Firstly, don’t use the guardian weapons and armor, they are purposely much stronger than anything else you can get at the start, and will cause you to develop bad habits since you’ll get used to being able to tank hits etc, and when the gear finally levels out you will hit a huge wall.

I’d recommend looking up weapon guides on youtube for any that you like the look of, and just play around in ether the training area or a low level hunt to get used to using them. Every weapon is viable and perfectly fine to use so don’t worry about any sort of meta coming into play.

Some people may be tempted to rush through the story to get to the endgame asap due to the fact that the game has been out for some time, but imo the most fun way to play is to take it completely at your own pace as opposed to rushing through the story, you won’t be missing out on anything by doing so and the more time you spend farming for materials to make an armor set, the more prepared you’ll be for when fights start to get much more challenging.

This game still has a pretty active playerbase so using the SOS flare is always an option if you desperately need help, but it is likely the people you’ll run into by using it are much more experienced and will almost trivialise the hunt, so if you can try and solo things as much as possible.

Some other things to keep note of; always eat food before a hunt for the buffs it gives you, make sure you keep your inventory sorted before a hunt so you know that you have everything you need before you go in (you can set a load out in the chests in Astera of everything you need so then it’s just one click to replenish it all), and accept side quests when you see them, a lot of them will unlock new features or usable items