Unless you have been hiding underneath a rock concerning Monster Hunter World: Iceborne news for the past month, fans of the game know that the current "craze and hype" right now is grinding the new siege event quest for the "awakened" (I've heard others refer to them as "relics" too so I'll be using both terms interchangeably) weapons that serve as the quest rewards for slaying this new monster that will only be around until January 4th when the current winter festival comes to a close.
I'm not one of those guys who cracks the numbers and stats for every build and weapon class for optimization but I'm aware of what's the "meta" in most cases since I frequent the Monster Hunter reddit forums. As a casual fan of the game, I thought it would be fun to offer my two cents on what this monster, Safi'jiiva, and this siege quest bought to the table going forward.
Pros
The Safi'jiiva siege event is actually REALLY fun and straight-forward in compared to Kulve Taroth.
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| FYI you can "steal" aggro from another player who doesn't want it during this battle by performing a Flinch Shot to Safi'jiiva's head. Pretty helpful tip if someone other than the party's tank picks up the aggro from dealing the most DPS. |
With a full online lobby session of max 16 players, it's easy to clear this hunt within 1-2 runs with maximum rewards, given the fact that everyone is breaking all of Safi'jiiva's parts and fulfilling the siege objectives. The hunt itself brings back what players enjoyed about the Extreme Behemoth (Ecliptic Meteor destroying everything and anything in it's path - sorry folks, no FFXIV Jump emote can save you this time...) and Ancient Leshen (assigning aggro to the player dealing the highest amount of DPS, something that originated in Final Fantasy's Behemoth collaboration first and expanded in The Witcher III collaboration) quests and cranked it up to eleven.
Kulve's siege boiled down to merely chasing her around the locale, dropping boulders and laying down a wealth of explosions to wear her golden coat down for the "real" fight to begin. The Arch-Tempered version did little to change the redundancy of that fight outside of the changes in her new "Fury Mode" state that was triggered after breaking enough of her parts before the final phase of the battle. While I enjoyed that aspect of that fight and grinded the hell out of it in the base game to ultimately get everything I wanted from RNG Jesus, I can understand that not everyone was so fortunate in terms of the random rewards that spawned from that hunt.
The fight against Safi'jiiva is a three-tiered hunt where players hack away at Safi'jiiva's massive health pool until it's forced to retreat to the final tier of his lair for the final confrontation. There's no downtime in the action as players are constantly engaged with this massive new foe. So yeah, you don't have to stop to pick up tracks to get the research level up high enough and all of that other nonsense with the Kulve Taroth siege.
Players are GUARANTEED rewards for their specific weapon class following the slaying of Safi'jiiva.
After defeating Safi'jiiva, you are allowed to choose up to 3 weapons (maximum is 4 from max reward level tier) from the rewards pool. Most players aren't aware that you can change weapons before you claim the rewards and get rewards to that specific weapon class if you used a weapon that you already gotten all of the rewards you wanted from as the quest rewards always grant you with at least 2 weapons for the weapon class that you have equipped when you claim the rewards.
The Awakened weapons open the door on a lot more flexibility in terms of builds per weapon class.
Sure, there's going to be the "meta" and more optimized loadouts for speedrunners and high DPS hunting, but for people who just want to have their favorite skills without having to resort to unconventional means, such as running with two parts of the Uragaan armor set just for Guard Up skill (after 800+ hours in this game I FINALLY got one of those decorations to drop over the holiday, actually...) from the set bonus or three pieces of the Zora set for Artillery 5 set bonus if you're running Lance/Gunlance. Having one of those set pieces on the Safi'jiiva weapons allows players to run with better equipment instead of being forced to stay within the confines of specific "meta" (but at the same time extremely limiting in terms of attack and defense) builds to build towards having specific skills to benefit your unique play style.
I'm glad these weapons didn't do to the meta like how the Drachen armor set did to the base game following the Final Fantasy x Monster Hunter World collaboration. You couldn't blame players either as it was just that good versus everything else that was available to us at the time. That set pretty much dominated everything else that came afterward until the first few quests into Master Rank. Here, the relic weapons are pretty average in their bare-bones states but are easily within the top 3 weapons per class following player customizations and upgrades. I honestly don't see these weapons flat out replacing everything else in most other weapon trees but I'm sure they are going to be a popular choice going forward just for the 5 unique skills that can be loaded onto them.
There's an ongoing debate that these weapons will "dominate" the meta going forward, but the truth of the matter is that these weapons - even after all of their upgrades and/or customizations - aren't the best weapons in the game. Yes, they are going to be well sought after given their ability to make armor skill set building a lot more flexible, but I don't think they are going to replace the top 2-3 choices in every weapon tree in terms of raw power. These weapons are going to be highly situational at best in terms of being the best optimized options per weapon. For example, even with a loaded stock of Status Ailment buffs to a poison-type hammer, it doesn't even come remotely close to holding a candle to the best poison-type hammer in terms of poison damage from the Pukei-Pukei tree.
Cons
The Awakened weapons can only be "leveled up" via the Dracolite materials from slaying Safi'jiiva or redeeming unused weapons at the Elder Melder.
Each weapon can be leveled up until a maximum level of roughly 24 (I've seen some "evolve" and take their final forms earlier than this, so this number is tentative) but still being able to accumulate experience/"potential" for rarer skills to be randomized well after this level is obtained.
For example, some weapon classes have abilities that are so rare to pop up that you will be dumping countless materials hoping and praying that it comes up, such as the Zora Magdaros set bonus for Gunlances or the various song lists for Hunting Horns.
There's a fear among players that Safi'jiiva will be the only means to "level up" these weapons, thus creating the same cycle of redundancy that was created once Kulve Taroth came into the picture in the base game.
In Iceborne's case, I don't think this will be as big of a problem as it was in the base game as they already have an explanation in the lore that would make it feasible to have Safi'jiiva's materials pop up in the Guiding Lands. He's feeding off that energy just like a lot of the powerful monsters already there, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to limit relic weapons being leveled up there from maybe tempered monsters in the Guiding Lands. If you're already Master Rank 70-100+, you're already seeing the pick of the litter in that regard anyway, so that wouldn't be too much out of the norm out of your regular grinding in post-game for tier 4 decorations, Research Commission+ tickets (only from MR100+ optional quest rewards from what I've noticed), and various materials for augmentations that are exclusive to the Guiding Lands.
I think it would perfectly fair to allow at least the first two tiers of Dracolite materials to be farmed from the Guiding Lands with max region levels. Once you put the Rigid and Large Dracolite materials in there, it would get too easy to power up these unique weapons.
All I'm saying is that I don't want to see the player base go dead when the festivals and siege events aren't in rotation and that's the only thing players are flocking to when they are in rotation. It made the last few months of the base game prior to the release of the Iceborne expansion really hard to keep playing. At least in my experience, most of the people I enjoyed playing with had dropped the game and moved onto other stuff following the months when Kulve Taroth and the Arch-Tempered monsters weren't in rotation until Iceborne dropped since they grew tired with the endgame grind.
Safi'jiiva doesn't feel like a "true" final boss for Iceborne.
Shara Ishvalda served as the final boss for the Iceborne expansion's main story, but in the base game, we had the Arch-Tempered monsters to challenge us even further (with Arch-Tempered Nergigante serving as the "final boss" to the base game prior to the release of Iceborne) to serve as alternatives to the grind that Kulve Taroth forced upon us. I don't want to knock the final battle with Shara Ishvalda as I really enjoyed that fight in comparison to what came before it in the base game with Xeno'viija, but with the way how the story ended, it felt like that was only the tip of the iceberg as the Old Everwyrm stirred up even more trouble for the New World, especially with the ongoing changes within the Guiding Lands. It's hard to tell what Capcom is going to do here in 2020 with the months to come, but I hope they don't consider this "adult Xeno'viija" to be the final boss of Iceborne. This is what we should have gotten with Xeno'viija in the first place in my honest opinion. Or even with Zora Magdaros in some capacity.
When Safi just decides she's tired of your $#!# from r/MonsterHunterWorld
Don't get me wrong. Safi'jiiva isn't a walk in the park in the least and seems to know how to punish player mistakes INSTANTLY in most cases while flat out being ruthless in other encounters. All I'm saying that I hope this isn't the last bullet in the chamber that Capcom has in store for us.
I know the Monster Hunter series veterans are going to hate me keep saying this, but I'm really getting sick of the dragon-type monster designs. We have FAR too many dragons to fight in this game, even though I understand that the Elder Dragons are essential parts of this series' lore.
Safi'jiiva weapons are already dominating every hunt in online multiplayer
I understand that players want to show off their spoils from completing the grind to get what they wanted out of this siege event, but as I go back into my regular grind within the confines of the game's endgame questing, I'm already noticing that the bulk of the player base have flocked to these weapons as their go-to weapons. I can't say that I'm surprised to see that as that's what Capcom suspected what would happen when they released their extra developer diary about this siege. If that wasn't enough, players are rewarded for using them in the Safi'jiiva siege, so that's even more reason to use them above all others during this festival. That being said, I want to see how the player base reacts to this once the siege goes away after January 4th.
My only fear in that regard is that players only take the flexibility that the Safi'jiiva weapons bring to the table only to making more "meta" builds and not trying to spice things up with new creative, yet viable skills and continue hammering home this "one over all" mindset instead of trying new things to keep the game fresh. I personally keep a hammer of almost every element just to experiment with different builds and loadouts. I don't expect every player to do that, but I would hate to see this game come down to the same few weapons akin to how the Drachen armor set dominated armor builds at the end of the base game's shelf life.
Closing Thoughts
Ever since I got into Monster Hunter World and followed this game's life throughout it's initial launch to the current Iceborne expansion, the developers seem to have something devilish in mind when they give us new seemingly incredible weapons to take on whatever the game has to stand in our way, only to follow that up with something just as wicked and challenging to best shortly thereafter. After they gave us the Drachen armor set, they threw a monkey wrench into our plans with the Arch-Tempered Elder Dragons and the Ancient Leshen collaboration event quest. Players may think they are hot shit with their fancy new toys, but Capcom is probably going to show us that we're going to need every advantage possible when it comes to whatever Capcom has up their sleeves in the coming months.
In either case, I'm enjoying how this new monster is spicing things up in terms of how we've come to know the game at this point. Innovative, fresh new ideas is always a good thing when it comes to grind-heavy games like this to liven things up before they get too redundant.
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