New weapons and my opinion on them!

  Alright so with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate being out for a while and having used both the Insect Glaive and the Charge Blade I thought I'd write up a little sort of "review" of the weapons! So far I've enjoyed using both but there are a few things I don't really like about them. You may or may not agree with them but if you have your own opinion feel free to comment and tell us what you thought about the two new weapons! Alright let's get this started!

  The insect glaive is by far one of the simplest weapons to use! That is not an exaggeration it's ridiculously easy to use and it has high attack,three different buffs,and a kinsect that can not only get you the buffs but also do damage AS WELL as elemental damage! Plus you can pole vault yourself on top of monsters and mount them! So insect glaive is a pretty easy weapon for beginners right? Right! That being said though it is extremely difficult to master! I've seen many players spam their jump skill and try mounting the every living fertilized dung out of the monster not realizing that each time you mount it it's resistance to being mounted go up! So a true master of the weapon would choose specific times to mount the monster! I usually mount when I see a player is getting the crude knocked out of them or my team needs to heal up or set a trap! Mounting gives them time to do this and if you knock the monster down it gives them even MORE time to heal up or to wail on the beasts face! Another thing people don't understand is that it is important for you to have at least 2 buffs mainly the red and the white one or the orange and white one(especially if you are mounting)! If you don't know what these buffs do then let me list em out for you!

Red Essence: Increased attack as well as having on more attack added to each attack. A popular infinite combo loop goes like this: X-X-A-X-X-A-X-X-A-X-X-A and so on until the monster gets up or you run out of red essence

White Essence: Increases the hunters speed!

Orange Essence: Increases the hunters defense!

Green Essence: Restores some life!

  You can combine the essences if you have two of the spheres touching! If the white one is missing you won't get the double up! You can also get the triple up which means you have all three of the essences(Red,White,Orange) and you get Attack Up,Defense Up,Speed Up,Quake Resistance,Earplug,and so on! The downside is you HAVE TO keep obtaining essences which is a relative pain in the butt if you are going up against a really fast monster! Not to mention that the essences aren't always in the same place and will change when facing a different monster! Sometimes orange essence is found on the back sometimes it's on the front of the monster and sometimes it's on the leg! You have to either know the monster and where they are or try your luck and hope you remember where everything is! The buffs also don't last long so again you WILL have to refresh those essences! I stopped using the insect glaive due to the fact that I had to keep on refreshing the buffs and really didn't like that the jump wasn't a "true evasion" so you could still get fireballed out of thin air by a monster!

  Another thing I didn't like was the homing system for the kinsect which has you shoot out a ball of pheromones(I think) by aiming at the monster similar to the ranged weapons aiming system! This allows you to tag the monsters body part and effectively see what color essence is located their by the color of the smoke that surrounds it! The problem with this is one the aiming mechanic makes it so you are effectively standing their for a bit! A bit is long enough to get screwed over in monster hunter! Another thing is that sometimes the kinsect will just up and fly towards that direction causing you to have to recall it and try again! Every hunter knows that monsters only stand still when exhausted and even then they still move quite a bit! So this homing system is effectively useless except for figuring out which body part of said monster gives which essence! Also on some really fast monsters you won't always be able to dodge their attacks! This is where my love for SnS started to come back and I had missed blocking monsters attacks! So I switched over to our next weapon...

  The charge blade! The swiss army knife of the monster hunter universe! Want to block a few attacks with an enormous shield? You can! Want to chop up the monster with an over sized axe? You can! Want to have an ultimate attack that will devastate the monster and probably finish it off? YOU CAN! Want to switch between axe and sword and shield seamlessly while attacking? YOU CAN DO THAT! This weapon is a good combination of offense and defense...but it's not without it's drawbacks! Since the shield is basically the blade of the axe each time you block the sharpness level will decrease! This means you will not only have the sharpness decreasing from attacking the monster but blocking effectively decreases the sharpness as well! This is pretty bad if you don't have the skill speed sharpening skill because that means or a few seconds you are open for punishment! And we all know these monsters LOVE to punish us!

  Also as you attack with the sword and shield form you slowly charge up and will notice the bottles glowing yellow or red! Once it gets to red or starts blinking the words "Charge" your attacks tend to bounce off the monster! I barely noticed this and it is a bit of a downside! This means that you will have to put down your shield for a split second to charge and again...that's an opening! Use this at a bad time will leave you flying around and if you don't use this then you can't really attack because your attacks will bounce which leaves you open for an attack! But with those downsides comes one of the best trade offs! If you use the axe mode to discharge your phials and do your ultimate attack you can switch back to your sword and shield mode when you are charging up and charge up your axe! This will effectively empty your phials but you will notice a glowing red shield next to the phials! This means your shield is charged and when you switch to axe mode your entire axe will glow red or yellow! You only have a limited amount of time to use this and as time passes it will eventually fade to yellow and then disappear! What does this mean though? Well when you use your ultimate attack in axe mode you will deal even GREATER damage to the monster! You will effectively destroy that body part or inflict a huge amount of damage to it! This is perfect to use on trapped or knocked down monsters since if it lands...well...it'll be beautiful!

  So if the trade off worth it for the charge blade? I think so! Now I'm not using either of these weapons anymore since I remade my character into a gunner using the Heavy Bowgun but I just wanted to give you all my initial impression of these weapons! Hopefully you guys found this helpful and hopefully my sleepiness didn't cause me to put down any wrong information! If I did feel free to call me on it(politely please) and I will change it and give you the appropriate credit for helping me out! Thanks for reading and as always...happy hunting! :D

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