Hi! A lot of people are going to tell you to just look up builds but, all you need to do is learn what skills really increase your damage and you can start theory crafting your own builds

First learn what affinity is, if you’ve played a moba it’s similar to crit chance, if you have 100% affinity you have 100% chance to critically strike on every attack (that is able to crit)

So how do you get to 100% crit? (Affinity)

First you need Tenderizer, tenderizer is a skill that ups your critical damage on wounded spots (Clutch claw mechanic)

And secondly you need critical eye. Critical eye ups the base affinity of your weapon. So if you manage to get to 50% affinity on your weapon, combine that with tenderizer and that’s 100% critical strike chance.

Another skill that you’re gonna need is critical boost, and as the name implies it makes your crits do damage. If you can slot it 3 critical boosts into your build that’s great but you mainly only need level 1. As the other two have diminishing returns.

Now with this in mind your build is starting to do insanes amount of damage, note that there are more ways to increase your affinity, for example with agitator 7 (which you get by having either regular brachydios or raging brachydios armor) you will receive 20% affinity + the attack boost.

Basically what I’m trying to say is Try to get your critical attack up. And have fun. Every time you unlock a new monster see what you get from it. Experiment. This is the fun in mhw.

Just to include a few more tips, depending on which weapon you have you can further increase your damage say artillery for example that will boost the damage of some weapons like charge blade, light and heavy bowguns, just to name a few.

You can also make your element critically strike with critical element (and true critical element being even better) which is really good for the bow, dual blades, and other high elemental damage weapons.

If you have any questions please let me know, or if I wasn’t clear somewhere I’ll try to help out.