YMMV / Dauntless

• Fandom Rivalry: An inevitable one with Monster Hunter. The vast majority of opinions from fans of that series towards this game range from, "An admiral but ultimately flawed and unpolished attempt at imitation," to "The Poor Man's ''Monster Hunter''," to "An ugly clone clearly designed for the Fortnite Generation."
• Fan Nickname: Interrupts are called "boops". Even the patch notes have used the term at least once.
• Friendly Fandoms: Among the Monster Hunter fans, however, there are some that do think Dauntless has its merits, whether it be in the differences how the different weapons play compared to those in Monster Hunter, the faster pace of battles (Most hunts in Dauntless rarely go over 10 minutes), the more streamlined upgrade system, or the cross-platform parity and cross-platform multiplayer. Being free to play certainly doesn't hurt, and some see it as an interesting little diversion while they wait for Monster Hunter: World's Iceborne expansion to release.
• Goddamned Bats: Gruk Gruk. They are essentially the Bullfango of Dauntless, but worse. The Gruk Gruk actually happen to be both Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders AT THE SAME TIME. They tend to come in groups, and they will Zerg Rush you with rolling attacks, which will launch you. To make matters worse, their rolling attacks HOME INTO YOU, making it near impossible to evade them. While they would otherwise be just classified as Goddamned Bats, what makes them additionally fall into the Demonic Spiders territory is their absurd damage output, rivaling that of some of the intermediate-difficulty Behemoths, even if you are level 20 and are exploring a level 3-5 area. If you are fighting a Behemoth in an Island Event and there happens to be a Gruk Gruk modifier, they will ruin your day.
• Mis-blamed: There are quite a few people who, when dismissing the game, seem to think it was developed by Epic Games. This could either be because the PC version of the game is exclusive to the Epic Games Store launcher or simply that the game's art style reminds them too much of Fortnite. The game's developer is Phoenix Labs, an indie studio based in Canada with former Riot Games, BioWare, Blizzard Entertainment, and Capcom employees on the staff.
• That One Boss: There are some Behemoths that are just plain unfun to fight.
  • The Boreus can summon flunkies to aid it, ranging from melee pests to suicide bombers to even ranged assailants. This wouldn't be so bad if it couldn't erect a shell of ice around its body that protected it from any and all attacks until said shell is broken, and said shell takes far less damage unless the slayer in question kills the flunkies; even then, the bonus gained from the flunkies expires when an attack is made or after a lengthy time period passes, which slows down the pace of the fight immensely.
  • The Hellion is notorious for nearly perpetually dousing the field in magma which sets slayers ablaze by mere contact, compounded by the fact that it hits hard. The Scorchstone variant takes all of that and turns it STRAIGHT UP TO ELEVEN.
    • The standard Scorchstone Hellion itself may be tough, but the Heroic Scorchstone Hellion is even worse in that when it digs into the ground and sprouts back up, it leaves a hole in the ground that continuously spews out magma balls that each leave big pools of lava upon landing, which will burn players. Regular Scorchstone can do this, but with the Heroic version? These fireballs will always target players, and players only. What makes it even more ridiculous is that the lava holes will target you no matter how far away you are even STANDING from them, practically across the entire ARENA. What is just as bad is that the holes linger for a LONG TIME. And Heroic Scorchstone tends to dig a LOT, so chances are, not only will the arena be constantly doused in lava, meaning that players will have little to no room to maneuver, but by the time the first hole expires, another hole will be created to repeat the cycle. And just when you think it could not get any worse, there is a bug that makes the holes continue spewing lava for a few seconds AFTER DESPAWNING. And all of this is only made far worse if you're inflicted with Burn Status, and you're out of stamina, meaning you cannot roll to remove the burn. And you will need its Hellstone Shards to fully upgrade the Hellion weapons.
  • The Embermane has a nasty reputation of running away from slayers, only to either charge back in or lob fire from a distance. Slayer teams that don't know how to interrupt will find the fight dragging on for longer than is comfortable.
  • The Nayzaga periodically spouts out spines from its back that serve as electrical tuning forks which fire ball lightning to harass hunters on top of its unorthodox direct attacks, too. The fight gets worse when aether-charged, and moreso at higher ranks (the spines gain an electrical shield that shocks on contact).
  • The Valomyr is set to take the Boreus' spot as the most despised Behemoth. Between the rotating minefield that is the swarm of sparks it summons almost regularly (the prisms it leaves behind at this time give buffs to the slayer that grabs them, but the purple "radiant shield" pickups are the least common), the laser spam that its drones give off not to mention its own, its periodic teleportation and its own prismatic shield which can lock you out (or in with the minefield) until it's broken, expect plenty of frustration when you go up against the thing.
  • The Stormclaw is similar to the Embermane above (being of the same type, just shock) but it has the additional ability to set up electric fences which prevents all movement through them even if you try to tank the damage or jump over it. And a lot of its physical attacks either have short windups, or have no windup at all. It becomes immensely easier to fight if you know how to reflect its lightning ball attack back at it (which stuns him and cancels the next series of attacks and abilities) but if you don't, be prepared to play the most annoying game of tag ever.
  • The Urska also takes after the Embermane (seeing a pattern?) in that it's a fast, nimble behemoth that is very hard to hit. On top of this, it's an Ice Elemental behemoth with a freezing attack, a keystone behemoth (meaning only reachable at the end of a long escalation), and most annoying of all it's Escalation has a unique Fail condition known as Frostbite, which is a meter that slowly builds unless you perform a specific action or find a brazier to warm up. These actions often require you to damage or break bits off of the Urska which, combined with it's buffed stats and evasion (including the ability to just cling onto the ceiling for short periods of time) makes the fight extremely annoying. This is only amplified because the Urska came after Agarus, a completely immobile behemoth that was rather well received.
  • The Chronovore is noted for being annoying not because of the fight, but because of its part drops and the conditions to initiate its encounter. Unlike any behemoth before it, it is an event-only behemoth that can only be initiated by using the Paradoxicon on a specific map. The Paradoxicon itself also requires 8 chronostones, which only drop one at a time on the island that the Paradoxicon is on. After the event is started, 2 other random behemoths are spawned before the Chronovore appears. This means that assuming you're not working with other players, a total of 10 behemoths must be killed before you even get a chance at the Chronovore (and these behemoths are all end-game level, meaning the fights are not going to be short). And once you do get a chance, the most desired part of the Chronovore is its tiny wing tips, known in-game as temporal fins, which have notoriously hard to hit (and at one point, bugged) hitboxes. It's not uncommmon to grind through 3 or 4 of these without a single wingtip breaking, which only makes it all the more frustrating when 10 of these are needed for a single weapon. The temporal tentacles, located on its underbelly, are not much easier. The Chronovore tends to move around a lot, and even coil its own tail around itself, making your attacks hit the tail instead of the temporal fins and tentacles that you need to craft its weapons.
    • And it does not end at its microscopic fin hitboxes. A few times throughout the fight, Chronovore will unleash a wide-radius area-of-effect attack that inflicts One-Hit Kill damage to every player in the vicinity (or, if you are lucky enough to survive, it just reduces your health by approximately 75-80%). Said blast radius is considerably wider than the arena itself, so evading this is nigh-impossible.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Unsurprisingly, there are many who simply write this game off as a third-rate Monster Hunter clone. In reality, Dauntless is a Spiritual Successor to it.

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