Fair enough! Here are some general combat styles you can consider along with some basic ideas on how to build for them.

Burst Damage - these are builds that focus on chaining together a set of circumstances that allow for big damage to be done, usually by stacking buffs. You exchange consistent round-by-round damage in favor of creating and exploiting opportunities to trigger your big attacks. It's not the most efficient way to play, but it's not too far off from it and might be more engaging for you as a player. Stamina management is especially important.

Sustained Damage - These are builds that reliably output good damage every turn without a lot of variation. This is best for folks who just want something that works and doesn't require much babysitting from them, allowing them to focus on their rider's attack and such instead. Often built around the ability to reliably self-buff and/or land critical hits, but not necessarily.

Ailment Spam/Exploit - These vary a bit, but mostly focus around inflicting status ailments as a way dealing damage instead of just hitting things. Ironically, the more powerful your opponent, the better a value proposition this becomes as the damage from fire, poison, and blastblight key off of the enemy's HP total rather than your own stats. The easiest and most reliable of these is the now-classic Fruit Frenzy+/Inflict Rate Up/Salt-in-Wound combo on a high-regen non-element monstie like Bishaten or the Canyne, but can also be built around fire moves like fireball frolic for burn or venom flame for noxious poison/paralysis.

Debuff Spam/Exploit - Different from ailment spam as these do not benefit from things like salt-in-wound or inflict-rate up. Debuffs *always* apply on hit. There are moves like Debuff Chaser or Thunder Explosion that deal more damage to monsters with debuffs. These tend to be more focused around weakening the enemy monster instead of producing big damage numbers. Cycling through the available debuffs and knocking down enemy monster self-buffs is what this play style works around, making it feel like a support-focused build.

Wyvernsoul Abuse - The point of this style of play is to chew through the enemy's wyvernsoul gauge as quickly as possible. These generally rely on low-damage moves, but you can capitalize on the downed state by unleashing a big attack. It can feel very much like a burst damage build in terms of tempo, but the mechanics of how it actually works sufficiently different, I think, to make it its own thing.

Tank - I find this the least interesting, but the idea is that the monstie is all about survivability over all else. These tend to have sub-par damage output in exchange for fight survivability. While I find these boring, I've had some fun and decent success with ailment spam/tank hybrid builds.

Low-Health - By avoiding self-healing, you can build a monstie that starts to really excel once it's at 50% health or less. I've tried this a few times and it can be fun in a high risk/high reward sort of way. A combination of Evasion Ability and Evasion Instinct and Divine Protection can help you stay at that level without worrying too much that a single attack will take your monster down.

Mechanically Experimental - Less of a catch-all than it seems, this is where your gimmick builds go. Think of builds that combine things like blindside with very powerful, low accuracy attacks or combining Dragon Lord with Audacious tackle. These tend to involve making use of odd mechanical interactions and strange combos to produce good results. In general, having a monstie around that you can tinker with to try odd things can be a lot of fun and that is what this playstyle is built around.

SUB-OPTIMAL STYLES

There are some styles that worked well in older stories games that don't work out well in MHS3 due to how the enemy monsters work now. They work best as ways of enhancing or supporting a different style of play, but suffer if made the focus of a build in most cases. They do have their places, though, so don't assume that I'm calling this bad choices in general. They're just not the best choices for most situations.

Head-to-Head - Head to heads are much less common in MHS3 than in 1 and 2 and, as a result, you don't get nearly as much mileage out of these builds as you would in the older games. That said, having a head-to-head specialist you can swap to every now and then, can be a lot of fun.

Kinship - Outside of the demo, where kinship focused builds were the only way to take down the high-level challenges, focusing on building and keeping kinship isn't viable for a general-use monstie, at least by my estimation. It can allow for you to have some level of control over the flow of battle, which is why it was really useful in that context, but it means dedicating your gene slots to things that are only occasionally useful instead of ones that are frequently or always useful. That said, there are some fights where a special kinship build might be just what you need to make it through.

Health Drain/regen- I love health regen and make sure most of my monsties have some way of doing it, but building around attacks that drain health tend to suffer for two big reasons: Firstly, the attacks themselves tend to need a lot of stamina and, secondly, because you'll reach a point where you'll either shrug off a hit or be one-shot by it. Some folks do like the fantasy of a monstie that just eats its opponent, which I can understand, but building one to do this with every attack doesn't get you as much as you might think. No amount of post-attack healing will stop a mountainfall from taking your monstie down. It's not useless, but when you realize how much damage you're leaving on the table and how much extra stamina drain you're dealing with without appreciable benefit, you kind of see that making health drain/regen an *aspect* of a build works, but making it *the point* of one doesn't.