Artian Lance Endgame Builds & Armor Sets - Monster Hunter

Artian Lance Endgame Builds & Armor Sets - Monster Hunter

Table of Contents

• Intro
• Best Combos
• Progression
• Armor Sets
• Weapons
• Endgame Armor
• Artian Weapons
• Matchup-Dependant Changes
• Glossary
• Updates

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Intro

Intr

With that out of the way, hello. My name is Syltphademus, and I have never done this ever. My background is a lot of napkin math and way too much time spent looking at armor sets and skills and seeing if what people are saying is best is actually... best. Currently, this is what we've found to be true.

The meme is 100% true. Artian lances are miles ahead of any other lance. Even a bad one is probably better than all but maybe one or two. If you want to run a non-Artian lance, just run Gore and enjoy doing way less damage to T3 Tempered Monsters.

While these sets are designed around optimizing damage, they are still taking the 'average' player into account. If you're trying to optimize speed runs, there are other factors involved that will change the builds. Element and Blast are within 5% of each other, and depending on matchup may even be closer.

Massive credit goes to Dot_Execute (for creating a calculator and helping with tests), Zebra and Arcah for bringing to my attention Fulgur Anjanath, Sonna for doing a lot of initial testing before we had calculators, and Labbed for putting together the document. Come join us on the MH Gathering Hub discord if you want to join the craziness.

https://discord.com/invite/monsterhunter

Do note this is not a guide on how to play Lance. This assumes you at least know the basics.

There are plenty of Youtube guides out there that explain each move, how it works, and how to get to them (though don’t listen to them about combos there’s a lot of misinformation or just lack of knowledge and honestly our math is probably bad too so)

Best Combos

Welcome to the lazy answer: Mid thrust, mid thrust, mid thrust, triple poke, or MMM TT. This will serve you as a basic bread and butter, but the first image is the actual answer. Lance is about being aggressive and staying on the monster, getting as much uptime as possible. The better you know your kit, the better you will perform because you’ll start instinctively learning what moves to use in which situation.

For example, while using a pure raw Blast weapon, High Thrust, Wide Sweep, High Thrust, Charged Counter (no parry) beats out MMM TT by about 6%. And this was all that you used in the fight. But if you have to spend just 0.2 seconds on each combo to position yourself, MMM TT would win because that would be about 15 seconds spent over the course of the fight JUST repositioning, which could easily fit 4 spam combos and equal each other. If you spend any more time than that, MMM TT wins. As you can see, these answers get extremely complicated at an optimization level, so you can spend several hours learning each monsters moveset, punish windows, hit zone values, and how all of those works with different weapons and skills… Or just Y spam.

NOTE: Doing side hops for the first two Mid Thrusts (Where you move to the side and stab) is a slight DPS increase (~1%) based on our calcs so far, so you should do it, but you don’t have to.

Proof: Progression

You all have annoyed me enough that I’ve finally decided to do this. For the record, none of this has been mathed. This is just gut instinct and whatever ‘looks’ good at a glance. I’m separating armor and weapons as they are pretty divorced from each other and there is no armor set that ‘demands’ a particular weapon to be run and vice versa. None of these will take decos into account because I’m not going to ask you to farm decos for sets you’re gonna use for maybe 10 hunts total.

Armor Sets

Armor in low rank is pretty awful, especially in the first half. We’re gonna focus purely on survival (and looks) for now. If you have a piece that you prefer, whether because it’s pretty, or it has a skill you’d rather use instead, please feel free to sub it out. Honestly you could probably beat the game fairly easily naked if you knew what you were doing.

Early LR

There are literally 0 offensive skills you can run before we start dealing with the early Apex fights. This build gives you Divine Blessing 2, Free Meal 2 (gotta save those potions), and I just think the Quematrice Gloves look cool. You can sub any of these out for other pieces that your prefer or like, just make sure to upgrade them.

Just wear whatever until you’ve unlocked these pieces. More armor = more better.

Late LR

Finally we’re getting armor that has ACTUAL skills on it. Burst is an incredible skill for one point, and the G Ebony armor gives you 3 and 10 extra attack for the 2 and 4 piece set bonus respectively. While you can start getting early WEX here, you won’t have the affinity to really use it, so the flat attack is just more valuable. Udra chest is just really the best you’re gonna find right now, as you can get some use out of Resentment and I’m a sucker for Speed Eating.

Do note that this set has TERRIBLE elemental resists. If you’re struggling with taking too much damage, just swap out the legs and waist for whatever you prefer. My recommendation would be G Rath.

Early HR

Honestly if you’re good enough, you could just use the LR build and swap in the Chatacabra chest for a defense upgrade. But if you’re struggling, this should be enough to get you over the hump until you get to some real armor pieces.

Don’t worry about upgrading anything, we’re going to be swapping them out real quick.

It’s not listed here (because I forgot) but you should be able to make Chain Charm 1 and you should do so because Burst is good.

Pre-Apexes

At some point the game is going to say ‘hey, go fight Jin Dahaad for real this time’, and this is probably the best you can get before going in. In reality, this is also more to prep us for endgame, as the Fulgur helm is used in one of the primary endgame sets, so might as well grab them now. You can also make the Fulgur B gloves if you don’t want to have to make them later, but you do lose a point of Agitator. If you want to know why Lance is running Maximum Might, please see the notes for the endgame sets below.

If you lucked out on a Maximum Might deco or two, you can sub out the Fulgur chest for a G Rathalos chest and get WEX 2.

Pre-Gore

Coming off the Apexes, we can pick up three new pieces. This lets us cap MM without needing decos and gives us a better Burst 1 piece. If you luck out into a WEX deco you can slot in WEX 3.

This gives us Agi 5 (Agi 4 if using the B gloves), and the waist and boots are used in one of the endgame sets later.

You can swap some stuff out if you really hate MM or Agi, but this is going to be the most useful (cutting out grind) while providing the most damage and a good amount of defense for the upcoming fight.

If you can beat Gore, you can easily beat the new and improved Arkveld and start working on the endgame sets.

Weapons

I’mma be real with you, chief. Your weapon really doesn’t matter before you get to the slot machine that is Artian. Just make what you can that gives a damage and/or sharpness boost (preferably both). The correct HR climb is to grab a R6 Artian as soon as Tempered monsters are available and use that to climb to R7 Artian. That will be more than enough to clear the game and start taking on T3 Tempered monsters and get your R8. But since a lot of people apparently think T1 Tempered is going to be hard, here’s my suggestions.

A quick note about Guard and Guard Up. If you have played Lance before, or at least have seen any older Monster Hunter guides, most people will probably be curious about the lack of any Lances with Guard or Guard Up beyond the immediate early game in my recommendations below. Guard and Guard Up are nice utility skills, but the fact that Capcom made them Weapon skills instead of Armor skills really limits us.

Thanks to the wonderful magnificence that is Perfect and Power Guard, both skills are fairly unneeded as you progress through the story. At endgame, there’s certainly arguments to be made that running at least one level of either skill can have value, but that mainly lies in punish windows and optimization. The attacks that demand Guard or Guard Up are mainly reserved to some of the end game monsters, so while you’re beating on Rompolo and Congalala, that Guard skill could easily have been an extra 10% damage that’s just doing nothing for you.

On a personal level, I like running without Guard as it forces me to get better as a player, but if you want to run Guard and Guard Up, please do so. Your comfort is more important than my math. In a vacuum, I can’t tell what players will or will not be capable or comfortable with, so I have to go with the ‘best’ case scenario, as it is.

On the other hand, Offensive Guard is a wonder skill and is extremely easy to access, resulting in a 5/10/15% damage increase to both Raw AND Element. This is one of the highest damage multipliers in the game, and we have extremely high uptime on it. You do NOT need to Perfect Guard to trigger Offensive Guard, but you WILL always trigger Offensive Guard from a Perfect Guard.

Again, for the record, run what you want. Guard and Guard Up are not going to make you do more damage, but if they make you comfortable, you should use them. These are just suggestions, not rules. This is also true for the Artian weapons.

Early LR

Upgrade of starting lance.

Easy to do and happens fairly quickly.

A very solid lance that you can upgrade throughout the game. Gives very early Offensive Guard, but at a time where we can’t get as much out of it.

Another early game weapon with good raw and okay Sharpness.

Late LR

Upgrade of the previous Balahara lance

Fire squid lance. -15% affinity feels bad, but beefy raw and OFG 2 make up for it mathematically.

Early HR

Can make this pretty much as soon as you get into HR and is a decent upgrade that will get you into the late game.

Late HR

Crit Draw and Crit Status are troll, but you can get the parts pretty quickly and has decent enough stats if you really don’t like using a weapon with element.

Pretty much the final version of the lance we’ve used from the very beginning.

Good raw, good sharpness, good element, but has Guard :/ All jokes aside, will lose out to any OFG 3 lance except on crazy thunder matchups, but you’ll have to sharpen less.

Rarity 8 weapons

None. They’re all bad. Just go do Artian…

…okay fine I’ll put some up.

Easy enough to get since it only requires T1 tempered monsters

If you didn’t think I was going to put this here, you haven’t been paying attention. Desperately needs Razor Sharp.

It’s fine, but if you can make this you can make Rank 8 Artian, so just do that instead.

OFG 3 and decent stats. Also needs Razor Sharp. Requires T2 tempered.

Probably the best crafted lance we have, but see the Rey Dau lance

If I don’t put this here, people will ask why I didn’t. So I did, and now I can laugh that they didn’t read the section they specifically asked for.

Because someone asked me to (it’s actually pretty good for crafted, arguably the best, I’m just being obstinate)

It has Crit Boost, I guess?

But seriously. Just go Artian.

ENDGAME ARMOR

FulGore

The current hotness. Gore 2 pc grants Frenzy when fighting a large monster, which once cleared grants 15% affinity for 60 seconds. Antivirus raises this to 25% total. WEX gives us 30% baseline to make 55%.

Old school Lance players are probably seeing Maximum Might and losing their minds, but the Fulgur 2 pc gives us a second stamina bar. While that might not seem that important, MM doesn’t go away until you start losing the FIRST stamina bar, and we get enough stamina that most players will be able to keep MM up a good majority of the time. If you’re really struggling, the below build will be better for you.

So all told, we get 85% crit from our armor. As mentioned at the beginning, Artian is the new king, and it comes with 5% crit base for 90% crit after Frenzy. Agi 2 gives us an additional 5% during Enrage for a whopping 95% crit for over half the fight usually.

Throw in Corrupted Mantle for an extra 10-30% and we actually overcap a decent chunk, but Corrupted uptime is not that high unless you’re doing sub 5 min hunts, in which case there’s probably a super speedrunner build out there you could use instead.

We heavily overcap affinity on wounds, but wounds should be seen as bonuses as opposed to something you’re specifically trying to create. If they appear and you can hit them, great. That's free damage. But you shouldn’t stop hitting the weakest part of the monster to create them.

'But why not just go for an affinity base or reinforce for 100% affinity?' Because the math says that's worse. Long answer is we don't have enough baseline raw and element yet.

So at the level of affinity we're at, every point of damage is just higher value than that last bit of affinity..

No free slots for comfort. Coal can be swapped for any other skill of choice but Coal seems the best.

GorJin

Mostly for people thinking about trying or learning to speedrun, this set lets you utilize Resuscitate (10 raw while suffering from an ailment). Frenzy virus both before and after clearing counts as an ailment, so you get a free 10 raw at all times. 2 pc Jin gives you another 25 raw on a clash for a full minute, so if you’re already approaching the sub 5 minute category, this goes way up in value. On targets with at least 20 elemental hit zones, the Fulgore set will pull ahead unless you’re already approaching sub 3 minute fights.

MM 1 is better than Coal 2 for Ark, and better on all the other Apexes at ~40% uptime, give or take. If playing with MM without Fulgur stresses you, just run Coal 2.

This build has some flexibility in pieces based on your current decos, but the version above has the most 1 slots for flexibility/comfort.

GoreVeld

If you really hate either of the above options. Always worse, but don’t have to play around MM or fight times. Fairly comfy as well. Ignore the weapon skills.

Artian Weapons

If you’re going Blast or Raw, your decos are OFG 3+Handi/Razor Sharp+Handi/Crit Boost.

TL;DR - If going Element, go 3 attack bases, 1 sharpness, and 4 element. If going Raw/Status, go 3 attack bases, 1 sharpness, and 4 attack.

Welcome to the true endgame of Wilds. Artian weapons clearly outclass all other weapons, and while some crafted weapons can come close, Artian will still come out on top. Because of the new Armor and Weapon skill separation, your armor isn’t going to change that much when you swap to a different lance. The above is mostly a template to show the highest theoretical dps weapon. It is not fight specific, and other combinations of decorations may be better in a given fight.

For Lance, we have a heavy emphasis on Element right now, so optimally you will craft a Lance for each situation we can find ourselves in.

If you ONLY care about T3 tempered monsters and trying to optimize damage, then I would recommend the following:

• A Fire Lance with Attack bases and rolling 4 Attack and 1 Sharpness (Jin Dahaad and Gore, although a Fire Lance with Element rolls would be better)
• A Blast Lance that is the same (Arkveld)
• A Water, Thunder, and Ice Lance with Attack bases and rolling 4 Element and 1 Sharpness (Gore, Nu, Uth, and Rey)

Of course, for those who aren’t insane, you can just grab a Blast Lance and call it a day.

The gist of it is, think of the rolls this way:

• Sharpness: We need one. It’s mandatory. Two is fine.
• Affinity: No more than two as anything extra is wasted. Preferably 0.
• Element: Four is going element, zero if going raw/status
• Attack: Four if going raw/status, preferably zero if going element but there’s use cases of using an element weapon with four attack rolls on certain fights. (See above about T3 monsters)

We’re lucky (or unlucky?) Critical Element, Offensive Guard, Razor Sharp, and Element Attack are all combination skills, so while I used Element Attack as my secondary skill, you can use whatever you have, so long as the secondary skill is the same. Feel free to do any experimentation you like. If you want more Sharpness reinforces, go for it. This is just the peak, not the requirement.

I will reiterate what I wrote in the Progression section for people who skipped it, but Guard and Guard Up are damage losses outside of very specific situations. Thanks to Perfect Guard and Power Guard, it is very easy to negate the knockback of every attack in the game, and the few you can’t are usually easier to dodge. Chip damage is easily negated by the insane healing output of your Palico. As stated in the ‘Best Combos’ section, part of learning Lance is learning when to use which guard, so if you’re constantly dying to chip damage, you’re doing something wrong. As such, you’ll see that the Artian weapon does not run Guard or Guard Up. This is mathematically optimal for general play.

If it makes you more comfortable, then run Guard and Guard Up to taste. The best part of the Artian weapons is that they have the flexibility to do whatever you like. My recommendation would be that Offensive Guard and Razor Sharp/MT are non-negotiable, so you’re going to have to drop either Crit Boost, Crit Ele, or Element Attack in order to fit those skills in.

*PLEASE READ THIS NEXT SECTION SERIOUSLY

YOU NEED TO READ THIS IT'S IMPORTANT*

Matchup-Dependant Changes

In the matchup chart below you will see me list either 'Crit Boost' or 'Crit Ele'. Against those monsters, you can swap between the two decos for a damage increase. It's not usually big enough to probably even be noticeable, but there is a difference. When you run Crit Boost, you will lose one level of a skill. Ele Atk is the correct choice, so Razor Sharp 3, Offensive Guard 3, Ele Attack 2, Crit Boost 3 will be your weapon skills

Listed below is every repeatable* large monster, what element they are weak to, what part you should be aiming for, and whether Crit Boost or Crit Ele is more damage. Crit Boost is generally superior. Also included are a few notes because some monsters are weird (looking at you, Fulgur).

Per usual, everything at this stage is roughly within 5% of each other, and oftentimes is within 1% of each other. Unless you’re going full speedrun, the time it takes you to swap between all the weapons is probably going to be longer than the amount of time you’re going to save by swapping.

Glossary

MMM TT - Mid Thrust, Mid Thrust, Mid Thrust, Triple Thrust

WEX - Weakness Exploit

MM - Maximum Might

CB - Critical Boost

Crit Ele - Critical Element

Ele Atk - Fire/Water/Ice/Thunder/Dragon Attack

OFG - Offensive Guard

MT - Master’s Touch

RS - Runescape Razor Sharp

Aff - Affinity

Coal - Coalescence

Agi - Agitator

T1/2/3 - Tempered (tier) 1, 2, and 3. Refers to which monsters drop what materials

R1-8 - Rarity 1-8, referencing the ‘level’ system of weapons

Updates

• March 9: Definitely the first time this guide was updated I haven’t already changed it like 4 times or anything
• March 10: Added comments about raw artian weapons because I forget people don’t understand how status works (and who can blame them since I’m pretty sure Capcom doesn’t know how status works)
• March 16: Added a glossary

Note: All weapon and armor recommendations assume the most optimal DPS perspective for a generic endgame fight. Your mileage may vary based on monster movesets, gaps in uptime, and personal comfort with skill layouts. The document emphasizes Artian weapons as the peak option and provides alternatives for players who prefer other weapon families, but it strongly favors high-damage options with consistent uptime. The matchups section explains that you may swap decos to optimize for specific monsters, but this is not a universal swap guide.

End of Document Snippet (Images)

• Image references throughout are provided as visual complements to the described builds and sections. See the accompanying screenshots for detailed equipment layouts and stat distributions. The visuals show armor and weapon setups across Early LR, Late LR, Early HR, Late HR, Pre-Apexes, Pre-Gore, and Endgame configurations, including Artian weapons with their recommended decorations and skill combinations.

Visual References (Images embedded in the original document)

• Best Combos screenshot
• Progression overview screenshot
• Early LR/HR weapon layouts
• Pre-Apexes and Endgame armor visuals
• Endgame Armor (FulGore) visuals
• GorJin and GoreVeld setups
• Artian Weapons configuration (Skyscraper visual)
• Various weapon detail panels showing weapon details and sharpness bars

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Endnote

If you’re looking for a high-damage Lance endgame with strong uptime and flexible hardware (armor and weapon separation), Artian remains the pinnacle. The document emphasizes experimentation within safe boundaries and prioritizes sustained uptime, with a heavy focus on optimizing for T3 tempereds and apex encounters. While some alternatives exist for players who dislike certain mechanics (Guard/Guard Up, specific deco requirements), the Artian-centric approach provides a consistent path to high DPS across most endgame scenarios.