Monster Hunter World Iceborne Best Insect Glaive Builds

Compared to the other weapons, the Insect Glaive is one of the newer introductions to the Monster Hunter franchise. It was added in Monster Hunter 4 along with the Charge Blade, and it quickly rose in popularity due to its impressive mobility and unique playstyle. If mounting opportunities and fancy flips are your thing, you’ll feel right at home with it.

Besides being extra agile in combat, you’ll have a variety of Kinsect buffs at your disposal. You can equip yourself with different types of Kinsects by purchasing one over at the Smithy and equipping it alongside your Insect Glaive. In this guide, we’ll dive deep into the weapon and explore a couple of builds you can try out in the base game and the Iceborn expansion.

MHW Iceborne: How to Use the Insect Glaive

First, let’s examine what makes the Insect Glaive stand out. Even without all the buffs, the IG mobility, reach, and mounting opportunities. The airborne attacks allow you to easily swing through the air, slicing and dicing the monster as you go. Compared to other weapon classes like the Greatsword or Lance, you will spend much more time up in the air than on the ground.

The “composition” of the Insect Glaive is simple; the Glaive itself is an insect that can inflict status buffs on your character by harvesting monster extracts. Different buffs can be applied, such as increasing your defense, attack, or movement speed. Your Kinsect can also do KO damage or targeted cutting to a monster, making it a helpful perk if you’re trying to farm specific pieces or keep a monster unable to move temporarily during a hunt.

Since the Insect Glaive possesses incredible speed and evasive capabilities, it would be a shame not to use it to its fullest potential. First, you’ll want to get an Attack Extract from your Kinsect to maximize your damage output. Then, it’s time to do some aerial maneuvers. You can vault up using the respective button combination (RT + A on Xbox and R2 + X on PlayStation). Immediately after vaulting, follow up with an attack or a Midair Evade.

You’ll need to consistently land your hits and manage your Stamina bar to stay in the air and string together a flurry of evades and air attacks. Doing so will trigger the Vaulting Dance, which resets your combo.

Insect Glaive Buffs

To use a Kinsect, fire it at a Monster’s face, making it glow red. If your Kinsect has a red glow firing it, it’s got the attack buff. You can apply this buff to yourself by recalling your Kinsect. Once your Kinsect has returned, you should see a glow under your Weapon Sharpness bar.

Different buffs can be received whenever you fire your Kinsect to the different parts of a monster. Here are the respective colored buffs you can get and what they mean:

• Red: Attack buff
• Green: Health buff
• Orange: White buff
• White: Speed buff

The Kinsect also leaves Dust, which you can hit to trigger an effect type. The effect can range from leaving a healing cloud to abnormal status effects. This is triggered by hitting the monster with your IG while gathering extracts or marking targets.

How to Change Kinsect Elements On Your Insect Glaive

You can imbue your Kinsects with Elemental Damage, the range of which is as follows:

• Electric
• Fire
• Water
• Ice

Depending on your progress in the game, you might not be able to unlock some of these elemental damage types yet, but fret not—these can be unlocked by getting new maps and increasing your Hunter Rank. If you’ve noticed, this resembles Monster Hunter’s standard Weapon Upgrade Tree.

How to Manage Your Kinsects

Go to the Smithy, and under Kinsect Management, you can select Nurture Kinsect, which opens up a new tree akin to any other weapon’s upgrade tree. From there, you can check out all the different Kinsect types. Each Kinsect you want to nurture carries different Dust types and ability strengths you’ll want to look out for. You’ve got the choice of Power, Heal, Speed, and Dust Effect.

The Power, Heal, and Speed types denote the Kinsect’s particular potency when extracting it from a monster. All of these max out at level 15. As for the Dust Effects, they are as follows:

• Poison
• Paralysis
• Stun
• Blast
• Heal

To get the best results when facing large monsters, we recommend upgrading multiple Kinsects at once to tailor yourself and your build to any scenario you face.

MHW Iceborne Best Insect Glaive Skills

Let’s move on to the skills you should prioritize when composing a build for your Insect Glaive. Since the IG relies heavily on buffs, stamina consumption, and attack speed, there are quite a few skills you should try to slot in.

First up is Protective Polish, a skill that keeps your weapon’s sharpness from whittling away for a while after sharpening. Since the IG is capable of swift attacks, you can expect the weapon’s sharpness to deplete quickly. Having Razor Sharp as an add-on is another helpful skill that should also reduce sharpness loss (provided you have an extra skill slot for it).

Next is Constitution, which reduces the cost of stamina-based activities like vaulting and evading. Since jumping and executing mid-air attacks require stamina, having Constitution means you can stay airborne longer for attacks. This is especially beneficial when you’re up against flying monsters, damaging hard-to-reach parts, and accumulating mounting damage.

Besides these skills, there are also some generic options worth investing in. We recommend having the following:

• Critical Eye: Increases affinity.
• Critical Boost: Increases damage dealt by Crit hits (works well with Critical Eye).
• Weakness Exploit: Increases affinity whenever you hit a monster’s weak spots.
• Agitator: Affinity is increased when the monster becomes enraged.

MHW Insect Glaive Build for Base Game

Even without considering the Iceborne expansion, many incredible Insect Glaive builds exist.

It was hard to choose just one weapon, but after some serious consideration, we decided to go with the weapon from Nergigante—Catastrophe’s Light. With a base attack of 651, High Elderseal, tons of blue sharpness, and 150 Dragon attack, the stats of this Insect Glaive are truly impressive. Moreover, it has a decent Sever Boost from your Kinsect Bonus and neutral affinity. It even has a level 1 slot to put it a gem.

As for the armor, you might be wondering why we didn’t opt for a mixed set, as that’s the best route to get more opportunities to slot in gems. However, we’ve gone with a single set for simplicity's sake. The Odogaron α armor supports the Catastrophe’s Light since it has almost tailor-made skills for it.

Here are the skills that come with the complete set of the armor:

• Odogaron Master 5: The equivalent of the Protective Polish skill. It ensures your blade will be kept sharper longer after sharpening with the Whetstone.
• Bleeding Resistance 3: Protects you from getting the bleeding status effect.
• Critical Eye 5: Increases your affinity.
• Quick Sheath: Decreases the time it takes to put your weapon away.
• Speed Sharpening 3: Increases the speed at which you sharpen your blade.
• Constitution 1: Reduces stamina drain while evading and using other stamina-draining moves.

Monster Hunter World Iceborne Best DPS Insect Glaive Build

This build centers around dealing as much damage as possible. As with most meta builds, we combine a piece of Velkhana’s armor with four pieces of Fatalis’ armor. With this, you’ll get the Inheritance and Transcendence set bonuses. Inheritance unlocks the skill caps of all skill secrets, making it useful for any build you have in mind. Meanwhile, Transcendence is particularly excellent for the IG since, in addition to getting a stamina and health boost, you’ll also get True Razor Sharp/Spare Shot, saving you from having to slot it in later.

With the Challenger Charm V, the total skill list should be like this:

• Handicraft 3
• Agitator 5
• Critical Eye 3
• Coalescence 3
• Weakness Exploit 3
• Evade Window 2
• Resuscitate 1

From here, you can use your slots to add other skills to boost your attack damage and affinity. Since we’re focusing on DPS for this build, the best way to capitalize on the True Fatalis Dyaus’ raw damage is by having these skills:

• Critical Eye (max)
• Critical Boost
• Agitator (max)
• Divine Blessing

Best Insect Glaive Build for Airborne Attacks

The meta DPS build is arguably the strongest, but what if you don’t want to conform to the rules? What if you want something different? This airborne build does a ton of work to compensate for the damage loss. We’re using the Safi’s full armor this time to get the True Dragonvein Awakening bonus. This increases your element/status damage and affinity as long as your weapon is drawn. Moreover, your health regenerates the more you attack continuously.

The skills from this set aren’t crucial; we’re mostly here for the set bonus. Regardless, it’s still a great armor, so don’t worry about swapping any pieces. The Resentment Charm V works wonders for the build since the damage boost pairs well with the Safi armor’s health drain. The skill list before decorations are the following:

• Resentment 5
• Critical Boost 3
• Critical Status 1
• Evade Window 3
• Blight Resistance 2

Now it’s time to slot in some decorations! There are some skills to remember once they’re available to you. We advise you to get these:

• Stamina Surge
• Attack Boost
• Airborne (or Elemental Airborne)
• Power Prolonger
• Constitution
• Protective Polish