UPDATED FOR ICEBORNE!
I thought to make two separate pages, but combining it made more sense. This guide is all about Affinity & Critical Eye in Monster Hunter: World. How does affinity/critical hit work? How “good” is the stat? Read on, hunters.
- How does Affinity and critical hits work?
- In-game description
- FAQ / Mechanics
- How good is Affinity? How bad is negative affinity?
- How good is Critical Eye? Compared to other skills?
- How does Critical Boost improve all of this?
- Summary & Discussion
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Affinity & Critical Hits: How does it work?
“Each point of affinity gives one percent chance for a critical hit that’s 25% stronger”
Affinity is simple, and can be compared to many similar mechanics across many different games. “Affinity is a chance to add a percentile bonus (critical hit) to your attack“. In the case of MHW – it’s 25% (modified by such things like Critical Boost).
Negative Affinity as found on some weapons gives you a chance to do a, what I call, “shitical hit” for (presumably) -25%. I also hear it’s -20%. Anyone got numbers on this?
With that out of the way, we can discuss how pure affinity affects our DPS. And when talking about pure affinity bonuses, the most basic example is the Critical Eye armor skill.
Critical Eye armor skill: In-game Description
| Critical Eye | ||
| Increases affinity. | ||
| Skill Level | Effects | |
| 1 | Affinity +5% | |
| 2 | Affinity +10% | |
| 3 | Affinity +15% | |
| 4 | Affinity +20% | |
| 5 | Affinity +25% | |
| 6 | Affinity +30% | |
| 7 | Affinity +40% | |
| Decoration? | Expert | Level 1 |
To understand how good Critical Eye is – we must first understand how good Affinity is.
Affinity & Critical Eye – FAQ & Mechanics
How good is Affinity? How bad is negative Affinity?
First, a very basic info dump.
“REGARDLESS of raw attack – Affinity gives a rough 0.25% DPS Boost
with default critical severity”
This is simple enough to calculate without the fancy table above. It’s simply “1% of your 25% critical hit” which is, lo and behold – 0.25%.
So is it worth stacking over other stats? Well… while the percentile increase remains the same for all builds, the NUMERIC INCREASE will vary wildly. I’ll talk about it in the next section after negative affinity.
How good is Critical Eye? Compared to other skills?
Well not that we’ve determined the percentile value of affinity for ANY BUILD, we can get an good idea of how strong Critical Eye is (very generally speaking).
| Skill | L | Aff+ | DPS% Gain |
| Critical Eye | 1 | 5 | 1.25 |
| Critical Eye | 2 | 5 | 1.25 |
| Critical Eye | 3 | 5 | 1.25 |
| Critical Eye | 4 | 5 | 1.25 |
| Critical Eye | 5 | 5 | 1.25 |
| Critical Eye | 6 | 5 | 1.25 |
| Critical Eye | 7 | 10 | 2.5 |
| Average DPS | – | – | 1.43 |
- Critical Eye points 1 through 6 give 1.25% DPS, which is godly considering it’s a small jewel, and pretty easy to find armor skill all in all.
- Critical Eye point 7 gives 2.5% DPS
- All seven points give an average of 1.43% DPS. Wow.
(More on this later, but, Critical Element builds benefit MORE from this)
So, comparing to other skills… it’s going to be really hard to beat that. Since the Iceborne buffs, I look at the numbers above and feel that Critical Eye has joined Weakness Exploit in the GOD TIER skill list.
But wait – Critical Element?
Depending on how good the damage increase Critical Element and True Critical Element is, how valuable is Affinity and Critical Eye for these builds.
Builds utilizing True / Critical Element get HIGHER bonuses from affinity.
(Compared to pure physical builds).
But, I guess it doesn’t really matter since Affinity is a PREREQUISITE for Critical Element builds. Estimated
How does Critical Boost improve all of this?
As discussed in the link above, “CB improves for each point of affinity you have”. Not surprisingly the cross-scaling works both ways. “Affinity improves by 0.05% DPS increase per point of Critical Boost“.
Not bad at all. Basically, the higher your Affinity, the better Critical Boost becomes – at 100% affinity, Critical Boost becomes probably the most powerful skill.
Affinity & Critical Eye – Summary & Discussion
“Affinity is plain great. Luckily, the Critical Eye skill is amazing”
Affinity isn’t a bad stat. Critical hits = good in Iceborne patch.
As for Critical Eye – I imagine most builds WANTING all 7 points. There are a few niche cases where I can imagine not taking all seven points, but for the most part…
“Critical Eye is in the absolute top tier of offensive skills”.
Why? Well, getting OVER 1% DPS for a “small deco” tier skill is pretty godlike. I can’t even list the reasons why this skill is so great in Iceborne (compared to being trash in vanilla).
- Great for almost all DPS builds imaginable.
- Extreme decoration size / armor skill efficiency. (Gives huge bang for buck)
- Enables Crit Element, Crit Status builds.
This is all meaningless if there aren’t any good armor pieces or decos that help us get these 7 points – BUT THERE ARE. The free Expert L4 gem, Kirin body B, Garuga boots B… the list goes on!
Well that’s about it. I hope you learned a bit about Affinity in Monster Hunter: World, and in extension, Critical Eye and it’s relative power to other skills. In the end, there’s really much more to “killing monsters” than “math and spreadsheets” but they CAN save us from traps and bad decisions here and there.
Interested in other MHW Guides?
1. Why does Critical Eye suck in Vanilla? (I don’t have Iceborne).
2. I’m making a Halberion build to farm Vaal like this: https://honeyhunterworld.com/mhwb/?190,75,72,84,68,84,48,0,0,0,30,0,0,25,30,0,96,96,96,86,86,86,30,0,0,30,56,0,3 – should I quit CE at all?
3. What to place in its stead? would you recommend sth?
Becouse point per point atack boost was almost equivalent if not better, with ib higher atk values, %increases became better
How about with crit element?
So if I have Critical Eye lvl 7 (+30%) on a 20% base Affinity weapon, for Example, Vice, and Level 3 Weakness Exploit, and Critical Boost Lvl 1 (30% more damage).
That means every time I hit a weak spot, I have 100% Affinity, right? Does that mean I’ll be getting 55% more damage when hitting weak spots?
Also do you know how much does Non-Elemental Damage boost attack?
Btw, great work, loved your post.
You will hit for “130% of your non critical damage”, or “+30%”. Critical boost IS NOT A LINEAR +30%, its a poorly worded skill – it only adds +5% to the base crit of 25 hence 30. Read up on Critical Boost here! Hope it helps!
Elementless adds 10% of unbloated raw. Bloat values are added to true raw to help players intuitively understand motion values, but that’s a whole other topic of discussion. It’s best to just simplify it as a 10% boost.
Great read man. Thoroughly enjoyed your spreadsheets