Last night I took on my first capture quest. I did this solo since it was before dinner and I wasn’t sure when I’d be suddenly called away to eat so didn’t want to involve friends, so I had to figure stuff out on my own.

My “Handler” was there to give advice but her advice seemed wrong. First she told me to grab the trap and tranq bombs from the supply chest, so I did. Then she said to find and fight the monster (one of those dodo looking rock-grabber things…google says Kulu-Ya-Ku) until it was weak. Check and Check. Once it was limping along, she told me to place the trap in its path. Did that. It stepping on the shock trap and was paralyzed by electricity. Then she said to throw tranq bombs at it to capture it. I threw all my tranq bombs at it, to no apparent effect. It either broke free from the trap or the trap expired, not sure which. The Handler, aka Captain Obvious, said “It’s broken free, you’ll have to trap it again.” but I only had the one trap. I forget what went down next but I wound up killing the Kulu-Ya-Ku and failing the quest.

Before trying again, I crafted extra traps and bombs. On my second try, the silly monster died before I could trap it. I dunno if I got a crit or what, but it never went into the limping stage. Quest Failed. Third time was the charm. It started similar to the first attempt. Trapping it, chucked tranq bombs at it, they did nothing and it broke free. This time I had more traps though. I fought it a little more, threw down a trap. It stepped in the trap and QUEST COMPLETED. Huh? So why am I throwing tranq bombs at it? I got the quest complete just using traps. I wonder if the Handler tells you the wrong order? Maybe I’m supposed to use tranq bombs THEN trap it?

I need to figure this out because for sure this one was frustrating. The good news was that each attempt was pretty quick.

After dinner I got social and loaded into a session with the AGE Squad. I started up the quest to take down Anjanath and almost immediately three other hunters joined me. It was a good thing too because in general I was having an “off” night and couldn’t seem to land any decent hits. The game does scale monsters to the number of players so that may have been part of it too. Whatever the reason, they were definitely carrying me in this hunt.

Then a Ratholos arrived and started fighting Anjanath. For a while the two of them duked it out and we were generally content to sit back and let that play out, but then Ratholos seemed to start taking an interest in us hunters. Somehow I remembered a tip I’d picked up from a YouTube vid. I loaded up a Dung Pod into my slinger (made from monster poo, of course) and flung it, hitting Ratholos right in the face. Disgusted, he flew off home to take a hot shower, leaving us to focus on Anjanath once again. I felt inexplicably good about this move…there’s so much happening in MHW that I watch videos to learn to do stuff but don’t retain much of it. Remembering that the scent of a Dung Pod will drive (some) monsters away felt good. Carrying out the attack and getting him right in the snout felt amazing.

And thanks to a lot of help from my friends, Anjanath was vanquished. Woohoo!

After that I returned the favor by jumping into someone else’s quest to defeat Barroth, that mud-flinging pain-in-the-butt. That battle went well too. The person completed their quest and I got the parts I needed to craft some new armor. Everybody wins!

So all in all, a good night of Monster Hunting.