Affinity is one of the most important modifiers for your weapons in Monster Hunter Wilds as it determines how often your attacks land as critical hits. However, unlike in most other RPGs, negative affinity does not mean you’re locked from dealing critical damage. Instead, you will dish out what’s often called negative critical hits. There’s a lot to unpack here, so our guide will break down how Affinity actually works in the game and how to increase it.
Monster Hunter Wilds Affinity Explanation
Affinity represents your weapon’s critical hit chance. At positive values, you gain a percentage chance to land a critical hit that deals bonus damage — indicated by a white line above your damage number. At negative values, you instead gain a chance to deal a weaker hit, often referred to as a ‘negative crit.’
By default, a positive critical hit deals 25% more raw damage. This bonus can be further increased with skills like Critical Boost. Meanwhile, negative Affinity applies a damage penalty when it triggers. That’s why, usually, weapons with negative Affinity have an absurd amount of raw to compensate for the penalty.
Affinity in Monster Hunter Wilds becomes even more valuable when you’re targeting weak spots, as stacking conditional bonuses lets you easily reach 100% Affinity. This is especially important for Dual Blades, Insect Glaive, Lance, Sword and Shield, and other fast-hitting weapons. They benefit more from consistent crits. Meanwhile, slower weapons like Hammer are given a bonus proc rate for critical hits, but they still won’t deal it as often as faster ones.
Important Skills to Increase Your Affinity
These are the skills that you can get from weapons, armor, and Decorations that will increase the amount of critical hits and chance you get. The skills are ordered based on general importance:
- Critical Eye: Unconditional Affinity buff. Easy to stack and reliable for reaching a high base crit chance.
- Weakness Exploit: Grants a large buff to Affinity when hitting weak points.
- Critical Boost: Does not increase Affinity, but increases crit damage. Essential once you’re already stacking high Affinity.
- Critical Draw: Temporary Affinity boost when doing an unsheathing attack. Great for sheathe-draw-based playstyles like Great Sword and Long Sword.
- Agitator: Grants Affinity when monsters are enraged, high uptime.
- Antivirus: Gain Affinity bonus after recovering from Frenzy. Pairs great with Gore Magala’s Tyranny set bonus.
- Maximum Might: Increases Affinity when Stamina is full. Can be hard to maintain, but very powerful for optimized play.
- Latent Power: Temporary Affinity buff after meeting combat conditions — after 120 seconds pass in combat or after taking 130 total damage, whichever comes first. Like Maximum Might, it’s less consistent for casual play but can be potent.
- Foray: Increases Attack and Affinity against Poisoned or Paralyzed monsters.
- Azure Bolt (Lagiacrus set bonus): Temporary Affinity bonus and can proc an extra Blast-like Thunder damage.
However, do note that when making Artian Gogma weapons, Affinity is less prioritized than other bonuses. Sharpness is the best status to have at EX levels because Artian Gogma has low White Sharpness. Then you can pick between Attack or Element/Status depending on your priority; Attack if you’re just focusing on raw damage, Element if you often hit good hitzones with fast moves. Affinity can be easily bumped up using Armor Skills, making it more efficient to fix through your build rather than dedicating weapon upgrades to it.
Last but not least, while min-maxing damage is very important for faster hunts, you should never neglect defensive skills. It’s better to clear a hunt in 25 minutes and get that Gem than having to retry it over and over again because you got one-hit!
