The race to raise your Hunter Rank in Monster Hunter Wilds is quite the grind, but it’s a worthwhile grind for fans of the monster-slaying RPG, given that every hunt and quest lines your pockets with useful materials and items — as well as experience. That said, how do you increase your Hunter Rank quickly?
Well, there’s only one answer, and that’s by completing quests, but some of the missions that you embark on offer a lot more experience than others, and there are a few tips and tricks for trying to increase your Hunter Rank and complete quests efficiently. To help you out, here’s how to increase your Hunter Rank in Monster Hunter Wilds.
How to increase Hunter Rank in Monster Hunter Wilds
Increasing your Hunter Rank in Monster Hunter Wilds is relatively straight-forward given that most of your experience will come from completing story assignments that you’re highly unlikely to miss. That said, what do you do once you reach the late-game and story assignments run dry? Keep hunting, of course!
While story assignments are missions that contribute the most to your Hunter Rank, this doesn’t mean that completing optional quests is pointless. When assignments aren’t available to you, be sure to check out the available optional quests via the Quest Menu and speak to any NPCs that have side missions (the yellow quest icon) available for you. These will increase your Hunter Rank slightly, and sometimes lead to new, optional quests for you to take on.
For example, one of the Smithy’s first side missions — Smithy’s Seal of Quality — opens up a new optional quest for you to complete in Alma’s Quest Menu.
Story assignments often introduce you to new monsters, which opens the path to new materials, which means that new armor sets and weapons might become available via the Smithy as a result. So, raising your Hunter Rank via optional quests to ultimately unlock more story assignments is very important, and given the materials you’ll wind up with, it’s far from a waste of time.
Ultimately, as your Hunter Rank increases, more story assignments will be offered to you over the course of time, leading to more experience. When story assignments aren’t available, you’ll no doubt often notice Alma regularly reminding you to take on more quests to raise your Hunter Rank, and then the guild will trust you with more high-rank assignments to complete.
It’s worth noting that you can also turn Field Surveys (this is when you naturally run into and hunt a monster you see on the map, rather than hunting it as a given quest) into an Investigation using Guild Points, and these will contribute to your Hunter Rank more so than a Field Survey would. Just make sure you are hunting/investigating High Rank monsters for most rewards, assuming you’re done with main campaign.
Additionally, there’s a limit to how many Investigations you can create, and as we mentioned, they cost Guild Points to set up. You can also leave them to later return back to via Alma’s Quest Menu.
To set up an Investigation, double-press the monster you wish to hunt on the map. You can then select ‘Save as Investigation’, and in exchange for some Guild Points, it’ll become an available Investigation when checking your Quest Menu!
On top of all that, it’s worth using SOS Flares wherever possible. Even if it’s only Support Hunters (AI) that show up rather than other players, the additional help from these Hunters will see you get through quests much more quickly. As a result, you can complete more quests in less time and raise your Hunter Rank that little bit faster.
It’s also worth noting that capturing monsters is much quicker than slaying them, so unless the quest objective specifically tasks you with hunting a monster, it may be worth capturing them instead. That’s up to you! And don’t worry, the game will teach you how to capture monsters in one of the first post-campaign missions.
To put it simply, you can raise your Hunter Rank in Monster Hunter Wilds by completing the following:
- Story Assignments
- Optional Quests
- Investigations
- Use SOS Flares to complete quests quickly
- Capture monsters — when you don’t need to slay them — to complete quests quickly
- Event Quests
For more on Monster Hunter Wilds, take a look at how to play co-op, all bosses you can expect to face and their weaknesses, and all Pop-Up Camp locations.