The quest – loot – upgrade cycle is underway.  I cleared out the main quests until Anjanath, the giant T-Rex with wings.  I upgraded my weapons as far as they could go.  I took out the baddies.  I looted and crafted and stabbed my way through a fair chunk of events.  I was taking out the mud-fish Jyuratodus with good efficiency.  Even the lightning-flying squirrel (Tobi Kadachi) wasn’t too bad.  T-Rex time!

I died in 2 hits.  1 hit that bit me, the other was a charge that took out 70% of my hit points.

Back to the drawing board.  Anjanath is big, and fire based.  So fire resistant armor and water weapons seems logical… let’s see.

Capturing Monsters

Capt Mud-fish is water based and I needed some loot from him.  Figuring out the loot dropped from him the first place was more guessing than anything.  I checked the investigation board for a quest and all I could find was the capture line.

Captures require you to drop them to ~80%, drop a trap, then stand in front of their heads and throw smoke bombs at them.  Then pray it works and they don’t eat you.  Oh, and you need to craft the traps and smoke bombs from environmental loots.  Well, not exactly true – you need a trap tool that’s bought in town, and can only carry 2 of them on you (more in your stash).  Anyways, long story short and my first capture was a complete failure until I understood those points.  Second attempt worked just fine.

Back to Leg Attacks

I really like the speed of dual blades.  The damage potential is amazing, if you can get everything to hit.  The full demon-mode super swing is like 20 attacks in a row.

The downside is that everything is always moving and hitboxes on legs are quite small.  It’s that age-old DPS simulation issue.  If everyone was Patchwerk (nothing but a meat wall), then dual blades would dominate everything.  If I can knock down something, then it’s insane the amount of damage that can be pumped out.  But that doesn’t really happen.

I tried another 3 times (max per quest) and wasn’t able to get much farther.  I’m going to have to do some more studying of this bugger and likely further upgrade my armor with speheres to take more hits.  It really isn’t that he hard to read, it’s that you can’t really make a mistake.  And mistakes are bound to happen due to the trees/cliffs/junk strewn about.  Even a wandering monster is enough to muck it up.

So that plan — shore up defenses, find a better spot to fight, try a better in/out attack pattern, and maybe, just maybe, load up on fire barrels.