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If you’re looking to broaden your Monster Hunter Wilds weapon horizons, choosing a new weapon type to try can be a daunting choice. Flipping through the in-game weapon guide assaults your eyes with a blur of gauges, meters, and mechanics. What’s an amped state? How do all those ammo types work? Is the Gunlance actually cooler because it has a gun on it? (Generally, yes.)
Our Wilds weapon tier list is here to help. I want to note up front that we assembled our tier list with general play in mind after a combined 500+ hours of hunting. This isn’t a tier list for speedrunning potential where, under extremely specific conditions, you can nuke a monster in 37 seconds. Instead, we’re more interested in versatility and utility, playstyle and build variety, mechanical satisfaction, and—generally—how freakin’ cool the weapon feels to use.
Ultimately the best Monster Hunter weapon is the one you enjoy using most. If you’re looking for a nudge towards a new weapon to swing, however, here are the ones we’d point you towards first.
Looking for more hunting tips? Check out our Monster Hunter Wilds guide hub for all the G-Rank advice we’ve crafted so far.
Monster Hunter Wilds Weapons, Ranked
Lincoln Carpenter
After reviewing Monster Hunter Wilds, I played another 70 hours and spent time with each weapon to create this tier list. I can’t stop. Help.
S Tier: Switch Axe, Great Sword
A Tier: Hammer, Gunlance, Sword and Shield, Dual Blades
B Tier: Lance, Hunting Horn, Insect Glaive, Bow, Long Sword
C Tier: Heavy Bowgun, Charge Blade
D Tier: Light Bowgun
Monster Hunter Wilds weapons: S Tier
S: Switch Axe
With an updated attack toolkit in Wilds, the steady ramp-up and explosive payoff of the Switch Axe has gained a kind of combat fluidity that almost feels like mastering a martial art.
In the more nimble axe mode, quick access to a rising Offset Attack lets you knock monsters down to earth. In the heavy-hitting sword mode, a perfectly-timed Counter Rising Slash gives Switch Axe a bit of Long Sword flavor, smoothly negating an incoming attack and countering with your own.
With a little mastery, your Switch Axe of choice—whether you prefer a power phial or poison, raw damage or elemental—can bully aside or weave through whatever threat comes your way.
S: Great Sword
Despite the simple concept—swinging a very big sword to do very big damage—the Great Sword has always been a weapon that requires nuance. Monsters are more than willing to punish an overeager Great Sword novice for misplaced positioning or poorly-judged timing on their meaty charge attacks.
In Wilds, however, Capcom’s chosen the Great Sword as its primary combat showcase. As the mascot monster-slaying implement, the Great Sword has access to just about every new Wilds combat mechanic, and as a result, is far more approachable.
It’s still a weapon requiring a delicate hand—even a Chatacabra can slap you around if you’re constantly overcommitting. But for those willing to meet it halfway, one of Monster Hunter’s most demanding weapons is now a swiss army knife of monster-slaying.
Monster Hunter Wilds weapons: A Tier
A: Hammer
Ah, my beloved Hammer. The Hammer, to me, is a pure distillation of Monster Hunter fundamentals. It’s a no-frills beatstick that expects you to meet just three demands: Know your positioning, know your timing, and know them well. Do that, and you’re rewarded with heavy damage and vital stuns when you’re bonking the monster’s head.
In motion the Hammer is deliciously mobile. Dodging and weaving between incoming blows is fun on its own: Quests become boxing matches with opponents 10 times your size, where you’re hunting for an opening to deliver a knockout haymaker. It’s a dance of close calls and earth-quaking counter blows.
A: Gunlance
The Gunlance is a vehicle for brutality. Fitting for its name, it’s a burst damage powerhouse. Unlike the Lance, which uses its shield for prolonged close-quarters exchanges, the main purpose of the Gunlance’s shield in Wilds is to help unleash a cascading avalanche of damage.
Personally, I prefer the Lance, but come on. This one’s got a gun on it.
I’ll confess I struggle with the long wind-up times in some of the Gunlance’s initiating attacks, but there’s a delight in the raw, unmitigated force it’s capable of applying. It’s worth making sense of the different shelling types just to find which option gives you the most comfortable avenue for unleashing havoc.
A: Sword and Shield
Sword and Shield has always been criminally underappreciated, but in Wilds it’s an absolute powerhouse, capable of hacking away at monsters with a hailstorm of attacks and shrugging off a surprising amount of incoming threats with generous transitions into Perfect Guard windows.
But the real attraction here is how Sword and Shield moves. In Wilds, it handles buttery smooth, with constant opportunities during and between attacks to sidestep and reposition without even a slight interruption to your combo.
Before Wilds, I thought of Sword and Shield as the Monster Hunter baseline. Now it feels like one of its high points. Like the Hammer, however, I just wish there was one more element in the mix.
A: Dual Blades
Dual Blades in Wilds are like if a Beyblade learned to hate.
This weapon has always emphasized aggression, and in Wilds that’s cranked up to 11. Enter the Demon Boost: With a perfectly-time dodged, you’ll nullify the incoming attack and activate a damage buff simultaneously. With just a little practice, you can easily skate through monster hits and continue dishing out a hurricane of rapid cuts like a murderous little blender.
What keeps me from choosing them more often is that they can feel a little spammy, like it doesn’t entirely matter which flavor of slash I’m throwing out at any given moment.
Monster Hunter Wilds weapons: B Tier
B: Lance
For the uninitiated, the Lance’s big, honking shield would probably indicate that it’s a defensive weapon. You couldn’t be more wrong. The Lance is quietly Monster Hunter’s most aggressive playstyle. That shield isn’t for cowering under the monster’s attacks; it’s for shrugging aside its attempts at keeping you from going for its throat. With the Lance, you’re a bulldog, and you’ve got a six-foot spear for teeth.
Sometimes the hopping sucks, though. And I’d be able to convince more people to use it if any part of it ever exploded.
B: Hunting Horn
You might not know this if you only pick DPS in MMOs and hero shooters, but playing support is fun! Hunting Horn doesn’t just have a unique playstyle that strings notes together while still pumping out damage. Because each Horn has its own set of songs, it opens up a layer of itemization, encouraging you to match song effects to the hazards of your next hunt—a satisfying extra twist on the Monster Hunter fantasy.
I end up staring at the staff to make sure I’m lining up the right notes, but that’s on me.
B: Insect Glaive
I admire how Insect Glaive plays like nothing else, even if watching IG users zip through the air makes me feel a little inadequate. It’s worth a try just to experience Monster Hunter as a gravity-agnostic individual; hunting feels very different when you only really need to touch the ground when you want to.
That said, it can feel too removed in some fights, like what the monster’s doing downstairs is a little irrelevant. Until something swats you out of the air, anyway.
Sean Martin
Now that destroying wounds gives you full Kinsect essence—which you can consume to perform a powerful Rising Spiral Slash—Insect Glaive finally has a clear, streamlined damage rotation. Though its aerial mobility isn’t quite what it was in Rise, where wall running and wirebugs meant you could chase monsters across the map, it’s still the best option for fighting in the sky— midair Focus Strikes are an especially fun addition. Insect Glaive also has a clear advantage in mounting monsters and opening wounds on top of them, though my heart longs for more flashy skills like Sunbreak’s Diving Wyvern.
B: Bow
Of the ranged options in Wilds, the Bow is what I’d suggest first. It’s a little unintuitive—you’re much better off dodging to power up your shots instead of charging—but the ability to nullify monster attacks and refill stamina on a perfect dodge makes for a surprisingly aggressive playstyle for a long distance weapon. In Wilds, it even has tools for turning its shots into homing arrows.
Those tracer and fuse arrows can be a little baffling to deploy in the middle of a fight, however, and the Bow’s stamina requirements tend to limit your armor selection somewhat.
B: Long Sword
If we were judging by popularity alone, Long Sword would top our chart. Heck, it’d be on a tier all its own. And it certainly has enough style to contend with any other weapon on the list: drawing a sword from its sheathe for a sweeping slash attack that triggers a delayed flurry of phantom cuts is, unsurprisingly, extremely cool.
In Wilds, however, even as its attacks have impossibly gotten even cooler, the new Spirit Charge breaks the playstyle a little bit for me. It simplifies spirit gauge management to the point where I’m less incentivized to bait out Iai counters. It’s a conflicting change.
Rory Norris
Walking the fine line between the heavy Hammer and agile Dual Blades, the Long Sword doesn’t trade damage for speed. Its main combo string can be held, meaning you won’t have to restart your combo just because a monster moved. When you’re ready to dish out massive damage, Helm Breaker is arguably the most badass attack in Wilds.Long Sword also has a suite of counters that turn defense into offense. Foresight Slash is particularly strong, dodging and letting you skip ahead in your combo. Iai Slash generates spirit gauge to make landing your combo even easier. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and it looks rad as hell. What more could you ask for?
Monster Hunter Wilds weapons: C Tier
C: Heavy Bowgun
There’s an undeniable magic to bringing fully automatic machinegun fire to a fight with a dragon when everyone else is hitting it with swords and hammers. And depending on how well you can slap an armor build together, the Heavy Bowgun is capable of pumping out enough damage to smoke a Tempered Gravios in under a minute.
That said, the changes Wilds makes to ammo and recoil adds a bit of clumsiness to bowgun play. While I’d never tell HBG enthusiasts to set down their arms, I think Monster Hunter has more interesting options in a world full of shooters.
C: Charge Blade
Mastering the Charge Blade is a satisfying triumph over some of Monster Hunter’s most opaque mechanics. Once you’ve got all your sword glowing, your shield charged, and your axe head spinning, you’ve balanced some near-unfathomable forces into a deadly combination.
That mechanical complexity comes at the cost of some moveset depth. I like juggling the Charge Blade’s charge mechanics more than I like actually swinging it in sword or axe mode. The combo options feel a little thin.
Swinging a spinning saw blade into a deflating Rompopolo helps, though.
Monster Hunter Wilds weapons: D Tier
D: Light Bowgun
There are, ultimately, no bad weapons in Monster Hunter. Any weapon can tackle the toughest wyverns with a little know-how. But there are unlucky weapons, and in Wilds, the Light Bowgun feels like it got the shortest stick.
As with Heavy Bowgun, the changes to ammo and recoil add some heavy clunk to Light Bowgun, but it’s got less oomph to make up for it. Its rapid-fire mode can’t match the HBG’s gatling gun spray and its chaser shots feel clumsy to deploy.
There’s still joy to find in the Light Bowgun. It’s just harder to track down.
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