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I've seen a lot of talk about how great monstrous cav is. And it is awesome. 8th Edition may be known as the monstrous cav edition. MC provides a staggering amount of hitting power over a very small frontage.
But I am wondering, how do you set up your terrain?

I know in my meta, they've got a modified terrain chart, with very few buildings and obstacles. This leaves wide open prairies of green grass to charge across.
Monstrous Cav have an soft spot. If they want to engage a unit in a building, they've got to get off their high horse(or juggernaught/demigryph/plague fly) and fight it out, toe to toe on foot without the mount. So building rules say that they take up 3 flight spots, but as per cav rules, the mount doesn't fight. This makes it very unlikely to have them force anything out of a building.

If you use the for terrain generation in the BRB, you'll notice you get a lot of buildings.
Rolls 2 & 12 each make D3+1 buildings.
Rolls 3, 4 and 10 each have you roll on charts with 5,2 and 1 building results.
Roll of a 6 is a building.
When all is said and done, ~39% of the terrain on the table is buildings.

If you're actually using the building rules, and the BRB terrain generation, are monstrous cav still that effective?

-Matt

I would say probably not, as standard cav are slightly favoured over MC in building fights (Blood and Chaos Knights esp).

However, I think it is a matter of practicality more than anything, gaming space is limited, hell my store is almost always 4x4, and that amount of terrain is quite expensive.

2 Buildings is considered standard on a tournament board here and MC are still awesome. I can only imagine how powerful they'd be if you regularly played without buildings.

I think there are multiple units or unit types that are considered powerful because most tournaments have not fully embraced the 8th ed terrain rules and scenarios.

If you have sufficient terrain out there (like rivers), those can dramatically impact the usefulness of large, points denial units that depend on having lots of ranks to keep steadfast. If moving or charging can result in that unit being on a terrain piece that disrupts the unit's steadfast status, that player will have to be far more careful in how they use that unit (rather than just pushing it forward). As Matt pointed out, buildings reduce the effectiveness of Monstrous Cavalry, but they also block line of site and can be used to protect large monsters from cannons. Impassable terrain features force more maneuvering, more intelligent deployment decisions, and exacerbate poor decisions made in the movement phase.

In my local area, I believe that the banners mission is used way too rarely in tournaments. Since we almost never use any iteration of that mission, we have seen the advent of small numbers of big units and inclusion of large units that cannot take banners (like chaos trolls). It's not uncommon to see a 2500 point army who has a fortitude of 5 (general, BSB and two banners). I've lobbied for a while for more inclusion of this mission as it would cause players to have to tweak their lists without adding any comp restrictions. The same with the Watchtower mission; people around here often complain about having to take an appropriate combat type unit that is small enough to fit in the tower.

Personally, I think a lot of people who play WHFB are guilty of a little intellectual laziness. No matter how much they protest to the opposite, most people's games would by choice consist of Battle Line played on a board with 4-6 terrain pieces largely arranged around the periphery of the table.

Well, "staggering damage output" is a bit of hype, really. 3 DGK get perhaps 15 attacks over 150 mm. 7 GS get 15 (17) attacks over 140 (160) mm. The latter can potentially opt to form a horde and get even more attacks. They're worse when it comes to put the same number into one smaller base, say, 40 mm, but not drastically so. Other MC is different but still...3 DGK or MF can lose fights.

The real clincher is not the number and quality of attacks, although that is usually good, it's that this comes on top of better speed, better mobility, better AS AND being cheaper.