I have attempted to slay the mighty Hallowed Jhen Mohran a couple times now and the expedition has always ended in failure due to our boat taking too much damage. Every time we've had about 10 minutes left in the quest in the second stage of the fight. I'm looking for tips on how to prevent this from happening and I have a few questions about the boat mechanic.
- Which of Jhen's attacks damage the boat?
- Do the boat damaging attacks all do the same amount of damage to the boat?
- How much "health" does the boat have?
- In addition to the above questions, what are some things to keep in mind during this fight?
Some further background: I only have the 3ds version so going online is unfortunately not an option. I either hunt solo or with 1 other friend. Typically I take the ballista binder, but I am still learning the attack patterns so I must admit I miss quite a few of the opportunities. I use gunlance and lance and my friend uses switch axe. At this point we've build up our arsenal enough to have a g-rank weapon of each element and rarity 9 armors.
Best Answer
There's no way to tell exactly how much health the boat has. But, you can get an idea of where it's at by checking your quest status.
I'm going to answer for both Jhen and Hallowed Jhen. The fights are basically the same, just the first phase pattern is different.
First things first: get to know Jhen's patterns. He does the same thing in the same order in the first phase. Throughout the whole fight, it's usually a good idea to assign a single person to interrupt him. There are two ways to do so:
Interrupts
Alternate the use of these items. The main things that can damage the boat in the first phase are:
Both of these can be interrupted, and you shouldn't use either the gong or the binder until he either does the frontal ram, or the big body check. The small body check happens too often to waste an interrupt on.
There's one more way to interrupt him, but you need to wait until he goes way out in front of the ship to be able to use it, and that's the Dragonator. The button to activate that is on the front of the ship, on the raised section. When he's in front, he'll launch a couple rocks at you, and then go back under the sand. He'll come back up in front of the ship, dive back down, and surface right in front. The timing is pretty generous, but once he goes under the sand the second time, that's when you should hit the switch. He'll come back up to land on the ship, and that's when the Dragonator spears him.
Throughout the first phase, interrupting those attacks will spare your ship the majority of his damage. You can't stop everything, but the idea is to stop enough so that you either run out of time or kill him.
In the second phase, the only attack that damages the boat is his giant landing on the boat. Anything at all can interrupt that, but if you use the gong to interrupt him as he's coming back down, he'll flip over and allow you to carve inside his mouth.
Damage maximization
Beyond just saving the ship, you can also cause more damage; phase two starts once you've dealt a certain amount of damage, and the quicker that happens, the less time Jhen has to damage the ship.
Regular Jhen is weak to Dragon damage, and Hallowed Jhen is weak to Fire. For regular Jhen, if you happen to have an ancientshard weapon upgraded to the max, those are usually your best bet. For Hallowed, Miralis weapons work extremely good. They tend to provide the most fire element.
Of course, if you're using a slower weapon like the hammer, then element plays a backseat to straight up raw damage, but there's a few ways you can bump up your damage.
Pre-battle prep
Speed Gatherer + Pro Transporter do absolute wonders for cannoneering. I believe you can just about fire two cannonballs in the time it takes someone without the skills to fire one. Add in Artillery Expert as well, and you'll be putting out a ton of damage.
Battle techniques