The Best Builds in Monster Hunter World

If you’re anything like us, the nearly unlimited possibilities for character customization in Monster Hunter World can be quite overwhelming.

From the typical armor and weapon options to unique skins, charms, and armor decorations, these customizations can greatly effect your character’s ability to fight particular monsters, survive in harsh environments, or perform a number of important tasks.

As such, we’ve put together this list of five builds that maximize your ability to perform critical functions, including dealing damage, tanking, gathering, offering support, and tracking prey.

1. Best DPS (Damage per Second) Build

Crush the skulls of your enemies beneath your... shiny red heels?

Since the main objective of the game is slaying monsters, the first thing on your mind probably is, “How can I kill them fastest?” and to that we say: good attitude!

For maximum damage dealing, you’ll need to obtain and equip the Teostra Alpha armor. It’ll increase your critical hit rate on both weak spot and normal attacks, reduces your stamina depletion, adds blast damage to your hits that will knock monsters back, increase your weapon’s elemental damage, and make it so that your weapon’s sharpness won’t degrade on a critical hit.

As if that weren’t enough, adding the Grinder Decoration will reduce the amount of stone strokes it takes to sharpen your weapon, meaning you don’t have to take as much time out of the fight. We recommend pairing a charge-able weapon such as the Switch Axe, Long Sword, or Charge Blade with this build, so that you can build up and maximize your damage output. Boost these with the Invigorate Charm to make the weapon charge bar deplete slower, and cause more hurt for longer.

2. Best Tank Build

Unwavering resilance, courage, and old school fashion sense.

Dealing damage won’t get you too far if you wind up dying quickly, so it’s always good to have a tank in your party to help soak up the massive damage some monsters put out.

Start your build with the Guild Cross Alpha armor to increase all elemental resistance, give you a 10% attack and 15% defense bonus the first two times you faint in battle and respawn, give you a random chance to reduce damage taken by 30%, and reduce stamina depletion while under negative effects such as poison or bleeding.

Decorate your armor with Ironwall to massively decrease the impact of attacks, and reduce your stamina depletion by 50% while you’re blocking, making you able to outlast even long barrages. Wearing the Bulwark Charm will give you the ability to block normally un-blockable attacks, upping your damage resistance to another level.

On the weapon front, grab a Lance and hunker down for pure tankiness, or opt for a Gunlance if you need to deal more damage, such as on a solo hunt.

3. Best Gatherer Build

Butterfly net not included.

At some points, you may find yourself in need of a large scale potion, ammo, arrow coating, or item re-stock, and why not optimize your character for the task at hand? If you want to collect resources from the various plants, mines, small monsters, and the like in the most efficient way, set yourself up with Commission Alpha armor.

It will allow you to collect at gather points an additional time, it increases your stealth, so monsters will have a hard time finding and harassing you, and if they do find you, it eliminates knock-back from attacks, so that your gathering won’t be interrupted. Add the Tip Toe Decoration to your duds to max out your stealth abilities, and add Specimen as well, so that smaller monsters who usually explode upon death will leave a body behind for you to scavenge.

The Geomancy Charm will increase the likelihood of finding rare items at gathering points, and also mark rare sights on your map, a must have for a serious gathering session. Since you’re not focused on attacking, loading out with a Bow or Light Bowgun will keep you highly mobile and able to minimize close range confrontations.

4. Best Support Build

There's always that one friend in your group...

Everybody loves a team player, and there is no player as team based as a support class. Monster Hunter World offers a wide variety of ways for you to help your fellow hunters, but we recommend you base your build around this custom armor setup: the Commission Alpha Chest, Belt, and Pants will not only increase your stealth to keep you out of harms way, but will also boost your ‘Wide-Range’ ability, so that hunters within a certain radius of you will be able to benefit from any potions you use.

Add the Wiggler Head Alpha and Lavisloth Alpha Arms to boost this ability to it’s max, allowing 100% effectiveness from your potions to anyone in a very large range. You’ll find a variety of Decorations useful here, including Enduring to increase your item and potion duration by 25%, Sonorus to increase the buff duration from Hunting Horn songs, and Challenger to increase your critical and damage rates while your target monster is enraged, meaning that any healing ammo you fire into your comrades will be that much more effective.

Throw on the Clearmind Charm to reduce environmental damage from heat, acid, and effluvia (smoke), and stay in the battle longer, even in the harsh environments that some particularly nasty monsters dwell in. To top the build off, you can either go with the clearly-designed-exclusively-for-support Hunting Horn, an Insect Glaive with a healing Kinsect, or a Bowgun loaded up with healing, armor, and damage buffing ammunition; whatever fits your favorite play style.

5. Best Tracking Build

Follow the bread crumbs... or ten foot claw marks.

Tracking down your quarry is a key element of the game, and an upgraded tracking build can not only give you the location, but lots of valuable information about a new monster that could be key in how you choose to hunt it.

The Hunter’s Alpha armor set was made for tracking, and not only directly boosts the speed of the tracking meter fill, but also, increases your stealth, increases the range of your Scoutflies to assist in finding monster tracks and other noteworthy locations, and gives you the Scholar bonus. This bonus is a simple way to boost the speed of your research levels, which will reward you with easier tracking, more information on the monsters, and increase the chances of rare part drops.

This armor doesn’t accept Decorations, but wear the Marathon Charm to decrease stamina depletion so you can stay on the hunt longer, and track down your prey faster. Weapons aren’t essential at this stage, so grab a Bow, Light Bowgun, or Dual Blades to stay nimble, and switch to a heavier load out once you’ve located your objective.

Also be sure to check out these articles:

• Monster Hunter World Tier List (MHW Best Weapons Ranked)
• The 10 Best Monster Hunter World Mods (That Give You a Winning Edge)
• Top 15 Games Like Monster Hunter World (With Awesome Boss Fights)
• 10 Things We Love About Monster Hunter World
• Monster Hunter World Guide: 50 Tips and Tricks
• Best Monster Hunter World Tips, Tricks and Secrets
• Monster Hunter Live Action Movie Release Date, Cast, Trailer, Story, News
• Monster Hunter World Large Monsters List: Weaknesses, How To Kill, and Location