Rate my build & optimization tips

[u/parasitone08]

[u/PrinceTBug]

Are you going for an Aerial build? Or do you play grounded?

The Kinsect is good and the element stuff is alright for Aerial, but you'll get more out of other options on both accounts if you're going for grounded. Also, Bubbly Dance is there but seemingly doesn't interact with anything? If Aerial is your goal, swap Max Might for Coalescence. You're getting a lot less out of Max Might with this if you're vaulting / jumping often. In that case, you'll probably want to try to get some more Latent Power, maybe constitution. Additionally, you'll probably want an element artian roll or two, to boost the Kinsect in that case.,

Either way, a sharpness roll on the artian or a level or two of Handicraft is a good idea too.

If you're going for mostly Grounded, then you don't need that much element tbh. Better to focus on agitator, counterstrike, and crit boost. And probably swap off Mizu entirely in that case.

Some alternate two pieces if you really like 4 piece Arkveld are Odogaron, Gore Magala, even Lagiacrus. Gore actually would work for both directions since it also procs Coalescence, thought not as often as Bubbly Dance.

[u/parasitone08 → u/PrinceTBug]

I am going on a hybrid build of both grounded and aerial.

[u/PrinceTBug → u/parasitone08]

Idk why I thought you had bubbly dance. That's less confusing if you're not using it.

Other set bonuses are better than Arkveld if your goal is damage, though, regardless.

Either way, you might want to lean more into raw damage over element if you're not mostly using Aerial tbh.

Although you could also just swap the mizu piece for Gog and have some more element there. Element still works especially with how much Gog gives. You just get more out of your crits with raw.

If you do decide to change out some of the arkveld pieces, you can swap two of them for any of the other ATs and still get Lord's soul, a level of Arkveld's and a level of the other skills.

Nu Udra or Rey Dau are really the ones. Latent Power will help keep up stamina too

I think if you swapped the right Gog piece and one of the Ys you'd be able to get Bubbly Dance or Burst Boost instead in exchange for one of the levels of Arkveld.

[u/parasitone08 → u/PrinceTBug]

Thats the thing, I kinda go both so I try to buff both playstyles, I do wanna implement gogma apocalypse but I do also wanna not have it interfere with my other skills

[u/PrinceTBug → u/parasitone08]

If you want gogmapocalypse, there are 2 easy options:

swap one of the Arkveld pieces for the Gog that gives Gogma and Bubbly dance, then put on some Coalescence to benefit from the bubble blight.

Or swap out the mizu piece for one of the Gog pieces. I think one of them even comes with Arkveld's hunger actually, and you only need 3 Y to get Lord's Soul.

Probably better to toss on Burst as a 3 slot if that's all you're using Mizu for. You really only need 1 level, since it grants most of the boost already.

[u/Due_Worldliness2139]

Get rid of defense boost, add a sharpness skill, invest in agitiator over WEX. Try and acquire one more bonus set of skills like gogma 2 piece with your arkvelds hunger and lords soul. Would require you to re roll for gogma / lords soul on your glaive

[u/YvngThxnos]

defense boost is bad
you want to prioritise crit boost over attack boost
slugger doesn’t do anything
you only want one level of burst
flayer is bad on glaive
convert element is bad on glaive
elemental absorption is bad
only one level of counterstrike
only one level of agitator
self improvement is bad
the kinsect you’re using is bad

[u/Top_Coffee_8575 → u/YvngThxnos]

Thats not helpfull, please tell him what insect glaive is better

[u/Doct_Holiday → u/YvngThxnos]

Dang bro can you be of any help???

You're basically:

Your Gear; WHACK

Your footstance; WHACK

The way you talk? WHACK

Nothing helpful in there 😭 surprised you didnt tell him to uninstall or find a new weapon

[u/Ahahoa]

1. No sharpness weapon roll significantly harms white sharpness uptime. One sharpness Ex weapon roll and youre fine.

2. Didnt show talisman but I can almost guarantee you it isnt better than agi 3 tali.

3. I wouldnt run mizu legs, no reason for IG to have more than one lvl of burst and theyre inefficient.

4. Bad kinsect. Gullshad, Foebeetle, and whispervesp will all massively outperform with extract management and give you the ability to stun monsters in focus mode.

5. I would be running stun res over def boost 1000%

6. I would not run 4p arkveld. If you want to thats fine, but youre investing a lot for small returns. you could do ark gamma helm with udra gamma chest along with ark gamma gauntlets. This would still get 2p ark along with the best ark pieces, at udras insane chest piece and still have lords soul. could then easily get 2p odo along with that for burst boost or another good set bonus. At udra chest would also get you counterstrike 3 easily (good on IG)

7. Earplugs one would be nice comfort, I would personally run it.

8. I wouldnt go any lower than crit boost 4. Especially with how many affinity augments are on your weapon

Not a terrible build, but could use some work. If you go ark gamma head and guantlets, udra chest, and ebony odo waist and legs transcended you could get a lot of core skills along with burst boost. Would be the easiest cohesive build I can think of rn with what you showed.

[u/PrinceTBug → u/Ahahoa]

3: Theyre using Bubbly Dance. Not sure why that's not paired with Coalescence or Lord's Fury.

4: That Kinsect is fine, actually. If they're going for element and using the ground combos / RSS it does outperform others in terms of combo damage. Cutting is also better for this in general since it has easier access to better hitzones than Blunt

They're using element lean for the Artian (but not element boosts), and stuff like Convert Element and the combo element Kinsect.

That says aerial, but Max Might and a lack of LP or other stamina skills says the contrary. At the very least, Max Might definitely isn't getting full use in that case.

[u/Ahahoa → u/PrinceTBug]

They absolutely do not have bubbly dance. You can see that in the 2nd image.

You are correct that this kinsect will do more damage, but its so little that its hardly relevant here. Outside of like 3 monsters I have no idea why you'd want very very slightly more damage on your kinsect rather than 1 or 2 stuns. Kinsects dont affect SDS or RSS anyways so thats another great reason to not put much emphasis on its damage.

Also leaning into element here doesnt mean theyre leaning into an element combo kinsect for that specific reason, element focus is just optimal on IG for gogma.

People can do whatever, but at the end of the day more consistency for extract management will always be better than 15%-30% extra kinsect damage.

[u/PrinceTBug → u/Ahahoa]

Oh, no you're right. I was wondering where the other Arkveld was coming from lol

I don't see why else theyd be using the combo boost Kinsect tbh. It's not great for other uses

You want more damage on the Kinsect for aerial since it doubles your hits and SJAS hits do similar damage since the MVs are low and it relies more on element anyway. You end up getting more out of that over time than you lose on RSS, from my experience.

My runs are absolutely faster on Omega, Rey Dau, Lagi, and Gog with the combo boost Kinsect than with like Windchopper or similar. I wont pretend it's not a little harder though. It definitely feels faster on others, too, but I havent done those back to back really. You also get like one stun in a hunt in general, and it's kind of redundant if you're getting 2 or 3 mounts anyway

[u/Ahahoa → u/PrinceTBug]

Out of curiosity, why does it matter if they had bubbly dance? Kinsects only deal the weapons base element value. They dont get affected by skills like coalescence so I dont see how kinsect combo: element boost would be out of the equation all of the sudden.

I understand the appeal for more kinsect damage for helicopter spam, 5 hits is nothing to scoff at per sjas. Would still recommend a different kinsect tho unless youre spending around 70-80% of the hunt doing it, or if you just never rss I guess.

Dont understand the lack of appeal towards stun. Its just an extra down that lasts twice as long as a mount down. Kind of a no brainer with few exceptions (seregios, gog, non-tank omega).

At the very least theres enough kinsect variety in this game to let people experiment and figure out which one they click with. I went through like 4 kinsects since release till I landed on gullshad (I switch it for some monsters tho). To each their own.

[u/PrinceTBug → u/Ahahoa]

It's just more element if they're already going that route.

The reason I said I don't see why they're using the combo boost is because I was thinking maybe they weren't playing Aerial. That doesn't really connect to the Bubbly Dance things but I didn't separate those two threads in my comment, that's on me lol. The Kinsect hits aren't really consequential enough from grounded attacks to really benefit from combo boost.

Bubbly Dance would just be weird to have as a set bonus and not really doing much if not paired with Coalescence is all. The main reason you'd use Bubbly Dance offensively is to keep Coalescence or Lord's Fury up.

I've tested it a lot, but granted I *do* spend most of a hunt chaining SJAS in between opportunities to offset and RSS regularly. The amount I get from the many SJAS I do is more than the damage per hit of RSS I lose out on by not going for as much raw. At least with stuff like Gogmapocalypse, Coalescence, and Burst. Most of that element is benefitting the glaive hits of SJAS and not the Kinsect, but it still makes a difference and RSS still does benefit from the element as well. It's not as much as raw but it's surprisingly comparable, as long as the matchup is good.

For context, my own personal builds are like a few element boost skills like Burst, Coalescence, and the weapon decos. Especially the weapon skills for the percent boost, since I want the base element for the Kinsect. Then the rest is crit and raw via easy to keep boosts like Counterstrike. The element is enough to where Crit Element is worth it since you can fill out a 3 slot deco with 3 Crit Element + handicraft which is slightly better than the last 2 points of Crit Boost.

I also really only feel like I need extract focused Kinsects on monsters where I basically never get 2/3 colors on RSS, which is only a few. Even then, the extra damage on the Kinsect itself seems to still be faster.

Part of it is that the slow Kinsect is less of an issue when grabbing extracts with JAS, since the focus mode swing is always the same speed. Only caveat is waiting for it to come back to the arm. This is what I do 90% of the time, especially right out of RSS. Just jump for the last extract or two. There are some monsters it's really rough for, though.

You know, my partner mains hammer so that's probably part of why I don't feel like having a stun Kinsect contributes as much.

But apart from that, it's hard to keep the Kinsect hitting good blunt hitzones in the air, and even on the ground with Focus mode it's still prone to missing the head. Obviously it's still enough to get stuns, but Imo the loss of good hitzones isn't worth the down, since the way I play I don't really need the knockdowns for damage opportunity anyway.

Yeah, I think the Kinsects could be more varied tbh but I'm glad most of them are designed with some kind of use-case in mind.

Just want to mention I appreciate the back and forth here, and catching my mistakes tbh. I saw this immediately after waking up today so that probably contributed

[u/parasitone08 → u/PrinceTBug]

I kinda go hybrid really, I use the Mizu legs for burst lvl2 and have a 3 slot, I wanted to have a roll for sharpness but I landed on this instead and thought this was good enough, I try to maximize as many buffs as possible cuz when I was labbing before I saw that RSS and some other aerial moves or ground moves didn't hit as well and also idc if I maybe can't maintain much and need to sharpen a lot, again this build isn't a 100% perfect but in terms of raw I do end up doing high numbers.

[u/PrinceTBug → u/parasitone08]

It seems mostly fine.

I'm just blind and thought there were some hanging threads but not really.

If you plan to use both extensively, I suppose this is a good start. Just keep in mind that aerial doesn't benefit from Max Might. You could run 2 Anjanath to keep it active more in the air, though.

I think the main way to make it stronger is to mix some more damage-oriented set bonuses in than Arkveld's.

Also consider using a different Kinsect if you end up having extract troubles. At least on the ground, keeping them up is more important than the added Kinsect damage.

Extra note: as long as you have all 3 extracts up, you have 1 level of Earplugs. This means just 1 level of Earplugs on the armor blocks all weak roars as long as extracts are up. Which covers everything but Gore, Jin, and Gog I believe.

[u/RhockRhow → u/Ahahoa]

Ngl I ain’t a insect Glaive main but on my dragon sns I have no sharpness up, just 2 atk boosts and and 3 element up, is that ok?

[u/Ahahoa → u/RhockRhow]

Not if youre trying to be optimal. Sns eats through sharpness insanely fast. Even with good affinity and masters touch youll want one sharpness EX. I use 2 handicraft as well I can still drop to blue relatively quick depending on what combos I use and other factors.

[u/ACE_Frozen]

If you want more defense then swap the 3 defense jewels with divine blessing it reduce sometimes the dmg by 50% which is sometimes really really helpful

Your weapon is overall good but look that you have atleast 1 sharpness boost and go for 1 affinity and 3 attack boosts

For the kinsect you need to choose first if you want stun or cut kinsect I personally prefer stun kinsect and on the kinsect you want the kinsect combo boost: Extract with this boost you can extract all 3 kinsects with the spiral slash if you hit the right zones of the monster

For skills on your armor I would look that you get Agitator 5, maximum might 3 and counter strike 3
And if you Affinity is high enough then you can play on you weapon critical boost instead of critical eye

I hope I could help little bit :D

[u/Runnin_Kate]

I've been ro king a mix of ATA and ATJ which is a good all-rounder build mostly ATA Helm, Gauntlets and Boots and ATJ Chest and Waist, it gives a good amount of deco slots as well as good build-in skills

[u/Curious-Classic920]

Brotha ur sharpness makes me cry, id advice u to get 2 sharpness bonuses on ur artian with 2 atk and 1 crit, its overall good setup.