Monster Hunter: World offers a huge choice of weapons for you to try. You’ll surely find something that matches your playstyle. However, every weapon requires you to play often enough to understand it. When first starting the game, it can be hard to pick which weapon to learn first.
Our Monster Hunter: World Dual Blades guide will give you an overview of this brutal weapon type and help you decide on whether they’re a fit for you. Let’s take a look, shall we?
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Dual Blade Basics
The Dual Blades are weapons built for speed. You’ll rush in, land a bunch of hits, and dodge out of the way before the monster can counterattack. Dual Blades are set so that you make a lot of quick hits, but that also means the damage of each hit is lower overall. If you want a weapon where you land one hit and do a ton of damage, the Dual Blades are not for you.
Dual Blades are melee weapons (unsurprisingly). But this weapon, specifically, has the shortest range out of all available weapons in Monster Hunter: World. You need to get up close and personal with any monster you want to fight. It’s normally really easy for Dual Blade users to focus on and cut off the tail, but due to the short range, you may have more trouble breaking heads and horns of taller monsters.
You do not have the ability to block attacks with the Dual Blades, so you need to have good timing and dodge attacks. This becomes more challenging when considering the Dual Blades’ unique techniques.
Unleash Your Inner Demon
The main draws of the Dual Blades are their Demon and Archdemon Modes. These allow you to do more damage per blow and give you a range of more impressive attacks in general. The key to being a Dual Blade master is learning how to juggle these modes without getting hit.
Pressing R2/RT will make your hunter enter Demon Mode. While in this mode, your attack power increases and your combos change. It also offers more maneuverability. Just make sure you don’t overdo it and hit your fellow hunters and knock them down!
However, your stamina rapidly depletes while in this mode. Since you cannot guard with Dual Blades, the main way to not take damage is by dodging. So you don’t want to completely deplete your stamina attacking, only to get KO’d by a monster’s counterattack.
It’s important to properly balance stamina consumption, but you still want to stay in Demon Mode as long as possible. Each hit that lands in Demon Mode will add to your weapon’s red sword bar. If you max out the bar and exit Demon Mode, you’ll enter Archdemon Mode.
Archdemon Mode gives you the same attack power increase and some of the same moves as Demon Mode, but it does not consume stamina. Essentially, you want to do enough quick hits in Demon Mode, so you can recover stamina in Archdemon Mode, and repeat the process.
Quick Tips For Dual Blade Users
Affinity is a great stat for Dual Blades. Since you hit a lot, but for little damage, high Affinity gives you the chance to land criticals very often. That adds up with the Dual Blades combos!
Evade Window gives you more room for error when dodging. This skill is helpful to any weapon type that can’t block. It gives you more “invincibility frames” (time where you can’t be damaged while dodging) when trying to avoid a monster’s attack.
Lowering stamina consumption lets you stay in Demon Mode longer. Anything you can do to keep stamina consumption down (Dash Juice, skills, etc.) helps a lot with juggling between Demon Mode and Archdemon Mode — letting you do more damage.
