Iceborne introduces Master Rank and isn't joking around with the title. I have no doubt the MH loyalists with hundreds or thousands of hours will breeze through these early battles, but lapsed players shouldn't expect to hit the ground running. I'm already feeling encouraged to dip back into the old zones to gear up and get truly prepared for Iceborne. Iceborne marks the beginning of a new power curve, a steeper one that's going to be extra exhausting for the more casual crowd, but-hopefully-all the more satisfying in the end. The damage I was doing wasn't enough, which is why it dragged on for so long. I mean, I'm still getting to grips with the controls again and it took me a bit to realize that the default key assignments had changed since I last played, but I don't think those things mattered much. Puny numbers to a series vet, big numbers to a fervent but infrequent fan. It took 40 minutes to kill Iceborne's first monster with the gear I ended with in the base game, the product of about 60 hours of play. Iceborne is difficult: it's balanced for the endgame crowd It's cold and pretty and more difficult than ever, but the new layered armor system means I'll be making cool clothes out of every last organism in this world, no matter the challenge. I'm just a few hours in, and I can't talk about the story after a certain point (not that the MH lore is something to worry about), but I like what I'm seeing so far.

If you're a lapsed player like me, someone who tore through the base game but only dabbled in the endgame as new monsters and events were released, it's important to know what Iceborne is and what kind of Monster Hunter player it's for.

Mhw steamworks numbers