I feel like they could decrease the encounter rate...

I dunno if I'm just unlucky or it's part of the game, but it feels like literally every hunt in HR is interrupted by Blazegeuse or Deviljho and the other large monsters roaming the map. On one hand, it's helpful that other monsters, Blaze and Jho especially, can do so many damage to your target. On the other hand, the AI in this game is straight up dumb because after they work out their problems, everything in the vicinity just ignore each other and all turn on you.

I was hunting an Uragaan and everything was going swell. Blazegeuse shows up, does a bit of damage, and I shoo him away with a dung pod. Then, within the next what felt like a minute at best, Uragaan then decides to roll away into a room with an Azure Rathian, I shoo that away, and Blazegeuse shows right back up. Mix and match, rinse and repeat this cycle for about 10 minutes and I'm losing my fucking mind because I just want to get this thing alone to wear it down and finish the hunt.

I even backed away for a while and the Uragaan and Rathian were just standing there, chilling for a while. I literally gave it like 5 minutes waiting for one to leave and they just sat there looking around. I wasn't registered as "in combat" either.

I'm not planning on quitting the game or anything. In spite of situations like this being a regular occurrence, I'm still having fun. I'm just not sure if I'm unlucky or the scripting/AI in the game is sometimes fucked and it's reeeeally annoying sometimes.

In my experience the monsters almost always spend far more time attacking each other than me if we're in a room together, not that that makes it easy to fight them. I've also found that invaders generally leave me alone entirely if I don't hit them at all, they seem to get far more aggressive towards me if I deal any damage to them. I do agree that Bazel is extremely obnoxious and I honestly wish he wasn't in the game at all.

That said, just add dung pods to all your item sets cause once you hit high rank you'll be using them constantly

@vizard1301: Because I had already used all my dung pods and couldn't craft anymore.

@babychoochoo: You can meld them in town from other materials. Just do some mining on each mission and you wont ever run out of them.

You might just be getting unlucky with the AI. Bazel only seems to show up once every few quests to cause trouble. Most of the time as a bow/dual swords user I just fight both monsters and reap the extras I might gain from it.

Elder's Recess by far has the highest encounter rate of all the maps I find. Bazelgeuse seems scripted to immediately home in on where ever the player is though.

I just got into HR and ran into this while hunting Rathalos. I know that it is normal for Rarthalos and Rathian to stick together and team up on you but adding Bazelgeuse to the mix made for a pretty frustrating hunt. I haven't been carrying dung pods with me until this point but now they are staying in my item pouch. Managing multiple monster encounters isn't really what makes Monster Hunter fun to me so if this is a common occurrence throughout HR then I agree that it should happen less frequently.

I love Bazel, his design, his gear, but he's also one of my main complaints game. He shows up within 30 seconds without fail of you encountering the monster you're supposed to kill. It's scripted to the point that it pulls me out of the game a little. It's not that he's difficult to deal with, I normally just leave the area to let them beat each other up a bit, but it makes quests take longer than they need to.