Best Bow Skills in MHWilds – In Monster Hunter Wilds, the satisfying gameplay loop of hunting monsters to get loot to craft stronger gear to hunt stronger monsters makes a grand return. And with this grand return also comes the return of a variety of skills that comes with the equipment you will be forging and using in your hunts.
In Monster Hunter Wilds, there are a total of 148 skills that have unique effects and each one of them is helpful in a particular aspect when you are playing the game. A lot of the skills that were in the previous games make a return with a few new added skills.
The biggest change to skills in Monster Hunter Wilds is that some of the Equipment skills that were on the armor pieces in the previous games have been moved to the weapons. This particular change makes it so that you will not be locked into specific monster trees when using a particular weapon.
In this guide, we will be taking a look at the skills that will bring out the Bow’s full potential during your hunts.
The Bow is a ranged weapon that excels at mid-range and at delivering a never ending onslaught of rain of arrows onto the monster. The bow also offers great mobility with options to go into combo ending finishers delivering massive damage with a single shot. As such, when using the bow, we are looking for skills that would maximize the Bow’s strength and bolster its weaknesses.
Best Bow Skills in MHWilds
The Best Tier Skills for the Bow
The best skills to have in your loadout when using the Bow are Ballistics, Special Ammo Boost, Focus, Stamina Surge and the Adrenaline Rush Skills. The Ballistics, Special Ammo Boost and Focus are equipment skills that are found on weapons and Stamina Surge and Adrenaline Boost are equipment skills from armor pieces.
Ballistics
The reason the Ballistics skill is the best skill for the Bow is simple because it extends the effective range of the Bow. When using the Bow, the hunter will want to stay as far as possible away from the monster but will have to stay within the optimal range of the weapon to be effective when fighting the monster. The Ballistics skills will widen the distance between the hunter and the monster by increasing the effective range of the bow.
Special Ammo Boost
The special ammo boost skill is great to have on the Bow as the skill increases the damage done by the shots that hunters will be using quite often in the bow’s arsenal, the Dragon Piercer, the Thousand Dragons and the Tracer shots. These shots play a crucial role when you are using the bow to hunt the monsters as the Tracer shot is a very powerful shot, because after landing the Tracer arrow on the monster, it will allow all your shots fired in the monsters’ general direction to home in onto the tracer arrow without the need to aim precisely. Dragon Piercer and the Thousand Dragons are powerful combo ending shots that will detonate the tracer arrow and all the lingering arrows you may have put onto the monster dealing massive damage. The special ammo boost skill provides tremendous value to the bow because you will be rotating through all these shots quite regularly.
Focus
The focus skill also works really amazingly for the Bow as the Focus skill increases the Gauge fill rate and reduces the Charge time of the weapon’s charge attacks. As the bow uses the Trick Shot Gauge to fire Tracer Shots and apply coatings to your arrow, as well as firing off Charged shots most of the time during your hunt, the Focus skill will help in keeping up the Gauge with your attacks, as long as you’re not missing your shots too much.
Although these skills work really well in combination, the Bows from the Guardian Doshaguma tree, are the only bows that will have both the Ballistics and Special Ammo skills on one bow and the Bows from the Rey Dau tree will have a combination of focus and Special Ammo Boost. But this does not mean that you must use this bow. The decoration slots available on the Bows will allow you to use the Bow with the skill you want and complement it with the skill that is missing.
Stamina Surge
Next we have the Stamina Surge skill. This skill increases the Stamina Recovery speed up to 50% at the highest level, level 3 and this is extremely useful for the Bow user. As a bow user, while you are aiming and charging your shots and constantly moving around the monster, you will go through your stamina really fast if you are not careful. This skill lets the stamina bar fill back up faster between your charged shots while you are repositioning, in between your shots or applying your tracers minimizing the chance of your stamina bar running out.
Adrenaline Rush
The Adrenaline Rush skill gives you a temporary increase in attack power whenever you perform a perfect evade just before the monster’s attack hit and in the Bow’s case, whenever you trigger a discerning dodge. This skill will give you an increase in attack power in addition to the huge stamina recovery whenever you trigger the discerning dodge with your perfect evade.
Although there is no Armor set that shares the skills Stamina Surge and Adrenaline Rush, the changes made in Monster Hunter Wilds makes sure that you will not have to sacrifice the skills that would benefit you when you are using the weapon. It is relatively easy to get both skills on your equipment using the Talisman slot, with either the Counterattack Charm for the Adrenaline Rush skill or the Surge Charm for the Stamina Surge skill. The decoration slots on the armor slots will also allow you to put on the skill you are missing in order to bring out the full potential of the Bow, provided you have got the relevant decorations.
Tier II Bow Skills
This set of skills are not necessarily the best skills to have when using the Bow but will help you while you are putting the armor pieces together or will bolster some different aspects when using the Long Sword.
Tetrad Shot
This is a skill that increases the affinity of the coated shots of your bow up to two levels after the fourth and the sixth shots while using the coating. Since you will be able to fire off ten coated shots per application, the skill makes it so that the last four shots of your coated shots are critical hits most of the time. The reason why this is in the second best tier is simply because , it is situational and you will not be able to rely on this skill reliably at all time since application of the coatings shortens your effective range and skill affects only the last six to four shots of your coating without doing anything for the first four shots.
Charge Master
The next skill, the Charge Master, will increase the elemental damage and status effect build up of your charged attack. Since you will be firing charged shots the majority of the time, this skill will allow you to ramp up the damage when using Bows with elemental damage. It will provide even further value when you are using a bow with a status effect coating like the Exhaust Coating or the Poison Coating, making it easier for you to trigger the respective status effects. Similar to the Tetrad Shot, although this skill is really good for applying status effect and when using Bows with elemental damage, it only strengthens part of the Bow’s moveset, making it land among the second best skills for the bow
Constitution
The Constitution skill, is a skill that reduces the stamina depletion of actions like dodging for the Bow. This will help when playing the bow because the reduced stamina consumption will allow the bow user to keep attacking before needing to stop and let the stamina bar refill. This extended up time will allow the hunter more opportunities to trigger a perfect evade which will help refill a huge chunk of the stamina bar removing the need to let up your attacks altogether. The reason why this skill is in the second tier but not the best tier is because if you did not get a chance to trigger a discerning dodge during your attacks, the time needed to regain your stamina will be longer compared to times when you are using the Stamina Surge skill, which will rapidly refill your stamina bar in most of the situations.
Evade Extender and Evade Window
These skills are good to have when using a bow as they will enhance your dodges and evasions by extending the distance of your evades and providing longer invulnerability time during your evades. This is especially helpful against larger monsters which have huge multi-hit attacks that can cover a wide portion of the arena you are fighting in. If you prefer to have more safety when you are using the bow, you can use this skill on the armor pieces.
Airborne
The next skill we will be talking about is the Airborne skill and what this skill does is, it increases the power of your jump attacks and in the Bow’s case, the Flying Swallow attack. Having this skill equipped in your loadout will increase the damage you will be doing while you are dodging out harm’s way using the Charged Step and following-up with a Flying Swallow Shot. The skill is in the 2nd best tier because it only increases the damage of the Flying Swallow Shot only, making it nice to have if you have a decoration slot that is free or you want to trade off one level of the other weapon skills such as the Ballistics for a higher overall damage output.
Scorcher
The Set Bonus skill from the Rathalos Armor Set, Scorchermakes it so that your attacks have a percentage of trigger flame elemental damage whether you are using a weapon that has inherent Fire element damage or not. This skill will only activate if you have a set number of the Rathalos armor pieces equipped and this is the main reason why this skill is in the second best tier. But more often than not, you will have this skill because the Rathalos Armor is a more reliable way to set up the Adrenaline Rush as it has the skill on the armor , rather than relying on the decorations.
Tier III Skills
Weakness Exploit
An optional skill that can be useful to have on a bow is the Weakness Exploit Skill. This skill will increase the affinity of your attacks that hit the monster’s weak spots and increase the affinity even further when hitting or destroying the wounds and in the bow’s case, you will be hitting the monster’s head with your shots for the majority of the time. This will result in an overall larger number of critical hits and once you use your Hailstorm attack to destroy the wounds, the increased affinity will enable you to land more critical hits amongst the rain of arrows it will unleash.
Partbreaker
Another good skill that is useful to have when you are using the bow is the Partbreaker skill. This skill increases the damage you do against the monster’s specific parts, (for example, the head, the wings etc.) As this skill will also increase the damage when you burst or destroy the wounds up to 30% at the maximum level, it can often lead to huge amounts of damage when you are using your Hailstorm attack. This is different from the Weakness Exploit skill, where Weakness Exploit increase the affinity and critical hit rate of the attack, Partbreaker increases the raw damage the attack will inflict when the wound is destroyed by 30%
Coating Functionality
Last but not least, is the decoration specific skill that offers specific coating functionality that is not available by default to the Bow. For example, the Artian Bow that you forge will not be able to use any coating except the close-range coating if you did not use the parts with the same element during the forging process. But the Rarity 8 Artian Bow, the Angelbein will have three level 3 decoration slots where you can put in jewels that provide specific coating functionality. Theoretically, this will allow the Artian Sight to use up to three additional coating types in addition to the close-range coating but this process is entirely dependent on luck.
So, these are the best skills to use with the Bow in bringing out its full potential in my humble opinion. I hope you find this helpful. If you disagree or have suggestions on which skills could work better with the Bow, please leave them in the comment below. Be sure to check out our other Monster Hunter Wilds Guides, and the wiki for more tips and guides and May the Hunt Favours You!!!.
Table of Contents
