difficult to hit heads. Something like Legiana that has a tiny head, giant wings and moves around a lot can make it pretty difficult to actually get the red extract. Also yes, AT Nergigante was base game. In fact the Developer Diary where they announced AT Nergigante was also where we got the first Iceborne teaser.

no weapon is truly "hard" to play. It's just that some weapons require the player to put in a lot more effort to achieve the same result as some other weapons. Put this way, the Gunlance would be considered a low effort weapon in early, mid, and early end game. But in late late end game scaling becomes an issue for Gunlance which makes it a chore to play, but that doesnt mean its "difficult".

The thing I love about the wyvernstake blast, it it's one of the few co-op damage mechanics in the game. if you have multiple gunlansers you can all get the bonus explosions, it also works for explosive ammo, Iceborne gl is great imo.

I think there a difference between how hard is the weapon to learn, and how hard it is to master, aka, skill floor, skill ceiling. Personally, i think HH and IG have a low skill floor, and CB and GL have a high skill floor. But as for skill ceilings, I think it would be fair to say EVERY weapon has an almost equal skill ceiling (near infinite), but the way you get to those ceilings is completly different. GS is about learning every monster inside and out, DB is about I-Frames, HH is about how you queue up and play your songs, CB is about resource management, and GL is about monster openings and in Icebourne's case, using the enviroment. I play every weapon at a mediocre level, so more advanced players can provide more insight, but this is just the way it seems to me. What I DO know is that I only play GL when I want an artifical challenge...cuz I suck at it. :)

The key to planting the WSB is always baiting an attack/roar and guardpoint- countering into it. You just have to leave the ammo unloaded until you actually want to plant it. The biggest issue I had despite this method was that the the initial wyrmstake hit would often knock the monster away because I guess it does a lot of knock damage. Another issue was just if the monster didn't want to cooperate for whatever reason. The last major issue is that some monsters didn't drop and didn't exist near good slingshot ammo (Safijiva) so you had to replant often. Thank god for fast wyrmstake in Risebreak, the wyrmstake loop was so fun I still used it even when the damage was just trash at the end of Rise and hunts would just take way longer than other weapons even if the run was perfect. At least if you only did shelling in Iceborne, you didn't have to always tenderize to get best shelling damage but you did have to tenderize to get the ammo in the first place often times. Dragon pods were indeed so bad and they were the most common too besides literal rocks. 😭 Slinger thorn pods were god tier though. They could some times last an entire hunt if you were on your game.

Charge Blade is a weapon I always wanted to play but whenever I tried picking it up I got my teeth kicked in even by something like a Rathian. It took a new playthrough in two games at the same time while only using Charge Blade for me to finally fully grasp the weapon. Now its my second favorite weapon. I love using the Buzzsaw Mode.

I play Hunting Horn, and I think part of the difficulty of Hunting Horn is that it has Variable Combos. To explain; If you pick up Longsword. Then you'll be using the exact same combos against Great Jagras as you would against Xeno'Jiiva. The only time you needed to re-learn some combos was when Iceborne rolled around, and again you'll be using the same Combos against Beotodus as you use against Fatalis. Because of the Song System that isn't the case for HH. You need to learn a new set of combos with each HH. Even if they have the sang songs, those songs might have different note sequences. Compare the Atk Up L From the Fatalis Horn compared to the Savage Jho Horn for instance. So you get a bit of needing to effectively re-learn your weapon potentially each time you upgrade it. You then run into this Variable Combo bit a lot during actual combat, because you need to vary your path through these songs, especially considering you may need to stop and start songs again. Hunting Horn is the only weapon that may need to consciously and intentionally stop moving before pressing triangle because the draw attack might ruin a song. Granted that last part was finally solved in Rise and while I hope to God they return to the World/Iceborne/OldSchool Song Systems in Wilds I hope and am pretty sure they'll keep that feature. But even outside of that this is the biggest execution difficulty of the Hunting Horn, the fact that you don't need to just choose the right time to attack, don't just need to choose the right attack for the opening, but also the right attack for your song, and that will factor into your positioning, and that for some of those positionings you need to face specific directions even away from your target, that can have a very high skill cap. Gunlance has a bit of this too, though I think in the case of Gunlance this is 100% a bad thing and a sign of poor design. Namely, Gunlance has moves that just kinda migrate around the control scheme, and that sucks. I don't like that if I use a Lunging Upthrust and want to Overhead Smash I need to use X+A, but if I want to Overhead Smash after a Rising slash I just press X. These are the same exact attack, they should have the same exact button input. Hell even the fact that Lunging Upthrust is just X but Rising Slash is X+A when the moves are so similar just why? Why? This is 100% the reason why I never play Gunlance even though I kinda want(ed) to, just because it seems like the Control Scheme is just cobbled together nonsense. Also as one Player-of-a-Weapon-whose-damage-was-nerfed-to-be-sold-back-to-us-via-upkeep-mechanics to another. I sympathize.

8:30 you can play that hilt stab by pressing back and any note, not just circle. This allows you to perform a note quickly. Preferably you would use this for any note other then circle, because the flourish (double swing) circle attack can input two notes in one. It’s also use for when the monster is down and you want to inflict as much stun as possible, so you press L2 for the spin attack, then the hilt stab so you can quickly go into a spin attack again. Also, reciting your songs is always fastest when not moving.

There are many well written pieces in these comments about why Hunting Horn is so much fun and interesting to learn how to play well that it can be considered one of the most difficult, but I'll add that its quite thematically fitting that the "best way" to play HH is heavily dependent on what songs you like/what monster you're fighting. Music is quite freeform, and as Gaijin always says "good monster hunter is like good jazz"

Those raw, uncombo'd forward recitals ruri does on the HH is painful to watch

Foresight slash being difficult is straight bs no offense lol. It’s as hard as any other counter and has more Iframes than maybe all of them combined. Dodge: 13 frames Foresight: 45 f*ckin frames

To add some additional matters regarding the Insect Glaive: - as with the Gunlance, you almost always want to use sling ammo to boost your Insect buddy. The boosting animation is long as well. - each monster has different parts of the body that give you the 3 extracts. On some of them they are very obscure or hard to hit when the monster is moving erratically. Thus you require better monster knowledge and memory to properly play the weapon. - while the flying style is fun, mastering it goes hand in hand with learning the move patterns of monsters. More than a few times I tried to end a combo with a down thrust on a monster's head and they moved in the opposite direction leaving me hitting the ground. - the insect adds an additional layer of management outside of hunts. You have to pick your insect, develop it, choose an element and type then mix and match with your glaive. This requires additional effort from the player to learn and master.

I play both Hunting Horn and Gunlance so here is the short version of it: For Hunting Horn, it's easy to play but hard to master (timing wise), just like any other melee weapon. For Gunlance, regarding the stake blast there is actually a shortcut to applying it. Triangle + circle after the loading animation iirc. Other than that, yeah it takes a while to get optimal damage with the work needed + getting shafted on decoration requirement. As fun as it is, it's a high maintenance weapon.

My friend is a hh main it’s definitely low damage compared to other weapons but attack up XL is a ridiculous boost for a full party

As someone with roughly 2-3 thousand hours in the game between 3 systems, and someone who’s used HH through at least 3-4 hundred hunts, your statement that the song lists are the most complex thing are mostly accurate. It’s also just learning odd positioning to use some of the attacks in a counterintuitive way like the backswing with the B button

Complex does not mean hard, it's why the Great Sword is considered one of the hardest weapon to master despite being one of the simplest weapons.

HH is one of my main weapons and I am good enough with it to kinda psuedo speedrun certain monsters with it. As someone who is very experienced with the weapon and knows all of it's shortcuts and advanced techniques I can say that I do understand where people are coming from. However I believe HH is just very misunderstood by the majority of the playerbase. A large part of the reason that I think HH has such a low player count is that it's attacks are slow and definitely take some getting used to. HH is one of those weapons where it can actually be quite the powerhouse, capable of doing very good damage if played well. The problem is that if you aren't playing it well you feel like you are barely doing anything. HH is a very feast or famine weapon. Those who know how to get the most out of it can do some pretty great damage, and really contribute a lot to a hunt whether it's solo or in multiplayer. Also a lot of people still do see HH as a "support weapon" that does less damage but makes up for it with buffs in multiplayer. When this is categorically incorrect. HH isn't a support weapon. It's a regular melee weapon just like any of the others, but it just has some supportive aspects to it. Generally speaking people like to see big numbers, and people also like having big flashy attacks. HH is a weapon where it doesn't really have anything like spirit helm breaker, true charged slash, or SAED that gives big feedback with big numbers. Also it is far more niche aesthetically speaking. I personally love the look and feel of HH but it just doesn't have the immediate mass appeal of a giant katana. Gameplay wise I think it suffers from the same thing as great sword. Again if you aren't playing it well you feel like you are doing nothing. Like how if you can't hit your big attacks on great sword the damage is shitty. But if you do know how to properly punish the monster and not get hit. You get heavily rewarded. Proper positioning is paramount with HH so that you can reliably hit the head. If you can't do that then you will accomplish very little with the weapon.

You can usually get away with playing 2 songs with hunting horn but depending how angry the monster is just one. My favorite move is when you slam it down and spin it. Its so satisfying.

The issue with world HH that I ran into a lot was the draw attack. The mechanics would usually mess up the notes that i had lined up for the 4 note song. This is not an big issue with most quest since there is usually enough time to build up your note again. But with time sensitive quest like alatreon and fatalis, failing to play your attack up song at the right opening can potentially ruin your dps and fail the quest

HH in iceborne is pretty tough but its also my favorite

My personal reason for choosing HH as the hardest weapon are: -Attack changes when you input a direction. Not to mention different angles and reach. And you really need to be familiar with each attack variation because of the next reason. -Other weapon have combos, HH have notes that you have to input and match to queue a song. So you really need to be intimate with the moveset and know them by heart. -Playing songs while mid hunt instead of corner horning. It's a bit tricky to queue songs and then perform recitals mid hunt. -Not having a shield or moves(back hops and foresight slash). Not even hyper armor moves. Just a simple dodge. Basically, it's hard for me to play the HH efficiently and stylishly during live hunts.

Part of the reason why the hunting horn is considered a difficult weapon to play is because of upkeep. A large majority of your damage and tempo arent provided unless you play your songs. On top of that the songs you choose to bring with you shifts your tempo pretty dramatically. Wheras other weapons such as the charge blade have guard counters and straight blocking, the hunting horn relies heavily on tempo and buff upkeep. Slack on either, and your damage suffers pretty dramatically. While its not difficult to pick up, the choice of attack changes what note you play and, therefore, what song you begin to prep. The upper echelon of HH users make it look like a dance while also always playing the right notes appropriate with buff upkeep. Their tempo is insane. Buff upkeep and DPS efficient moves are not the same. Generally to play a buff you need to perform an attack that isnt dps efficient or sometimes awkward to weave into your rotations. If you choose to ignore it your damage falls off a cliff. Dont do it right and you get slapped around like a rag doll. HH also has really strange range consistency. Some of the moves are deceptively short or long and maximizing that is difficult. A major part of the complexity also revolved around animation cancelling. The short stab, dodge to avoid comitting to the full play animation of a song, and stutters are what cause the HH to be a weapon that, although easy to pickup, is really complex to be a master at. Its truly a spectactle to watch.😊

Hunting Horn do be strong. But because you are animation locked for 10 seconds, just to activate your damn songs, it is a pain in the ass to play in Iceborne Endgame and very much so if you are solo. Which is why I actually prefer Rise Hunting Horn where your songs activate as soon as play the right sequenz of notes.

Hunting Horn is rather simple, it may sound (heh) overwhelming at first because of the song list and how much stuff you can apply. But once you slap on a Horn Maestro on it you can buff yourself and not care for the whole duration of the encounter. All of its moves are quite similar with the way they bonk the monster so it's mostly about which note you need, not this insane thing about combining the right move at the right time for the right song, it's much more mellow than one would think. I also think most of the people that voted did so because they never played with it nor saw many people playing it online, thus skewing the voting towards it being the hardest.

I dunno. The thing you said @18:10 about "If you actually play the weapon and like the weapon, it's not that hard". Well, obviously! If you play and like a weapon, it's because it clicks for you and makes sense. If a weapon is hard to use after you know it intimately then, yeah, that would make it a difficult weapon. But for someone who doesn't like that weapon or picked it up and found it challenging, then that too would make it a difficult weapon. Charge Blade being so unanimously chosen I think belies the real answer here: Charge Blade is the most difficult to play overall, regardless of skill with said weapon. -Understanding the basics is more difficult compared to other weapons. -Learning the weapons combos is difficult. -It's a morphing weapon, meaning different movesets in each form. (Mode switching isn't unique, but it's another thing to think about) -Executing those combos in combat can be pretty challenging. -Performing guard-points, which are a passive thing that occur during regular combos, is something other weapons don't do. That in itself is hard to do effectively. All of these things compound to make the weapon harder to understand than other weapons, harder to use effectively for someone new to it and harder to master with the guard point mechanic, making it overall a very challenging weapon. I think Gunlance being of moderate difficulty to understand compared to other weapons, cumbersome to use for someone new to it and hard to master makes it a difficult weapon too. Maybe just not as difficult overall to a majority of players. Possibly the question should have been "Playing optimally, which weapons is the most difficult to utilize?". I think that's more in-step with what you were trying to say here.

Yeeess! Ur Insect Glaive guide helped me get into World, my 1st intro to MH! Stick N Bug all the way baby!!

You're explaining why charge blade is not complex in the most complex way xD. I understand your point though. Once you get it going its simple but many hunters don't know HOW to get it going or what each part of the process does. The benefits you list that make charge blade easy are what add to its complexity by giving it more versatility. There's so many bells and whistles its hard to remember everything you're able to do.

I'm a CB main, and for me the hardest weapons are IG and DB. That's because the simple fact of pressing one button and seeing an entire flurry of attacks is confusing AF for me, and hard to know when the attack starts and finisheds mid hunt. I like "hit one button, do one swing" things, and at worst case, something like "only on this part of the combo, pressing this will do 2 swings". I droped both weapons after less then 15min trying those because I was confused af and felt like a newbie fighting game player mashing buttons and hope for shit to happen. EDIT: Also CB was the hardest for sure on 4U, but guard points are less punishing on IB, you don't have to do a more pinpoint execution for the morph to be a guard point, and you have more motions that do them as well. CB became way more accessible.

I am a GunLance main as well and I feel like what makes the GunLance feel harder to use is how "countered" it can feel going up against monsters that have 0 chill, like Rajang and Velkhana. Without those nice, bigger openings every other monster has it's very hard, bordering on IMPOSSIBLE, to plug a Wyrmstake Blast to maximize your damage just because of how slow it's execution is. I try to look for opportunities in the middle of combat to land it instead of just waiting for a BIG opening since the only big ones monsters like that have are the ones you create yourself by knocking them over somehow, which means a LOT of waiting. It's frustrating.

Opinion from a HH and Lance main. The hardest weapon is the bow. Not only do you need to manage positioning like all melee weapons, but you need to aim every shot, there’s no BS EZ coatings like sticky ammo, you need to constantly manage your stamina, and most monsters have poor hit zone.

Slingshot main rise up 😎

In my honest opinion, I find SnS to have a lot of nuances that you learn and incorporate over time. Like, when I found out you can go from Guard to Perfect Rush in Rise I had like, oooooh moment. Charge blade I agree is a bit complex, but it's more of a rotation, Charge this, charge that, exhaust charge, recharge. SnS makes me try and squeeze out as much as possible in every moment like an angry goblin.

I understand that there is a problem if you miss the stake, but the timing is a non issue. HH has an encore mechanic that is playing the performance twice in a row. This lets the buffs increase, so for example attack up L goes to XL. More time is required to get out safely when doing the encore. Insect Glaive needs ammo as well for extra buffs. Nice ammo like bomb pods gives more attack. L2+triangle+circle with ammo

The Gunlance isn’t the “hardest” weapon to play in MH iceborne neither is the Charge Blade, nor Insect Glaive, or any of the weapons, it’s impossible to make that determination because hardest/difficulty is down to the player and what their skill set and skill expression allows them to do because unlike bosses, a player’s invesment and interest with what was mentioned before will determine how difficult it will be to utilize the weapon to it’s optimal potential, the reason why bosses don’t fall under the same determination is because most of the time the player will be invested in doing their best to beat the boss to engage in the mechanics of the fight and how to utilize their weapons and tools to their optimal performance, if the player isn’t interested in the weapons from the beginning not to mention what the player prefers and can most easily handle which differs player to player then what one player considers easy to utilize can be infinitely difficult for another to use, not because they are a bad player or don’t understand the mechanics but because their skills set and mindset aren’t suited for that weapon/playstyle. I think the question you should be asking is not wether GL is the hardest weapon to use but is the GL badly designed in iceborne? My answer would be Yes and here’s why. GL in iceborne is tied to the wyrmstake blast which serves as the weapons crit damage for the shells which is halved of the weapon, i think you aren’t seeing that Gunlance isn’t just the blast but also the physical damage and you need both to deal optimal damage. Since the shells are tied to WSB and that is tied to a just one part of the monster the player is incentivized to chase that specific part unlike most weapons which have multiple parts to deal crit damage the GL is tied to one part which isn’t always available while other weapons even if they don’t have their optimal spot which most of the time is the head, they still have other parts that deal crit and the damage mitigation isn’t substantial enough to make a difference but for GL the loss of WSB is so noticeable that it makes the player chase that single part. To finish this i want to give an example in myself. I’m a GS main with my second being LS and third being GL in both World/Iceborne and Rise/Sunbreak, i have no qualms in saying I’m a proficient player in all three weapons being nearly untouchable by most monsters since i play the games and these weapons so much, i have played CB quite a lot but i can definitely say i suck at the weapon I’m not proficient with it with most monsters swatting me around like a fly, I’m not bad at the game but the mechanics and moveset of CB don’t “gel” with me no matter how much i try because the weapon doesn’t go with my personal playstyle and skills but that doesn’t mean it’s poorly designed, what I’m trying to say is that one must look at what makes a weapon “hard” in order to understand if it’s the player or the mechanics of the weapons are poorly thought out, hope everyone has a wonderful day and would love to hear your thoughts on what i just say if you read all this and if so thanks for lessening to me.

HH is no doubt one of the easiest weapons to understand imo. The rules it follows, particularly between 4U and Worldborne, are so damned consistent and simple to follow to get a satisfying hunt. Not to advertise myself or anything, but my World HH guide shows the simplicity, and the footage in my Fatalis video shows the weapon actually in action. It's very fun and shockingly easy when you give it a good go.

In my opinion, as a Hunting Horn main for the past 6 years, the moveset is not hard in the slightest. The hard part comes from the fact that you need to learn every monster very well, and you need to learn different combo patterns for every song list. Every fight is like a dance. You allow the monster to "lead" and you punish the monster for that. Say with Rathian. She charges, you right swing. She charges, you dodge. She charges, you swing. You focus on S.I. and then Atk Up

So as someone who has restarted a World/Iceborne maining the gunlance I 100% agree. And it isnt so much that it's hard to play because i wouldnt even go as far to say that gunlance is hard to play but it does alter how you play which cna make playing gunlance feel weird. And it's because wormstake is just a wonky mechanic to engage with. It also doesnt help, especially when starting fresh, that low rank monsters do not have a lot of health so you're kind of half ass learning the mechanics because they die really fast lol

Memorizing songs on the Hunting Horn is the easiest aspect of the Horn. The difficulty is song uptime because of the large window required to play the songs. For solo play you only need self improvement and attack up Large but you need to execute them skillfully or else fights start taking significantly longer than every other weapon.

In my opinion, the chargeblade is easy to learn but hard to master. For me it didn’t take long to understand what to do and how to do it but when it came to applying it to a hunt, that became the difficult part. Maybe it’s my fault for doing all of 2 hours of practice then trying to hunt AT Nergy for the first time but… after having about 50 or so hours into it, it’s my favorite weapon. The guard points are fun and very satisfying when you get them then follow with a solid counter, the savage axe mode just rips right through monsters stun locking them and just eating through everything with its massive reach. It’s such a fun and versatile weapon, I wish I mained it earlier tbh

I would agree that getting the timing right for foresight slash is harder than guard points but Wyrmstake Blast is not really what I would call hard tho, is it annoying and inconvinient? hell yeah it is.

Back in the day shortly before Iceborne came out, I happened to be into long type charged shelling spam gunlance. It wasn't amazing but was kinda a fun, turn your brain off sorta playstyle. Now once Iceborne dropped, the first thing I did was factor the wyrmstake blast into this playstyle. Yes, setting up the blast sucked, at the start of the hunt, I could be flailing for minutes before I got one online. I learned that I essentially needed to force a knockdown as soon as possible just so I could get my first stake in. That said, after I landed my first stake, that monster was living on borrowed time. The damage output I could start pumping out with charged shelling into the wyrmstake blast was kinda insane. I basically just waltzed through Iceborne without learning any of the other mechanics. Tenderizing? Why bother, 100% of my damage is shelling. Flinch shot? Honestly I just forgot about it because the monster flinches nonstop when I blast it. Upon beating most of the content and then trying out other weapons, I thought I was going crazy because I was pretty confident in my ability to play other weapons, yet hunts were taking so much longer. This is all to say that I guess I stumbled into a relatively comfortable and mechanically simple playstyle for the gunlance, so I never saw it as being all that hard of a weapon. Even replaying World and Iceborne now, if I break out the long type gunlance, I can destroy things without trying, so I save it for when I want to farm something. Now there is the catch that this playstyle may have sorta fell off in the endgame. First, at least while I was originally playing, I noticed that max level long type gunlances were mysteriously not present (I don't know if one was later added, but at the time, only normal and wide ones went to the highest shelling level). And then the game dropped a hunt where elemental damage was mandatory so I decided I was done playing at that point :)

I've been using all the weapons in iceborne (and most of the other games) and difficulty to me is affected by 3 things: 1- complexity : I've played most weapons to the point that I don't really have an Idea for this one. 2- survivability :I'd define this one as ways of avoiding damage,factors like moving speed, dodging and gaurding capabilities. 3- damage output and maintaining it : obviously higher damage makes hunts easier. But also how easy it is to maintain the dps. I'd say the only difficulty with IG is maintaing the buffs for your hunter and the slinger ammo buf for your kinsect, other than that it is a good weapon for moving around and damaging At the second place would be charge blade because of all the points you mentioned At the third place would be HH simply because of low survivability since a lot of the endgame monster do tons of damage, sure Hh has a good moving speed(after using self improvement which i didn't consider while commenting on the community post) , however it only has normal rolls which makes avoiding damage harder than the previous weapons.(unless you get evasion songs or skills) Hardest on the list : GL, reason wyrmstake blast however other than that you have the strongest shield (as strong as the lance shield) and backhops.

I’ve played a lot of charge blade and understand its mechanics well, I personally find it to be the most difficult/frustrating weapon to play purely because of the amount if combos/inputs there are to remember, I often find myself thinking “how do I charge the shield again?” Or using the wrong moves just because I find it difficult to commit to memory these combos and execute them during an actual hunt, there’s a lot of mechanical upkeep to the weapon with keeping the sword and shield charged and managing phials, each of these mechanics have a specific string of inputs tied to them and I find it fairly overwhelming and confusing whilst in a high intensity boss fight. This is 100% a skill issue on my part but these are the reasons I find it to be the most difficult weapon.

Okay, so basically what you're wanting to know is which is the hardest weapon to max out damage with consistently? Yeah, I'd agree it's the gunlance. Easiest weapon to use: Hammer Most versatile weapon: Charge Blade Most Damaging weapon: Heavy Bowgun Biggest single hit weapon: Greatsword Lowest mobility weapon: Switch Axe Best defensive weapon: Lance Best support weapon: Hunting Horn (Sword & Shield become best support with wide range maxed out) Best mobility weapon: Insect Glaive Best dodging weapon: Daggers Best counter weapon: Longsword Now when it comes to mechanical complexity of weapons for timing all the options correctly, I'd say it's Charge Blades guard points. You point out that they are easy to activate, & I'll agree they are easy to activate, but there is only 1 of the guard points out of 3 kinds that has a large window for the guard point. The other 2 guard points have a tiny window where they are a guard point before its no longer blocking an attack & you get hit.

IMO, the charge blade is the hardest for exactly one reason: bouncing sword when phials are overcharged. Especially for someone new to the game who wanted to figure out the weapon organically, this one feature alone probably turned off a lot of people for not understanding why their weapon suddenly can't do damage. I'm ok with dealing less optimal damage for not knowing optimal combos, but basically turning off your weapon for not knowing how to charge phials really sucks for newbies. That's the one feature I wish they would just remove entirely from the game.

I've only gotten into world 2 months ago which is my first mh game and throughout base world i used mostly gunlance. Fell in love with it and in iceborne i decided to try charge blade and fell it love with it too and now both are competing for my favourite weapon in world. So with that in mind, i find charge blade much easier to use than gunlance in iceborne the wyvernstake blast is the reason why. It's just so damn slow, so i'm constantly missing it by seconds because the monster got up or flinched away or some other reason, then it's to pick back up ammo and load it and then sometimes when it does hit it's in a completely different position than where i intended it to because of overlapping hitboxes and now i have to pick my struggle, whether to reload up and and attempt to place a new one or just try to chase after the position of the stake and make sure my shells hit that. Heck sometimes i decide to completly ignore the blast and fight specific monsters without it because it's such a hassle to even use. Now do i hate the wyvernstake blast? Heck no. I love making monsters heads go boom. It's extremely satisfying to set it off with full bursts, even with the long charged shells playstyles i love the extra booms and damage. that being said it's still just such a tedious and sometimes dangerous hassle to use and maintain. So when i can't I play charge blade. There's more monsters i'd fight with a charge blade than monsters i'd fight with a gunlance, especially since I only just got fatalis armour and can actually setup the the skills i want.

Well if you're in a group you can just stand in the edge of the zone and spam buffs. We call this corner horn. It you add wide range, mushroomancer, and speed eating skilld you can give even more buffs between songs.

I think HH is the hardest because it has no defensive skills or moves, it's a slow weapon meaning you have to mind your openings, you don't have hyper frames, you got buffs, but buffs don't really do that much in MR, because MR armor sets exist and they're generally much better at the skills they give you and the weapon's damage is just, it's just good, but other weapons do much better despite lacking all those buffs and when we're talking things like CB and GL which can block? yeah, that's a pretty good advantage to have when you need them. Then you have the echo spin which a lot of people won't be able to do unless the monster is KO'd, because it's essentially like doing a shoulder tackle and charged slash, without being hit during both of those attacks, not exactly easy. In short, the reasons why I find it difficult is that it's hard to beat monsters with it and it takes a lot more effort than most weapons do due to the HH's lower damage potential, where as for everything else people are saying? I don't really get that.. Songs only seems daunting at first in the same way that phial charging and charging the shield of CB seems complicated. As for the song notes, we've got the whole list on our HUD now. Personally, I think people Way overemphasize how complicated the song system of the HH really is, there's a few quirks to it like a faster speed to neutral performance, but even those are pretty simple, neutral is slightly faster, forward encore is good for more hits, other directions are good to reposition a little bit and that's about it.

HH main here, world iceborne HH in generally speaking has lot of thing going against it that make it harder even through it probably the one of weapons with the least amount of armor skills required. When it come to weapons you're doing a lot of juggling for good stats like any other weapons but also having to add good song buffs to that mix (most of the color combination are kind of bad and make certain buff just useless for the hunt). To get buffs you may have to do awkward attack combos depending on what color correspond to which button which isn't really intuitive compared to other weapons. HH does have some tech which makes it easier but it does come off as too much for most players. The solo part kind of put a wench in things since there isn't exactly a lot of good options when it comes to progress in the end game for iceborne not counting safi weapons since those are great picks but is unrealistic to grind for if you are actually in a solo lobby by yourself. This is coming from the dude that likes mains alchemy HH in genu

GL isn’t the hardest weapon but its definitely the most inconvenient in Iceborne. I had no idea it needed 2 clutch attacks to tenderize

The wyrmstake mechanic is very frustrating, tbf. Getting the stake in the right place and then having to hit that same spot is just inevitably going lead to inconsistent damage.

Hunting Horn is mechanically quite simple. The hard part is playing the songs AND doing damage, which a lot of people have a lot of trouble with. Like, how many people can say they hunt with HH solo and don't feel like they're nerfing themselves by using it instead of something else?

Ruri talking about the charge blade just flowing through all the combos and managing the charges just blows my mind, I lose my mind remembering all the combo chains. However the dootstick just feels so easy for me. There's some 7 moves and 8 performaces/encores, and outside of queing a song there's really no combo chains to mess up. I've made strides towards learning all the weapons, but the skill floor for CB is still so far away...

on Charge Blade Guard Points are the thing that feel like it makes the weapon overpowered just by it being able to just block anything and then that it is on the end of some strings and the transform that you can just become unpunishable for throwing out moves by just hitting guard and quick attack, it is ridiculous, that the gunlance needs to go through like 3 attacks to get to its main gimmick while the Charge Blade can just do it whenever it feels like it makes it harder and clunkier to use than most weapons

Wait. Gunlance has to tenderize TWICE?! I always assumed that Gunlance counted as a heavy weapon. I mean, movement is at a snail's pace! Gunlance got hosed.

I am a gunlance main too, I agree with most of what you said, and the charge blade hard because the best attacks are a long commetment attacks witch makes them hard to use and healing much like the gunlance and the lance takes tons of time and very dangerous , so if you fight a monster like ragang, you will get tons of chip damage very fast . and asking for evasion skills to remedy that for a weapon like the charge blade and the gunlance will require tons of sacrifice. the charge blade needs power prolonger and a bit of focus , the gunlance don't .

I love the Charge Blade. I mained it in World, Iceborne and Rise. In Sunbreak I branched out and played as many weapons as I could. It's awesomely versatile and mobile and does great damage and KOs. I agree, Charge Blade has a decent barrier to entry, but honestly, it's easier to master than things like the Long Sword or even Sword and Shield, which are way more popular.

Only thing I didn’t like was the part with Hunting Horn where you essentially said you feel like all you have to do is memorize the songs, but thinking that’s the only thing you have to do and actually putting it into practice is a different thing. An inexperienced player is going to pop those songs at the wrong time and be locked into the song for the monster to diddle.

I said this on the original poll but I will say it again, since I consider myself a main of Hunting Horn, Lance, Insect Glaive, and Charge Blade. I have played through World solo with each weapon, but when I got to 3 star in Iceborne I started getting very close to timing out. That’s why I consider it the hardest, and no, I am no corner horner. I played it a ton in GU as well. It’s not the most complex weapon, as that would go to Charge Blade, but its damage output is just not high enough to easily do solo endgame content Insect Glaive is just the easiest in general. I was even able to rush through Sunbreak with ease solo

As a GL main I agree about the heat gauge vs stake thing.I don't think Gunlance is hard to play, or complex. The issue us that it is so poorly balanced that it makes using it difficult, especially towards the end game when monsters are much faster, more aggressive and have moves that can hard counter Gunlance's few benefits. If they made the Stake damage bonus purely additional it would have been fun, rewarding good play and a bit of luck with an explosive firework. Instead they balanced it as part of its main damage which guts the GL power. The whole point of Shells if that they can hit anywhere at the cost of no critical hits. The Stake effectively negates that by locking to an timed area you have staked. Still get the nerfs and no crits though.

Ruri: Is hunting horn hard? Me, an educated Hunting Horn main: Hunting horn bonk real hard, heh heh

I would probably say CB is the most mechanically complex and DB being the most mechanically intensive as it clearly has more inputs per min than any other weapon.

I think it's more of "the gunlance is the hardest weapon to execute optimally". As Ruri presented, the wsb mechanic would have been great IF IT WAS EXTRA DAMAGE. The fact that the devs removed some damage from based shelling just to implement it on wsb is absurd. Capcom has a lot of troubled history with the gunlance balance, and even in Rise, during the early days, ground splitter "buff" was basically just the same issue, they removed some based damage from shelling and added it back through some silly mechanic

As a Hunting horn main since 3u i have to say Hunting horn is the most complex weapon in monster hunter ! (NOT in rise) The amount of monster knowledge you have to Have to pull of your songs and deal Damage to the monster and keeping an eye on your songs so the DONT run out is the hardest thing to do in Monster hunter. in addition to that The hunitng horn Has Alot of moves you can pull of to attack the monster. You DO NOT que up songs all the time and attack the monster with the Que'd song ! You Que up songs while dogeing the monsters attacks and then you use the recital to keep up the aggression on the monster! If you play the Hunting horn and allways Que up songs to to attack the monster and that is your only way of attacking you playing the Weapon Wrong! Proper positioning and Monster knowledge is a MUST have For a Good HH Player !! keep playing that Sweet chin music boys 🎵

As someone who played hh for a while you have to play it like a great sword where the monster's openings dictate the moves that you would do. Like if you had an opening to side step an attack you could play the y note or if it got tired do the yb or play the songs that are queued up. Also this is the guy that opened up my mind to the Hunting Horn www.youtube.com/@HandiTips/featured.

I don't get it. I came in here expecting him to talk about how and why the gunlance is the hardest weapon, but all i got was him talking about how easy the charge blade is. I was very interested in how why the gunlance is hard as a gunlance main, I think it's very easy. You got pokes, slashes, and various explosions. Wsb is situational, and shelling is very strong and consistent. It's not going to beat out a greatsword tcs in terms of burst damage, but I can attack the monster anywhere and still do full consistent damage. GL light weapon, slinger ammo is always present, don't need ammo from the ground, and doing Slinger Burts at the beginning of the fight and during is when you should apply the sticky bomb thing.

Hunting Horn is pretty hard to get into It's basically a counter bonk stick the songs you can just kinda get if you focus them or run away shortly basically counter bonk KO perform on face spin to win if you have time repeat

There really is different criteria for what weapon is the "hardest" so its a hard question to truly answer cause everyone has their own preferences and skill levels. A good example is the SnS, I think most people would agree it is the easiest weapon to use, they portray it as the beginner weapon in game and media, they tend to start a game with one equipped etc Yet those of us who play it know that the SnS in endgame demands a lot of its players, a true easy to learn hard to master weapon as to use it in endgame you need to make effective use of its entire move set, maintain a high uptime and avoid getting nocked around, and have an excellent understanding of the monster and its weak spots, and elemental weaknesses. Because if you don't, you will not be doing enough damage to the monster, you will have very high time hunts or run out of time out right. Yet most people would call it the easiest weapon in the game, and they would not be wrong.

I think with Insect Glaive it's not fundamentally hard mechanically (other than getting 3 buffs on certain monsters), it's more to play it effectively is difficult. Doing good damage is often not easy. Staying in the air and doing whatever is fairly easy, but it's also often not doing a whole lot other than avoiding the enemy. CB is just complex, once you get the muscle memory down it's pretty effective. At least in World. I'd say in Rise/Sunbreak it's a lot worse because every enemy is so fast landing much of anything on anything is a giant pain. In World it's all about setting up your big moves. In Rise it's repeatedly whiffing your big moves because the monster is running all over the place all the time. Getting Guard point down is also not particularly easy, but overall I found the flow of the weapon in World to be very good and reliable for the most part. CB's biggest thing is the learning curve for all the moves and when to use them, which I'd argue is not easy at it's base. GL imo, is in a similar boat as IG in that to play it effectively requires a lot of set up and work. Someone could argue "you just slam, full burst, reload it's not hard" and they'd be sort of correct, but you'd also be doing pretty bad damage. So, like somewhat like IG playing it well requires a lot of setup, timing and work. TLDR: CB requires a lot of learning, but once you get there it's not too bad to execute. IG and GL both require some learning, but also a lot of set up and execution to actually do anything of value, especially for the GL. HH is just weird so I have no real opinions on it, but it seems to me it falls into both categories. Lots of moves to learn and a pain to actually execute in an actual fight. Later monsters are less likely to leave you alone to put up buffs and keep them maintained, I would assume. Edit: The "bookkeeping" on GL is, frankly, atrocious, which makes it hard to play. IG is in a similar boat but it's bookkeeping is fundamentally easier, you can do it from range and just run around the whole time to make it happen, more annoying than difficult. CB bookkeeping is just part of playing it and seems bad until you get used to it. Once you get over that curve it's mostly fine. HH bookkeeping seems pretty terrible as well, but I've never played it. It feels like it's between IG and GL, IG's annoying part, but in melee and then you have to stand around to make it pay off. Then you have to keep it maintained. So I can see how it could be the hardest.

These polls are wild. I had a lot of fun maining HH during the initial release of MHG. It never felt that complicated. The only reason i don't play it much is because I got tired of not having easy tail cuts. I main IG these days because I'm lazy and it's an easy weapon against most monsters.

HH is absolutelly the hardest weapon, even harder in the older games because you didnt have the on screen song combos, you needed to memorize or have notes for the songs.

14:41 Lol Ruri you're tripping saying CB has better mobility than SnS 😂 Just because it has moves that relocate and block doesn't mean it's better. SnS can do the same thing faster and with by just rolling. rolling gives you much better control because you can precisely change facing direction and timing, and can be done multiple times. That CB sliding slash is convenient but you're vulnerable for quite a while during sliding, and the guard point timing often come out later than you thought.

Theres also the slinger ammo bonus for IG (Kinsect Charge) that the users have to keep up for max damage. I think that's where at the endgame it becomes a bit trickier to upkeep the buffs consistently. But overall mechanically its not a difficult weapon.

I think every melee weapon has its own difficulties. While learning when and how to attach that sticky GL thing to monsters may prove to be challenging at times, I on other hand am often jealous how GL can easily block hard to dodge moves or deal decent shelling damage to hard parts, etc. With SnS I often struggle with the reach against many monsters, not being able to hit weak points easily or miss half of the attacks during opening when monster is fidgeting when lying on the ground. Anyway it's quite apparent to me, you want to play GL :D

I voted hunting horn because to me, an insect glaive main, it feels so slow and cumbersome without the boons that the other slower weapons have.

As much as gunlance frustrates me because they continue to give it the shaft, I’ll never give it up, I love it too much

Really, it all comes down to recognizing that in monster hunter the mechanical complexity of a weapon isn’t strongly correlated to how difficult that weapon is to play. GS is the classic example, as a weapon that mechanically is probably the simplest weapon in the game, but is nowhere near being the easiest weapon to play. And then insect glaive is above average in mechanical complexity, but is one of the easiest weapons for a new player to pick up and get to a level where you can reliably kill monsters.

Confirmed Ruri is charge blade main

I hardly ever get guard points on the CB and I still find it super easy....once you get all charged up, you just chew through monsters...the hardest part is getting into the flow of getting charged

all the subtle shade thrown at Kegaran this video ;)

15:00 yeah idk i really hope that Wilds does a lot for the SnS because i've always felt that Charged Blade Sword and Shield mode is literally just a better SnS

I played Wide Gunlance exclusively on World and Iceborne because I found the charged shelling focused play style that Long Gunlance used to be boring. The Wyrmstake Blast can absolutely be a pain but by no means do I think the annoying mechanic makes the weapon harder to use.

I’m not sure that I’d say that the GL is more complex to learn or more difficult to play than charge blade but it’s definitely a top contender for most frustrating to play because of the wyrmstake mechanic.

If you want the real answer to this question just get a new player to try them all out through a play through. And the correct answer will always be charge blade. Too many people confuse this answer for weapons that kinda suck being hard to use because their damage output makes the fights worse. The gunlance is at best a medium difficulty weapon.

Play gunlance! Less people playing it. More unique

To me one of the hardest weapons to learn and master, as well as mechanically hard is easily Hunting Horn in freedom Unite, that shit is crazy.

I picked up insect glaive for the first time and was able to kill Fatalis by day 2 of using it. That's an argument towards how easy it is to grasp and go.