I have at this point roughly 1.6k hours in a bunch of Monster Hunter games, though by and large the vast majority of them are in Generations and Generations Ultimate. I’ve never liked concerning myself with meta builds, certainly not in a cooperative PvE game that I regularly would play solo.

Now I’ll preface this by saying I’ve made some lifelong friends in the community, one of which I traveled halfway across the US to visit a few years ago. I don’t think the community is all bad, but I’ve found so many people who will do very little other than try to minmax DPS build via the current meta and shame others for not doing the same.

One not so bad instance I had was when I was trying to break into some higher tier armors. I was going into a fight that I figured would take a long time, knew was going to deal a decent bit of burst damage, could easily knock someone out after that burst was dealt, and most importantly had 3 people joining. Because of these factors, I went with a build where I would primarily support everyone else, then try to keep myself alive, then any time in between those priorities I would try to deal some damage. A large portion of my armor was kitted out to increase the effectiveness of my items, have them affect my teammates, make my items have chances to be reused, then I set up my inventory so I was carrying a lot of healing items and could craft more when necessary.

One of the players in that 4 man squad I remember specifically trying to shame me for bringing a lower damage weapon (chosen because it had more skill slots), having significantly lower armor rating than the others (because I only had mid game support armor, not late game), and for not dealing much damage (because I was trying to keep him and the others alive). I say this one wasn’t too bad because I also remember specifically that others in that very party pointing out that although I may not have had much armor it didn’t matter much since I didn’t engage much and they had noticed how much I was keeping them alive which would have otherwise failed us all the mission.

The worse situation I remember was getting sent DMs about how my build was bad, I was using awful skills, I had one particular armor set that was “a trap for new players”, and to “please just use [x] armor set”. They didn’t like I was using three skills each decided upon because they would fix reasons I kept getting combos interrupted then killed and told me none of them were necessary because “if you’re in the right spots then you won’t need any of those”,aka “git gud”. I could somewhat understand this mentality if we were in a PvP competitive setting, or if we were in a group together actively working to speedrun this monster, or if I had asked for feedback on my armor. This entire discussion came about because I was trying to share with the wider community: “hey I just found about this neat skill exclusive to this armor set!”