Monster Hunter Wilds Endgame Guide: Tempered Monsters and Artian Weapons

Beating the main story in Monster Hunter Wilds is really just the warmup act. The credits roll, and then the actual game opens up, built around Tempered monsters, Artian weapons, and chasing better gear through dozens of hunts. The loop is simple once it clicks, but the game does a lousy job explaining how the pieces fit. You'll see new terms thrown around, like investigations, melding, and reinforcement, and very little of it gets spelled out.

Here is how the whole endgame works and where you should actually spend your time.

Unlocking High Rank and Tempered Investigations

When High Rank actually starts

You don't pick High Rank off a menu. It kicks in the moment you finish the final story mission, which is just called "Monster Hunter," the last boss of the low-rank campaign. Once it's done, the game hands you access to four-star quests and higher, and that is High Rank. From here on, almost everything you hunt scales up, the monsters hit a lot harder, and you start pulling better materials.

A quick heads-up, because it trips people up. Your Hunter Rank (HR) is locked behind story progress for a while. You can grind all you want, but the number won't climb past certain caps until you clear the next story beat. So if your HR feels stuck, that isn't a bug. Just keep pushing the main quests.

Hitting the tempered wall

Tempered monsters show up around HR 20, right after the mission "Wyvern Sparks and Rose Thorns," where you fight a Tempered Lala Barina. That's your first taste. After that, the map starts getting littered with these souped-up versions of normal monsters.

You can spot them easy. A Tempered monster has a purple border around its icon on the map, and the scoutflies that lead you to it glow blue instead of the usual green. They hit harder, they're meaner, and best of all, they drop better stuff. Tempered hunts are where the whole endgame economy lives, since they hand out the damaged weapon fragments you need for Artian gear, plus a steady drip of decorations.

The materials come in three rarities. Early on you'll pull rarity 6, then 7, and finally rarity 8, which glows orange and is the good stuff. Only the toughest tempered investigations cough up rarity 8, so there's a clear climb baked in.

How investigations work

Investigations are basically custom quests you can save and replay. Here's the flow. When you're out in a map, monsters roam around, and some have a little reward preview attached. If you spot one you want, you can start it on the spot as a Field Survey, or you can spend points to save it as an Investigation for later.

Saving is done through Alma's "Field Survey History" menu, and it costs a few hundred points. A saved investigation gives you three attempts, which is handy if you want to set something up and come back to it, or round up a couple of friends to knock it out together.

The real prize here is the Great Hunt. That's an investigation with two targets instead of one, and it pays out way more in rewards. If you see one of those pop up with a monster you need, grab it. It's basically a two-for-one on drops.

The hunter rank milestones that matter

A few HR numbers open doors, and they're worth knowing:

• HR 20 is when Tempered monsters start appearing.
• HR 41 unlocks the Tempered Apex monsters (things like Tempered Uth Duna, Jin Dahaad, and Nu Udra), lifts the HR cap, and opens up the first tier of decoration melding.
• HR 50 lets you meld the best Ancient Weapon Fragments, which break down into rarity 8 Artian parts.
• HR 100 unlocks a special mission that opens up the big endgame superboss.

So the stretch from HR 40 to 50 is where the endgame really opens up. Push to 41, then 50, and the gear options get a lot wider.

Artian Weapon Rolling and Stat Priorities

What Artian weapons are and why they're the goal

Artian weapons are the top-tier gear in the game, and the catch is that you don't just find them. You build them, and you get to pick a lot of how they turn out. Think of them like a kit you assemble from parts, then tune up with random bonuses. Done right, an Artian weapon beats pretty much every monster weapon in its class, which is why the whole endgame loop feeds into making them.

You don't farm a specific monster for these. You farm Tempered monsters for damaged parts, then combine those parts at the Smithy. It's a different pipeline than the usual "kill the big lizard, take its scales, forge its sword" routine.

Forging your first Artian

Head to Gemma at the Smithy and pick "Forge Artian Weapons." You need three Artian parts of the same rarity, and each weapon type wants a specific mix of part shapes. There are four shapes, Blade, Tube, Disc, and Device, and the recipes look like this:

• Great Sword: two Blade, one Tube
• Long Sword: one Blade, two Tube
• Sword & Shield: one Blade, one Tube, one Disc
• Dual Blades: two Blade, one Disc
• Hammer: two Disc, one Tube
• Hunting Horn: one Disc, two Device
• Lance: one Blade, two Disc
• Gunlance: two Disc, one Device
• Switch Axe: two Blade, one Device
• Charge Blade: one Blade, one Disc, one Device
• Insect Glaive: one Blade, one Tube, one Device
• Light Bowgun: one Tube, two Device
• Heavy Bowgun: one Disc, one Tube, one Device
• Bow: two Tube, one Device

Each part also carries an element and an infusion. The infusion is either Attack, which tacks on +5 raw damage, or Affinity, which gives +5% crit chance. So the parts you pick change the final weapon's stats in real time.

Here's the big rule on elements. If you use three parts with the same element, you get an element infusion bonus, and that's always the way to go for damage. If you mix three different elements, you end up with a raw weapon that has no element at all, and that's basically always worse. So pick a lane. Go all-in on fire, or water, or blast, whatever your target is weak to.

Reinforcing and the five roll types

Once forged, an Artian weapon isn't done. You can reinforce it up to five times, taking it from level 0 to level 5. Each level hands you one random bonus, and there are five types those bonuses can be:

• Attack: +5 raw damage, works on every weapon
• Affinity: +5% crit chance, works on every weapon
• Sharpness: +30 extra sharpness, melee weapons only
• Element: a boost to element or status, everything but bowguns
• Capacity: +1 ammo per clip, bowguns only

The rolls are locked in the moment you forge the weapon. They're decided ahead of time, not when you click reinforce. That detail matters a ton for rolling, covered down below.

Reinforcing eats special ore. You get it from Azuz through item trades and festival shares, or by smelting at the Oilwell Basin base camp, where you dump spare monster parts into the smelter and pull out ore. For rarity 7 and 8 weapons, expect to smelt a whole lot of Oricalcite. Maxing a weapon out costs about 50 Oricalcite, which works out to 15,000 upgrade points.

Stat priorities and what to chase

So what rolls do you actually want? For raw damage weapons, the community has more or less settled on a couple of patterns. Four Attack rolls plus one Sharpness is the most popular pick, since it piles on raw and keeps your sharpness bar from vanishing mid-fight. Pure Attack, all five rolls, gives you the absolute most raw, and that's the top pick for pure damage.

Affinity tends to be the weak link, because you can load up on crit through armor skills like Weakness Exploit way more easily than you can pile on raw. So most hunters treat affinity rolls as the leftover slot, not the goal. For elemental weapons, swap in Element rolls where you can, since elemental damage scales hard when you stack it.

Here's the sanity-saver, and it's worth repeating. The gap between a true god roll and a weapon that just hits four out of five of what you want is tiny, somewhere around 1 to 2% damage. You do not need the perfect five. If you land four good rolls, keep it, move on, and go hunt something. Chasing that last 1% will eat your evenings.

The save-scum trick

Because the reinforcement rolls are baked in at forge time, there's a clean way to fish for good ones without burning materials. The game uses a seed system, meaning the next weapon of a given type and rarity will always roll the same bonuses. So you can test-drive it cheap.

The method: forge a throwaway Artian of the same type and rarity as the one you want. It doesn't need the same element, since element doesn't change the rolls. Save your game, reinforce the dummy to max, and see what you got. If the rolls are bad, dismantle it and forge another dummy, and repeat until you hit a roll you like. The moment you get a good one, quit to the title screen without saving, reload, forge your real weapon, and reinforce it. It'll have the exact same rolls as the dummy did.

It's a little fiddly, yeah. But it saves a mountain of Oricalcite and Zenny, and it's how serious crafters chase their best gear.

Best Endgame Armor Sets by Role

Armor in Wilds leans on set bonuses. Equip two pieces of the same set and you get a bonus, four pieces and it gets stronger. Because of that, a lot of the strongest builds are mix-and-match, hitting a 4-piece bonus on one set and padding the last slot with a good off-piece. Here are the sets that carry the endgame, sorted by what they're good at.

The damage dealer, Gore Magala

If you ask the sweaty crowd what to wear, the answer is usually Gore Magala, specifically a four-piece set. The set bonus (called Black Eclipse, or Gore Magala's Tyranny) does something cheeky. It infects you with Frenzy on purpose.

That sounds bad, but the trick is that when you fight through and cleanse the Frenzy, you get a chunk of affinity back as a reward. Pair that with the Antivirus skill, which bumps the affinity you get from curing Frenzy, plus Coalescence, which spikes your affinity and element whenever a debuff gets removed, and you've got a setup that stays buffed almost the entire fight. It's the highest-damage option for a lot of weapons.

The catch is that it takes some babysitting. You're managing a status on yourself, and if you let Frenzy build too long it'll chew your health bar. So it rewards hunters who are on the ball.

The survivor, Guardian Arkveld

Not everyone wants to juggle a self-inflicted debuff. Guardian Arkveld is the comfort pick, and it's built around staying alive. Its set bonus restores health whenever you destroy a wound on a monster, which means a lifesteal effect you trigger just by playing normally and hitting wounds.

It also comes packed with good skills. Decimator and Flayer both make wound creation easier and more rewarding, so the lifesteal kicks in more often. Weakness Exploit and Partbreaker usually show up here too. For hunters who cart a lot, or anyone learning a tough fight, Guardian Arkveld buys you a ton of forgiveness. You give up some peak damage compared to Gore, but you actually get to finish your hunts.

A common move is running two pieces of Guardian Arkveld just for the sustain, then mixing in three pieces of a damage set. You get a little lifesteal without giving up much offense.

The fast-hitter, Ebony Odogaron

Ebony Odogaron is the Burst set. Its bonus (Ebony Odogaron's Power) kicks in at two pieces and scales up at four, and it's all about stacking the Burst skill, which bumps your damage every time you land rapid consecutive hits. That makes it a favorite for fast weapons, like Dual Blades, Sword & Shield, and Bow, anything that throws a flurry of hits.

The Guardian Ebony Odogaron variant is the one people chase, since its Burst Boost got buffed to give more juice per stack. If your weapon hits fast and often, this set cranks your damage without the Frenzy management that Gore demands.

The skills that show up everywhere

No matter which set you build around, a handful of skills are basically mandatory for endgame damage:

• Weakness Exploit (push for level 5) is your big crit driver, since hitting wounded weak points cranks your affinity.
• Critical Boost (level 5) makes those crits hit harder.
• Agitator pumps your attack and affinity whenever the monster is enraged, which is most of the fight.
• Maximum Might gives affinity when your stamina is full, great for weapons that don't chew stamina constantly.
• Burst keeps stacking damage on rapid hits.

Defensive and comfort skills matter too. Evade Distance, Divine Blessing, and Constitution all make your life easier, and for the hardest fights a little survivability goes a long way. A glass-cannon build that carts in two minutes does zero damage.

Mixing sets instead of going full

Going all five pieces of one set isn't always the play. The smartest builds usually stack a 4-piece set bonus and fill the fifth slot with whatever single piece gives the best skills and decoration slots for your build. The classic example is four Gore pieces for the Frenzy damage, plus one Guardian Arkveld piece for a sliver of sustain.

So don't stress about completing a full matching set. Look at what skills each piece hands you, what decoration slots it has, and build toward the skill list above. The armor you wear is really just a vehicle for those skills.

Farming Rare Decorations Efficiently

Decorations, or decos, are the little gems you slot into your armor and weapon to add skills. You can't buy the good ones, you mostly find them, and the rare ones are a big part of why people grind the endgame for hundreds of hours. Here's how to pull them without losing your mind.

Slot level beats rarity

First thing to understand, and it confuses everyone. A decoration's rarity number barely matters. What matters is its slot level. Decos come sized to fit specific slot levels, and the higher the slot level, the bigger and rarer the deco. A level 3 or level 4 slot deco is what you're really after, because those hold the strong skills.

So when you're hunting for decos, you're hunting for high-slot-level drops, not just shiny rarity numbers. Keep that in mind when a pile of rewards looks underwhelming.

Tempered investigations for drops

The straightforward way to get decos is to hunt Tempered monsters. The higher the tier of the tempered monster, the higher the slot level of the decorations it can drop. Tempered Rey Dau, Tempered Arkveld, and the Tempered Apex monsters are all good targets, because their reward pools reach into the high-slot-level decos.

The trick is to load up on investigations that list decorations as rewards. Scroll around the map, check which tempered hunts are advertising deco rewards, and save the ones that look juicy. Great Hunts, the two-target investigations, are gold here too, since they pay out more reward slots per run.

Jumping into other players' SOS flares is a fine way to farm as well, especially if you just want to grind while half-watching something. More hunts, more deco rolls.

The Melding Pot at Suja

If RNG is being cruel, the Melding Pot is your backup plan. Head to Suja, Peaks of Accord, and find Vio, the character sitting in the big cauldron. The Melding Pot lets you trade materials and Zenny for random decorations, which is a way to convert junk into useful gems.

There are a few melding options. The basic one rolls random decos for a pile of materials. Then there's Wyverian Melding, which is the same idea but lets you aim a little. The star of the show is Gold Melding, which uses Gold Melding Tickets to target rare decorations, and that's the most reliable route to the specific high-slot decos you actually want.

So your flow is to hunt tempered monsters for direct drops, and pour the leftovers and extra materials into the Melding Pot for more shots at rare decos. Done in combination, hunters pull well over a hundred decos an hour this way.

Gold Melding Tickets and Nightflower Pollen

Gold Melding Tickets are the rate-limiting thing, so they're worth chasing. You pick them up through festival shares and certain event activities, and you'll want to stockpile them for when you're gunning for a specific deco.

The other farming angle is Nightflower Pollen, which has its own gathering loop that feeds the decoration and melding economy. It's a side grind you can do between hunts, and it pads out your resource pile without costing you much time.

The short version: don't lean on one method. Tempered hunts give you direct drops and parts, the Melding Pot recycles your extras, and tickets plus pollen smooth out the dry stretches. Run all three and the deco collection fills up steady.

Preparing for the Toughest Tempered Fights

The endgame has a handful of fights that will absolutely paste you if you walk in unprepared. Tempered versions of monsters hit like trucks, the Tempered Apex fights are nastier still, and there are a couple of superboss-tier encounters past HR 100 that exist mostly to humble people. Walking in with the right prep is the difference between a clean kill and a cart in the first minute.

Know the hard fights

A few names come up over and over when hunters talk about walls. Tempered Arkveld is a big one, fast, aggressive, and happy to punish greedy swings. Tempered Gore Magala is the other main grind-wall, and its Frenzy-inflicting kit is rough if you aren't ready for it.

Then there are the Tempered Apex monsters, things like Tempered Uth Duna, Jin Dahaad, and Nu Udra, which unlock around HR 41. These hit harder and have more health than the standard tempered fare. And past HR 100, the special mission opens up the superboss Gogmazios, plus Arch-Tempered versions of certain monsters that are the toughest fights in the game. The nine-star tempered hunts are where people go to test their builds.

So when you see a purple-bordered monster you haven't fought tempered before, assume it's going to hurt, and prep like it will.

Load in the right items

Gear is only half the fight. Your item pouch matters a ton on the hard fights, and showing up under-stocked is a fast way to cart. Here's a solid loadout to bring:

• Max Potions for a big burst heal, way better than chugging Mega Potions when your health is low.
• Mega Potions as backup, plus the materials to craft more mid-hunt.
• Well-Done Steaks or rations to keep your stamina bar maxed, since a short stamina bar gets you killed on the hard fights.
• Dash Juice to slow stamina drain, which is huge for bowguns, bow, dual blades, and anything that dodges a lot.
• Flash Pods and Shock Traps to interrupt big moves and create openings.
• Barrel Bombs for when the monster is trapped or asleep.
• Dust of Life for emergency healing, and Nulberries or cleansers for blights.
• Antidotes or Herbal Medicine for poison-heavy fights.

The small things add up. A hunter who keeps their stamina full, traps at the right moment, and tops off with Max Potions survives fights that a glass-cannon with a bare pouch never will.

Play the fight, not your ego

On the hardest tempered fights, patience beats aggression. Monsters in this tier punish greedy combos hard, so mashing attacks when you should be dodging is how you spend the quest carted. Watch the monster first. Learn which moves leave an opening, and only commit to your big damage when the window is actually there.

Wound management matters more here too. Breaking wounds is free damage and, if you're wearing Guardian Arkveld, free healing. Focus your strikes on weak points and pop wounds whenever they show up. And if a fight is going sideways, there's no shame in falling back, recrafting, swapping a defensive deco, and going again. Dropping one offensive skill for Divine Blessing has saved more hunts than anyone admits.

The end-of-the-line fights

If you push all the way past HR 100, you hit the content that exists for the people who want to be tested. Gogmazios, the superboss from the special mission, is a long, punishing fight that wants a real build and real item prep, not a half-finished loadout. Arch-Tempered monsters are the top of the pile, souped-up versions of fights you already know, tuned to break hunters who got comfortable.

The thing to remember is that none of this is required to enjoy the game or feel strong. By the time you've got a full set of rarity 8 Artian weapons, a Gore or Guardian Arkveld armor build, and a pouch full of the right consumables, you can handle the vast majority of what the endgame throws at you. The superboss and arch-tempered stuff is there for when you want to push, and the rest of the tempered ladder is plenty rewarding on its own.

Last concrete tip before you head out. Always smelt your spare monster parts into ore at the Oilwell Basin camp after a hunt. That one habit keeps your Oricalcite topped up, which keeps your Artian weapons reinforcing, which keeps your damage climbing. It's a small loop, but it's the engine that turns every hunt into steady progress.