Monster Hunter World: What is Affinity

11cQV94.jpg

At times, the monster hunter world could cause serious confusions to the players. With all its amazing features, mechanics and long menus, you can dig through quite a lot in the game. Although there are so many things that you may have either missed or been confused about, there is this one particularly strange stat that keeps most of the players puzzled most of the time. And that stat is called affinity. Many players wonder about affinity, and its application.
This brief guide helps you in understanding what affinity is, and what does it do. It will walk you through ways to get it and how can you use it to your advantage.
cB39UpH.jpg

What is affinity?
In monster hunter world, you are supposed to be fighting and taking down a lot of monsters. For that, you obviously need weapons. An affinity stat basically refers to the chances that a weapon has of landing additional damage to the beast.
5ho8QvT.jpg

In other words, the affinity stat may be believed to be the percentage by which a weapon becomes more capable of dealing damage than it is under normal conditions without affinity. Normally during the initial phases of the monster hunter world, weapons have zero affinity stat. But as you progress through the game, you come by weapons with varying degrees of affinity.
v32Jd0D.jpg

How does affinity work?
Due to its extremely useful capability to help make killing monsters easier, you might want to have it. The basic idea behind affinity is that the rate of percentage which your weapon carries indicates the level of damage is capable of inflicting in contrast to a weapon with zero affinity. For example, if your weapon shows an affinity stat of +10%, it simply means that ten percent of the time, your weapon can land more damage.
A weapon may also have a negative affinity. So, if your weapon shows -10% affinity stat, this means the weapon will inflict damage ten percent of the timeless.
Benefits of Affinity
Both positive and negative affinities have their own unique payoffs. While it is understandable how a weapon with a positive affinity stat is helping, one may wonder what benefits could there be of weapon carrying a negative affinity stat? True that negative affinity means less damage but these weapons have more overall damage ratio than the other weapons.
v0YRjKp.jpg

The final choice rest with the player. You can choose a weapon with a negative or low affinity to deal more overall damage with additional reward benefits or you may choose to have a weapon with high affinity with more damaging ratio with risk of less overall damage.