How to progress?

[LevelQuestRPG]

I might get some hate but I genuinely don't know haha. I've played MHW for about 100 hrs now, 45 of those hours were restarts etc... but on my current save/play through I'm at 55 hrs and at Nergigante, I bought Icebourne during the Steam sale because I really want to get into MHW.
Do you just farm further up the armour and weapon tree to get the better sets or do you have a build in mind and just farm around that? I have no idea what I should be aiming for tbh.
I'm not running anything special just the bone armour alpha and the Grandrock I hammer.

Thanks

[BlitzkriegMike]

Not quite sure how to approach this. As there might be multiple reasons as to why you have problems progressing through the game.

Things that you could try is using a different weapon (Maybe the hammer just isn't for you, and see if you have a better click with a different weapon. As the game/fights change quite a bit when using a different weapon).

Regarding gear. Depends a lot on how your fights go. If you get hit a lot and have trouble learning the fight you might want more survivability. Things like Health and the recovery up skill might help here. If health is not the issue you can focus on things like trying to slightly up your crit / attack, like weakness exploit or attack (Slugger helps a lot tot with the hammer when doing solo hunts).

Also given that your crit change at this point in the game is relatively low. Be on the lookout for a hammer that has high raw damage (doesn't matter if it has -35% affinity) as this only becomes important when you have more options to increase it

[CookedMeat]

There are two types of progression in Monster Hunter, the progression of game content, and the progression of players' performance.
To push progression of game content, you just gotta do every quest/side-quest/objective you see, and talk to the NPCs that has a ( ！) mark.

To progress in your own performance, you only have two ways.
1. By understanding the game better, and playing it better. Learn the mechanics, learn your opponents, learn to use various tools to your advantage so you can take down your enemy faster with less error.
2. By crafting better equipment, including weapon and armor. For weapons, what generally matters are their raw Attack and Elemental Attack, then Affinity and Sharpness. It is simple at its core: bigger number = better damage.
For armor, these are the most important factor that determine your build being good/bad.

Skills are a passive perk that gives player buffs and abilities. When someone talks about builds in Monster Hunter, what they mean are actually a combination of skills, achieved through a specific mix of Equipment, Charm and Decoration. Some skills for example are:
① Attack Boost: Higher level gives a higher raw damage buff. Highest level gives roughly 10-15% bonus.
② Critical Eye: Higher level gives a higher critical rate buff. Highest level gives about a 40% bonus.
③ Evade Window: Higher level gives you a longer bonus on i-frames. Highest level can almost double your default i-frames.
As you can see, skills provide massive benefits to a player, and are the only way to become more powerful other than playing better.

Armor in Monster Hunter has to be regularly replaced while you are progressing the game content. The armor you get from the most basic monster (Great Jagras) and the end-game monster (Nergigante) will have massive differences between skills they provide. Most of the time, the later you unlock a piece of armor, the more valuable the skills it provides, and thus having them can greatly enhance your 'power'.

[LevelQuestRPG]

Thanks for your comments! It's given me some things to think about

[Sanquin]

I'd like to add something more: Certain quests/missions are locked behind hunter rank. I believe tempered monsters were locked behind reaching high rank 100? Not sure exactly anymore, but yea. At some points you just need to farm monsters for a while to get to a higher hunter rank. And while doing so, it's a good idea to aim for specific monsters that you can upgrade your gear with, or make a build you want with.

Though once you can go to Iceborne content you don't really have to keep grinding your rank in the base game if you don't want to.