Any build for early high rank bow game?

[zalexy]

I am using nergigante set and dragon king which focus on attack. Any recommendede build?

[Dyvawn]

First, you either need a Normal Shot jewel or Spread Shot jewel to be stronk.

[Stationary Traveller]

Rath soul helm b
Rath mail b
Teostra braces b (a if no WE decos)
Odo coil b
Lavasioth coil b (Diablos Nero b if you have spread deco)
Fitness charm III
Decos: weakness exploit, bow charge plus, normal shots or power shots (depending on what you have), 2/3 elemental attack decos corresponding to your bow element and as many critical eye decos as you can. You can also use stamina thief if you're solo and health boost if you're doing mp.
This build will work efficiently with any elemental bow.

Bows to get: Kadachi, Legiana, Anja, Hazak, Water Shot (Proudhunter is better but requires a specific build with free elem)
Use the bow with the element the monster is weak against.

[😎Astran😾]

Don't forget to add 3 Vitality jewel for tempered multiplayer. Nobody want you to be one/two-shot.

[Ragosta tin Dei]

Elemental or elementless?

[zalexy]

Elementaless

[Stationary Traveller]

Don't go elementless with bow please, you will just be wasting your time. It doesn't take long to build 5 bows and to learn which one to use against which monster. You can easily save your bow loadouts and pull them out before the quest begins.

[fireandice]

Originally posted by Moonmadness:

Don't go elementless with bow please, you will just be wasting your time. It doesn't take long to build 5 bows and to learn which one to use against which monster. You can easily save your bow loadouts and pull them out before the quest begins.

This is incorrect for allot of reasons. Elements have a cap in damage in this game firstly, so all speed run builds end game are raw. The best bow currently is the diablos bow. Elementless adds 10% of the weapons base true attack to the weapon. Diablos is 230 true, putting it at 253 true with a single jewel. Atack up 6-7 roughly 20 more true, 273. At this point you want to start stacking crit as the dmg for stacking more attack evens out. Crit becomes more important past 270 ish true. You will be able to push much much further with out an element on bow in the long run than if you were to use it, so aim for the diablos bow.You can ofc push it even further with peak, for another 20 true, mega demon + attack food L+ might pill etc etc etc.
- The evasion mantle gives 5 evasion for a limited time and on dodging grants 20 seconds of + 30% raw true, this is not applied to any element of any type. This is another reason raw is king for all weapons in mhw.

Elemental on the other hand adds a flat amount of damage based on the elementals true. So if a bow has 1000 element it would have 100 true element on a hit. if a monster is weak to that element of 25% you would only be adding 25 dmg for your hits with that large amount of element. (which i will say again you can't get close to that since element is capped very low in world.)

However early game element is excelent to start with, the anjanath bow has 200 True, and 390 fire to it placing it as a nice go to bow for starting as you work your way up to diablos.

Here is a good site to help with bow formulas. http://laxgg.blogspot.com/p/mh4u-bow-damage-calculation-and-motion.html

[Goilveig]

Originally posted by fireandiceco:

This is incorrect for allot of reasons. Elements have a cap in damage in this game firstly, so all speed run builds end game are raw. The best bow currently is the diablos bow.

The diablos bow is favored by speedrunners primarily because many are wall-shot spammers, and wall shot has incredibly high motion values for raw compared to elemental damage, far higher than any other move. Wall shot, with its unusually high raw MVs, and Dragon Piercer, with its unusually low elemental MVs, benefit from a raw bow. However, with any other shot, element wins pretty handily.

Some actual math on, say, Vaal Hazak's head, hit by Rapid Shot III with a Power Coating:

Cera Coilbender w/ +7 Attack & Elementless
---------------
True Raw: 241
Effective Raw w/ Elementless: 265.1

Anja Arch III w/ +4 Fire Attack
---------------
True Raw: 200
True Element: 51

Rapid Shot III
---------------
MV: 0.1
EMV: 1

Vaal's Head
---------------
Hitzone (Shot): 0.5
EHitzone (Fire): 0.25

Power Coating: 1.35 raw multiplier


Cera Coilbender:
Raw: Round(265.1 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.5) = 18

Anja Arch III:
Raw: Round(200 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.5) = 14
Element: Round(51 * 1 * 0.25) = 13

This is before you consider the Anja Arch's higher (or less negative) affinity, the effects of Affinity Boosters & Critical Element, etc.

The other thing to consider with "raw over everything" for a bow is that bow motion values are very low, as low as 7% for Rapid Shot I, and damage is rounded. For the case of the above Rapid Shot III to Vaal's head, anything with a damage value between 17.5 and 18.49 would round to the same 18 damage per shot.

That would work out to be anything between 236 and 249 true raw before elementless - those additional 13 raw do no additional damage, at least with this particular move, because they round to the same final value.

Also, the motion values on the site you linked are wrong. The best source is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/comments/7y4bq9/indepth_bow_math_part_1_new_motion_values_damage/

Edit: Oh, and if you think the Anja Arch is an unfair comparison, here's the Flying Kadachi Strikebow on Kushala Daora's head with Rapid III:

Cera Coilbender:
Raw: Round(265.1 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.45) = 16

Flying Kadachi Strikebow:
Raw: Round(170 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.45) = 10
Element: Round(35 * 1 * 0.2) = 7

While this is much closer, this is before you consider the 45% base affinity difference between the bows, or how Critical Element plays into things (since the elemental critical multiplier is 35% and not 25%).

I'm also giving you the benefit of power coating, which only affects raw. Close-range or uncoated shots favor elemental bows even more.

The coilbender does, however, not take a damage penalty for firing status coatings (apart from the lack of a power coating), while the elemental bow's damage drops considerably. However, that's only for a fairly small number of shots in any given fight.

[Gearhart]

Really it depends on what kind of bow guy do you want to be? pure raw dmg? elemental or debuff? as this will change what bows and what armor you use.

nergigante is kinda trash for any bow though

[Ragosta tin Dei]

IF he's just starting out then elementless teaches fundamentals better than elemental bows. However this means fighting black diablos to some degree of success (blos bow needs horns, and that means killing/capturing blos with broken horns) no small feat for a hunter just starting out. Blos also needs decorations, which he may not have, elementless for one.

If this is the case, it might be more prudent to start out with Kadachi, Legiana and Dragonbone (lightning ice and dragon) before moving onto anja arch and blos.

With this in mind, I think it would be best if he started farming elemental sets and then move onto a more advanced, non elemental build.

[fireandice]

@Goilveig Raw pulls ahead when it stacks more true attack+ crit does it not as buffs like ev mantle dont effect element? Also thank you for putting in the mhw bow formula, mine was from 4u.

[Goilveig]

Originally posted by fireandiceco:

@Goilveig Raw pulls ahead when it stacks more true attack+ crit does it not as buffs like ev mantle dont effect element? Also thank you for putting in the mhw bow formula, mine was from 4u.

If you multiply the raw values by 1.3, you get, for my two above:

Vaal
-------
Cera Coilbender:
Raw: Round(265.1 * 1.3 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.5) = 23

Anja Arch III:
Raw: Round(200 * 1.3 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.5) = 18
Element: Round(51 * 1 * 0.25) = 13

Kushala
--------
Cera Coilbender:
Raw: Round(265.1 * 1.3 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.45) = 21

Flying Kadachi Strikebow:
Raw: Round(170 * 1.3 * 1.35 * 0.1 * 0.45) = 13
Element: Round(35 * 1 * 0.2) = 7

So on Kushala, nonelemental very slightly inches ahead assuming you actually can keep the buff up the entire fight. On Vaal, element still wins. On white-spiked Nergi, the raw bow with evasion mantle is significantly better, because white spikes give Nergi a huge weakness to raw damage.

[Stationary Traveller]

Originally posted by fireandiceco:

Originally posted by Moonmadness:

Don't go elementless with bow please, you will just be wasting your time. It doesn't take long to build 5 bows and to learn which one to use against which monster. You can easily save your bow loadouts and pull them out before the quest begins.

This is incorrect for allot of reasons. Elements have a cap in damage in this game firstly, so all speed run builds end game are raw.

I'm gonna stop you right there. If you look up at the top bow runs ranked on speedrun.com, of the 24 registered speedruns there's a whopping total of 3 that use Coilbender instead of an elemental bow (in a 4th one, White Winds of the New World, Cera is used exclusively on one of the four monsters to beat). All of these runs exploit literally the same cheesy strat - affinity booster, evasion mantle and wallrun spamming, because that move is the only one that ignores hitzones. There's a reason why wallrun moves are banned in TA rules.

So please stop spreading BS. Just because you saw that sub 1 min Nerg speedrun with wallrun spamming that doesn't mean that it's the main build used by speedrunners or the most optimal way to play bow. You actually just need to try both Coilbender and elemental bows for yourself to immediately realize how little damage you do with the former compared to any elemental bow even with a heavily optimized build.

Originally posted by Ragosta tin Dei:

IF he's just starting out then elementless teaches fundamentals better than elemental bows. However this means fighting black diablos to some degree of success (blos bow needs horns, and that means killing/capturing blos with broken horns) no small feat for a hunter just starting out. Blos also needs decorations, which he may not have, elementless for one.

I don't see how doing less damage and ignoring hitzones teaches fundamentals better than doing good damage for hitting the correct spots that are weak to the element. You're basically cutting yourself off learning how to exploit elemental damage which is critical for a weapon like bow that relies on it to be competitive.
Going raw is the most lazy way you could approach learning bow.

[Goilveig]

Originally posted by Moonmadness:

So please stop spreading BS. Just because you saw that sub 1 min Nerg speedrun with wallrun spamming that doesn't mean that it's the main build used by speedrunners or the most optimal way to play bow.

Also, just as a note, that particular speedrun used a bug that has since been fixed - the power/spreadshot skill used to incorrectly give 20% bonus damage to wall shot and not 10% as it is intended. Even still, the strategy is cheesy as hell, but it's not quite as bad as it was at that time.

[John]

Yeah... Having the same stast and skills , that speedrunner hit Nerg's white spikes for 160 each tick and I hit for 60. lmao.

To address the topic, there normmaly are two categories of bow builds. The normal/spread shot build and the Dragon Piercer build. Use elemental bows for the normal/spread shot build, and bows with high base attack for the Piercer build.

For normal/spread shots, the core skills are: Constitution (must have), Stamina Surge, Weakness Exploit (must have), Elemental Attack, Critical Element, Spread Shots (must have), Normal Shots (must have), and Bow Charge Plus (it is particularly difficult to acquire but quite powerful).
Choose the armor pieces that optimize the above mentioned skills, I use the Fitness Charm, Dragonking Eyepatch, Teostra Arm B, Nerg Chest B & Waist A, and Lavasioth Legs B, but you can and should adjust to your personal preference and the Jewels you have.
This build has very high mobility and dps, the only limit factor being the stamina. It's viable against every monster.

For Piercer: Critical Draw (must have), Critical Boost, Non-Elemental Boost (must have for Cera), Attack Boost, and Critical Eye. Personally I don't recommend Bow Charge Plus for this build.
This build purely revolves around Dragon Piercer, and is particularly strong againtst enemies like Bazel, Uragaan, Daora, etc, those with "thick" weak parts, essentially. It is viable against most monsters.