Monster Hunting General Pairs

As you move beyond trying to play for free, you probably want to look at a premium monster hunting pair. Partly because it is fun to be able to kill the bigger monsters. Partly because the rewards they give will help you control your overall spending. Partly because other members in your alliance need the rewards. How much each of these motivates you will vary both from player to player and from day to day.

While there are a few good free Monster hunters, notably Martinus (if he has a dragon) all of the truly great pairs include at least one premium general. This changes regularly enough that I am including my table for displaying pair attributes, pre-filtered to display mounted monster hunters, with an explanation for how to use its data.

Explanation

As you look at this, there are a few key things to consider.

• Everything I wrote in Evaluating Generals applies here.
• Some generals have colored dots next to their names. These have special
  considerations. I hope to eventually have these considerations show up in tooltips.
  • Some generals conflict with certain skill books regardless of whether the skill book is assigned to them or the other general in the pair. Sometimes the general is strong enough that you do not care. These generals will have orange dots.
  • There are some generals whose buffs only activate with a spiritual beast or dragon. They are often very strong, and sometimes it is worth picking them. Be aware however, that you will not get the power listed unless you can assign the appropriate companion to that general. Unless there is a more severe problem also present, this will show up as a magenta dot.
  • Some generals only conflict with skill books present in the other general of the pair, but not if the skill book is their own. This will be a blue dot. You need to be careful setting up your pair, and may find them less flexible in how you mix and match generals across different pairs.
• For Monster hunting the two most important characteristics are the attack buff and the March Size buff. These will control how big a monster you can kill.
• When you hunt monsters, you attack first. If you wound the monster, it attacks back.
  • The HP and Defense buffs determine your survivability, or, conversely, how much this counter-attack wounds you.
  • A severe enough counter-attack (ie you lose more than 10% of your total
    march size) and you lose the overall attack.
  • Your choice of pair needs to consider your tolerance for wounded. The pairs with the strongest attack (and thus able to kill the biggest monsters soonest) are often not the ones that will most reduce your wounded. It is perfectly reasonable to accept a slightly slower rate at which you can take on the next biggest monster in exchange for doing so with much less wounded.
• I currently have no way to display which generals are easier to get fragments for
• I currently have no way to assess the effects of soul binding on monster
  hunting.
• I currently have no way to assess the effects of covenants on monster hunting.
• Since flexible specialities can be moved, I am not considering them at this time. If you are able to max out your generals, I assume you will add the relevant flexible specialities Monday through Thursday.
• I am also not yet calculating the effect of standard skill books on buffs. Since some generals conflict with some skill books, this is a flaw, and will hopefully eventually be addressed. I may even remember to update this note when I do so. This is important. A general pair A with no skill books might show as weaker than another pair B, but if pair A has no conflicts and pair B does, the difference these skill books make will sometimes tip the balance in favor of pair A.