I love this game, but as I've pointed out before, there's a lot of dumb shit that can really hamper your enjoyment of it. First up on the roast is the latest monster I've been farming, the mysterious elder dragon, Shagaru Magala.
Each of the elder dragons have a gimmick to their fight. Kushala has an annoying-as-fuck wind barrier. Chameleos has his invisibility, Teostra has the fire barrier and Kirin is basically Kelbidrome. Shagaru Magala's gimmick is the god awful explosions that appear when he's in rage mode.
Fighting Shaggy is relatively simple: stay away from his face and whale away at his softer hind quarters. He's got plenty of openings, letting you get in some decent damage between his sometimes ludicrously damaging attacks. But there's a catch: once enraged, exploding pillars of frenzy energy start erupting at "random" points on the map. Its like he called in orbital carpet bombing or something. The pillars take a bit to explode, but if you're stuck in an animation, you'll just have to watch the pillar slowly charge up, while your character does whatever the fuck they're doing before getting launched a good 5 feet.
Fortunately these pillars can be easily avoided, and, if you're properly kitted out, won't do...too much damage. That is, until you hit G rank. You see, most monsters, in their G-rank form have new moves in addition to generally being tougher in every way. Aside from having more HP, dealing more damage and stuff, Shaggy doesn't get any new moves. He doesn't need to. Once Shaggy hits G rank, he cranks the dial on his orbital strikes up several thousand and literally rains hell on you. The damn pillars show up EVERYWHERE. If that wasn't bad enough, a couple of his moves are accompanied by predetermined pillars that explode after his move's animation is done. If you get hit by his move, the pillar won't hit you, but if you're guarding in front of him, going for his horns, they'll take an extra chunk out of your stamina. It'll usually leave you somewhere between 30 to 40% of a full stamina bar, leaving you hoping he doesn't attack before your stamina's back up to a more preferable level.
Not sure who made this, but it pretty much sums up the G rank fight against him. Lower ranks are actually quite bearable, as the explosions are rather tame in comparison to his G rank bombardment.
The best way to fight this guy is with a fairly mobile weapon that you can keep on the move with. Also be aware of attacks that have long drawn out animations, like the full charged combo with the great sword, or, heaven forbid, anything with the gunlance. The gunlance, which happens to be my weapon of choice, has some of the longest animations that doing anything outside of the bread and butter (poke poke shot) leaves you extremely vulnerable to getting smoked while your character is recovering from an animation. Stay on the move, keep away from his face and you'll probably be fine. Glad he and his ilk aren't returning in MHX, because fuck them and their virus exploding shit.
