Creatures

Each of our 32 Monster Hunter Rise hunt pages carries a hitzone table: the damage every body part takes from cutting, blunt and ammo attacks and from the five elements. Read one page and you learn one monster. Put all 32 side by side and a pattern falls out that no single page states: the roster sorts itself by how much a clean hit is worth.

That is the order this guide uses. Narwa the Allmother sits at the top because her abdomen takes 90 from a cutting weapon, the highest figure anywhere in our pages. Basarios sits at the bottom because nothing on it goes above 28. The number tells you what kind of fight you are in. A high value means the hunt rewards aiming at one spot. A low value means nowhere is soft, so the hunt is about staying on the monster rather than hitting it precisely.

How to read the ladder

Every hunt page rates each body part from 0 upward. A 65 head means a cutting weapon lands 65 percent of its damage there, and a 25 foreleg means the same swing lands 25. The ladder takes each monster's best cutting or blunt part and sorts by it. Element figures run lower, so a 30 is excellent, a 10 barely registers, and a 0 means the element does nothing on that monster. The immunity column lists ailments the page rates at zero stars, and the locale column follows the page's own spawn list. Two pages, Gore Magala and Malzeno, give physical values only, and Barioth has no table at all, so those three carry what their prose says instead.

Every large monster by its softest part

What the ladder tells you

The spread is wider than it looks. A hunter who has learned to land on Narwa's 90 abdomen is doing more than three times the work per swing of one hitting Basarios anywhere. That gap is why the same weapon feels fast on one hunt and hopeless on the next, and it is not a matter of monster size. Gaismagorm, the largest thing in Sunbreak, is fourth on the ladder, while Basarios, a mid-sized rock wyvern from the base game, is last.

The head is the softest part on 21 of the 30 monsters that publish a table, which is the boring default. The nine exceptions are the ones worth memorising. Narwa wants the abdomen, Gore Magala the antennae, Aurora Somnacanth the neck, Arzuros the rear, Royal Ludroth the mane for cutting weapons, Magnamalo the back once gas builds inside it, Espinas the legs, Basarios the tail tip for cutting and the legs for blunt, and Garangolm's arms tie its head for blunt damage. On those nine, the reflex to go for the face costs you real damage.

The bottom of the ladder is where our pages' advice changes character. Basarios, Espinas, Malzeno and the three Citadel monsters at 50 are the hunts where the pages stop talking about weak points and start talking about openings: Basarios softening its own body when it heats up, Espinas sleeping in the open, Garangolm coating its arms in fire and water that a Blast weapon can break off. When no part is soft, the fight is about when you hit, not where.

Which element to bring

Counting each monster's best element across the 29 pages that list them gives a census, and the census is not what the roster's reputation suggests. Fire leads with eight monsters, then Ice and Water with six each, Dragon with five and Thunder with four. The second column matters as much as the first: an element that is the best choice on one hunt is often a dead weight on the next.

Two things follow. Ice is the safest element to carry when you do not know what you will meet, because it is fully useless on only four monsters: Aurora Somnacanth, Gaismagorm, Kushala Daora and Lunagaron. Dragon is the opposite. It does nothing on 14 of the 30 tabled monsters, more than any other element, yet it is the best pick against Narwa the Allmother, Gaismagorm, Shagaru Magala and Mizutsune, four of the hunts a returning player spends the most time on. A Dragon weapon is a specialist's tool for the top of the ladder, not something to level for the roster.

Element choice is decisive on only three hunts. Rajang and Furious Rajang take 30 from Ice and 5 from the next best element, and Khezu takes 30 from Fire and 5 from Water. Those are 25-point margins. On three other hunts the choice barely exists: Arzuros takes 30 from both Fire and Thunder, Daimyo Hermitaur takes 35 from both, and Crimson Glow Valstrax takes 25 from four of the five. Everything else sits in the middle, where bringing the right physical damage type matters more than the perfect element.

One page argues with itself. The Shogun Ceanataur table gives Fire 35 on the head against Thunder 25, while the same page's strategy section tells you Thunder is its biggest weakness, and our Anomaly Research page repeats the Thunder advice for the afflicted version. We have kept both statements as written; bring either and you will not be wrong by much.

Which ailments to leave at home

Immunities cluster at the top of the roster. Twelve monsters cannot be exhausted, eleven cannot be paralysed, eleven cannot be put to sleep and ten cannot be poisoned. The five that also cannot be stunned are the fights where a Hammer's knockout game does not exist: Crimson Glow Valstrax, Rajang, Furious Rajang, Gaismagorm and Narwa the Allmother. Narwa goes one further and shrugs off Thunderblight as well, six immunities in all.

The reverse list is short and useful. Only a handful of monsters rate any ailment at three stars: Arzuros for Poison, Paralysis, Sleep and Exhaust all at once, Khezu, Daimyo Hermitaur and Shagaru Magala for Poison, Kushala Daora for Blast, Tetranadon for Paralysis, Seregios for Exhaust and Basarios for Sleep. Kushala's is the one to remember, because our elder dragons roundup adds that poison is also the only way to strip its wind aura.

Where the roster lives

Adding up the spawn lists on all 32 pages shows the Lava Caverns is the busiest map in the game, with 14 of our monsters passing through it, and the Shrine Ruins is second with 12. The two Sunbreak locales are quieter on our pages, five for the Citadel and three for the Jungle, partly because several Sunbreak pages name a quest rather than a map.

Two monsters roam everywhere. Rajang and Crimson Glow Valstrax appear in all five base-game maps, which is why both of their pages spend so long on quest lists. Six pages also mention the Arena as a venue: Barioth, Mizutsune, Rajang, Royal Ludroth, Tetranadon and Volvidon. Apex Zinogre is the only monster our pages tie to the Infernal Springs, the Rampage variant of the Shrine Ruins.

The Rise seventeen and the Sunbreak fifteen

Seventeen of our pages cover monsters from the base game and fifteen cover Sunbreak additions, and the split says something about where each half of the game keeps its difficulty. The base game's toughest entries are elder dragons and one apex: Narwa, Teostra, Kushala Daora, Crimson Glow Valstrax and Apex Zinogre all sit in the immunity table. Sunbreak's list is fuller of variants. Five of its fifteen are new coats on old monsters, Aurora Somnacanth, Magma Almudron, Pyre Rakna-Kadaki, Scorned Magnamalo and Furious Rajang, and every one of them swaps its parent's elemental profile. Magnamalo takes Water best and its Scorned form still does, but Rakna-Kadaki takes Ice best while the Pyre form takes Water, and Somnacanth's Aurora form takes Fire.

The other ten Sunbreak pages are monsters with no base-game version in our folder: Daimyo Hermitaur and Shogun Ceanataur, the two crabs; Seregios and Espinas, the two flying wyverns; the three lords of Elgado, Lunagaron, Garangolm and Malzeno; the Magala pair, Gore Magala and Shagaru Magala; and the expansion's final boss, Gaismagorm. Our Shagaru page notes that it is the matured form of Gore Magala and that Dragon weakens it most, which the table confirms at 30.

The two roundups that cover what the pages do not

Three elder dragons appear in Rise without a hunt page of their own: Chameleos, Wind Serpent Ibushi and Thunder Serpent Narwa. All three are described in the elder dragons list, alongside the seven that do have pages, with the unlock ranks our pages give: Kushala Daora opens at HR 30, Teostra at HR 40, Narwa the Allmother at HR 50 and Crimson Glow Valstrax at HR 100. That roundup also carries the rule that elder dragons cannot be ridden or captured without a Puppet Spider, a piece of endemic life worth pocketing before any of those hunts.

The second roundup is the Anomaly Research page, which walks through 31 afflicted monsters from Arzuros at Master Rank 10 to Almudron at Master Rank 50. Afflicted versions cannot be captured, hit harder and inflict Bloodblight, and the page's per-monster tips are the closest thing our folder has to hunt guides for monsters like Great Izuchi, Barroth, Nargacuga and Almudron that lack a page of their own.

Frequently asked questions

How many large monsters does the wiki cover?

Thirty-two have their own hunt page, 17 from the base game and 15 from Sunbreak. A further three elder dragons and the 31 afflicted variants are covered inside the two roundups above, and the smaller monsters you carve for materials are listed on the items guide.

Which monster is the strongest?

Our elder dragons roundup calls Gaismagorm the hardest fight in the whole game, and its own page describes a two-phase battle keyed to Fiorayne's signal. For the base game, Narwa the Allmother is the final boss and the only monster immune to six ailments. Both sit in the top four of the ladder, so neither is hard because it lacks weak spots. They are hard because of what they do to you.

Which monsters cannot be captured?

Every elder dragon, and every afflicted monster in Anomaly Research. That rules out capture on Teostra, Kushala Daora, Crimson Glow Valstrax, Narwa the Allmother, Malzeno, Shagaru Magala and Gaismagorm among our pages.

Which weapon should I bring?

Pick the physical type first from the ladder, since cutting and blunt values usually sit within five points of each other but ammo values often lag by 20 or more. Then pick the element from the census table. The weapons guide sorts all 14 types by how much they ask you to manage mid-fight, which is the other half of the choice. For the materials each monster drops and what they build, start at the Monster Hunter Rise hub.