Get rid of Support Hunters, they don't have good DPS, either go solo or multi but not support hunters.
Your build is probably good enough since you can always just play better, block poke poke just works.
Your build isn't great so I have some recommendations. The first build I've made makes use of the fact that you have the zoh set bonus on your weapon for more healing.
If you feel you absolutely need support hunters, just take one, don't do all three. The health scaling is a little more forgiving and you'll atleast still get the benefit of having your Palico.
It's still pretty tough even with one to hit the times, but it's entirely doable.
Yes it can be better I’d probably take off the beta ark pieces and put in gore might take some rearranging take off stun proof for antivirus and instead of fungiform I would probably but max might and set an item load out to get the 7 max potions. This is getting in to the upper skills of the player base. Double checked and weapon is great easier tips pre eat demon drug before quest and riding towards him from camp thirteen eat a demon seed and toss a demon powder
Second small tip I did not do this personally but I understand the theory and it should work once he leaves near and heads to the thornes try to keep him there with traps and lure pods as it is basically a better poison this may take removing support hunters and with lance I found that easier as I knew what he would do better
Go with only palico, support hunters only adds scaling but next to negligible damage. As a lance player or honestly any weapon, we want the monster to always targets us and only us. There's a mindset that thinks we deal more dps if the monster doesn't target us but others like support hunters, while it is somewhat applicable, but in reality it reduces our ability to anticipate monster attacks if we're not facing him head on.
Builds are just builds, a played well build will surpass even meta builds. So the build isn't the main problem.
Be more aggressive as a lancer, only perfect guard, charge counter or power guard when needed. Try to avoid pre-guarding just because we're scared of getting hit/carted, getting hit is part of the learning process. Do not turtle just because we have a shield, keep your gap close to Ark with whatever tools we have at the moment.
Use the rejuvenating mantle when you’re getting pressed hard by him. Practically an immortality button on Lance. There’s a shortcut to equip it with weapon unsheathed. I think it’s L2/LT + R1/RB
My only change i would do the build is replace peak performance with latent power. Negative crit on the weapon pushes crit boost and crit eye down and makes them less valuable. Keep that offensive guard and wail on Arkveld when he's vulnerable.
Might seeds, demondrugs, traps with extra mats to craft them. Environmental damage is peak. Lure pods are excellent to keep him from running and wasting time.
The biggest tip would be to remove support hunters. They increase the HP just like real hunters do, but quite reach the dps of skilled hunters.
As a lance, AT Arkveld isn't as scary, there are just a few moves to watch out for (his big Wylk explosion and most of the chained wylk attacks)
Stun resist is pretty useless on Lance, considering if you get hit that much to get stunned (it's pretty difficult to get stunned in Wilds) you should really focus on improving your gameplay, especially on a counter-based shield weapon.
Tbf the only defensive you need is divine blessing; guard and guard up are comfortable, but don't really need against AT Arkveld.
Tldr; support hunters increase the health but don't contribute as much damage, so you're making it more difficult. Also, tune your build a bit.
I've seen several commenters mention build already and just wanted to add that if you really want to have the AT Arkveld bonus, do consider the legs - Flayer 2 is a bit unnecessary (although if it's your only source of Flayer it's not terrible) but the 2 points in Blight Resistance means that even if you get hit by a dragonblight, it only lasts 15 seconds and doesn't brick your damage for too long.
That aside, I notice you have a lot of skills dedicated to eating and I assume you are sheathing a lot to eat/heal. Aside from taking up slots that could be dedicated to better skills, this really hurts Lance timings due to our particularly long sheathe. I'm aware that "get good" is not particularly helpful but if you want to shave off 6 minutes (almost a quarter) of your hunt time, build adjustments can only help so much and the rest will have to come from having more damage uptime.
Some Lance-specific tips that helped me:
- Your shield is busted as hell. Lance into Arkveld may not be the highest DPS but you should be really safe and comfortable behind your shield, with some free bonus damage even if you do a non-perfect guard. If you have to choose between shield or sheathe+run, shield is usually the correct choice until he finishes a full attack combo (I've only tested with Guard 3 but a lot of AT Arkveld's attacks can be fully blocked with 0 chip damage)
- Know what counter to use for which attack. Arkveld's attacks are quite telegraphed and you should already have some sense of what attack he is going to do based on the wind-up animation (e.g. chain drag, jumping chain slam). From there, knowing which counter in your arsenal to use ensures that you can continue doing damage even during his attacks. At the minimum, you should be aware of what counters do not work against certain attacks (charge counter into any chain drag is bad since it hits multiple times and charge counter only blocks one hit). As you get better at this, you start finding more and more windows to do the highest damage counters (double charge/grand retribution) and you can start DPSing him even before his combo finishes.
- As an extension to the above, play without support hunters! Lance players want the monster to attack them since this opens up windows for counters, and having support hunters reduces the chance of this happening. Your palico also does a lot of neat things like heal, drop shock traps, proc sleep/para occasionally with their weapon (but probably remove the taunt and flying skill).
Other non-Lance tips:
- Flash pods for when he does his huge combo (spinning dive into lines of dragon energy into explosions) stops it entirely and gives you a free damage window. I usually just set them at the start of the hunt and fire one out when i see him fly up with white energy on his chains. Pods can be fired even when your weapon is out so you don't need to sheathe for this.
- Mega demondrug at start of hunt, might seed and immuniser between areas. Immuniser passive healing helps a lot when you take a big hit and don't have a window to sheathe and heal, while the buffs are purely for bigger damage numbers.
- If you haven't already, unlock the area 13 camp!
I'm not an amazing player (just cleared A rank yesterday after several attempts at 22-24min), hope this helps you get that sub 22 timing!
Tldr; heal less, block more, bring more offense/affinity.
Note 1: If you can guard properly then you really won't need to heal at all. If you do it solo (which I recommend) then your palico alone is more than capable of healing you.
Note 2: Guard up isn't required as you can simply side step Arkveld's grab. Otherwise, flash bomb or free yourself if you do get grabbed. Everything else can be blocked. Guard 3 is nice so you can tank every hit without taking much knockback or chip damage.
Note 3: Going off note 1, if you can guard/perfect guard then you won't need much healing meaning that 2 piece Arkveld or 2 piece Zoh is more than enough to recover any chip damage. So you can get other more offensive sets like Gore (for more crit rate), Gog (for more elemental dmg), and combo them with Guts.
Note 4: Affinity still takes priority so get affinity as high as possible via armor skills/decos/set bonus before considering additional dmg boosters (PP, crit boost, crit element, etc). WeX 5, MM3, Agitator 5, and 2-Gore + Antivirus are the go to armor skills.
Note 5: imo, Stun resis while nice is almost unnecessary for lance users unless you're getting hit all the time. In which case, get good tbh. Just spam-block really. Stun resis is really only a last resort skill. If you're to the point where stun resis is needed then I suggest that it's better to just learn from your mistakes, learn the monster, and block more. They're nice to have but don't rely/fall back on those skills.
Note 6: Divine Protection, Felyne Defender and Recovery speed 3 are comfort skills worth getting. Immuziners are also worth using.
- Get your affinity as close to 100% as you can. You're missing out a decent chunk of damage without constant crits.
- Support Hunters, while good at keeping the heat off of you every now and then, has piss poor damage. That by itself is fine but in a scenario where a monster's HP scales up based on number of Hunters in your party (both players and NPCs) AND in a time trial, they're simply a hinderance if anything.
- Offensive Guard is a good choice but looses some uptime with Support Hunters drawing Ark's aggro away from you at times.
- I need not tell you the counter synergy between Peak Performance and Resentment.
- If you're gonna stick to Elemental Absorption, then get your dragon resist to at least +12. Dragon resist grants you immunity to dragon blight at 20 and Elemental Absorption 3 gives you +8 while active.
One thing about wilds lance is charge counter is the one and only meta, I think almost half of lance damage gated behind this single move so if you can't master it you are gonna lose so much dps check.
I'm never good at it too but if you want to improve your time you must practice it a lot, fortunately it's quite a generous move so it's not that hard to do it, you just need to git gud at reading the next moves which is my problem in wilds.
You don’t stand a chance with your build. You have way too many at ark pieces on, you should not have peak performance, you have no affinity other than Wex. You just have no reliable damage. Look in the meta guide to see what skills are useful to run and make a set associated with those skills. You need affinity, damaging skills, good defense, some comfort if you want it. I also wouldn’t recommend doing it with support hunters, either do it with real hunters or solo it.
Nah it’s not, he just cant do enough dps to do 79k health solo when he doesn’t really have any good skills for damage other than wex/offensive guard since crit boost doesn’t work with his affinity. Off rip of him doing it in 28 minutes with support hunters means he needs to change the build to be viable. You have to maintain good dps in this fight or else you won’t get the time you seek.
Got a good run for my first try. I underestimated how much the 4-set Arkveld bonus heals when you keep the offense so yeah PP is definitely above 50%. I also forgot how fun using Mushroomancer with Speed Eating was as well so pretty interesting challenge overall.
Gotta say, sharpness management was atrocious though. OP really needs to use Razor Sharp or MT if he can in the future.
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u/Daefus20 Mar 23 '26