The Monster Hunter series has a wide array of monsters at its disposal and the collection continues to grow with Monster Hunter Rise. One monster that gets pulled from the reserves quite often for new Monster Hunter games is Diablos. Diablos once again returns in Monster Hunter Rise mostly unchanged from its appearance in Monster Hunter World. As with most returning monsters though, there are a few new things to be aware of.
Prep, Weaknesses and Hitzones
In terms of weaknesses, Diablos take decent elemental damage from everything but fire. Ice is going to be the best element to bring into the fight, but water and dragon elements are not a bad second choice. As for Diablos' hitzones, blunt weapons like the hunting horn excel. The head and abdomen are good hitzones for these types of weapons. Cutting damage is decent on the head, but better on the abdomen and tail. As for shot type weapons, the head, abdomen, and tail get good damage, but the wings are going to be the best part to aim for. While the hitzones on the tail are good for both shot and cutting damage, hitting the tip of Diablos' tail does pretty weak damage for every type of weapon.
As for status ailments, Diablos is very susceptible to paralysis, so if players have a weapon that deals paralytic damage, it may be a good option to bring it into the fight in order to score some free hits on Diablos. Iceblight and blast are also listed in the hunter notes with a two star effectiveness rating. Notably, Diablos is resistant to being stunned, so knock out damage will be largely ineffective. Every other ailment is listed at one star effectiveness.
Given that Diablos doesn't have any element of its own, players don't really need to worry about speccing for any particular elemental resistance. However, Diablos can hit fast and hard, so players may want to invest in stun resistance to prevent getting stunned by Diablos and promptly carted. Players may also want to bring sonic bombs as they can force Diablos out of the ground when it burrows.
Fighting Diablos
Diablos is a fairly straightforward fight in that it will mainly try to attack players with various close range attacks. It definitely likes to charge hunters with its large horns and while this is fairly obviously telegraphed, it will do a lot of damage if not dodged or blocked. The game's hunter notes helpfully inform players that Diablos can be baited into charging into the anthills around the map to get it stuck.
If Diablos is already close to players, it will attempt to swing its horns at them and knock them away. If players are close to Diablos, but behind it, then it will swipe at players with its tail. This can mitigated by cutting off Diablos' tail with a bladed weapon like a great sword, but this will take some time and players will be right in the danger zone of the tail swipe attack as they try to cut it off.
Diablos' most iconic attacks though are the ones where it digs underground and attempts to attack players once it exits. Sometimes it will dig underground and players can see it moving towards them, meaning it will come up from under them and try to attack that way. However, players may sometimes notice that Diablos seems to be digging entirely away from any of the hunters. If it does this, its going to jump out when it emerges and it can cover a lot of distance and hit players hard, so players need to be on their toes even if it doesn't look like Diablos isn't targeting them. Players having difficulty dodging Diablos have plenty of time to sheathe their weapon, even without the quick sheath skill, and run before Diablos emerges. As previously mentioned, sonic bombs can also be thrown to force Diablos out of the ground when it burrows.
Notably this time, gunners are not safe at a distance. Diablos now has an attack where it will slam its tail into the ground, sending a rock hurling at hunters. This covers a decent distance, so anyone at range will want to want to watch out when Diablos turns its tail towards them.
Monster Hunter Rise is now available for the Nintendo Switch. A PC release is slated for 2022.