Monster Hunter: World – Guide for Fatalis

How to Beat Fatalis

• If you don’t want to read a long post, here’s the short version

Go watch some speedruns, they help a lot with learning. Watch lots of them. The slower speedruns are often better for the learning side of things.

Stop worrying about damage, and get a comfort build. Get skills and armor that will help you stay alive, thus learn more, as well as not be punished so hard which helps with your mental. Armor wise, the Gold Rathian and Kushala armor is good. Mix and match whatever suits your fancy. The main comfort skills I recommend are, Divine Blessing, Evade Window, Evade Extender, Speed Eating and Recovery UP which equals super mega potions (you heal a lot more and drink them instantly), and Health Boost. Some other notable ones are free meal, fortify, tool specialist, and heavy artillery (for the roaming ballista).

Stop committing to long animations, stay close to Fatty, and focus on actually learning the attacks. It’s likely that you have not really learned how to play MHW. You can ♥ your way through the entire game, whether that’s you squeezing on by or getting carried from other players, and thus you never learn. Here’s how to play MHW. Let the monster attack, dodge the attack, hit them in openings, repeat. It really is that simple. Stop spamming attacks, because the monster gets to spam attacks, you don’t. If you want to double, triple, quadruple your damage, then learn the openings and attack there.

• Now if you actually want some more in depth details, here we go.

So why are you struggling? Well!

Basically, new players come in, get the defender armor, get carried, don’t get punished or rewarded, they get to Fatalis, then die. You can get through the whole game by just brute force or sos flares and getting carried. You get to Fatty, and struggle. I hope to remedy that with this guide.

The Comfort Build: Skills

Now your build is going to vary a bit from weapon to weapon.

For example, Long Sword, Great Sword, and Hammer are going to build very similarly.

Whereas Dual Blades and bow have a focus on stamina economy.

Lance and Heavy Bowgun will make good use of the “Guard” skill, but you obviously wouldn’t run the guard skill on a weapon that has no guard or block ability.

Regardless of what weapon you are using, I highly recommend you go for a full comfort build that’s more suited to staying alive than doing damage. Having a comfort or stay alive type of build will make your mistakes much more forgiving, it will keep you alive longer which means you’ll be seeing the monster attack more and getting more practice in, and you’ll be dying less and feeling less frustrated. It makes no sense to try and put everything into damage when you’re dying every 2 minutes anyway, barely hitting the monster, and often times, I see players getting damage skills that adds very very little to their overall damage.

So what skills should I get?

• Divine Blessing – Gives you a chance to take less damage upon taking damage. This is a big one and it is awesome. Stops you from dying instantly to 1 or 3 unlucky attacks.
• Evade window – Gives you more invincibility frames (or iframes) when you perform a dodge or roll. If you don’t know, your normal roll without any evade window gives you 13 iframes from the very moment you start the roll or dodge. What does 13 iframes look like? Well, when you roll and your character sticks his/her left arm out, by the time the arm is extended, your iframes are gone. This means that your timing for iframing through attacks has to be very precise. This also means that you can’t iframe through some attacks because some attacks last longer than 13 frames. The barrel bomb in the training area is one example. It’s explosion damage frames last longer than 13 frames, so it’s impossible to dodge through the explosion without some evade window.
• Evade Extender – Extends the distance of your dodges or rolls. This makes a world of difference to your survivability. When you’re caught with your pants down, being able to cover a large distance very quickly is extremely useful. This is especially nice to have for weapons such as dual blades, or bow. Also it’s a bit goofy on Long Sword with the foresight slash.
• Health Boost – At level 3, this adds +50 Health to your character. By default, your character has 100 hp and stamina. Eating a meal can increase these stats, consuming certain items, hunting horn buffs, etc, can all increase these stats by up to 50, giving you 150, but as far as I understand it, those do not stack with each other. Health Boost is it’s own separate +50, so the max hp you can have is 200 HP. You won’t always have consumables, meals, or a hunting horn to buff your health, so having an extra 50 health no matter what, even when you die, will help you quite a bit.
• Recovery up – All sources of incoming healing, heal more. Fun fact, I got kicked from a Fatalis mission by a max level 999 who said I was cheating because my health regen augment on my weapon was “healing me too much” because he didn’t know that recovery up increases the healing from health augment. That was fun. If you combine Recovery up with Speed Eating, you will drink potions instantaneously whilst healing much more from each one. Mega potions become super megapotions.
• Free Meal – Gives a chance to not consume an item when you consume it, this does not work work for all consumables, but it does mean you get more healing, you use less resources, and you don’t have to return to camp to restock as much.
• Stun Resistance – at level 3, stops you from getting stunned entirely. If you get stunned, it’s almost certainly a death sentence. If you don’t know how stun works, basically if you get hit 3 times in quick succession, you will get stunned. Some attacks from certain monsters will stun you quite quickly though.
• Tool Specialist – Mantles come back faster. Very nice indeed.
• Handicraft – less sharpening. By the way, the damage loss from purple to white sharpness is minimal, so for the most part, just sharpen before you completely lose white sharpness. White to blue sharpness is a dramatic loss in damage.
• Fortify – When you die, gain damage and defense. Stacks up to 2 times. You might be dying a lot so, yeah, not a bad choice.
• Heavy Artillery – Increases the damage of artillery such as cannons, ballista, and roaming ballista. I recommend putting this on your mantles if possible. More on this later.
• Partbreaker – Head breaks are kinda important to this fight. AFter 2nd nova, his fire attacks all basically one shot without a head break. You can get 2 head breaks, each one nerfs his fire damage after 2nd nova.

If you don’t know how to farm decorations, I’ll show you in a minute.

The Comfort Build: Armor

As for the armor, look at some armor pieces that you can make. Look for armor that already comes with some good comfort skills on them. Feel free to mix and match for all your armor pieces. The gold rathian and kushala armor is very good, so look at those.

It’s up to you if you want to farm these armor pieces or just make the ones you can currently make and roll with that. You’re most likely not going to be able to have all of these comfort skills mentioned, and probably won’t max out too many of them either. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to farm. I also don’t recommend getting your total defence below 850 at the absolute minimum, which would be each armor piece giving you 170 defence each. Keep in mind, you can upgrade the defence of your armor pieces. If you’re around 1k defense, you’re good to go.

As far as resistances go, I ignore them completely. While getting certain resistances may save you in some scenarios, I’d much rather take any of those comfort skills than some fire resist so I can tank fireballs a bit better. Not getting hit is better than taking less damage when you get hit. Also I’m convinced that other than the nullification of elemental and blight effects on your characters, elemental resist does basically nothing regarding the damage you take. I never noticed a reasonable difference in how much damage I took whether I had fire resistance or not.

Though if your fire resistance is high enough (I think 30?) you won’t take fire damage, especially after the 2nd nova where he leaves fire all over the floor that ticks your hp. If you have health augment on your weapon, it nullifies that damage.

Farming Decorations

If you don’t have any decorations, you can farm level 1 and 2 decorations. As long as you are Hunter Rank 50 or higher. A high rank event quest called “The Greatest Jagras”. You’ll need some traps, a farcaster (though the farcaster isn’t 100% necessary), and if you have any mantles that reduce knockback such as vitality or rocksteady, those will be good options. Also some earplugs will be good if you don’t have rocksteady mantle, as rocksteady mantle nullifies monster roars.

Here’s how you do the Greatest Jagras farm.

Launch the mission at camp 1. There’s a high chance you’ll spawn somewhere else though, and if you’re near enemies and can’t fast travel, use the farcaster, and get to camp 1. If you don’t have farcasters, run away towards camp one or hide in a bush until the monsters lose sight of you, and then fast travel to camp 1. If the giant Jagras spots you, restart the mission.

As soon as you come out from camp 1, put on your mantle if you have one, and wait for the big jagras to kill and eat the aptonoth. This is actually 2 separate scripts, killing the aptonoth, then eating it, so be careful not to approach or attack it until it starts the eating animation.

While it’s eating, go up and place a trap. Start hitting it’s belly as much as possible. Then place a second trap and continue to hit it’s stomach. Stop attacking the stomach before the trap runs out.

What has happened here is that jagras has turned the aptonoth it ate into 30 decorations, and if we partbreak his belly, he will drop 15 of them. By using traps and hitting his belly, we can get his belly to 1 hp, ready to trip whenever we want to, since you can’t belly trip him while he’s in a trap. What you do is you let Jagras do his vomit attack where he throws 5 chunks out. Wherever these chunks land will be a white rock on the floor. Those are your decorations. Let him do this attack 3 times for a total of 15 decorations.

Then, hit his belly until he trips over and starts squirming. Go over to his mouth and he will drop more decorations. Pick them all up.

Once you have picked up all the white rocks you can find on the floor, return from quest, and that’s the farm. You can see all your decorations in the appraisal box. You should get about 30 decorations, but you might get less if you get hit by the vomit attack chunks which stop them from dropping the white rocks/decos on the floor, or if you just missed some.

Mantles

As for mantles, I recommend the vitality mantle and the rocksteady mantle. If you don’t know how to get mantles, google it, and the wiki will tell you or find a video tutorial. One thing to note is that when the wiki or the video says something like “talk to this npc”, and the npc either isn’t there or doesn’t give you the dialogue like the wiki says the npc should, try the npc over in astera instead of seliana, or vice versa, or try restarting, or try verifying that you’ve completed all the steps beforehand. Sometimes, you just need to spam the talk button as well and they’ll give it to you on the 10th try or something. It’s a bit weird, but you can figure it out, I believe in you. I also recommend getting the plus versions, as those allow you to put some decorations on the mantles. Whatever decorations you put on the mantles, they will only be active while you are wearing that mantle.

Leaning Your Build into Damage

I should maybe put this part after the “how to fight” part of this guide, but i’ll put it here for those are you that are a bit more spicy and wanna get some damage in.

If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re actually running out of time for the mission, that’s a good thing. You have enough skill to actually stay alive while fighting Fatalis. Well done. Now is probably the time to begin trading off some of those comfort skills for damage.

OR.. Keep the comfort build and start practicing more on openings and keep learning the attacks. But if you do decide to start getting some damage, well here we go.

The main 3 damage skills are critical eye, critical boost, and weakness exploit.

As long as you have those 3, you will be good to go. The other damage skills will be attack boost (usually just going to level 4 for the +5% affinity if you want it), agitator, and peak performance.

I will note however, there are plenty of videos out there explaining how these +x amount of attack actually works in regards to the calculations, but I’m not going to bother explaining that. Just know that it doesn’t add a massive amount to your damage, and you will most likely be better off running some comfort skills instead of squeezing that extra +9 attack.

Unless you are playing dual blades or bow, do not build into elemental damage. Basically. You technically can run it on some other weapons.

Here’s an oversimplified explanation of elemental damage vs raw. These are made up and exaggerated numbers for the sake of explaining the concept. Short version: percentage increase vs flat increase.

Say you have an elemental damage build. (and by “build” I mean you have “x element attack” skills). It adds a flat 20 to the damage number that comes out when you smack a monster. If you’re playing bow or dual blades, your damage number is quite low. Lets say with the bow, you deal 10 damage per hit. 10+20 is 30, you just tripled your damage, 200%.

Take that same build on something like Long Sword. Say the Longsword does 200 damage per hit. +20 to that is only 220, a 10% increase in damage.

Basically, other than the Alatreon nova mechanic, don’t bother with elemental damage and matching the monster’s elemental weakness to your weapon unless you’re playing low damage number weapons, such as bow and dual blades. For the higher damage number weapons, critical damage and affinity is a more consistent percentage increase in damage, so it works better with larger damage numbers.

I’m not an expert on this so if I got anything wrong, please let me know, but this is how it was explained to me a long time ago.

Food Meals

This one isn’t really necessary, but it’s definitely nice to have. I’m not going to give a tutorial on this as there are lots of other videos explaining how to get these meals, but basically, you can make custom meals so that you always have access to certain food skills.

The ones I have bothered to farm for was safeguard, which gives an extra life to the team, and tailored, which reduces the cooldown of mantles, similar to tool specialist.

Items

If you are carrying the ingredients required to craft an item, and you have that item in your radial menu for that item loadout, you can craft more of that item in the middle of the hunt. Ancient potions or max potions are very nice healing options and you can carry the ingredients for them, effectively letting you have 10’s of them if you have the ingredients.

If you’re not going to bother with the custom meals, go for whatever gives you the most hp and stamina. The chef’s choice is almost always the best option. The damage, defense, elemental resist, and elemental damage bonus is not very significant.

How to Play

There’s quite a bit of information so here we go. I’ll first talk about the general way you should be playing MHW, and how it applies to Fatalis, and then I’ll go over some general tips for the fight itself. Keep in mind, I main Long Sword, so some of the things I say might not directly apply to other weapons, but the information and philosophies are the same and will absolutely still help you even if you use a different weapon.

Stop spamming attacks

You don’t get to spam attacks, the monster does. Understand that you need to stop attacking in order to respond to the monster’s attack so you don’t get hit. It might seem quite obvious, but you’ll be amazed at how much you’re getting hit and dying, simply because you are attacking too much.

This is especially true for longsword, where you build stacks of damage by using foresight slash, which you can only perform after you do an attack, and the monster attacks you.

This is why I recommend Long Sword to newer players as well, it teaches you the basis of the game since the “playstyle” or “philosophy” of Longsword matches pretty well with the game: Don’t spam attacks. Stop attacking, and respond to the monster attacking you.

Avoid long animations

These are what get you killed. If the monster’s current attack is ending, you don’t have time to throw out the triple hit Spirit 3 attack with longsword, no matter how badly you want that roundslash for damage stacks. For longsword players, practice building stacks solely through foresight. No more spamming the ctrl button to do the entire spirit combo to land roundslash, it takes too long.

Be disciplined

Wait and see. When I was learning Fatalis, I would literally stop after every single input of any attack or movement, and stop and see what Fatalis was doing to see what I was able to do next. You have to wait and see what is coming so you know how you can react, whether you need to dodge or if you can continue attacking.

With Longsword, when you land the foresight slash, and you’re one button away from performing the roundslash and getting a damage stack, you still need to wait and see if you’re able to roundslash. It takes a good bit of discipline to not get greedy and just throw it out in hopes that you land it. Failure to do so can get you killed.

Then, if you have decided to throw out the roundslash, the direction you roundslash in matters quite a bit, as your character will continue in that direction after the roundslash. This small bit of movement is a big deal. I often try to roundslash away from Fatalis to either the left or right.

If you do a roundslash or helmbreaker, you also need to wait and consider if you can safely perform a special sheathe. Don’t do special sheathe unless you’re confident it won’t get you killed, as special sheathe locks your character in place, and the only way to move is the iai spirit slash, or the regular slash into a roll. You can get killed quite often from special sheathe. Return to the habits of the pre-Iceborne Long Sword Players and let your character sheathe the sword if necessary.

In short, stop spamming, don’t do long animations unless you know you have the opportunity to do so, and be disciplined.

Stay mobile

Constantly repositioning is part of the fight. Don’t just take whatever angle you have because you got behind him. Simply walk back into a good position, and continue fighting.

Another tip is to stay close to Fatty. If he moves back, you move with him. If he runs away, you run towards him. Being far from Fatalis makes him use much more dangerous attacks that can be quite hard to dodge. Even if he does do those longer range attacks, if you’re close to him, it’s much easier to dodge.

Learning the Attacks

So, we have a comfort build with the idea that we are not focusing on dealing as much dps as possible, and instead we are here to learn the attacks of Fatalis. In fact, if you just wanted to run around and watch Fatalis for several minutes or hours to learn all the telegraphs and attacks, and literally never hit him at all, that’s fine. It’s actually what I did. If you stare hard enough, focus hard enough on learning what each attack’s telegraph looks like at the very beginning of the animation, you will get to a point where you know what attack is coming out as soon as he starts the attack.

“It does not matter if you fire only once. Show me control.” -Kratos

Here are some examples!

The crotch spray that starts from his crotch and goes outward has a sound effect. It’s pretty hard to tell he’s doing this attack just by looking at his body, so the sound cue is very useful. The fire really does just spawn on top of you, so keep your ears open.

He has hand slams and a hand sweep. The hand slams are fast, too fast for a foresight and roundslash. But the sweep is slower and gives a bit more of an opening afterwards to do a foresight and roundslash. He will often do hand slams and finish off with the sweep at the end.

If he does a tail swipe, whichever shoulder he looks behind, the tail will swipe starting from the opposite side.

The shotgun blast has a hissing sound. You’re only safe from this attack if you’re extremely deep into his crotch or thigh area, or just far away enough in general, but if you have max level evade window, you can avoid the explosion by waiting for the hissing noise to end, and then hitting spacebar. Though this is pretty hard.

Sound cues and animations. Stare at them enough and you will learn them.

General Tips for Fatalis

Watch some speed runs.

Actually this goes for every monster. They help a lot with learning and finding out the openings for some big damage opportunities. I actually recommend watching the slower speed runs as they’re usually better for learning. This piece of advice actually applies to any monster with any weapon.

Don’t do the ghillie cannon strategy unless you’re really dying to reach that cutscene.

I think you’re better off to just learn the fight. Also, the damage isn’t great, and if you’re playing a weapon like longsword, it’s much better to get the artillery knockdown using the roaming ballista with heavy artillery 2 equipped since you’ll likely have 2 or 3 stacks as well as agitator proc’d.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Fatalis has a heavy artillery damage threshold. When you do enough damage with the cannons, ballista, or roaming ballista, Fatalis will get knocked down to the floor, and you get to temporarily smack him for free.

Getting the knockdown at the beginning of the fight as a longsword means I won’t deal any damage since I don’t have my Long Sword damage stacks. It’s a bit of a waste. Also, you can actually knockdown Fatalis twice, maybe even 3 times utilizing all the artillery on the map, but past the first knockdown, it’s hardly worth it. As a full team, your whole team will possibly miss out on damage for similar reasons, or if they take too long to come off the wingdrakes at the start of the mission.

Dragon pods.

2 Dragon Pods on Fatalis will cause him to recoil back. Note that these only register if you hit him while he’s in an attack animation. Other animations such as him flinching, being knocked back, recoiling, or doing a pin attack do not count and hitting him with a pod during those animations will not count.

Keep Fatalis “primed” with 1 pod and keep pods on you whenever possible so that you can flinch him in an emergency to save yourself or a teammate.

Fatalis has 2 modes, one where he’s standing, and the other where he’s on all 4’s.

His attacks change as he goes from one to another, but where this really matters is wallbanging. If you try to wallbang Fatalis while he’s on his hind legs, he will simply go down to all 4’s. This also counts as one of the 3 chances you get to “flinch” or “turn” monsters before they enrage. Once Fatalis is on all 4’s, if you then try to wallbang him, he will run forward, possibly hit a wall, take massive damage to his head, and become enraged.

If Fatalis is in the air, and he decides to target a player that is hiding in a smoke bomb, he will land on the floor and look around.

This is a good way to stop him from flying, as he’s very hard to hit and does some annoying attacks. Take note that smoke bombs are not always safe and can sometimes still decide to attack you while you are in the smoke if other players are not in smokes. If everyone is in a smoke, Fatalis SHOULD, 99% of the time, land on the floor.

1st Nova:

As soon as the fire ends and you are able to leave the iron curtain, grab the binders next to the wall. We can use this after the 2nd nova.

After the first nova, Fatalis will fly back. A good strategy is to throw a smoke on the roaming ballista, and make sure you have heavy artillery. Fatalis will land on the floor, and you can attack him almost completely for free on the roaming ballista while you’re smoked. If you land about 80% of shots on the chest with agitator and heavy artillery and tenderized, you will get the knockdown.

If you have teammates, and they don’t get in a smoke bomb, and Fatalis decides to target them, well, he’ll continue flying for a while and it’s rather annoying. Also if you’re in a smoke bomb, but your teammates aren’t, Fatalis can target you through the smoke and hit you anyway.

2nd Nova:

As soon as the gates drop, go to the right where the ballista is in front of the 2nd binder. As soon as Fatalis turns/begins his attack after the big roar/energy wave thing, bind him and he will fall out of the air. If he targets you, his head will land nicely on the ramp in front of the ballista. If you’re coordinating with your team, the binder goes to bind, the other 3 players simply go to the ramp as soon as the gates drop from the 2nd nova.

Use the 2nd binder whenever suits your fancy. Use it for head damage if you’re struggling to get that.

Also, after the 2nd nova, Fatalis’s fire attacks will be stronger based on how many head breaks you have done beforehand. If you have not gotten any head breaks by this point, his fire attacks will basically one shot. If you’ve gotten 1 head break, his fire attacks will be weaker, and if you have 2 head breaks, they will be back to normal. This is why getting head damage is so important on Fatalis. When he’s on all 4’s that’s your opportunity to get head damage. 1 hit on the head is easily worth 20 on the body.

And Lastly, NEVER take your eyes off Fatalis.

Even if you’re far away for whatever reason, when you look away is when he will kill you.