Affinity is one of those things in Monster Hunter Wilds that isn’t well-explained, but as we’re going to demonstrate, it’s one of the core components of crafting effective builds. Affinity is something you’ll find on all weapons, and you can use its percentage to maximise the effectiveness of your weapon – even before you get into Elemental damage and such.
When viewing the stats of any weapon, you’ll see three key items on it: Attack, Affinity, and Element. Attack is self explanatory, it denotes your weapon’s raw, physical power. Element refers to Elemental damage, which some weapons will have. Several of those exist and no one option is the best. Ideally, you’d want to use a weapon with an Element that the monster you’re fighting is weak against.
Affinity is a little more tricky to explain, which is what we’re going to do in this guide.
Monster Hunter Wilds Affinity Explained
The best way to describe Affinity is to think of it as the weapon’s critical hit chance. In Monster Hunter Wilds, this refers to the percentage chance your attacks will deal bonus damage on top of the weapon’s base damage.
Affinity can be neutral, i.e., zero. It can also be either higher than 0%, or below that in some cases. Positive Affinity is what you want, and failing that, neutral (0%) is the next best option. Obviously, the higher your Affinity, the better, because it raises the chance your attacks will crit. That, however, may not always be possible, depending on your build.
Negative Affinity, on the other hand, is something we should avoid if at all possible. Anything below 0% means fewer of your hits will be critical, and their critical damage will be lower as well. It’s worth keeping in mind that Monster Hunter treats critical damage percentage as a +/-.
Here’s an example to help you wrap your head around it. If we assume that a critical hit does 25% increased damage, then having a negative Affinity of -10% on said weapon means 10% of the hits you land will deal 25% less critical damage, and a -50% would mean that half the hits you land will do half their critical damage.
You’ll be able to tell which of your hits are affected by this boost/handicap. Hits that have the orange diamond are crits affected by positive Affinity (anything above 0%), whereas ones with the blue diamond have sadly been affected by your weapon’s negative Affinity (anything below 0%).
Now that we got the basics covered, it’s worth mentioning that just because a weapon has negative Affinity doesn’t automatically mean it’s a “bad” weapon. For instance, a weapon with negative Affinity could have Decoration slots that let you counteract its negative Affinity.
Even if it doesn’t – or you simply want to use those Decoration slots for something else – Skills can counteract low/negative Affinity in a variety of ways. In fact, sometimes having Negative Affinity may not matter much if your weapon has very strong Elemental damage, for instance.
Ultimately, these are the sorts of decisions you’re going to have to make when creating builds in Monster Hunter Wilds. It’s always a good idea to have a target monster (or family of monsters) in mind when creating builds, too, because you’d be surprised which monsters respond better to Elemental damage compared to how they do to Affinity.
For a quick look at your weapon’s Affinity, bring up the pause menu, and pick Equipment Info from the first page (Items & Equipment).