There are plenty of good reasons to consider different arms and armor in Monster Hunter Wilds - better damage, superior sharpness properties, elemental and status effects, more defense, varying resistances, and most of all, aesthetics! Perhaps superior to all of these (save the rule of cool, of course), are the skills - each weapon and piece of armor has some skill attached that gives the hunter bearing and wearing said gear passive boons, and cobbling together gear with the skills that best suit your playstyle is as close as Monster Hunter Wilds comes to having builds. This page will discuss how skills work in Monster Hunter Wilds.

Page Breakdown¶

Weapon and Armor Skills¶

Whenever you go to forge/upgrade a weapon or armor at Gemma’s forge you’ll be treated to a plethora of information about the piece of gear in question. In the lower middle of these three stat columns, it can be easy to overlook the “Equipment Skills” line, which provides little more than the name and level of the skill each bit of gear has. All weapons and armor have at least one skill, with higher-tier gear generally having more or higher level skills on them. You can check what these skills do by selecting the piece of gear in question, pressing the “Submenu” button / , then selecting the “Skill Info” option.

Different pieces of armor within a set often share a theme - Leather armor pieces either have the Botanist or Hunger Resistance skills, making it good for exploring and salvaging materials, but not so great in combat, while the Quematric armor set has the Flinch Free and Fire Resistance skills - much more useful in combat. Weapons are stand-alone affairs, so their damage, sharpness, elemental and status effects and skills all need to be considered, but since there are (usually) five pieces of armor per set, you can mix and match armor pieces as you need to get the skills you want. Say you plan to fight Uth Duna and you want the Aquatic/Oilsilt Mobility skill - nothing’s stopping you from just putting on the Duna Coil armor along with anything else you care to wear just to get that skill active. Then again, some armor “sets” only have one piece of gear in them, like the Bulaqchi set - the only reason to wear Bulaqchi Specs (save for the cosmetics) is to get a level of Entomologist from your gear.

You will enjoy the benefits of any skills bestowed by weapons or armor as long as you have them equipped. In many cases, a piece of gear will give you one or two levels in a skill, and many skills yield increasing effects up to Lv3-5. The Lala Barina set has two pieces of armor that each give one level of Paralysis Resistance, which itself has effects up to Lv3. Wearing two different items that grant the same skill will have an additive effect - wearing the Barina Headgear and Barina Mail (both of which have Paralysis Resist Lv1) will net you Paralysis Resist Lv2. If you further supplemented this by wearing, say, Vespoid Vambraces (Paralysis Resist Lv1) you’d get the Lv3 effects of the Paralysis Resist skill.

Needless to say, it’s a good idea to tailor your skills to the threat you’re facing. If you’re fighting a foe that can inflict the poison debuff, you can mitigate or even negate this threat with the right skills active. You can create numerous different loadouts via the menu in your tent, and some ideas for loadouts include gear that makes harvesting materials in the wild more efficient (Leather armor set + Geology Charm), group gear (equipment with the Shock Absorber and Wide-Range skills, to make playing with friends easier), generic battle gear, elemental resistance-focus battle gear (one for each element, if you find it necessary), status effect negating battle gear (per ailment you wish) or even loadouts designed to counter specific enemies - you can change weapon types, armor, decorations and talismans between loadouts and you’ve got 140 loadout slots, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of them, especially for endgame play!

Just to complicate things further, however, some armor sets also have “Group Skills” which reward you for - you guessed it - wearing multiple pieces of the same armor set (or in rare cases, different set that still share a Group Skill). This mostly takes the form of a skill that has one level that unlocks if you have three set items equipped, or a skill with two levels that unlock when you’re wearing two and four pieces of gear of the same set. This doesn’t prevent you from subbing one item in, but it’s another thing to consider when selecting which armor pieces you want to wear.

High Rank Gear¶

Once you beat the main story you’ll unlock high rank variants of monsters, which drop high rank materials that can be used to craft high tier weapons and armor - the virtuous gameplay loop of Monster Hunter. HIgher tier armor has higher stats than its lower tier counterparts, as well as more and/or different skills. In addition, many high tier sets of armor are split into two types, an alpha set and a beta set, with the alpha set typically having more/higher native level skill bonuses and the beta set having more/higher capacity [decoration] slots. Decorations can be equipped onto weapons or armor that have open slots, and decorations add skill levels while equipped, so functionally you’re choosing between the native skills on high rank alpha armor and the customization of beta armor.

Talismans, Decorations and Food Skills¶

Weapons and armor are the most reliable ways to get certain skills, but they’re certainly not the only source of skills in the game. Eating meals will also grant you skills - Food Skills - which are temporary buffs that last the duration of the meal in question and don’t otherwise interact with the skills you get from gear. [Talismans] and Decorations, on the other hand, do - they are accessories that can be crafted or found, offering the same types of skills you can get on weapons and armor, supplementing your current build with whatever nice-to-haves you want but which don’t otherwise appear on your current gear.

For example, let’s say you wanted the Flinch Free skill to avoid having your attacks interrupted as much - you could always just wear some Quematrice gear, or the Kranodath Mail. If you wanted to wear different armor, however, you still have options - craft an Impact Charm and equip it, or get some armor with open slots and equip a Brace Jewel into it. The downside with decorations is that you’ve got to have armor with decoration slots and you need to get lucky enough to find the jewels you need.

Between your weapon, armor pieces, talismans and decorations, you’ve got plenty of options for getting the skills you want, but it’s going to take time and effort to hunt down the materials you need and a fair bit of RNG to find the desired decorations. Don’t neglect skills and try to find a good balance between the raw stats (attack, defense and resistances) which will keep you alive and the skills needed to make your playstyle work!