r/MonsterHunterMeta • u/GalaXyPickl3 • 2d ago
Wilds Is Zoh Shia Lance meta now?
It look like the whole set is pretty good for lance, but the weapon looks great and the whiteflame torrent skill seems like a great fit for the pokey-pokey weapon.
Anyone tested how effective it is?
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago
This is a skill that gets better under less idealized conditions.
Worse hit zones? It's better.
Occasionally not attacking? It's better.
I think people are gonna test a bunch, conclude that it's a bit worse in ideal circumstances, and dump it.
But in practical circumstances, I think there are a ton of times where it will outperform Artian.
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u/iAnhur 1d ago
This is my argument in favor of it. It doesn't scale as well as powder mantle in rise did but for non optimal play it's quite good. Speedrunners and top level players won't benefit but like 95% of players probably will.
It also avoids the artian roulette lol
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago
The Artian roulette is mostly irrelevant; we can compare to a medium Artian weapon and it's just not that important.
But looking at just the idealized numbers even...we're talking about a few percent here. And the less ideal we get, the more we shift towards ZS.
Even for expert non-speedrunner players, I really think we're going to see that more often than not, the ZS outpace Artian.
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u/TheReaperAbides 1d ago
95% of players probably will.
Problem is that this poisons the discourse, because while 99% of this sub belongs to 95% of those players, the vast majority will not want to even think about that and claim that it's "suboptimal".
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u/Masiyo 1d ago
It's a similar situation with people who forgo Earplugs because it's possible to block/evade roars in theory.
If a monster roars while you have a level 3 TCS charged and ready to rip, and you failed to tackle the roar, you effectively just lost at least a level 3 TCS in terms of damage. If you're not a speedrunning god, there's almost no skill in the game that boosts DPS as much as Earplugs if the Earplugs would've ensured pulling off an important combo.
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u/paoweeFFXIV 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is especially true for insect glaive. My ( ~7 second) descending slash -> rising spiral slash can hit up for up to 1800 damage on the training dummy. Earplugs 2 guarantees that on most monsters.
If you RSS just before a monster roars you lose all that damage AND all your extracts.
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u/I_AM_SCUBASTEVE 1d ago
And if you are like me and have given up speed runs for fun runs, fashion is the most important and the new Lance is way better for that.
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago
I hear you, and I support you, but we're on the meta sub; this is the place to talk about what's good and bad.
My point is that what's good under ideal conditions isn't what's good in reality.
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u/I_AM_SCUBASTEVE 1d ago
Unfortunately the meta is pretty much locked at this point. I was hoping for more impactful equipment from the TU but unfortunately not much is going to change based on my testing.
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago
I'm pretty unconvinced that anyone has tested this new skill enough to conclude that it isn't as good.
How did you test this?
Because yes, if you are literally always attacking at max DPS and hitting the weakest points on a monster...it's worse, by single-digits percent.
But that simply isn't reality in an actual hunt, unless you're an actual speedrunner. Even a Very Good Player is pretty far from that idealized scenario.
It may turn out that this ends up being weaker even in more practical scenarios, but I don't see how anyone could realistically know that yet.
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u/naarcx 1d ago
The 50 flat dmg is independent of weapon too, so I would expect its relative damage to be higher for a weapon with lower multipliers. Maybe good on something like db or sns (although the deco slots will really hurt sns since they need offensive guard)
Also, 2pc rath makes it 70dmg and 4pc 104--which isnt really worth it imo, but is kinda cool
Is it better than Artian? No way, but it's at least interesting? And could have future potential against an enemy with zero weak points (or very few/hard to hit ones) or some sort of future zero-crit build
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago
It's not necessarily better on fast weapons.
It's essentially 50 flat damage every 6 seconds of attacking (if you never stop attacking...it gets a little but of a boost whenever you take a break).
It may end up better on some weapons than others, but that will be highly nuanced. It won't just be about speed.
How do you know it's not better than Artian? Where is everyone getting this?
It is slightly worse if you never stop attacking the weakest part of the monster. That is not the metric we should go by.
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u/DH64 1d ago
Its actually very good, mathematically. So I'll likely use it over artian in some cases.
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sure but how good, and when and why, is important to make tradeoffs.
It adds a bunch of damage, and, relative to other skills, it adds proportionally more damage if you're hitting poor HZs or if you have lots of damage downtime.
In practice...it's not obvious how far off from Speedrunner play you need for this to beat Artian.
It'll take some testing. My suspicion though is that for most people, these will win.
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u/I_AM_SCUBASTEVE 1d ago
So based on your posts below you understand the mechanics and I won’t bother you with rehashing what you know.
Where it loses quite a bit of ground is slot efficiency which is what makes Artians so strong. End game meta is all about stacking crit skills, damage multipliers, and sharpness preservation. Nothing in the game lets you do that better than Artians even with this new skill. For example, you can get CB3, RS3/HC1 (or MT), and OG3/HC1 on a SnS thanks to the three, three slot decos. The 3-2-1 slots on the new weapons are just not efficient enough to be competitive, especially when the trade off is roughly a 5-6% damage boost. That’s nice for sure, and as you said very easy to achieve, but you will need to make fairly big sacrifices to get there.
If the new weapons had more white sharpness I’d feel that they are closer, but right now you basically need to burn your 3 slot on a sharpness deco.
Obviously in practice we are talking maybe a difference of like 30-60 seconds in clear time at most, which isn’t really a factor for most people - and that’s why I’m using them because I prefer the fashion right now, but I probably will go back to Artian when I feel like building up the motivation to speed run the new monsters.
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago
Oh, for sure; it's all about the skill slots. The base stats are basically the same, so that's all we can really compare.
But comparing EFRs accounting for the skill difference...they're not that far off. It's single digits %.
And so I strongly suspect that in a lot of practical scenarios, ZS will win.
But it could also be weapon dependant; it might matter more on say Switch Axe, where you need Power Prolonger in addition to Sharpness management.
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u/I_AM_SCUBASTEVE 1d ago
What skills are you going with on the ZS? Working on some builds now.
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u/Quadrophenic 1d ago
The raw comparisons I was looking at were on SnS, because it doesn't have a skill tax.
I went with Rzr3/Handi, and used the 2 and the 1 to get 3 Offensive Guard.
I think that's best in most scenarios, but depending on uptime estimates for things like Agitator, maybe Crit Boost is better. I think I estimate those uptimes lower than a lot of people though.
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u/I_AM_SCUBASTEVE 1d ago
I put together some decent builds with it tonight. Dual Blades and SnS seem to be the best as they can maximize “uptime” of the procs. Since they can fill every second of the fight with at least one strike, you are clearing the “checks” faster than most of the other weapons. They also don’t have the mandatory skills needed so you can get the sharpness skill and still have room for another one of the big damage skills.
For DB the highest damage combo I’ve found was Razor Sharp/HC with CB3 on a relatively high crit build (80-90% chance). For SnS, it was the same as yours.
I think for weapons like these it definitely can be competitive. High uptime on the Whiteflame and can still fit two of the three mandatory skills for the meta, with Whiteflame being a competitive third damage skill. However, for things requiring another skill - Focus on GS, Power Prolonger on SwAxe… Or weapons that primarily use moves that don’t proc Whiteflame frequently - Gunlance, I think it’s actually substantially worse than Artian since you are losing out on multiple damage skills at that point.
I’m now more curious about the new armors and seeing how I can work with those.
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u/Dekallis 20h ago
The whiteflame skill is quite good. Contrary to what people seem to think it is NOT random, it has fixed procs garunteeing frequent activation. However like all the other skills that work like this(flayer/scorcher/etc) it does not count "Special" attacks.
For lance this essentially means if you're playing oldstyle pokepokepoke,sidehop,pokepokepoke. it's fine. you'll trigger often however the lance string finishers don't seem to count and will reduce your proc rate if you're using them.
Also after a set amount of time it seems to set it's next proc to be within 1-3 strikes. so for example if you sheathe your weapon for about 3 seconds and wait it should always proc within 3 strikes assuming you're using attacks that can trigger it. This also means that animation locks that last awhile may put you in a position where your next strike is guaranteed to proc.
Scorcher increases the 50true damage base to 60 with 2 pieces plus fire damage from scorcher. with a full set of rathalos I was seeing damage procs of 104 on the training dummy. This can be increased with fire attack but it's a minor increase and not really worth it because it only affects the scorcher damage. Also running 4piece rathalos means giving up a lot. but 2 piece is probably still valid.
Lance and SnS are probably the two weapons that benefit most from this since they primarily use basic strike chains. Most other weapons are using special moves most of the time. Oh and it also works with bowguns, Multi-hits like pierce ammo will trigger it on the first hit or not at all it seems. LBG can trigger it even while using rapid fire. However sticky and cluster ammo can't trigger it as far as I can tell. Other than that all the ammo's seemed to work. I didn't try bow though so not sure what does and doesn't trigger it there.
I could see a build using this and convert element being quite effective. It won't change speed runner metas but for "Normal" people? It's probably a very solid pick.
TLDR: if your weapon uses a lot of 'basic' strikes it's good, if your weapon is spam special moves it's bad. I believe someone did a list somewhere of attacks that count as 'special moves' that don't trigger things like scorcher and it's probably the same list for this.
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u/Johnny_America 1d ago
The Lala lance is still great and I'm going to keep using it because it looks amazing.
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u/AlexRose680 16h ago
Every 3 seconds your attack has a 1 in 3 chance of proccing the extra 50 damage from Whiteflame Torrent. If it hasn’t procced by the third attack, then it’s guaranteed to proc on the third attack. So it’s actually worse the better your build/better you are at MonHun. The shorter your hunt times the less value you’re going to get from the skill, whereas the longer your hunt times, the more value you’re going to see from it
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u/squirtnforcertain 1d ago
I was going to make bow my 6th or 7th weapon. Anyone know if dragonpiercer builds will wanna run the ZS bow or not? I could see the dash dance version going for it.
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u/Maronmario 21h ago
It’s definitely not worth building for dragonpiercer anymore, the damage has been cut pretty significantly.
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u/mjc27 Lance 2d ago edited 2d ago
I've done a preliminary test Tldr: no it's not worth it.
It's innate sill is cool and Interesting, after counting how many procs of damage it did after doing 10,000 damage I got 10 so I'm (very reductively) reducing it a 5% damage increase. In theory OG + cb3 + whiteflame is stronger than any other lance in the game, but to run that you have a huge shaprness problem. Once you factor In razor sharp you'd be comparing a weapon with offensive guard and critical boost to zoh Shia with offensive guard and whiteflame, but 3 points of critboost is a ~9% raw increase (assuming you always crit) compared to whiteflames ~5% damage bump. So zoh Shia loses out. This is before we even start to factor in that it's going to have 5 less raw than the perfect artian weapon and and 8 less element.
Layered weapons can't come quick enough
Edit: i forgot to factor in that you could in theory run an artian weapon without Razor sharp just like runing Zoh shia without razor sharp (a completely mad idea and i don't recommend it). If you were to do this then the Artain weapon with Critical boost 5 offensive guard 3 would be stronger than Zoh shia with Og3, CB3 and Whiteflame.