Charge Blade Phials

改善/Improvements
, ,
1

Charge blade mains, please feel free to correct me.

After guard pointing with the charge blade, the followup attack goes directly into SAED. This also provides a boost to phial energy. HOWEVER, despite the sword being put into the shield as the opening for this attack, this does NOT convert phial energy into stored phials. This is very frustrating, as once the animation begins, you are then forced to commit to your biggest, strongest, slowest attack with nothing but the raw strike itself to back you up.

The worst part about this is now the boost to phial energy. Instead of rewarding me for getting a successful guard point, now I feel like it’s mocking me! “Here, let me bring you from yellow to red energy! Now let’s do an SAED! What’s that, you wanted to use your phials now? Too bad!” This is inordinately frustrating and I find the weapon borderline unusable from it.

To top it off, this happens while I am trying to fill my phials! The only way to do this is through the tap-and-hold animation, but this animation also creates a window in which, if a monster attacks me, I will now automatically guard point. So now my options are: awkwardly stand still and wait for my hunter to reset so I can try again (wasting precious time), or fire a blank SAED with full phial energy and no phials (which feels like a massively wasted potential opportunity for damage). Yes, a successful guard point does fill a single phial. Yes, this single phial would potentially be immediately overwritten if the hunter now has red phial energy levels. This is definitely the lesser of two wasted potentials though, in comparison with the current implementation.

I believe that this change more thoroughly reflects how the weapon works in Gen 5 Monster Hunter (I would appreciate if anyone could verify). Regardless, I don’t understand how this has not been addressed yet.

2

Pull down while going into SAED, will instead go into AED, pull up for forward slash that will charge your shield with whatever phials you have stored already. Alternatively, and I would actively encourage that one in Now specifically, drop shield charging entirely, and play CB like its 4th gen instead (transform > AED spam). You’ll never get into SAED animation without charged shield. Not only you’ll spend less time charging, you will never run into a situation where you are locked into an animation that last the better portion of hunts time

1 Like
3

I am aware that I can cancel my SAED into an AED or a shield charge. What is frustrating for me is when I am “forced” to enter the SAED animation with charged phial energy but 0 actual phials. I will take your “don’t charge shield” advice into consideration, but I don’t see how it helps solve this particular issue. I do appreciate the help!

4

Well, you can always not act upon your guard point. Guard point is unique in it’s fact to be 2 step process (as opposed to lance and ls counter). See, when you trigger GP, it’s just a guard +1. Now when you tap the screen at this time, your hunter will go into counterattack

Please be aware that, like all other weapons, CB is heavily abridged in Now, so most of the mechanics doesn’t translate all that well (or didn’t survive the transition at all, rip sword charge). If presented with the situation you are describing, I’m doing GP into side roll most of the time to reset my animation and then do 4th gen dance, cause 75 second and like 1 button is not enough to fiddle with monhuns one of the most complicated weapons

1 Like
5

4th gen dance? Do you mean the charged slashes? Or is that an axe mode thing?

World was my first game, so I am not terribly familiar with the weapon-specific stuff from before. Honestly Rise was the first game I seriously tried to understand how to use the charge blade.

6

Sorry. 4th gen (incidentally also generation that introduced CB) dance consist of not charging your shield, loading phials, going into axe mode and spending them there either with regular attacks or AED, using sword just to get said phials back.

Loading shield was concidered detrimental to the gameplay cause every SAED burned charge on top of phials. Thus unless very specific cases in MHGU, it was advised to not charge it, since time saved on this move could be translated into more damage. It was actually 5th gen (or world) that changed this.

In short, I would forgo shield charging, using SP button to load my phials and transform into axe, then AED the monster wherever possible (sometimes it’s better to swing with an axe, you know how it is), transform into sword and board in the process and immediately change back to axe with SP button again, rince and repeat.

With this, even when I’ll manage to accidentally guard point, I can AED which does damage superior to SAED (one motion Vs three) when not loaded, takes half the time to swing and gets me back to sword and board for another loading attempt or roll out of the counter attempt and load my phials.

I am going to write CB guide at some point I think cause without training dummy most people tend to get into a trap of doing the most flashy move cause big numbers and that’s not really the case in Now, it’s not like mainline game where I have 50 minutes limit to do what I want

7

Is shield charge not worth it even when you know you’ll be getting full duration benefit, and even if you’re ok committing to cancelling all your SAEDs into AEDs? I’ll be honest, my CB playstyle here tends to revolve around spamming the SNS shortcut into SAED, but I consistently find myself a quarter second short of actually pulling it off unless the monster is already downed.

Thank you, by the way. You’ve been really informative and helpful!

8

No Biggie, happy to help. Let’s put it into perspective. What you get from shield charge is SAED and 20% RAW damage increase (roughly translating to 1k attack weapon getting additional 200 raw) on PHYSICAL ace attacks. What you lose is about 10 seconds (I’m using approximation here) for phials into charge into second set of phials and additional 5 seconds for every new set of phials if you are SAED spamming

If you are using elemental phial, all you do is increase the actual hit of an axe. Whatever value you have on attack will be increased by said 20% but your elemental damage (and as such, phials) will be unaffected. Thus, your actual damage is actually increased by approx. 10% on axe hit (more or less, depends on weapon) and you gain nothing for your phials

If you are using impact, your phials gets affected by this increase. In this case, you can justify shield charge, but I will still be against it. See, the issue is as always time spent Vs time gained. You lose 10 seconds for a setup. Now this setup increase your axe damage by 20% and that’s all good and dandy, but considering that 1: SP is SAED launched with shield charged and 2: CB is one of those weapons that recharge SP especially fast, is it really worth complicating your already complicated moveset even further when you can charge your phials, proceed to bonk with SP SAED, do gen 4 dance and in about 20 seconds (give or take, again, it’s an approximation), you’ll be able to launch SP SAED again, which, mind you, givess you all benefits of regular one without eating your resources

No matter how I run the numbers in my head, shield charge is not worth it. This might seems counter intuitive, but 5 AED bonks for 154 + 3x28 motion in around 20 seconds outclass 2 SAED bonk for (1.1-1.2)x(20 + 92 + 65 + 5x27) motion in the same time simply due to how this specific game works (impact phials have negligible less motion btw) and the amount of time needed for setup and maintain of shield charge is not worth the additional damage you gain. And I know I’ve over analyzed the everloving Gogmazios out of this one, but CB is my main and I feel obliged to do so, sorry in advance

Edit: so I’ve realised while digging for information that Now SAED motion is scuffed. In any other game second hit of SAED has the same axe motion as AED (the big vertical chop one), where in Now it’s like 60% of the damage. That might also be a factor why I would suggest not investing into shield charge

TL.;DR: You shave off 5 seconds off every rotation while not charging your shield, which outclass damage increase in the long run. On weaker monsters you’ll end your hunt that much faster and on harder ones (7+ :star:) you don’t risk timeout and apply constant pressure. This applies wherever you do or cancel SAED with shield charged. This logic will apply as long as you have just 75 seconds to hunt. It might change if this time ever increase to at least 2 full minutes

1 Like