Affinity Meaning and Guide

Affinity is one of the offensive mechanics in Monster Hunter Now that determines the chance of a critical strike. Check out more details about affinity and how you can get it.

What is Affinity?

Affinity is Your Critical Strike Chance

Affinity is the chance for an attack to deal bonus damage. Affinity is Monster Hunter's term for critical strike chance.

Affinity stacks additively with other sources, such as from the Equipment Skills Critical Eye and Weakness Exploit, and from a weapon's base affinity to a maximum of 100%.

Dealing a critical hit makes that hit deal a 25% damage bonus.

Critical Hits Affect Weapon's Raw and Elemental Attacks

Unlike Monster Hunter's mainline series of games, where only the weapon's Raw Attack stat is affected by a critical hit, Monster Hunter Now's critical hits apply to the weapon's combined Raw and Elemental attack stats. We've done some tests to confirm this information to be true.

Testing How Affinity Works

To test how affinity works in Monster Hunter Now, we've taken two weapons with similar stats, except one has an element. We then tested their damage against small monsters to check how critical hits affect the final damage. Here's a rundown of our initial test:

After this initial test, our team has done more tests against Large Monsters, which also yielded similar results.

Elemental Damage Only Affects Monsters Weak to that Element

The critical damage calculation also comes with another change where Elemental Damage will only be dealt to Monsters weak to that element.

Therefore, critical hits will only deal bonus damage according to your weapon's combined Raw and Elemental attack stat only if the monster is weak to your weapon's current element. Otherwise, only your Weapon's Raw attack stat is calculated, as your weapon's element does not affect the monster.

We have confirmed this information with a similar test to the previously mentioned one, where two weapons with similar Raw Attack dealing the same amount of damage despit one having an extra Elemental Attack stat.

Elemental Damage Explained

Critical Hits Have a Special Visual Effect

A long red streak visual effect on a hit indicates a successful critical hit. There are no special changes to the damage numbers on a critical hit.

How to Raise Affinity

Get Affinity Equipment Skills

The primary source for affinity would be from Equipment Skills. The affinity granted by these skills can be a permanent effect or during specific conditions.

Skills Granting Affinity

Best Armor Sets

Equip a Weapon with Affinity

Certain weapons would innately have affinity on them, such as the Kulu Beak and First Dance. This base affinity will stack additively to other affinity sources, such as ones from your Equipment Skills.

Best Weapons Tier List

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