The pixel art in the thumbnail was published by Patattackerman on tumblr. I deployed a cropped version here under the assumption of a fair use clause. Why? Because it looks awesome! Details of game mechanics and stats are taken from in-game displays, the fextralife mhw wiki, kiranico's mhw database and the amazing spreadsheets compiled by Deathcream#1576 and MoonBunnie#0001. Those are excellent sources for further reading - for instance, if you want to learn more about weapon classes, bowgun mechanics, attack motion values, hit zone multipliers or example builds. Because these are all topics that are not covered by this guide here. Rather, we go into the details of stats and skills that are generally relevant for coming up with your own blademaster builds.

T.l.d.r: Yes, you can skip this section. The guide content begins here.

The basic concept of builds in MHW in a nut shell:

• Get the quality of life (QoL) skills you want to make the hunt enjoyable,
  
• add the defensive skills you need to make the hunt successful,
  
• add all damage skills you can to make the hunt short.

In the following sections, we cover some of the most popular skills, explain why they matter and how the related stats and game mechanics work in detail. In particular, the third point is quite a bit more complex than one might assume.

In MHW, there are many situational skills that can make a hunter's life much easier, depending on the monster you face, the weapon class you utilize or the quest type you tackle. Here we discuss some of these QoL skills, with a short explanation of their relevance.

• Flinch Free
  If you hunt in a team, light attacks from fellow hunters can stagger you, and shots from archers and gunners may get blocked when you stand in the line of fire. One level of flinch free is enough to prevent this, and therefore recommended for multiplayer.
  
  
• Evade Window
  This skill makes it easier to time your doges and to evade attacks. If that makes the difference for you to avoid taking damage, the skill is invaluable. If you can do without it or still mess up the timing, there are other options.
  
  
• Stamina Surge, Constitution, Runner, Resuscitate
  Stamina management is important for some weapon classes. Even though items like Dash Juice solve most of that problem, stacking up stamina skills can help. Though, there is a cap of 50% stamina usage for actions like rolls. Note that the damage skill Latent Power covers this limit.
  
  
• Guard, Guard Up
  If your weapon can block and you are willing to take advantage of this feature, these skills are essential. Guard reduces chip damage, stamina usage and knockback while blocking, while Guard Up challenges the definition of "unblockable" attacks.
  
  
• Evade Distance, Quick Sheath
  If your weapon class suffers from low mobility and/or slow sheathing, these skills can be such a relief! Side note: Quick sheath also comes with the Assassin's Mantle.
  
  
• Short Charge, Power Prolonger, Horn Maestro
  Some weapons need time to charge up attacks or to unfold temporary buffs. Skills that help with such mechanics are the definition of QoL!
  
  
• Artillery, Heavy Artillery
  Artillery increases the damage of certain explosive attacks, like sticky ammo, Gun Lance shelling and impact phials of Charge Blades by up to 50% (Level 5, Secret), and specifically lowers the cooldown of Wyvern fire. Not to confuse with explosions from blast status, or the skill Heavy Artillery, which can double the damage of siege weaponry.
  
  
• Earplugs, Windproof and Tremor Resistance
  Certain monsters tend to interrupt and immobilize hunters - a major nuisance that can be avoided with well timed dodges, proper blocking or the above resistance skills. The infamous Rocksteady Mantle or the set bonus from the Ishvalda armor cover these immunities as well.
  
  
• Stun and Ailment Resistances
  Immunity to effluvia, blastblight, sleep, defense down, poison or paralysis can be a game changer for certain hunts. Few creature inflict those status ailments, thus these potent counter skills are situational. Stun effects, however, can be inflicted by any creature that repeatedly hits you. Therefore, Stun Resistance is awesome for those who don't want to dodge and just go for tank and bonk.
  
  
• Elemental Resistances
  Skills that boost resistances to fire, ice, thunder, water or dragon only make a marginal difference for elemental damage received. But they help to reach a resistance of 20, which grants immunity to the corresponding elemental blight status, much like the skill Blight Resistance Level 3. Note that the element (L) buff from the canteen grants +15 to all elemental resistances, and that the skill Coalescence won't trigger if you are immune to blights.
  
  
• Recovery Boost
  This skill synergizes greatly with health drain augments on weapons. These become available rather late in the game, though, and only boosting the effectiveness of healing potions is not quite as helpful.
  
  
• Quick Eater, Wide Area, Free Meal
  Quick eater makes it easier to time your heals, which is a noob friendly super power that may lead to bad habits. Wide are shares some of the joy with your party, and free meal greatly extends your supplies, especially with the "secret" set bonus. We list them together for their nice synergy.
  
  
• Tool Specialist
  Reduces the cooldown of tools, and is thus popular for mantles like Rocksteady or Temporal, which allow for a more aggressive playstyle.
  
  
• Part Breaker
  For some hunts, breaking specific monster parts early can be a tremendous help to prevent certain moves and attacks of the creature.
  
  
• Geologist
  One level of this skill is enough to double shiny drops in the Guiding Lands. Bling bling! Otherwise, this gathering skill is nice to have, but certainly not a priority for hunting.
  
  
• Slinger Capacity
  With just one skill point and one slinger load, a monster can be wall slammed twice. *Click* Noice! Ammo dropped from monsters will require higher skill levels for this, though.
  
  
• Clutch Boost
  This skill is an Iceborne exclusive from a melded decoration, and it allows light weapon classes to soften a monster part with one clutch attack, rather than two.
  
  
• Non-Element Boost, Free Elem/Ammo Up
  For some weapons, the element or status value - like fire or poison - is shown in brackets. Either the skill Free Elem/Ammo Up is required to activate these (one third per skill level), or the Namielle Set bonus. Only when a weapon has no active element, the skill "Non-Element Boost" can raise its raw damage by 5%.
  
  
• Fortify
  During expeditions or in the guiding lands, there is no real penalty for carting. And with this skill, two carts unlock a massive damage bonus of 20% for 50 minutes! This is also a game changer when you struggle with harder quests, and it is way too strong to be allowed in time attack (TA). For these reasons, we list this one as a situational QoL skill, and not as a damage skill.
  
  
• Heroics
  This skill is very powerful, but it stands in a weird place: Too imba to be allowed in time attack (TA). Too tedious for most casual hunts. And a waste of skills for those who are crazy ... i mean... skilled enough to run Felyne Heroics. That's why we keep it here, and don't discuss it as a damage skill.
  
  
• Guts
  Prevents one cart if your health is above 64HP, much like Felyne Moxie, and leaves you with 1HP. Therefore, great to activate Felyne Heroics.

T.l.d.R: Do I need this stuff? It really depends! If you are looking for the damage skills, you can skip the next section.

Some of the QoL skills we just discussed are a great boost for your survivability, as they protect you from stunlocks or help you to avoid taking damage. Some say "offence is the best defence", which is undeniably true in MHW, if your team's damage output gets so overpowered that a monster is constantly staggering and flinching. But this is not what we are covering in this section. Rather, we look into skills that allow you to take more damage, should you fail to evade those nasty monster attacks.

• Health Boost
  This is the skill for survival. Raising your max health from 150 to 200 is a massive differentiator, equivalent to a 33.3% higher survivability or a factor of 75% for effective damage received. Side note: The set bonus from the end game Fatalis armor already covers this, among other effects.
  
  
• Divine Blessing
  If Health Boost is not enough to keep you going, this one should be added next. Maybe it won't trigger when you most need it, but its chance to reduce damage makes a big difference overall. In late MR, the skill becomes even stronger with the set bonus from the Gold Rathian or Fatalis armor.
  
  
• Defense Boost
  This one looks obvious. Yes, your overall defense matters. But does this skill help? Actually, not quite that much!

Let us compare the effective factor for damage received and its inverse, the survivability factor, for each level of these three skills. Why factors? Because you can multiply them for each active skill.

Health Boost rocks, Defense Boost sucks? Gotcha! But how does that defense stat even work?

Taken damage is multiplied by the following factor: 80/(Defense + 80)

So, the total damage it takes to cart you is proportional to your defense plus eighty. If you want to compare the survivability of two defense values, add 80 each and look at the ratio. 80 defense has twice the survivability as zero defense. 920 defense can take twice the punishment than 420 defense - got it.

In late game, typical base values are around 1'000 defense. This is the value we assumed for above table. E.g. for Defense Boost Level 7, we calculate (80+1000*1.1+35)/1080 = 112.5%. Of course, if you look at typical values of around 400 defense for end of high rank, or even around 30 defense for early game, the relative usefulness of Defense Boost increases accordingly. But in late game, the skill can safely be ignored.

Armor upgrades are similar. The progression of base defense values - as you reach higher rarity equipment - makes a huge difference in terms of survivability. But the relative impact of individual armor upgrades gets smaller accordingly. However, each small bit can make the difference between getting one-shot or surviving a strong attack.

T.l.d.r: Yes, Health Boost.

Below is a list of skills that provide some direct damage boost - either by Affinity, raw damage or elemental damage.

This is a lot of information. And to compare these skills and their relevance, we first need to get an understanding of how attack stats and affinity work. That's what we address in the next sections.

T.l.d.r: Yes. But I bet you will get back to this list.

Affinity matters. But how does it work? Positive values are a chance for critical hits. The weapon's base value and all Affinity bonuses stack additively, up to a cap of 100% (*Captain obvious flies away*). If the total Affinity is negative, it implies the chance for blunder hits that deal less damage.

The actual raw damage factor of affinity hits depends on the skill Critical Boost, as shown below.

It is important to mention that certain attacks do not make use of Affinity, such as the explosive damage attacks mentioned in context of the skill Artillery.

Simple maths section: If we look at a given Affinity A and one of above crit multipliers C, the expected value or weighted average of raw damage scales like C*A + (100%-A). So, the relative extra damage is simply the product A*(C-100%).

The skill Critical Boost is weak for Affinity values below 40%. But it becomes essential as you approach the 100% Affinity cap, which is well possible with the plethora of Affinity skills we have seen earlier. Here are some more stats to relate the skills.

• If 100% Affinity is given, Critical Boost 3 increases raw damage by a factor of 1.12.
  
• Without positive Affinity, Critical Boost is useless.
  
• If Critical Boost 3 is given, every 5% of Affinity add an average of 2% raw damage.
  
• Without Critical Boost, every 4% of Affinity add an average of 1% raw damage.
  
• Compared to 0% Affinity, that is up to 40% more raw damage overall.

A guaranteed extra of 40% damage? That's too good to miss! And for that reason, high Affinity is a key priority for late game builds, but it requires Critical Boost to work. In return, these skills are much less effective in earlier phases of the game.

Note that some Affinity skills like Weakness Exploit or Latent Power are situational. With such skills, it can make sense to overshoot the Affinity limit, as from time to time only some of the skills will be active.

T.l.d.r: Affinity needs Critical Boost and vice versa. Maxed: +40% Raw!

We have a long list of attack skills, and we know how to quantify affinity. But what about all those raw damage values? In this section, we relate those numbers to other buffs and actual base stats, so we can estimate their relative usefulness.

In early game, typical weapons have a raw damage of around 100, high rank weapons reach around 200 raw, and most of the late master rank weapons are in the order of 300 raw. So, if a skill or buff adds 30 raw - which is rather much - then that is roughly 15% of a HR player's base damage, and maybe some 10% of a MR player's base damage. And as more and more buffs are stacked, the relative benefit for adding one more bonus gets smaller accordingly. When stacking plenty of raw damage buffs, it is possible to reach a raw damage cap. This limit equals twice the weapon's base value (including weapon upgrades, like augments and awakenings).

Let us wrap this up with the defense information from a previous section, and compare the numbers with typical item buffs.

Most of the items listed above do stack in the sense that one of each can be active. E.g. having two charms and two talons in your inventory adds a permanent 15 raw and 30 defense. Exceptions: Seeds don't stack with pills, and "drugs" do not stack with their "mega" variant. For the HH buffs: Each buff can be applied (and encored) once, while buffs from Palicos with the coral orchestra gadget do stack with buffs from hunting horn players.

So far, we have been talking about raw damage, which is actually never displayed in any of the game menus. In the monster hunter franchise, there are two different measures for physical damage:

• "Raw" is comparable across weapon classes and buffs. It serves as the base value for damage calculations.
  
• "Attack Power" is shown in the stats menu, and equals the raw damage times a weapon class multiplier.

These weapon class multipliers are larger for heavier and slower weapons, but they are not used for actual damage rules. Rather, every single attack or move has its own motion value, which is applied for individual scaling. So, if we want to compare the base damage of different weapons with each other, or with the raw damage from buffs and skills, we need to divide the displayed attack power by the weapon class multiplier, as listed below.

Okay, but what the heck are those "Fat" numbers in the last two columns? Well, there is a major exception to our estimate of about 300 base raw at late Master Rank. End game equipment typically uses Fatalis weapons, which excel in raw damage and are the best weapons in many situations. And these Fatalis weapons are one of the only weapon sets, for which the raw values differ greatly from one to another weapon class. That's why the last two columns of above table show the raw damage and attack power for each of the Rarity 12 Fatalis weapons.

T.l.d.r: Raw boosts are relatively small on top of end game equipment, but they are an important factor to reach high DPS values.

Each blademaster weapon has a mulitcolored bar that indicates how the sharpness degrades as the weapon is worn down. These colored sharpness levels serve for three factors: Weapon bouncing, raw damage and elemental damage.

Every hit zone of each monster has a certain hardness or sharpness limit. Hitting that body part with a weapon below that sharpness limit causes the attack to bounce. In this case, the Mind's Eye skill prevents staggering, but the attack still deals less damage and doubles the wear down of sharpness per hit.

While this sounds fairly imporant, bouncing can be widely ignored in many cases. The more important factor is damage scaling. If you wonder how important it is to sharpen a weapon, the relevant question is: What is the relative loss of overall damage when the sharpness falls to the next lower level? These loss values and the base factors are shown for raw and elemental damage in below table.

Okay, that is quite a bit, and weapon maintenance makes sense. The following skills make sharpening more efficient or even obsolete.

• Master's Touch
  The Teostra set bonus grants infinite sharpness when paired with 100% affinity. For high rank, this is also on the Behemoth meta.
  
  
• (True) Sharp Sword / Spare Shot
  A powerful set bonus on Narga and Fatalis armor that diminishes sharpness lost by a whopping 70%. The weaker variant on high rank Xeno armor grants 50% loss of sharpness.
  
  
• Handicraft
  Many weapons require this skill to unlock the last 50 units of their sharpness bar, 10 units per Skill level. In certain cases, this enables a higher color level of sharpness as well.
  
  
• Protective Polish
  Comes as set bonus or from a meldable decoration (Iceborne). Grants infinite sharpness for 60s after sharpening.
  
  
• Speed Sharpening
  Faster sharpening is nice if you do not have access to whetfish fins.

Once you reach master rank, there is an event quest that makes Whetfish Fin+ items easily accessible: "A Fish to Whet your Appetite". Using the Ghile mantle and Capture Net, it can be completed in some 90 to 120 seconds per run. Each fin can be used about 10 times for sharpening at max speed.

T.l.d.r: If you cannot maintain sharpness, you lose quite a bit of DPS, especially with elemental builds. Teo set or Fin+ items help.

At the bottom of the damage skills list, we also covered elemental attack boosts. But comparing these with raw damage is tricky, because the mechanics are complex. Here are some of the key points you should consider when going for elemental damage.

• Base values
  Elemental values on weapons and skill bonuses are always shown as multiples of ten. Elemental damage calculations are based on one tenth of the element value displayed. So, is +150 ice damage equivalent to +15 raw? Yes and no. It is a crude approximation with limited validity, and there are many factors that scale elemental damage in a different way than raw damage.
  
  
• Motion values are not relevant
  Faster and lighter attacks have smaller motion values, i.e. they deal less physical damage per hit. For the elemental damage part, however, most attacks use the same scaling factor, so the faster attacks work best. In general, only a few weapon classes like Dual Blades, Charge Blades and bows make excellent use of elemental damage. For heavier weapon classes, it is much more difficult to outperform a raw build with an elemental setup.
  
  
• Hit zones are more important
  You need the right element against the right monster - and hit the right spot! Because hit zone multipliers vary greatly for each element and body part. That's another reason why physical damage builds are generally easier to deploy. Often, the physical weak spot has a higher multiplier than the elemental weak spots. In some cases, this will roughly compensate for the motion value scaling.
  
  
• Elements are capped
  As you stack elemental damage boosts, you will eventually hit a damage cap indicated by a red number in the stats screen. The cap is at least +150 or +60% above the weapon's base element: cap = MAX(base+150, base*1.6). The Safi Set bonus can modify the cap multiplier of 1.6 as follows.
  
  Weapon

  No Safi Set

  3 Safi Pieces

  5 Safi Pieces

  Bowguns

  1.6

  1.8

  2.35

  All others

  1.6

  2.2

  2.55
  For example, consider a weapon with 250 Ice (including upgrades and augments). With Ice Attack Lvl 6, you already reach the cap of 250+150 ice, which is 60% above the base value. Further skills like Coalescence will have no effect in this case. To stack more elemental damage boosts, you either need a substantially higher base value on the weapon. Or you can consider 3 pieces of Safi armor, which in this case adds another 80 element, and raises the cap by another 150 points, leaving room for another 70 points of buffs.
  
  
• Raw still matters
  You should see elemental damage as an extra on top of raw damage. Even if you specialize in an elemental build, a skill like Critical Boost is still important, although it never affects elemental damage.
  
  
• Affinity requires Critical Element
  The skill Critical Element comes with Kjarr weapons (from Kulve) and with certain armor sets (from Rathalos or Velkhana). Without this skill, Affinity has no effect on elemental damage at all. A stronger armor set skill, True Critical Element, is exclusive to Silver Rathalos and Azure Age armor pieces. The elemental damage multipliers for Affinity hits differ per weapon class as follows.
  
  
  

  Weapon classes

  Crit. Element

  True Crit. Element

  LBG

  125%

  140%

  All others

  135%

  155%

  GS, H, HH and HBG

  150%

  170%

As you approach end game content, Kjarr weapons allow for the most flexible elemental builds, e.g. with Fatalis armor for plenty of deco skills, or with Safi armor for the highest element caps. But it really depends on the monster and circumstances. Mashups with other sets for Crit. Element are well possible. As outlined in the section title, elemental damage is complicated.

T.l.d.R: If you are not into Dual Blades, it is probably easier to go for raw damage.

We started with skill priorities in a nut shell:

• Get the quality of life (QoL) skills you want to make the hunt enjoyable,
  
• add the defensive skills you need to make the hunt successful,
  
• add all damage skills you can to make the hunt short.

Then we discussed examples of relevant skills for each of the above, and dived deeper into the stats and game mechanics. Simply put, we have seen that

• raw damage relies on Affinity and Critical Boost,
  
• elemental damage relies on Affinity, Critical Element and many other factors,
  
• both are affected by sharpness, which is important to maintain.

In practice, applying these points heavily depends on the equipment you have at your disposal. Once you reach end game content, most blademaster builds will be based on 4 pieces of Fatalis armor, simply because the combination of base skills, set bonus and decoration slots is unmatched.

But there are so many options until you get there - or for those who dare to be creative. Depending on your progression, weapon class and personal preferences, a set bonus like Master's touch or Critical Element can be super helpful. The same goes for conditional damage skills and QoL skills that should really fit your preferred playstyle and synergize with your build. Annoyed by some status ailment? Then use the right counter skill. And if there is no room for damage skills? Well then, maybe the hunt takes a little longer, but we are here to have fun, right?

That's it for now. If some of you enjoyed the read and had the one or the other new insight, feel free to leave a comment or a cookie.

Happy hunting!

Bonifarz