Last updated: 29 June 2026

Monster Hunter Wilds Best Weapons for Beginners — All 14 Ranked

Fourteen weapon types with completely different mechanics, timing, and skill requirements — and you have to pick one before your first hunt. The good news: every weapon can clear all content in Monster Hunter Wilds, and you can switch freely at camp between hunts. The bad news: some weapons have layers of complexity that can overwhelm a new player and turn the early game into a frustrating lesson in what not to do. This guide explains which weapons are genuinely forgiving for beginners and which ones to come back to once you understand how monster fights work.

01How to Try Weapons Before Committing

Monster Hunter Wilds has a Training Area accessible from any base camp. Every weapon type is available to try there against a stationary training dummy, with move-list hints displayed on screen. Spend 10–15 minutes with any weapon you are considering — feel the attack speed, learn one or two core combos, and check how long it takes to sheathe (put away) the weapon.

Sheathing speed matters because sprinting (the fastest movement in the game) requires your weapon to be sheathed. Slow weapons like the Great Sword take noticeably longer to put away than fast ones like the Sword and Shield, which affects how quickly you can reposition between attacks.

You can also freely change your weapon type at any item box or camp between hunts at no cost. Nothing locks you into your first choice — experiment freely.

02Top Pick: Long Sword

The Long Sword is the most popular weapon in Monster Hunter Wilds worldwide — and for good reason. Its forward-reaching attacks cover enormous horizontal distance, the combos flow naturally from one motion into the next, and it includes a built-in defensive option: the Foresight Slash, which lets you dodge through an incoming attack and immediately counter it, filling your Spirit Gauge as a reward.

The Spirit Gauge is the Long Sword's core mechanic. It fills as you land hits and empties slightly on each Spirit Roundslash (a looping finisher). Managing this gauge becomes second nature quickly: fill it during normal combos, spend it on Roundslashes, and the rhythm of the fight falls into place almost automatically.

Why Long Sword suits beginners:

• Long reach means you can hit most body parts without needing to perfectly position under a moving monster.
• Foresight Slash rewards aggressive play — it is forgiving of timing mistakes and still generates gauge when it misses.
• The move set transitions smoothly between offensive strings, so there are no awkward dead-end combos.
• More Long Sword tutorials exist online than any other weapon, so help is always close.

The one downside: Long Sword has no blocking option, which means defensive play relies entirely on dodging and Foresight Slash timing. If you want the option to hold a button and block hits, look at the Sword and Shield or Lance instead.

03Strong Alternatives: Great Sword and Sword and Shield

Great Sword — the patient beginner's weapon: Every other weapon in the game deals damage in rapid sequences of hits. The Great Sword deals its damage in one enormous swing. The True Charged Slash — the Great Sword's signature move — is the single highest-damage hit in Monster Hunter Wilds. Landing it cleanly on a monster's weak point feels extraordinarily satisfying, and missing it teaches you immediately where your timing was wrong.

Great Sword is forgiving in a different way than Long Sword: because you hit so infrequently, each miss has low stakes compared to a weapon that needs to sustain a full combo to function. You sprint in, wait for an opening, charge the strongest hit you can, sprint out. Learning monster attack patterns happens naturally as you search for those openings.

Sword and Shield — the safest starting point: The Sword and Shield has the fastest attacks of any melee weapon, a reliable block you can hold to absorb damage, and a unique feature no other weapon shares: you can use items (potions, traps, coatings) without sheathing. Healing mid-fight without putting your weapon away is a major quality-of-life advantage when you are still learning how to stay out of danger.

The damage output is lower than the Long Sword or Great Sword, but the freedom to heal, reposition, and maintain pressure without committing to long animation windows makes it the most low-risk introduction to Monster Hunter combat available.

• Choose Great Sword if you want deliberate, high-stakes timing gameplay that quickly teaches you monster patterns.
• Choose Sword and Shield if you want fast feedback, blocking options, and the most forgiving item usage in the game.

04Good Second Weapons: Lance, Bow, and Hunting Horn

Lance is the most defensive melee weapon in the game — its high-guard shield can block almost any attack, and its primary offensive style is counter-attacking after blocking. If you find yourself dying frequently and want to prioritise not getting hit over dealing maximum damage, Lance is highly effective. The downside is limited mobility: Lance hunters mostly stay stationary and poke, which can feel restrictive when first learning how monsters move.

Bow keeps you at a safe distance from the monster at all times. Ranged attacks let you see the monster's full body and read its movements more easily than a melee weapon where you are standing inside its hitbox. Bow gameplay revolves around maintaining optimal range, choosing coatings (buffs applied to arrows), and chaining charged shots into powerful combos. It is more mobile than any melee weapon and teaches you monster patterns from a privileged vantage point. The stamina management (dodging drains it quickly) takes adjustment.

Hunting Horn is an underrated beginner choice that rewards social play. It plays melodies during your attacks that apply party-wide buffs — attack boosts, stamina reduction, wind resistance — and most of its basic moves are straightforward blunt-damage hits. Solo, the self-buffs are meaningful; in multiplayer, a skilled Hunting Horn user is one of the most valuable party members in the game.

05Weapons to Save for Later

These weapons are rewarding to master, but their mechanics add a layer of complexity that makes the early game harder for new hunters. Learn the fundamentals of Monster Hunter Wilds first, then come back to these:

• Charge Blade — the highest-skill-ceiling melee weapon. You must manage a phial charge system: build phials in Sword mode, store them via a specific animation, then release them in Axe mode as explosive bursts. Mistiming the storage or release wastes all your preparation. Tremendously powerful once understood, but the mental overhead is significant for a first weapon.
• Insect Glaive — requires managing a kinsect (a bug that harvests extracts from the monster's body parts to grant you buffs) while also handling aerial combos in a game where staying mobile and airborne is already complex. The kinsect adds a third resource system on top of normal combat.
• Switch Axe — transforms between Axe mode (high mobility) and Sword mode (concentrated damage). Knowing when to switch and how to maintain the Sword mode's phial energy while sustaining a full combo takes time to internalise.
• Heavy Bowgun — the most powerful ranged weapon but also the slowest-moving one. Managing multiple ammo types, special ammo recharges, and positioning under low mobility is a full-time job that compounds difficulty in the early game.
• Gunlance — combines a lance's guard system with a shelling mechanic (barrel shots that deal fixed damage and bypass monster defence values). Shelling consumes ammo that must be reloaded manually, and the interaction between shell types and weapon sharpness needs separate study.

06Building Your First Weapon

Once you have chosen a weapon type, keep upgrading the same type rather than switching constantly. Weapon skills (Attack Boost, Critical Eye, Weakness Exploit) build off the decoration slots on your specific weapon, and a fully upgraded version of your weapon type will massively outperform a freshly-forged alternative of a different type.

Early priorities for any weapon:

• Upgrade along the Bone or Metal base tree first — these need only Bonepile materials and common drops, which are easy to farm from any hunt.
• As soon as you hunt a named monster that drops materials for your weapon type, branch into that monster's upgrade path for an immediate power jump.
• Check the sharpness bar on your current weapon after a few hunts. If the bar is depleting into red or orange during a single hunt, upgrade your weapon or use a Whetstone immediately after each hunt — low sharpness costs roughly 25–30% of your potential damage.

The training area also lets you test fully-upgraded versions of any weapon to see how the later move set feels before you invest in materials. Take advantage of it before committing resources to a new upgrade path.