Monster Hunter Wilds - Hunting Horn: Such Dragon Much Wow Build

Hunting Horn: Element Build Guide

Ву November.

For all you non-hunting horn users or people who haven’t looked at the numbers, there are some important things you need to know before you pick up an Elemental Hunting Horn (status too, but I’ll be sticking to Element).

First of all Hunting Horn has some new moves and returning ones that are important to talk about, before that here are some terms that will be thrown around frequently:

Weapon Element: The base element of your weapon.

Current Element: The modified element of your weapon. through Equipment skills. This caps out on weapons by appearing Orange when entering the Menu.

Echo Wave Element – Echo Wave Element cannot crit and deals 60/100/140 direct Element damage. This scales with skills which give % Element boost but not with your Current Element.
Echo Bubbles – Echo Bubbles scale off of Current Element and % Element Equipment Skills, but deals damage with at 30% efficacy of your Current Element. With all 3 out, this means regular weapon motions will be dealing an additional 90% of your Current Element. It’s small, but small numbers add up, so drop some bubbles. Again cannot crit.
Resounding Wave – Can crit and can elemental crit when running Crit Element. Scales with Current Element and % Element Equipment Skills.

Now. That’s a lot to think about. But keep in mind just like all of those scale with Current Element, they also scale with our other favorite damage bucket, Raw (R.I.P. Elementless). Current Raw and % Raw Equipment skills scale with all 3 of the above attacks.

This is important to know as maximizing raw first and supplementing with element is ideal. This build we entertain ideal, but make certain sacrifices in order to Maximize Dragon Element while maintaining competitive raw. It will most likely not outperform a build prioritizing raw above all and splashing in Element to match the monster when available.

Weapon and Armor

This is a Dual Horn build running Artian Dragon Primary and Resounding Galahad Secondary.

Why Artian Dragon? Because Elem Boost Song, Echo Wave Dragon, and Resounding Wave with competitive Raw through Reinforcements. Why not G Galahad? No element wave and no elem boost song.

Why Resounding Galahad? Resounding Galahad is our buffer giving us Attack Up L, Knockback Resistance, and Extends Melody. I prefer this to Bagpipes because Extends Melody allows me to also keep Primary Horn buffs going while I refresh on this one between areas. There is a solid argument to run other buffers such as Gramklang or Bagpipes. Gram gives Affinity Up and Earplugs (maximizes our crit rate at the expense of 10% raw, but gives us Earplugs), Bagpipes is the middle ground giving Attack Up L and Earplugs (S) which can be encored to (M).

For armor we run a mixset of:

We run this for 2 slot gore and for Convert Element 3.

Now here’s the Equipment Skills:

Crit Boost 3
Dragon Attack 3
Crit Element 3
Slugger 1
WEX 3
MM 3
Convert Element 3
Antivirus 3
Elemental Absorption 2
Adrenaline Rush 1
Burst 1

Alternative: Drop Arkvulcan for 4 piece gore. This is opting out of conditional skills Convert Element and Elemental Absorption. Run Coalescence 3 instead and grab higher WEX and Agitator.

An additional perk to picking Artian is triple 3 slots. We pass on Horn Maestro because Elemental Attack Up is the least important % bonus. A cherry on the top really, and we’d rather maximize element through Crit Element instead.

Crit Boost 3: Increases crit damage. We will be spamming Resounding which can Crit and Crit Elementally. We want bigger numbers.
Dragon Attack 3: Gives us Current Element and % Elemental damage. Scales (1) (2) (3) and all other basic attacks.
Critical Element: Allows elemental damage to crit (if attack can Crit). Provides a % elemental sink that only procs on Resounding Melody. We like that. (Note, opting out of this I would probably take Crit Boost 5 instead or Horn Maestro)
Slugger 1: I’m lucky what can I say.
Weakness Exploit 3: Why not 5? Because I gotta slot in Adrenaline Rush and Burst for the bonus raw.
Maximum Might 3: 30% affinity all the time? We like this on horn. Every build.
Convert Element 3: Arguably the strongest skill for Dragon Element in the game next to Dragon Attack Boost. It gives 180 flat Dragon element at level 3 and gives a buildable status (think blast or flayer). It gives 280 flat damage and 100 dragon damage at level 3. It has an uptime of 2 minutes and a cooldown of 90 seconds. For it to activate you need to take or DODGE elemental damage. Only worth it in fights where you’re taking elemental damage.
Antivirus 3: 15% element when frenzied, and additional 10% when you clear it. 25% total. With MM, that’s 55% when cleared.
Constitution 2: Not slotted for but enjoyed. Helps with Maximum Might.
Evade Window 2: Not slotted for but enjoyed. Helps proc Adrenaline Rush.
Elemental Absorption: Same proc conditions as Convert Element and comes on pieces with Convert Element. Cherry on top to our preferred skill.
Adrenaline Rush: Slotted for instead of an extra WEX. +10 raw when active, worth 1 point. Activates on a perfectly timed evade. Happens way more often than you think.
Burst 1: +10 raw when active for Hunting Horn. Equal to Greatsword raw values. We don’t slot for Burst 5 because Convert Element gives us all the element we need.
Arkveld’s Hunger 2: Perk of going for Convert Element.
Gore 2: Gives frenzy to proc for Antivirus. (Missing out on 10-15 raw from 4 piece Gore Set.)

So those are all the Equipment and Skills. But this is Hunting Horn! What about the Melodies?

We begin the hunt on our secondary, using Self-improvement and Attack Up L (10% raw when encored). We can play Knockback Negated if desired. We have Horn Maestro on this horn to extend its buffs. It retains lengthened buff timers when swapping to another Hunting Horn so we Self Improvement on this weapon.

Swap to Primary and play our Elemental Attack Boost.

We only Elemental Attack Boost between areas. If it runs out during the fight it’s a DPS loss to reapply.
Now spam Resounding Melody and the occasional Echo Wave Dragon on the monster’s head.
But really this build is only for the following monsters because of hitzone elemental weakness.

Dreamingsuntide Data

[2]: Head is equally weak to Fire, Thunder, Dragon; but other parts are Fire-weak (antennae are Dragon-weak).

The last 5 columns show the Elemental Hitzones Ratio for each element respectively.

Dreamingsuntide Example:

Max Raw, Artian Long Sword Crimson Slash vs Arkveld:

DMG improvement from element = [Effective Element x HitzoneRatio x Attack Ratio] / [Effective Raw]
= 40 x 0.111 x 2.9 / 430 = 3% additional damage when matching an element.

However the same example vs Rathalos:

= 40 x 0.46 x 2.9 / 430 = 12% additional increase when running Dragon.

Now how do we increase Effective Element to get a larger additional increase, you might ask?!

Effective Element = Element x ElementSharpnessMod x ElementalCritMultiplier

So you finally see why to maximize element we are taking Elemental Crit. It gives us an additional multiplier to Effective Element which additionally increases the damage we can do. Using the same Rathalos example but with Crit Element we would see:

= [40 x 1.25] x 0.46 x 2.9 / 430 = 15% increase in damage from element.

This alongside Elemental Attack 3, Elemental Attack Boost, and Convert Element provides us with a way to hit the Maximum Element Cap and then to Surpass because of Convert Element Quirkiness.

Anyhow, long story short this is all only worth it when going for monsters weak to dragon in the images listed above. Arkveld has the lowest ratio in the game whereas the upcoming Zoh Shia will have one of the highest ratios while also applying bought. So keep this build around for the April update and enjoy smacking Rathian and Rathalos in the mean time.

But anyways. Altogether with Corrupted Mantle,Attack Up L, Element Attack Up, Self Improvement, Convert Element, Elemental Absorption, and Elemental Boost and our other skills our horn is looking like this (work in progress, image missing for some reason).

Maths for Resounding Wave:

Calculating Attack Ratio for Resounding Wave. The attack ratio is our Element Modifier Total / Total Motion Value.

For Resounding Wave this comes out to be 350/77 = 4.55.

We know the HitzoneRatio changes per monster.

What about Effective Element for this build. This build easily caps out on element when Convert procs. To find out Element value we divide our bloated element by 10. Normally my Artian is sitting at 400 element which gives Element value of 40. You can get this base higher through reinforcements (if desired).

Hitting cap we see the element raise to 760 for an element value of 76.

Finally my Effective Raw will be:

EffectiveRaw = 283 x 1.32 x 1.34 = 501

So altogether my damage increase from matching element to Zoh Shia hitzone will be and assuming a crit:

Effective Element = 76 x 1.15 (white sharp) x 1.25 (not sure if Crit Boost increases this mod) = 109.25
DMG Improvement from Element = 109.25 x 0.46 x 4.55 / 501 = 46% increase in damage from element.

Now these calculations are assuming Element stays locked at cap. Rumor has it that Convert Element actually adds on top of hitting cap. So assuming we’re already at cap and then proc Convert Element, we’d see our Element gaining 18 going from 76 to 94.

Effective Element = 94 x 1.15 x 1.25 = 135.13

DMG Improvement from Element = 135.13 x 0.46 x 4.55 / 501 = 56% increase in damage from element against Zoh Shia while still maintaining a competitive raw.