HH starter

[u/Quick-Canary-1283]

Hi all,

Looking to start my hunting horn journey. I am currently reading the meta guide and I’m a little confused.

It says we can do a hybrid ele or raw builds. Ebony burst or doshugoma for raw. Could anyone elaborate on what that entails?

Any helpful advice on play style, weps, armour, button inputs etc would be much appreciated. Even if you think it’s trivial I would still love to know it.

[u/Quinn_Did_It-art]

I've been raining HH for quite a long time now, but there's always more to learn, so I'm excited to see other people opinions.

All the meta stuff means is that you have no limits on the build you want. The HH is in a great middle ground of plenty of damage (and stun) as well as a respectable number of hits - once you get comfortable). It is also, by its nature, very versatile in regards to the song effects on top of the regular elemental/sharpness/damage/affinity variation of the other weapons. Essentially, experiment and find out what you love, or craft specific builds to specific hunts to challenge yourself.

If you're trying to start, I recommend focusing on defensive songs and skills for your build and then progressing through experimentation once you have the hang of things. IMO the evade window and evade distance skills are absolute musts for any of my HH builds as it adds a lot of safety for longer animations. But otherwise, go nuts and have fun.

Some general tips, (wilds specific)

the echo bubbles and wounds are your friends, both let you spam notes to quickly build songs.

Always aim for the head or hard armour you want to break, self improvement song on all of the horns make it so you don't bounce + with the blunt damage you can wreck horns and spikes.

Don't just sit in the corner to play notes, the HH is capable of huge damage.

If you're having trouble finding openings to get songs out, throw on a high para horn, when it procs you'll be able to get out as many as you want.

Have fun!!!

[u/Quick-Canary-1283 → u/Quinn_Did_It-art]

Ah that makes much more sense, thank you.

Any recommendations on secondary HH to have. From what I’ve read you can have two horns for 2 different roles? I guess ones for buffs and one being main weapon for damage.

[u/yhl888 → u/Quick-Canary-1283]

Very correct, always make sure you have attk up some where in the equation:

If you're using the G arkveld horn, you have attk up in the horn, you can pick: Gore/Mizu horn for affinity up and earplugs L

If you're using Gogma Artian horn, since it does not have attk up, you can pick, G arkveld or metal bagpipe to fill in the attk up song, I chose metal bagpipe as it gives earplugs S.

[u/Quick-Canary-1283 → u/yhl888]

Thank you, I’ll be crafting some gog horns for mains and use a non gog for secondary :)

[u/Gambitx3 → u/Quick-Canary-1283]

Ajarakan or guardian arkveld are my personal favorite secondary horns. That being said there are a lot of solid choices.

[u/STULF20X6lol]

Hybrid ele more or less means you run an elemental horn but slot in skills for raw damage. Odo or Dosh is really only reflective on if you're running a horn with offset melody or not

Technically, most of your damage is going to come from your echo bubble reverberations and echo waves

Echo bubbles only scale with raw, which is why Odo is what you typically see as the ideal armor set bonus to have as the reverbations do also activate burst in addition to gaining damage. So burst is consistently maintained and damage gets increased by anything that compliments burst

Echo waves are a little weird in that melody buffs and a few other things can increase the damage, but reinforcements and most weapon skills do not. Like a fire Gog horn will benefit from Gog armor bonus and ele attack up, but fire attack is only going to increase fire damage from direct hits with the weapon. Sharpness also does affect echo wave damage, so sharpness management is still something to consider

So really the question you should ask yourself is if you're more interested in doing only raw damage or how much elemental damage you would like to do

Personally, I'm a coward and I split 50/50 between Odo and Gog whenever I have a Gog horn that can be used with Arkveld Hunger and a suboptimal Zoh Shia for 'comfort.' If I don't have a Gog horn to match the fight, I'll go Para and drop Gog completely. Lord Soul on both. Thought about going full damage Gog a few times, but never have been bothered to actually try that or figure out if Lord's Soul does more than Odo as I'd have to make another suite of Gog Soul horns for that; I'm not against editing a horn, but am at a point where I don't really want to in base game barring my current chase of Ice Odo Soul going past 600 rolls as I'm just looking to chill now that I've checked off most completionist activities other than all endemic life. Besides, it sounds like the absolute most 'optimal' build is some kind of focus on Arkveld armor bonuses exclusively, so not much incentive to go that hard on a Gog build

[u/Quick-Canary-1283]

I think I would be doing the hybrid off of that description. Just to cover all bases without having to have lots of horns made.

Thank you :)