The half-the-HP comment was not a complaint about P.Gypceros, but purely a response to Peru about armor giving a sense of comfort for tiers of monsters, which was a contradiction to my point that the gameplay shifts from LR to HR in such a way that you have to prove you don't need armor in order to get better armor, and if you are so proving you don't need it, then the sense of reward gained from it is nullified. To me, anyway.
I don't need to take less damage with my armor, since I'll quickly die if I'm taking hits either way. So then you let your movement keep you from taking damage, as I have obviously been doing. So then the focus on armor what gets you what you do need, such as the ability to swing a sword at the thing without it bouncing off for a while, hence my choice of Ceanataur. But "allowing you to attack" is not an advantage, it is a baseline. So my point about the reward being the capacity to scrape going forward by stands.
The same stands for pretty much any other notion of apparent advantage. Want a decent water elemental upgrade to fight so-and-so monster? Well for some dumb reason it requires parts from this much-harder monster. If you beat that one a few times, you'll have parts for your reward of an advantage against the comparatively-now-puny-looking monster, making the whole endeavor to get an advantage seem like a waste of time not only in fighting it now, but retroactively also the process of fighting that other monster to get the mats for gaining that needless advantage.
Maybe I just got a bad luck of the draw in my choices, but it has been amazing how strongly this pattern has held in mats desired for getting an upper hand and the challenges required to get them. There has been absolutely no progressive sense of reward, only retroactive if for some reason I ever wanted to go back to fight outdated things. Going forward, it has always been hardline necessitated that I fight harder things at neutral or disadvantage.
