Monster Hunter Wilds High Rank Endgame: What to Do After the Credits Roll

The credits rolled and I had no idea what to do next

Monster Hunter games have always been bad at explaining the transition from story to endgame and Wilds is no different in this regard. The moment the Zoh Shia cutscene ends and High Rank unlocks, the training wheels come off and the game just sort of gestures vaguely at the world map.

Good luck.

No direction and no roadmap and just a map full of icons where I had no idea which ones mattered.

I fumbled around for about ten hours doing random optional quests without any real direction and I don't want that for you because it was a complete waste of time. Here's the actual priority order that I wish someone had given me from the start. Follow it and you'll waste way less time than I did.

First: unlock your Hunter Rank cap

Your HR is capped at certain points until you complete specific urgent quests and the game absolutely does not make this obvious. So many hunters waste time at caps without realizing it and I was one of them for a full Sunday of farming. The first cap is HR 8 after the story ends and beating the urgent quest will dump all your accumulated HR exp from story hunts and probably jump you straight to HR 20 plus which feels great. But then the next cap is at HR 29 and then HR 49 and then HR 99 for the final cap and each uncap unlocks new monsters and new armor tiers and new decoration slots that you absolutely want.

Don't put these off. I say this as someone who put them off and regretted it deeply. I spent a full Sunday farming Doshaguma at HR 8 cap wondering why my rank wasn't moving. The answer was I was still capped. Don't be me and just do the urgent quests because they're not even that hard and the payoff is immediate.

Tempered monsters are the actual endgame

Tempered monsters are where you farm decorations and decorations are where your real power comes from in High Rank. Tempered monsters deal more damage and have more HP but the real difference is they drop Feystones as quest rewards and Feystones are appraised into decorations that slot into your gear. Higher threat level tempered monsters drop better Feystones.

At threat level 1 you're looking at Chatacabra, Quematrice, and Congalala which drop Mysterious Feystones mostly giving rarity 5 to 6 decorations and these are fine for starting out but you'll outgrow them fast. Bump up to threat level 2 like Rathalos, Doshaguma, and Uth Duna and you get Gleaming Feystones with rarity 6 to 7 where your midgame power spike comes from. Then at threat level 3 it's tempered Arkveld, tempered Rey Dau, and tempered elder-tier monsters dropping Worn and Warped Feystones with rarity 7 to 8. That's where your best decorations live and that's what you should be targeting as soon as you can handle the fights.

Tempered investigations are by far the best farming method because investigation reward boxes have bonus Feystone slots that multiply your decoration income dramatically. Check the investigation board and filter for tempered and sort by purple reward boxes and prioritize multi-monster investigations because each monster adds its own reward boxes and more boxes means more decorations. A tempered investigation with two threat level 2 monsters and three purple boxes each gives you six chances at rarity 7 decorations per quest. Way better than optional quests where you get maybe one or two chances and it's not even close. So check your investigation board regularly and refresh it by gathering tracks during expeditions and always be running the best investigations you have access to.

Augmenting: the thing nobody explains

Once you uncap past HR 29 you can augment armor at the Smithy and the game says almost nothing about this feature that completely changes your survivability. Augmenting removes the upgrade level cap on a piece of armor, letting you push it past the normal max and this costs armor spheres plus Streamstones that drop from tempered monsters. The first augment on a chest piece costs a basic Streamstone and one heavy armor sphere and the second augment costs rarer Streamstones and more spheres. But you'll farm tempered monsters constantly anyway so Streamstones accumulate naturally without you even trying to farm them specifically.

Augmenting makes a huge difference and I learned this the hard way against tempered Arkveld when I kept getting one-shotted and couldn't figure out why. An augmented armor set with max upgrade levels will have about 80 to 100 more defense than the same set unaugmented. That's the difference between dying in one hit and surviving with a sliver of health. And that changes everything. So prioritize augmenting your chest and legs first since they contribute the most defense per slot and your hunts will get noticeably easier.

Weapon augmenting is separate and unlocks later around HR 50 and adds things like attack increase, affinity increase, defense bonus, or health regen on hit. The health regen augment is probably the most impactful single upgrade in the entire game because every hit heals you for a tiny amount that adds up over a long hunt. On weapons with high hit counts like Dual Blades or Bow you recover noticeable amounts of HP per combo and on slower weapons it's less impactful but still means you don't need to sheathe and potion for every chip of damage. Try going back to playing without health augment after getting used to it. You'll feel the difference on the first hunt.

Crown hunting if you care about achievements

Gold crown large and gold crown small monsters are different sizes of the same species and you get crowns recorded in your hunter notes and getting all crowns takes hundreds of hours so know what you're committing to before you start.

Certain event quests have increased crown chances and the music-themed quests specifically are the ones to prioritize when they're available. Check the event quest board during festivals for anything mentioning unusual sizes or special specimens because these quests have crown rates of about 12 percent per monster compared to the normal 2 percent and that's a massive difference. Measuring is faster than fighting so use the Ghillie Mantle to approach a monster and compare your hunter's height to the knee joint and for large crowns your hunter's head should be below the knee and for small crowns your hunter should be taller than the shoulder. Not exact science but after measuring twenty of the same monster you develop an eye for it and if you're unsure just fight it and the crown notification pops at the end screen.

Arena quests and layered armor

The arena at the Gathering Hub has preset loadout quests you can't bring your own gear to and they're timed and ranked and getting A rank on all arena quests unlocks the Brigade layered armor set plus a pendant. It's purely cosmetic but the Brigade set looks great layered over any armor and flexing it in multiplayer lobbies is practically required at this point. Arena quests are scaled for two players by default and the monster HP doesn't change if you're solo which makes solo arena runs genuinely challenging with some time requirements tight enough that you'll need near-perfect play. Bring a friend or accept that you're doing challenge runs and I still haven't gotten all A ranks. I'm not sure I ever will but that's fine and honestly I don't think most people do. There's a bunch of other stuff you could chase too but arena quests are a good place to start.

The actual endgame loop

The actual endgame loop of Monster Hunter Wilds, once you have your best sets and your augmented weapons and you're HR 100 plus, is simple and repetitive and that's the whole point of the game. So you log in and check the event quest board for anything new and you post or join tempered investigations for monsters you need Streamstones or decorations for and you meld bad decorations into new ones at the Elder Melder waiting for RNG to smile. You help lower ranked hunters with SOS flares because you remember being stuck on Arkveld for 11 attempts and someone helping you felt genuinely great. So you try a new weapon type because your main set is done and crafting a whole new build gives you something fresh to work toward. And you complain about decoration RNG. Everyone does and that shared suffering is practically part of the community identity.

Monster Hunter Wilds doesn't have a destination and it's not that kind of game and there probably never will be a finish line. It has a rhythm instead and the fun isn't reaching some endpoint. The fun is getting better and getting luckier and sometimes getting absolutely destroyed by a tempered monster you've killed forty times because you got careless and it taught you the same lesson again. And that's exactly why I keep coming back and probably always will. There's honestly nothing else quite like it and I mean that sincerely.

See you in the Forbidden Lands. I'll probably be there carting to something stupid.