Endgame
Endgame
Face the White Wraith and Tempered monsters with powerful endgame lance builds!
These are the current endgame builds for Title Update 2, which added Seregios and Lagiacrus. All of these builds assume you've completed the main story and have access to the highest rarity Artian weapons, plus pretty much all decorations and armor pieces.
Weapons
Artian weapons are still the best option in the game by a wide margin. They all come with three level-3 slots, which lets you stack the weapon skills that lance really needs. The reinforcement system also gives them the best stats for almost every element or status, making most craftable lances pretty obsolete (for thunder the Lagiacrus lance is pretty good).
When crafting new Artian weapons, try to get three parts with the same element or status and all having attack infusions. This basically guarantees you to get the element you want while maximizing the attack production bonus.
A fire Artian lance with full raw production bonus and 2 sharpness, 1 affinity and 1 affinity production bonus. Not the god roll, but still a very good one.
For reinforcement bonuses, aim for 1 sharpness and 4 attack. Anything that has 1 sharpness and at least 2 raw is considered a good roll and pretty much beats all craftable weapons (except for thunder).
Weapon Decorations
Here's how to use those 3 weapon decoration slots:
- ⚔️
Offensive Guard 3
Lance's most important weapon skill for damage
- 🗡️
Master's Touch 3 or Razor Sharp 3
Essential for maintaining sharpness during long fights
- 💥
Critical Boost 3
Great damage skill, but prioritize the other two first
Offensive Guard comes with combo decorations that include guard, handicraft, or elemental attack. Pick based on what you need—guard for tough matchups, handicraft if you're struggling with sharpness, or elemental attack for a small damage boost.
With our high affinity builds (around 80% average), Master's Touch becomes more effective than Razor Sharp for sharpness management. At 80% affinity, Master's Touch effectively multiplies your sharpness by 2.78x, giving Artian lances around 138 effective hits compared to Razor Sharp's flat doubling (100-120 hits depending on your combo decoration choice).
Craftable Weapons
The Lagiacrus lance actually beats the Artian Thunder Lance in very elemental-heavy matchups like Seregios and if you manage to reach high thunder resistance. For longer hunts, an Artian with god roll probably still wins due to better slots, giving it better sharpness.
When using the Lagi Lance, eat a meal that gives elemental resistances and use your 1-slots for more thunder resistance.
For other craftable options, the Blazing Sital from Zoh Shia has a unique
weapon skill, while the Guardian Rathalos lance Shining Pillar offers good
stats and slot efficiency.
Element vs Raw
Since Artian weapons can all reach the same raw damage, using elemental ones just adds free damage on top. If possible, craft 6 different Artian lances (one for each element plus one status/raw weapon) to maximize your damage potential across all matchups.. Using the right element typically adds 5-10% damage, which really adds up over time.
Check the matchup table to see which element works best against each monster.
📊 matchup chartIf you want to stick with raw weapons, blast is generally the best option, though paralysis is also solid for the openings it creates.
RNG Charms
The latest update added a new charm system. Unfortunately all new charms are random and most of them are not that good. It's relatively easy to find a charm that has a 3 slot and either 1 level of Wex, Agi or Burst together with some additional skills. Making it a clear upgrade over the craftable charms.
Because we are trying to get both a 3 slot skill and a 3 slot, the skills we can get are very limited (for most skills you can only get 1 level). What you wanna look for are Critical Eye, Attack Boost, Handicraft Guard or any other comfort skill.
To actually make a meaningful damage increase, you need to be very lucky. What you want are:
- 🛡️
Armor Skills
1 point of Wex/Agi or Burst
- 🗡️
Weapon Skills
All 3 levels of Offensive Guard, Razor Sharp or 1 level of Master's Touch
As you can see, the required charm to get a noticeable damage improvement is pretty crazy. What it allows you to do is slot in the remaining 2 levels of crit boost into the now freed up weapon slot, at the cost of dropping 1 level of Agitator. Doing so results in around a 1-2% damage increase, which is pretty low considering the estimated effort you need to put in to obtain such a charm.
Armor
All three builds here use Guts, the set bonus from wearing 3 pieces of any Arch-Tempered Apex monster armor. Guts lets you survive a lethal hit if you're above 40% health, and as long as it hasn't been triggered recently, it gives you a 5% raw damage bonus. Combined with how skill-efficient these armor pieces are, it makes Guts one of the strongest skills available.
The builds are very similar in damage output, but each has different strengths and use cases.
Now with all that covered, let's take a look at the builds.
All builds use craftable charms since RNG charms are too inconsistent to recommend. Any charm with Wex, Agi or Burst + a 3 slot and some additional skills is a solid upgrade over craftable ones. The charms that actually provide a meaningful damage increase are way too rare to consider them here.
latent power set
This build uses 3 pieces of Rey Dau combined with the best-in-slot armor pieces available, letting us max out both Agitator and Weakness Exploit.
The key feature is high Latent Power levels, giving this set the highest theoretical damage output. The downside is that Latent Power can be inconsistent, as it has high up and down times. And when the up times overlap with zone transitions, or timings in the fight where you can't attack or deal less damage due to monster states, it can lead to damage loss.
If you get hit a lot, you actually will have a higher latent power uptime. If this is an advantage solely depends on you :)
rey dau latent power set
We get Guts/Lord's Soul from 2 pieces of AT Rey Dau and the new AT Uth Duna boots, allowing us to max out agitator and weakness exploit
With an additional 3 levels of latent power, we reach a very good average affinity allowing for the highest damage output
High thunder resistance makes this set particularly good when using the Lagiacrus lance.
EFFECTIVE RAW
fire ELEMENT
AVG AFFINITY
azure bolt set
This set uses 2 pieces of Lagiacrus for the Azure Bolt set bonus, trading some raw power for much more consistent damage output.
While the Lagiacrus pieces make this slightly weaker than the Latent Power set on paper, Azure Bolt provides more reliable affinity uptime with shorter cycles. The set bonus also adds free damage procs that aren't reflected in the displayed stats. We also get 2 levels of Stamina Surge, which helps maintain Maximum Might uptime.
lagiacrus azure bolt set
Two Lagiacrus pieces provide the Azure Bolt set bonus for more consistent affinity.
The set bonus offers reliable uptime and additional damage procs not shown in stats.
Two levels of Stamina Surge help maintain Maximum Might uptime.
EFFECTIVE RAW
fire ELEMENT
AVG AFFINITY
comfy zoh shia set
Alternatively, there's this third set which is a really comfy variant using the Zoh Shia super recovery set bonus, which allows you to recover health passively even without having red health. This is really nice for us, as it can help a lot with damage building up from chip or smaller hits, meaning you need to heal less often, allowing you to focus more on attacking.
Overall, this set has only around 1-2% less damage than the latent power set, but offers a lot of quality of life, making this my go to set for most late game investigation hunts.
comfy zoh shia recovery set
Two Zoh Shia pieces provide Super Recovery for passive healing without red health.
AT Uth Duna boots still let us max Weakness Exploit and Agitator while losing only one Latent Power level.
Two free level-1 slots can be used for comfort skills like Mirewalker, Windproof, or Stun Resistance.