What is Affinity?: How to Raise Affinity Stat | Monster Hunter Rise | MHR (MH Rise)

This is a guide to the affinity stat, a damage modifying stat in Monster Hunter Rise (MH Rise) for the Nintendo Switch. Read on to learn about the effects of Affinity and negative Affinity, and how to raise your Affinity.

What is Affinity?

Monster Hunter's critical strike chance

Affinity is Monster Hunter's version of critical strike chance. It amplifies your damage to the target by 25% and is a highly valuable stat when wanting to optimize your hunter's damage output.

Does not take elemental damage into the calculation

Affinity strikes from your attacks do not include the damage calculation for elemental attacks. Without proper setup, your damage output from critical strikes will become the following:

Total Damage = (Damage x Critical Strike Damage) + Elemental damage bonus

Due to this reason, elemental builds rely on the skill called Critical Element which will make your elemental attacks do critical strikes as well!

Critical Element Skill Effects

What is Negative Affinity?

Chance to deal less damage

Having negative affinity should be avoided under normal circumstances(more on this below). There are several weapons that have negative affinity but they try to compensate with high base damage or high elemental attacks.

How to Use Negative Affinity

Equip the Brutal Strike Rampage Skill

The Brutal Strike ability is a Rampage Skill that turns your negative affinity into positive affinity! It's a great skill to have when wielding negative affinity weapons but is only exclusive for some weapons. Perhaps, it might be possible to make an end game negative affinity build?

Cancel off your negative affinity

Equipping just enough affinity to offset your negative affinity is a popular way to use negative affinity weapons. Since they normally have higher damage than other weapons, just eliminating their downside is enough to make these weapons worthwhile.

How to Increase Affinity

Equip high Affinity weapons

Similar to negative affinity weapons, there are also weapons with high affinity stats. Even with high affinity, it doesn't mean that they have lower damages than other weapons and high affinity weapons are often considered good weapons in Monster Hunter games.

Upgrade weapons

With the Ramp-Up feature, you'll be able to equip Rampage Skills to your weapons. You'll only be able to choose one per slot (rampage weapons have 3) but this feature greatly increases the flexibility of your builds.

Equip Affinity-raising skills

Affinity raising skills like Critical Eye are highly recommended if you wish to increase your affinity stat. There are also other skills that have affinity modifiers so make sure to consider all your options!

Skills Related to Affinity

Monster Hunter Rise Related Guides

All Tips & Tricks

All Tips and Tricks