How Elemental Damage Works

Elemental Damage refers to secondary damage typing in addition to the physical damage of attacks from both monster and hunter attacks. What makes this damage unique is that it can be modified by investments in hunter gear and monsters’ latent weaknesses/resistances to each of the five Elemental Damage types: Fire, Water, Thunder, Ice, and Dragon. 

In the Monster Hunter series, each monster has a unique mixture of these weaknesses and resistances, ranging from Null to 3-Star Effectiveness (4-Stars for Physical Damage) across their body parts. These details can be found in the Hunter Notes in-game Physiology section.

This guide is written by PeanutWizard.

Most monsters in the game typically deal one or more types of elemental damage against hunters. Each Elemental type has a specific negative effect imparted upon hunters once enough damage buildup has occurred; these are referred to as Elemental Blights.

However, these effects can be mitigated or entirely avoided with investments in Elemental Resistance (having 20 or more of a Resistance to an Element will make you immune to the associated Blight) or Blight Resistance.

Blight Effects

Dragonblight will cause the hunter to deal no Dragon Element damage with their equipped weapon. It can be cured with a Nulberry.

Fireblight will leave a damage-over-time effect on the hunter. It can be cured by a Nulberry, rolling on the ground, or jumping into water.

Iceblight will cause a debuff that increases a hunter’s Stamina consumption for performing actions like dashing, attacking, and dodging. It can be cured with a Nulberry.

Thunderblightwill increase the odds for a hunter to be stunned by monster attacks. It can be cured with a Nulberry.

Waterblight will reduce a hunter’s stamina recovery rate. It can be cured with a Nulberry.

Elemental Damage from monster attacks can be increased or reduced by a hunter’s Elemental Resistance. A negative resistance will increase damage taken, while a positive value will decrease damage taken.

Additionally, there are many roads to raising your Elemental Resistances in Monster Hunter Wilds. Here are some prominent methods:

Armor Resistances

Most Armor in the game will affect your overall Elemental Resistance. Typically, if a monster is weak to an Element, its corresponding Armor set will reduce your Resistance to that Element, and vice versa.

Armor Skills/Decorations/Talismans

Some Armor sets have skills that will grant ranks in skills that increase Elemental Resistance, like the Fire Resistance skill. However, it is recommended to get these defensive stats from Decorations and devoted Resistance Talismans to increase your build diversity options.

Other Sources

Food

Cooking meals with vegetables will grant a timed buff to your Elemental Resistances, typically around 50 minutes if you use all the available ingredients (30 minutes base).

Hunting Horn Buffs

Some Hunting Horns will have songs or Echo Bubble effects that provide a variety of Elemental-related buffs like Blight Immunity and Elemental Resistance Up for a short period of time during a hunt.

IFirst things first, make sure you are using the weakness charts provided in-game to determine which Elemental weapon you should bring to hunt the monster(s) in question to maximize your damage output.

For example, if you were hunting Arkveld, you would find that it is quite weak to Dragon Element and thus equip a Dragon Element weapon. From there, you can increase the output in a variety of ways.

Primarily, this will come from upgrades on the weapon tree and investing in Decorations. Please note that Elemental Damage will scale with things like Sharpness and Affinity if you are using the Critical Element skill.

Making Sense Of The Elemental Damage Numbers on Weapons

Players new to the series may notice that the Elemental Damage stats have a seemingly large disparity between weapon types. To give an example, the difference in damage between this Great Sword and Dual Blades in the same relative position on their respective weapon tree looks quite stark.

However, these numbers take into account the hit rates of each weapon. The Great Sword hits less often than the Dual Blades, so its Elemental Damage per hit calculation is raised to compensate.

To see more skills and try out different loadouts, check out our Monster Hunter Wilds builder.

• Burst
• Charge Master
• Coalescence
• Convert Element
• Critical Element
• Elemental Absorption
• Handicraft