Let’s Build a Monster Hunter (With Ben Byrne from Ghostfire Gaming)

Do you just like the Witcher video video games? Perhaps the 2004 Van Helsing film the place Hugh Jackman has a repeating crossbow? Do you need to suss out a monster’s vulnerabilities, monitor them to their lair, put together your defenses, then have an epic confrontation?

If so, you may need to learn on, as a result of we’re speaking the brand new Monster Hunter class from Grim Hollow: Player’s Guide with Ghostfire Gaming’s Creative Content Director, Ben Byrne!

Your Ultimate Pass to Dark Fantasy Adventure

With the Grim Hollow: 2024 Bundle from Ghostfire Gaming, you’ll unlock each the Grim Hollow: Player’s Guide and Grim Hollow: Campaign Guide on D&D Beyond.

Explore new courses just like the Monster Hunter, a whole bunch of latest participant choices, twisted transformations, grim magic, and a totally realized marketing campaign setting steeped in darkness and peril.

The Monster Hunter Class

Artist: Vincenzo Pratticò

Monster Hunters are professionals who specialise in defeating monstrous entities that lurk in shadows and threaten the lives of bizarre people.

These martial combatants reside or die by their sword, bow, or arms. They flip encounters in opposition to harmful creatures into hard-fought victories by counting on coaching, information, and sheer grit.

They don’t have divine magic like Paladins and aren’t in tune with the pure world like Rangers. Fighters and Rogues, whereas sensible in fight and sometimes strategically minded, don’t have the identical devoted coaching that equips a Monster Hunter to stalk and slay the unknown. Monster Hunters spend uncalculable time finding out creatures, uncovering weaknesses, and turning that information into deadly precision.

Level 1: Monster Grimoire

Artist: Suzanne Helmigh

Monster Hunters get the Monster Grimoire function at stage 1. This cornerstone function supplies hunters with a catalog of data about their foes, enabling them to realize a strategic benefit.

The Monster Grimoire grows with the information of its wielder. Early on, it sharpens your capacity to establish and exploit a creature’s weaknesses, however as you advance, it broadens its catalog of prey, turns information into protection, and even shields you from the particular talents of legendary foes.

At its zenith, a Monster Hunter utilizing the information inside their grimoire can deal a important blow so exact it may possibly fell essentially the most fearsome monsters in a single strike.

Level 2: Studied Response

Studied Response is one other necessary function for Monster Hunters. This permits them to show an enemy’s aggression into alternative—putting again as a Reaction when an enemy targets them with an assault.

Paired with Weapon Masteries like Vex or damage-enhancing talents just like the Trapper’s Elemental Ammunition, this may produce hefty injury every spherical, even earlier than their Extra Attack enters the image at stage 11.

Level 3: Monster Hunter Guilds

Not all Monster Hunters battle alike. At stage 3, Monster Hunters select their subclass, which represents the type of looking they commit themselves to mastering:

• Carvers rise up shut and private, wielding heavy weapons and armor to take down their foes with brute power.
• Devourers embrace the ability of their quarry, consuming defeated foes to realize monstrous traits themselves.
• Occultists research the occult to make use of and deepen their understanding of eldritch energy, and due to this fact defeat it.
• Trappers lay crafty snares and wield crafted devices to weaken prey earlier than transferring in for the kill.

Ben’s Monster Hunter (Trapper) Build

Artist: Matt DeMino

When constructing this Monster Hunter, Ben needed to showcase the extent of this new class’s talents and a few synergies that have been attainable to create a lethal grasp of preparation and precision.

He selected the Trapper subclass, which has a modular strategy to fight, and constructed across the Trapper’s talents to seed the battlefield with hazards whereas avoiding up-close fight with their foes.

Survival of the Fittest

Ben imagined that this explicit Trapper Monster Hunter was solid via adaptability and grit. He survives in a harmful world by studying classes after which using techniques to place extra highly effective foes at a drawback.

In the world of Etharis, evil is an ever-present power, and only some have the ability and tenacity to face up in opposition to the horrors that stalk the land. One such horror is the Great Beast, a behemoth wreathed in shadows whose rotting, corpse-like physique spreads corruption wherever it treads.

While our Trapper was raised within the Bürach Empire, he has devoted himself to a lifetime of hazard. One spent looking and killing the abominations that spring from the Great Beast’s shadow.

Know Thy Foe

When constructing this Monster Hunter, Ben emphasised the category’s investigative edge. He chosen Perception, Investigation, and Nature as the category’s talent proficiencies to make sure the hunter may monitor, establish, and, ultimately, exploit his prey’s weaknesses.

As this Monster Hunter expands his information and begins encountering totally different minions of the Great Beast, he provides new monster varieties to his grimoire. First Monstrosities and Aberrations, then Undead, and ultimately Fiends.

Tools of the Trapper

These are the first aspects of a Trapper Monster Hunter that Ben centered on:

Ambush. Ben leaned into the Trapper’s ambusher playstyle. The Human’s First Strike function combines with the Trapper’s stage 7 Ambusher’s Advantage function in order that they’ll strike first and deal large injury.

Strike When Your Foe is Distracted. The Opportunist Fighting Style feat provides a bonus to assaults made as a Reaction, which, when mixed with the Monster Hunter’s stage 2 Studied Response and stage 5 Expert Strike, creates a vicious combo of lethal and exact strikes.

Weapons of Choice. Ben’s Monster Hunter selected the Rapier and Hand Crossbow’s Vex mastery properties, which might present a constant supply of Advantage because of the Monster Hunter’s Reaction-based Studied Response assaults.

The Master of the Hunt

Build Information

* Located within the Grim Hollow: Player’s Guide

Hunt Your Foes

The new Monster Hunter class is however a small style of what awaits at midnight fantasy world of Grim Hollow. The Grim Hollow: 2024 Bundle, now obtainable on D&D Beyond, opens the gates to Etharis—a grim land the place survival isn’t assured and energy all the time comes at a value.

On high of the Monster Hunter, you’ll discover 40 new subclasses and 40+ feats, twisted transformations, grim magic, a setting teeming with peril, and extra. Whether you need to step into the boots of a monster slayer to face in opposition to evil or succumb to the darkish whispers, this bundle offers you every part you might want to descend into the shadows and carve your legend.

Mike Bernier is the founding father of Arcane Eye, a website centered on offering helpful ideas and tips to all these concerned on the earth of D&D. Outside of writing for Arcane Eye, Mike spends most of his time taking part in video games, climbing together with his girlfriend, and tending the veritable jungle of houseplants which have invaded his home.