Note for wiki: The underlying cause for set skill crashes is a 7 armor-skill limit

[Shadowex3]

Long debugging story short I found the issue isn't using armor set skills as regular skills in and of itself, but that the game only seems to be able to handle having 7 armor set skills attached to you at a time. I think it's UI related because I was reliably able to cause the crash without even equipping an armor piece that would put me over the limit by viewing the last page of set skills, and able to avoid a crash for a bit by using saved loadouts to switch super fast and immediately get out of the equipment menu.

At 7 armor set skills the UI starts to look a bit off, like it's not rendering properly, so my guess is if it is the UI and not something else causing the crash it's caused by whatever formula they use to try and calculate rearranging the boxes to fit. This also still fits with why disabling them as an armor skill prevents the crash.

[Synthlight]

I know the game crashes if you go over a certain number of skills. More specifically, it's like 7 pages or so. I don't remember the exact number. If you exceed the page count it can display, it crashes. If you're just under it, you're fine till you look at some armor that adds another skill then *boom*, crash.

I don't remember the exact number. 50 or something.

Were you anywhere near the page limit there? If so, it's not the set skills that did it but rather just the count.

I don't think I ever bothered to put this on the wiki either.

PS: I skimmed through the messages on Discord too.

[Shadowex3]

Interesting. I definitely had way less than 50 regular skills, I wonder if both of those can cause the same problem.

Edit: I was thinking about this some more and I remembered that there's two types of crashes. One is the classic CTD, but I also could reproducibly get the game to hang at 100% CPU load on a single core while the others went idle. At 7 armor skills the UI starts looking a little funky. What if the code they use to automatically reposition everything is hitting some kind of runaway math or divide by zero error?

I don't have the skill for it but a quick differential test would be to try armor with no regular skills and then see if you can cause the issue with 8 armor skill gems, then disable those as armor skills and try again. Then again with Rise coming out and how hold MHWI is the game's probably close to end of lifecycle at this point.