Focus Mode is a new mechanic in Wilds that lets you aim your attacks and guards more precisely by turning your character toward wherever your camera is facing. While it's active, your camera zooms in and your character always faces the camera direction, letting you block attacks from any angle and adjust positioning mid-combo.

In older Monster Hunter games, once you started a combo like the triple poke, your direction was locked in. If you mispositioned, you'd need to hop or wait to reset before you could aim properly again. Focus Mode changes this completely by letting you turn your character significantly while performing combos, and even move a little bit.

High Thrusts let you turn into any direction mid-combo, while Mid Thrusts let you strafe into any of the four directions. This means you can make small position and angle adjustments without stopping your combo, making positioning much less critical since you can always adjust, or sometimes even avoid attacks by moving mid-combo. It's incredibly powerful because positioning, which was always a major skill expression factor in previous games, becomes much more forgiving.

• 🎯

  Adjust position and angle during any combo without canceling

• 🛡️

  Turn to block attacks from any direction regardless of starting position

• ⚡

  Recover from positioning mistakes without losing offensive pressure

The downside is that your camera is slightly zoomed in, you don't have access to all items and it makes the game feel more like a hack-and-slash since you can constantly attack while repositioning, rather than the deliberate positioning game Monster Hunter traditionally requires.

The default Focus Mode controls are pretty awkward since you need to hold multiple buttons, often requiring claw grip on controller or uncomfortable hand positions on PC. But since there's really no downside to Focus Mode except the zoom and needing to disable it for sheathing/using certain items, why not just stay in Focus Mode for the entire fight?

To make this easier, you can change the Focus Mode controls to a toggle instead of a hold. This way, you can just press the button to enter Focus Mode and press it again to exit, without needing to hold it down.

Settings → Keyboard/Controller Configuration → All Melee Weapons → "Focus Mode/Aim Slinger Hold" to a button of your choice

Now you can just press the button when engaging a monster and press it again to turn it off when you want to sheathe. Much cleaner and lets you actually use Focus Mode without hand cramps.

With the addition of focus mode we also got a new wound system. When you repeatedly hit the same monster part, it eventually gets wounded. In Focus Mode, wounds are super easy to spot since they're highlighted in red (or blue for tempered wounds), giving you another reason to stay in Focus Mode most of the time.

• Wounded parts take increased damage until destroyed

• Some wounds cause flinches or topples when destroyed (like leg trips)

• Blue wounds on tempered monsters always cause free topples

• Skills like Weakness Exploit and Flayer synergize with wounds

Preparing and destroying wounds is a very important part of optimal gameplay, since it lets you play much more aggressively by constantly getting flinches and free topples.

While we are in Focus Mode, we can easily spot open wounds as they are higlighted with red glows. In the Image we can see Arkveld with 2 open wounds on his wing arm.

The extra blue wounds on tempered monsters that always result in free topples actually make some fights easier than their regular counterparts, since they make the monster fall on the ground even more.

While in Focus Mode, you can perform Focus Strikes on wounded parts that instantly destroy the wound and deal significant damage. They can even cancel some monster attacks, lock them in place (looking at you switch axe) or just give free flinches.

Focus Strike in Action

Focus Strike in Action

We can see a bunch of open wounds on the Chatacabara. Right after it recovers from a long attack, we perform a Focus Strike on the face.

After the Focus Strike, often the monster ends up at a distance, so you usally want to follow up with a leaping thrust. In the clip we somehow open a blue tempered wound on the arm and pop it, resulting in a topple.

Lance's Focus Strike is a shield bash that triggers a long charge attack when it connects with a wound. The charge looks cool but is actually pretty wonky and often makes you miss the wounded part with the finisher.

The best way to use the Focus Strike is to: immediately cancel the charge attack by pressing the Focus Strike button again. This gives you a quick thrust that's much easier to land on the wounded part and deals better DPS than the full animation.

Certain special monster attacks create temporary weakpoints that appear with the same red highlight as wounds. These include attacks like Uth Duna's jump, Rey Dau's big thunder explosion, and more.

You can use Focus Strikes on these temporary weakpoints to deal bonus damage. If you successfully destroy them, they deal additional damage and go on cooldown. If you don't destroy them in time, they disappear after a short duration.

Taking Advantage of Temporary Weakpoints

Taking Advantage of Temporary Weakpoints

Gravios is a monster that leaves a lot of temporary weakpoints. One example is the fire beam showin in the clip, where after the beam ends, the head glows red temporarily and allows for a Focus Strike. Against this certain attack, performing a successful Focus Strike even ends in a free down of the monster.

As you can see we use the Cancel Trick to quickly get the topple.

Depending on how long the fight lasts, these temporary weakpoints may become available again once their cooldown expires, and the attack is used again.

A Power Clash is a special interaction that some weapons with perfect guard mechanics can perform. Essentially, it's a forced clash, where you need to spam the guard button to win the clash. If you win, you will deal a high damage finisher and knock the monster back slightly.

Just like not all weapons have this interaction, not all monsters can be power clashed. There's only a few of them, and even then only a limited selection of attacks can start the interaction. For example, Arkveld never triggers the Power Clash when chargin through you, it's always the follow up chain slam attack that does.

If you performed a Power Clash, it will go on cooldown (the CD depends on the monster) before it can be provoked again.

Eat my Shield

Eat my Shield

In this clip we can see a successful Power Clash after we Perfect Guard Uth Duna's quick bite attack. Since we are left at a distance, we follow up with a Leaping Thrust.

There's a few armor skills that interact with Power Clash, like Binding Counter from Jin Dahaad. Other than that, Power Clash is not really a good damage mechanic (it's like a forced DPS loss), but since you will perfect guard from time to time, you get forced to do it anyway. In multiplayer, Power Clash can be a nice opener for your teammates to deal some damage, while the monster is clashing with you.