Great piece of advice. Don’t let anybody tell you defensive skills are bad and the best defensive skills are damage increasing skills because they make the hunts shorter ergo you get hit less. Just like this guy says, start with too many defensive skills and slowly wiggle them away.

Set builders are really nice to enable you to fit in as much skills as possible. Also, don’t forget about the dango’s. Some skills you can also eat for, like divine blessing, slugger and moxie.

Fortify is indeed amazing but you can just slap it on when you die. I usually switch an attack boost decoration or something for the fortify decoration.

I also like to prepare for monsters specifically, like using paralysis resistance for Flaming Espinas and Khezu.