It doesn't ruin the game outright, but it's safe to say that the overall reaction to the Clutch Claw in Monster Hunter World: Iceborne was tepid, to put it plainly, but it does require some explanation as to why that was the case, as much of its derision comes from it being a finicky slog of a solution to a problem they had created in the base game.
IN THE BEGINNING!... there was Monster Hunter World, and more specifically its endgame that players eventually figured out was revolving around a very particular skill called Weakness Exploit. Prior to Iceborne, WEX (which is what I'll be referring to it as from this point forward) worked on a flat value system in which the rate of critical chance (referred to as affinity in the world of Monster Hunter) done to a part on a monster that's considered the weakest part of the monster in terms of defense values, and the value changed at different levels of the skill. Those levels are as follows:
Lvl. 1: 15% bonus affinity
Lvl. 2: 30% bonus affinity
Lvl. 3: 50% bonus affinity
As you can imagine, lvl. 3 WEX is where the real magic begins to happen, especially when combined with skills like Critical Boost (which itself can get as high as 140% of the normal damage caused when a critical hit does occur for juicy hits) and Partbreaker (additional base damage done to a limb that can break that goes up to an additional 30% to have you breaking and severing parts with the greatest of ease), to say nothing of what happens when you wear armor that adds additional affinity to make your crit chances virtually guaranteed. That, in of itself, used to be somewhat tricky to do as the skill system in Monster Hunter generally has you picking and choosing between several skills that forced you to live with not being able to have everything at your fingertips to be a one-man army. Well, until they did release an armor set that did just that:
Say hello to the Drachen Alpha set! The ultimate reward for farming runs on the FFXIV collaboration quest that has hunters squaring off against Behemoth, the Drachen Alpha set very quickly became THE meta for the game, as its built-in skills granted you the likes of maxed out Crit Boost, nearly maxed out Crit Eye (this is what raises your affinity, and at lvl. 6 of 7, that's a staggering 30%), a solid amount of additional damage granted by having lvl. 3 Attack Boost, as well as some solid ancillary skills with some good utility for various weapons. But that wasn't enough, as there were two additional elements to wearing the armor that really pushed it to unseen heights: it had an unbelievably great spread of decoration slots (decorations being additional augmentations to armor sets that can allow you to slot in new skills or boost existing ones to their highest level) as each piece had at least one slot (two in the case of the head and chest pieces) and sits at a total of 1 lvl. 1 slot and 3 of each lvl. 2 and lvl. 3 slots for absurd amounts of flexibility, and the second was that the built-in set bonus of Soul of the Dragon grants you an additional skill depending on how many pieces of the armor you're wearing, with 4 pieces granting you Master's Touch, which is a skill that prevents your weapon from losing sharpness when it does make a critical hit. Needless to say, slotting in WEX and something like, oh, I don't know, Non-Elemental Boost for a then 10% raw damage bonus on weapons with no element (this eventually got nerfed to being 5% in Iceborne) meant that your uptime on maximizing your damage output was clearly moving towards something the game really wasn't designed to handle as health would just melt like no tomorrow. Sensing that this was soon to be a problem and very quickly, the developers tried to move things towards the Arch Tempered monsters as a kind of solution due to their incredibly high health and damage values, but the armor sets they bestowed simply could not compare to the kind of damage possible with the Drachen Alpha set once equipped with WEX, especially as the skills there made it possible for everyone weapon in the game to use it and see tremendous results. There was very little reason to not roll into a quest not equipped with the Drachen Alpha as your base armor with WEX installed, as it was often the best choice, period.
SUDDENLY!...Iceborne is announced and coming out imminently, and the players get a sneak peak as to the kind of balance changes coming to the game. Due to how Monster Hunter expansions work, High Rank armors are effectively useless after the first few hunts as the damage output on G-rank monsters (since renamed to Master Rank with Iceborne) simply outstrip the defense values on those armors, forcing players to start playing the game as intended and start crafting new gear from the Master Rank monsters, with additional incentives coming from MR armor featuring lvl. 4 decoration slots (lvl. 4 decorations being able to carry two skills on them instead of one) and having earlier access to more powerful skills. This is to be expected, but there were additional balance changes made to the game that would soon impact every player, regardless of owning Iceborne or not, and that started with WEX receiving a major rework. Now, the base values looked very different:
Lvl. 1: 10% bonus affinity
Lvl. 2: 15% bonus affinity
Lvl. 3: 30% bonus affinity
Quite the stark nerf to their values from how they were before, right? However, there was a catch to the nerf in that potentially, the old values still remained the same, but only if you wounded a part beforehand, in which the values would get an additional boost (5%, 15%, 20%) when hitting those affected parts, thus restoring them to their original bonus affinity values. But how does one wound a monster part? Enter the Clutch Claw!
The biggest new player action addition to Iceborne from the base game, the Clutch Claw is an extension of the base game's Slinger (the thing that lets you fire off ammunition found in the world as well as player items) that allows players to, well, clutch onto monsters using the claw. Unlike mounting a monster, using the Clutch Claw on a monster does not stop them from moving around, which does put the player at risk when it enters into an attack and you'll be bucked off of it and take lots of damage. However, if you find the right opening, you will have enough time to perform a few different actions, including the aforementioned wounding that has you plunging your weapon into a monster and opening it up to receive additional damage than what was possible before. When combined with WEX, this had the benefit of you being able to do more damage than would have normally been possible had the WEX values stayed the same as a result of how wounding works, so the flat nerf effectively becomes a buff in terms of the raw numbers. So, if that was the case, why was the Clutch Claw so poorly received if you can theoretically dole out more damage than ever before?
There are often a lot of different opinions as to what hurts the idea of the Clutch Claw, but I think they can be traced down to three absolutes that I'll zero in on:
1. Monster have a LOT of health in Iceborne: This in of itself is an expected outcome for what is supposed to be the highest difficulty in MHW, but the problem that it runs into towards the endgame is that you don't really feel like that you're doing the kind of damage that you might expect to be doing as a result of just how much higher the HP pools are for monsters, particularly for elder dragons like Lunastra whose HP values are so high that it's like you're already fighting a modified quest version as it is with how long it takes to bring her down. It leads to the underlying feeling that the team may have overtuned the response to how much WEX in conjunction with other skills was impacting the output possible with it that they made the monsters too robust in retaliation, practically requiring you to wound them to keep up the tempo and not have the fights drag on too long to make the player feel far weaker than they should be at that point in the game.
2. The Clutch Claw aiming properties: Needless to say, the accuracy of the action itself is a bit lacking. If you've ever played the game, you know all too well how often you practically zero in the spot you want, let the hook fly, and then the game decides that you're instead on their hindquarters for no particular reason. Some of this is exacerbated by the very nature of the amount of zones there are on a monster to begin with, as you have monsters that can let you go practically up and down their entire length in several sections that can already make it pretty risky to get to where you need to go to begin with, but unlike mounting, which maxes out at a total of three zones (tail, back, and head), you can find yourself dealing with a monster that has twice as many, making for a very finicky experience unless you stick to situations where the monster is downed or trapped, and even a slight bit of movement on their part can cause you to go off course.
3. The impact it has on the combat flow: To help balance wounding, it only lasts for a set duration. Initially for just 90 seconds, this was eventually doubled to 3 minutes down the line as the complaints about the frequency to keep wounding parts to maximize your damage output were quite loud. Even with the doubled duration, however, it doesn't do a lot to address the fundamental problem that using the Clutch Claw really isn't all that fun to begin with, as its level of interactivity boils down to a single button press more often than not, and typically without that much risk involved unless you're a YOLO player that uses and abuses it regardless of what the situation calls for. Wounding also had to be adjusted from its small pool of weapons that could actually wound on the first instance, as lighter weapons would need at least two attacks to be able to pull of what those could do, making fights for those weapons take even longer as a result. Again, the complaints were so loud they had to rework it for those weapons so that they weren't potentially being left behind as they were initially, but it still added to the feeling that the entire mechanic felt more like busywork than a solid addition to combat at all.
It's hard to know if something like the Clutch Claw will ever come back again, given its controversial nature of it being a moldy bandage to a self-inflicted wound. I suspect that, much like swimming in Tri/3U, it'll remain a curio of its particular generation with no real impact on the series going forward, though unlike swimming, which did allow for a few monsters to have more diverse move sets as they worked differently underwater versus how they are on land, the properties of the Clutch Claw were limited exclusively to damage opportunities through either wounding or using Slinger Burst to drive a monster into a wall or another monster to down them, and the more aggressive playstyle of gen 5 MH hardly needed another way to do that with how frequently such things can happen now. Rise has a different philosophy altogether as it traded away the Slinger altogether to focus on the additional mobility options and special attack skills afforded to players through the Wirebugs (amusingly, WEX was reverted back to its pre-Iceborne values, but there are arguably more busted skills in Rise that Sunbreak may yet address), but don't be too surprised if the first gen 6 game puts the Clutch Claw back in the drawer in favor something else that won't be as polarizing.
