Monster Hunter Wilds: Best Weapons for Solo Players

The best Monster Hunter Wilds weapon for solo play let you cover all bases without having to worry about someone watching your back. Some of them guard, a few are just exceptionally powerful, and one in particular lets you exploit weaknesses with ease.

Our list of the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons for solo player includes five of our top picks with an explainer about what makes them worth your time.

Switch Axe

The switch axe takes time, planning, and patience to learn, but it’s an exceptional weapon that can easily deal with a strong monster without aid from support hunters. It’s also more versatile than the charge blade, with more powerful combos for the axe and sword version compared to its faster counterpart. 

Axe form lets you use wild swing, among other things, which is basically just you continuously whaling on a monster with a massive axe and dealing high damage amounts. Changing to sword form gives you several more intricate combos, including the weapon’s traditional burst attack and a few heavy-hitting chain attacks that can send damage numbers soaring into the hundreds and that’s just with low-level versions of the weapon.

Hammer

We picked the hammer for our best beginner weapons list, and it’s an excellent choice for solo players as well. The hammer is one of Wilds‘ most powerful weapons, easily rising above most others in terms of pure damage output. That means you can invest in the weapon’s ailment branches, such as sleep or paralysis, and still dish out big hits while controlling the monster’s behavior more effectively.

Hammers make it easy to break weak points and knock monsters to the ground with repeated attacks, and dealing high damage to weak areas is more likely to create wounds as well. The hammer’s focused strike – the one that breaks wounds – hits particularly hard. Not only are you ending hunts faster with this mighty weapon, but you’re also going home with a lot more crafting pieces from breaking wounds and weak areas.

Great Sword

The great sword is like a sharp hammer in the sense that it only does a few things, but it does them really well. It’s so big that movement with this weapon equipped is rather slow, but on the bright side, you can use it as a shield of sorts and guard against incoming attacks. There’s a regular slash and an overhead strike attack as well, but the real star is the charged attack.

The great sword’s charged attack has three levels, but reaching the most powerful requires going through the first two phases. Hold the attack button, release it, then hold it again before the attack animation finishes to start charging the next blow. Getting the timing right without the enemy monster repositioning takes some good planning, but the good thing about this weapon hitting so hard is that even the basic and first-level charged attack deal a respectable amount of damage.

Lance

The lance in Monster Hunter Wilds is much improved from its older iterations and is good for more than just guarding with the occasional poke at a monster. You’ve got the standard guard – the most powerful in the game – and thrust attacks, but these lead into even stronger skills than usual. A thrust combo opens up a multi-hit thrust attack, for example, and you have more mobility options than usual as well.

Add to that a new guarding skill that continuously uses stamina to block incoming attacks more effectively than the standard guard and a ramming attack, and you’ve got everything you need to stay strong during tough hunts. The lance is still a defensive weapon, though, even if it is the best version of itself. Your damage numbers will be lower than if you used the great sword, for example, so hunts might take longer.

Heavy Bowgun

The heavy bowgun has an advantage over the light bowgun in solo play for a few reasons. It deals more damage, for starters, which is enough to make it an easy recommendation when you’re the only person dealing damage in a hunt. It also fires more ammo before having to reload, and it comes with a mighty burst mode. True, that burst has a cooldown timer that lasts for several seconds, but it’s strong enough to make the wait worthwhile.

Aside from that, it has a set of perks similar to the light bowgun. You can equip any ammo type, including standard ammo that never runs out, powerful piercing ammo, and rounds coated with status ailments, all of which give you greater versatility than pretty much any other weapon type in the game. That, plus being able to attack from afar instead of having to stay right by a monster’s head, mean the heavy bowgun is perfect when you’re playing alone.