How Convert Element Works

The damage you do in Monster Hunter can roughly be divided into two parts: Raw damage, which is based on your Attack stat, increased by skills like Attack Boost or Critical Boost, and is most important on slow, hard hitting weapons like the Great Sword; and Element damage, which is based on your element stat, boosted by skills like Fire Attack or Dragon Attack, and is usually more important on fast, quick weapons like the Dual Blades. Convert Element seems like it’s a nice skill for Element damage… but is it?

In-Game Description

The base description for Convert Element says:

• After taking elemental damage, temporarily grants you dragon element effects. (Cooldown after effect ends.)

The description for Level 1 Convert Element says:

• While active, deals extra dragon damage after dealing enough elemental damage. Slightly increases dragon attack.

Since Convert Element increases your Dragon damage, and is based on how much element damage you do, it may seem to be a great skill on fast weapons. But from our testing, the description of Convert Element is actually incorrect, and it doesn’t matter how much Dragon damage you do. Let me explain.

Activation and Effects

Like the description says, after you’re hit with enough elemental damage, the skill Convert Element will activate. You can tell it’s active because you’ll get a notification on the right side of the screen that “Convert Element has activated”, and your weapon will start to shine with red energy. Convert Element will now be active for 2 minutes. After this time, Convert Element will deactivate, and cannot activate again for 1.5 minutes.

Once Convert Element is active, you gain 80/120/180 visible Dragon attack if you have a Dragon-elemental weapon. This is a nice bonus that will help improve your damage on every attack, but it won’t be completely game changing; 100 visible Dragon attack means you’ll deal about 3 more damage per hit on the most Dragon-weak monsters, but oftentimes you’ll be lucky to get even one extra damage.

The real prize, though, is that every now and then, you’ll get a massive bit of extra damage—even if you don’t use a Dragon weapon! The extra damage you do has two parts. First, you’ll always deal a flat 150/200/280 damage. In addition to that, you’ll also deal an additional Dragon damage as if you had 600/800/1000 visible Dragon attack. With one point of Convert Element, this means you’ll usually do around 160 damage per activation—a really nice boost for a single skill point!

What’s surprising though is that, despite what the description says, the frequency of the extra damage does NOT care about how much element damage you do. So long as you have a tiny bit of Element, the extra damage from Dragon Attack will activate—and how frequently it activates depends on your raw damage, not your Element damage.

So how do we get the extra damage to activate? Well, it turns out Convert Element is treated like a status effect, just like Poison, Blast, or Sleep. Whenever you attack an enemy, you do a tiny bit of “status damage” to the enemy, and when this status damage exceed some threshold, BAM, you get the extra bit of damage.

Like every other status, every time the monster gets hit by the Convert Element activation, it builds up some resistance. So your first Convert Element explosion will probably happen straight away, but the second will take some time, and the third even longer…

And how much does the invisible status increase when you attack? Well, we’ve found it depends on only four things. These are:

• Your raw attack value (which you see on the pause screen)
• The actual attack you use (and its motion value; that is, how “strong” your attack is)
• Whether or not you land a critical hit (and the critical multiplier you have)
• Your level of Convert Element
  

Nothing else affects the buildup rate of Convert Element. This includes:

• Your element attack
• The monster’s hitzone values (that is, how “hard” the monster part is)
• Your weapon sharpness
• Weapon type

After some testing, we’ve found that if you do build up the status on the monster, this buildup is:

Buildup = RawAttack × MotionValue × CriticalMod × ConvertElementMod / 100

Where RawAttack is the attack value you have when you attack, the MotionValue is how strong your attack is, and the CriticalMod is 1 if you don’t land a critical, or the raw damage modifier if you do land a critical (this is 1.25 by default, but increases by 0.03 for every level of Critical Boost). ConvertElementMod has a value of 1.10/1.15/1.20 depending on your level of Convert Element.

Here’s an example. Say you’re using a Dragon-Elemental Great Sword with a total of 205 attack, you have 5 levels of Critical Boost, and one level of Convert Element. If you use your Lv. 2 Charged Slash (this attack has a MotionValue of 129) and land a critical hit, your buildup is:

Buildup = RawAttack × MotionValue × CriticalMod × ConvertElementMod / 100

         = 205 × 129 × 1.4 × 1.1 / 100

         = 407.25

The training room dummy has a Convert Element resistance of 500, which means, if you do this attack on the Training Dummy, you’ll need to land two hits to activate the bonus damage. On the other hand, if you use a Lv. 3 Charged Slash (MotionValue = 160) and everything else is the same:

Buildup = RawAttack × MotionValue × CriticalMod × ConvertElementMod / 100

         = 205 × 129 × 1.4 × 1.1 / 100

         = 505.12

This means you can activate Convert Element on your first attack on the Training Dummy! That’s a lot of extra damage for just one hit!

Since this buildup is based entirely on your raw attack and motion value, this means that Convert Element is better on raw-focused weapons and builds, like the Great Sword or Hammer, and is worse on element-focused weapons and builds, like the Dual Blades.

Convert Element has a bunch of other interesting quirks that I want to quickly speed through here:

• You don’t actually need to take damage for Convert Element to activate; a well timed Lance guard or Long Sword Foresight Slash can activate Convert Element without taking any damage! This could make it really good on these weapons.
• Not every attack actually builds up the Convert Element status, and this varies from weapon to weapon. For example, using Long Sword spirit attacks do not actually help Convert Element to build up. So be careful!
• The skill Dragon Attack, which is probably the best element-boosting skill for a Dragon weapon, doesn’t actually interact with Convert Element at all! It doesn’t boost the increase to your element stat, the damage from the activation, nor does it make the activation more frequent! Feel free to use Dragon Attack anyway, but don’t use it just because you think it’ll help boost Convert Element.
• In the game’s code, the monster’s resistance to Convert Element seems to be called SkillRyuki. Ryu means “Dragon” in Japanese, so it checks out!

Summary and Conclusions

Convert Element is a fascinating and potentially very powerful skill. If you can activate it reliably, you use an Element weapon, and you want to focus on raw damage, then Convert Element could be a massive boost to your overall damage! If you want, try it on a big, raw weapon like the Great Sword, or a blocking or dodging weapon like the Lance or the Long Sword. If you use any Element at all, it could be a massive boost to your damage!