Monster Hunter Rise – Heavy Bowgun Tips / Guide

Short / Medium length guide with Heavy Bowgun tips, tricks and suggestions.

Introduction

This guide is a collection of tips and advice for the Heavy Bowgun. These have helped me a lot, but keep in mind that I primarily play multiplayer and may value some strategies more than you would in single player. There are many ways to play the Heavy Bowgun and I will try to explain the choices you have when I discuss how I play.

I haven’t beat all the content in the game yet so I don’t have much advice specific for the endgame monsters, but this guide will help you get there yourself. I encourage experimenting while you play as well, you don’t need to follow everything in this guide to beat monsters.

Some Basic Tips

Some things you should know about before you get started with Heavy Bowgun.

Charged Shots

You can charge shots by holding the fire button. Releasing the button will fire the shot, and it won’t fire by itself at full charge. Most of the time, charged shots aren’t that great because you get more DPS by spamming uncharged shots, but this eats through ammo and it can be wasted potential if you run out of ammo before the monster dies. The only ammo type you can’t charge is Cluster Bombs.

I recommend charging shots like Sticky Ammo and Wyvern ammo, which have a very limited amount of uses, because it increases the damage significantly and you’re gonna run out of ammo with them anyway. If you craft your own ammo in the middle of the hunt, you can get away with using less charged shots because you will have more ammo, but keep in mind the cost of crafting ammo is expensive early in the game.

Reloading All Ammo Quickly

In Monster Hunter, you don’t need to reload right away if you switch ammo types. However, the old ammo you used is still unloaded, and if you keep switching ammo types, eventually you will want to reload multiple types of ammo in one go. You can do this simply by holding the Reload button instead of tapping it. This makes it so you quickly cycle through all of your unloaded ammo and refill it one at a time without needing to navigate to it.

Silkbind Glide

Free Silkbind Glide is a very useful ability. This is similar to a regular silkbind dash, but you can use it with your weapon drawn, and at the end of the dash you can sheathe your weapon with a special animation that is much faster than your regular sheathe. This is very important when you need to use a healing potion but you’re stuck with your weapon out and can’t get away from the monster easily. You can also use it to reposition for a Wyvernsnipe.

Bowgun Mods

No, not mods like modding the game. You can attach modifications to your bowgun. There’s only two options, but here’s what I think about them.

You can select between the Shield mod and the Power Barrel mod.

Power Barrel simply increases the Attack value of your bowgun by a decent amount. This should be your default choice if you don’t want the Shield. It’s great for experienced hunters.

Shield is extremely useful and somewhat underrated by those who haven’t tried it before. It’s not just some weak baby shield, it actually turns lethal hits into something 10 times less deadly, and it’s active as long as you’re aiming and not reloading or in a firing animation. I laugh every time a monster charges up a strong attack at me and I just block it so it only deals 15% of my health instead of 80%. Yes, you still take some damage and the block animation is rather long, but it’s MUCH better than carting if you aren’t good enough to avoid the monster all the time.

Switch Skills

Here’s my opinion on the Switch Skills available for Heavy Bowgun.

Melee Swing or Tackle

With the Heavy Bowgun, you can choose to play with the Melee Swing or Tackle abilities. They’re both melee-range attacks but function a little differently.

Melee Swing is a very simple attack that smacks the monster in front of you. It’s fairly slow but it deals stun damage if you hit them in the face, and it deals a reasonable amount of damage. The important information here is that you can block attacks during the animation if your bowgun has a shield on it, which can be great value if you have good timing.

Tackle is very similar to the Greatsword tackle. You just shoulder bump and completely ignore knockback effects during the animation, dealing some stunning damage to the monster. It’s pretty fast and makes you immune to getting flung around by monster hits or stunned by roars, but you still take the damage. This is generally a better choice than Melee Swing if you are not using a shield.

You can shorten the long Tackle animation by aiming and firing a shot. I use this strategy to kill small monsters without using expensive ammo.

Mech-Wyvernsnipes

These affect the powerful special ammo you load when the bar is filled. The two choices of switch skill here are almost identical. One of them has Healing in the name and causes the skill to deal less damage but give you some healing in return. Personally I don’t like the healing one very much, I just prefer to deal more damage and heal with potions if I need to.

If you like to use Wyvernheart instead of Wyvernsnipe you might appreciate the healing more because it takes you longer to use your special skill and it might get interrupted by damage.

Counters

The Heavy Bowgun has two Counter skills that you can switch between: Counter Shot and Counter Charge. Both of these skills have a counter component to start with, making you immobile until the monster hits you, but it will counter the monster’s hit and send them reeling back.

Counter Shot costs 2 Wirebugs with Fast recharge speed and allows you to fire a powerful shot after a successful counter. It’s fun to use and reasonably effective. Good for mounting, especially in solo hunts.

Counter Charge costs 1 Wirebug with Medium recharge speed and enhances the charging speed of your next charged shot. This one isn’t as fancy, but the lower cost is appealing if you just want to counter quickly and get back to using powerful ammo. Spamming sticky ammo is usually stronger than the counter shot from the other skill, for example.

Ammo Types

There are many times of ammo available. Bowguns all have different ammo capacities and you will have to pick one that allows you to use your favorite ammo type. Here are my opinions on the ammo types available, but keep in mind that you can use whatever ammo you think is fun because they’re rarely a bad idea to use, just not as effective as the other types.

Sticky Ammo

Sticky ammo is the strongest ammo in the game. You can only start with a small amount, but they deal crazy damage, and the game’s crafting system allows you to make tons of them in the middle of the hunt so you don’t run out. Hitting any part of the monster deals the same damage, and they have a long range, making them insanely easy to use for any player.

They also stun the monster a lot, making people love you in multiplayer or allowing easy solo hunts. I usually stun monsters in the first 2 or 3 sticky shots I land on them, allowing me to predict a good time to use Wyvernsnipe. Make sure the stickies land on their head if you want to stun them.

Spread Ammo

Spread ammo has fantastic damage output when used on the right bowgun, especially if you have reload speed and recoil skills. You have to get a little up close to the monster, but it’s a favorite for experienced hunters who don’t fear close combat.

Slicing Ammo

Slicing ammo is great because it’s consistent. Similar to Sticky Ammo, but it deals slashing damage and you should avoid aiming at armored spots. Very good DPS and relatively easy to use, but probably still outdone by Sticky, Spread or Pierce on optimized builds. Take some with you on hunts and try it out.

Pierce Ammo

There’s the regular piercing ammo, and then there’s the elemental piercing ammo as well. Both of them are great, but they can be weak on smaller monsters that only take damage 2-3 times per shot. I suggest trying the Elemental piercing ammo on large monsters that are weak to specific elements, or just bring some regular piercing ammo if your bowgun allows it. Can’t hurt to have it around.

Normal Ammo

Honestly not bad, but rather boring and completely average performance. You can do good damage with this ammo type and it’s cheap to craft compared to others, but it is definitely outdone by the top performers like Sticky, Spread and Pierce on optimized builds. Go ahead and bring some as a backup for the time you run out of your main ammo type.

Elemental Ammo

Fire, Water, etc. They’re very similar to Normal ammo. If you know the monster you’re fighting is very weak to a specific element, you can try using that elemental ammo on it, but I’m pretty sure that the Piercing version of the element is almost always better. If you often use elemental damage on heavy bowguns, let me know your experiences with it.

Wyvern Ammo

Very fun to use, and powerful early game, but it loses effectiveness as you fight harder monsters. Eventually your gear will be good enough that spamming sticky ammo is more DPS than using Wyvern Ammo, and you can be forced to waste ammo if the monster moves before you finish charging the shot. Still, I enjoy using it when I can.

Cluster Bombs

Cluster bombs are really strong for damage, but they have a big downside. You will your allies go flying if you hit them with this bomb, causing them to lose damage output. I recommend using this ammo if you are playing solo, as it deals a lot of damage and gives you a good choice on monsters that have been stunned or trapped, but it can be really tricky to use properly in multiplayer.

Status Effect Ammo

These can be pretty good. Poison ammo is very easy to use and deals decent damage on lower level monsters. Paralysis ammo is rarely a bad idea to use, especially in multiplayer. Sleep ammo is situational, but it can be used effectively if you have a teammate with a Greatsword or something. Exhaust ammo is weird because it can be hard to tell if it even worked, but it might be useful on monsters that keep killing your allies.

Other Ammo Types

Buff/healing ammo and Shrapnel Ammo are usually never useful for me. The other ammo types just do better. Shrapnel ammo in particular is hard to use. Even if your bowgun can load this ammo, it’s often more useful to just avoid taking it with you so you can switch between ammo types that are stronger more easily.

Feel free to take any of those if you think they’re fun, though. I’m sure someone out there appreciates your Demon Ammo.

Good Bowguns

There’s quite the selection of bowguns available, and they have lots of differences such as elemental damage, wyvernsnipe or wyvernheart, ammo capacity, deviation, reload speed and recoil. Most of the time your selection will come down to your preferred ammo type.

I encourage you to try as many bowguns as you want. They’re all unique and have different advantages. These are some of my favorites that have proven to be strong and reliable, but you can try anything and do relatively well.

Meteor Cannon

Available early and upgrades as you progress. One of my favorites. This bowgun is designed to use Sticky Ammo effectively, and the lesser versions can be obtained early in the game. I used this for most of my progression so far. Once you run out of Sticky Ammo you can use the Pierce ammo instead. One of the downsides is that it doesn’t have Cluster bombs, but that doesn’t matter to me because I don’t like using those in multiplayer.

Sinister Volley

Available early and upgrades as you progress. Another great damage output bowgun. You’ll primarily focus on Spread Ammo with this bowgun, but it comes with some other strong ammo types like Sticky 3, Cluster and Slicing. Can’t really go wrong with this choice if you enjoy spread ammo.

Mountainous Roar

Available early and upgrades as you progress. This bowgun focuses on the regular Pierce ammo. Use this one if you like pierce ammo a lot. It also comes with Piercing Water Ammo for those monsters weak to water element, and some Slicing ammo too.

Rajang’s Rage

Not available early. One of, if not the best DPS bowguns. This thing makes complete jokes out of solo hunts by spamming Sticky Ammo and stunlocking monsters until they’re dead. Hard to get but definitely worth it.

Skills

Armor choice and skills are very important as usual. There are multiple bowgun skills that help a lot. Let’s start with those.

DPS Skills

Spare Shot

Really good bowgun skill. Not only does it give you more ammo to play with, but it actually increases your DPS by making you reload less often. Very strong at level 3, but very weak at level 1 and only decent at level 2. You can wait on this until you can get Channeler-S gear set.

Reload Speed

You will find that the strongest ammo types have long reload animations. Increasing your reload speed is one of the best ways to increase your DPS, and it even helps you survive better.

Recoil Down

Similar to the Reload Speed skill, this increases your DPS by allowing you to shoot faster. Combine both for a very fast and deadly bowgun.

Artillery

Increases the damage of your strongest ammo type by a large amount. Very strong and simple, but mostly useless if you don’t use Sticky Ammo.

Pierce Up

Alternative to Artillery if you like to use Pierce Ammo.

Spread Up

Alternative to Artillery if you like to use Spread Ammo.

Ammo Up

Increases the loading capacity for bowgun ammo types. This means you can shoot more between each reload. Not the best skill but it’s good if you can get it after the other skills.

Attack Boost

Everyone wants this skill. Get it where you can get it, but I would actually value Reload Speed, Recoil Down and Artillery more than Attack Boost.

Load Shells

Only get one level. This makes you reload slightly faster at level 1. Not great but it’s only a single level so you can probably fit it somewhere.

Critical Eye and Critical Boost

Crits are good, but you might not really have enough room for these skills after all the others. It’s fine to pick them up if you want.

Normal/Rapid Up

Normal ammo is decent, but you should be using your skill levels on something else. Sticky, Spread and Pierce ammo often scale better than Normal ammo.

Defensive Skills

Recovery Speed

This increases the health regen speed of your “red health” after taking a hit. Very nice for Shield users, since you will want to heal back that extra health eventually or be forced to drink a potion.

Recovery Up

I prefer Recovery Speed with a shield, but this is good too, especially if you don’t use a shield anyway.

Wirebug Whisperer

Heavy Bowgun relies on Wirebugs a lot to move around and counter monster attacks, so this can be really good.

Resistance Skills

If you’re struggling against any type of monster, get resistances to it somewhere. Either from dango or gear, find a way to get yourself some protection. Particularly important for stuff like Paralysis.

Evade Extender

Heavy Bowgun has good evades that you can chain together. Extender will allow you to get far away from a monster quickly. Powerful mobility if you can’t survive with Shield or Counters.

Utility Skills

These skills aren’t required but are nice to have, and often increase your damage or defense in their own way

Earplugs

The classic anti-annoying skill. Roars just waste your time, but they aren’t particularly deadly, so you don’t really need to focus on this skill at all.

Quick Sheath

Great quality of life for the Heavy Bowgun. We have one of the slowest sheath animations, but we can speed it up with the Silkbind Glide, so this skill isn’t super important.

Bombardier

This increases the damage of the placeable bomb items. Not very impactful but it can be good if you don’t want defensive skills and you have free slots.

Weak Skills

I don’t like these skills on Heavy Bowgun, for one reason or another. They’re generally beneficial skills, but very weak ones that you should seek to replace.

Flinch Free

You should probably pick up a level in this skill if you’re using a Spread bowgun and you’re playing in multiplayer. Otherwise, you should be hanging further back from the monster so you don’t even have to deal with teammates attacks anyway. The occasional flinch from a bow user is tolerable.

Focus

Increases the charge speed of your charged shots. Not awful honestly, but not everyone uses charged shots, and the speed increase isn’t that good for 3 levels.

Ballistics

Not very useful in the end. The default ammo ranges are good enough that you shouldn’t need to bother with this skill. Relying on it can mess up your muscle memory if you take it off eventually.

Evade Window

Evade Extender is just better. Getting away from the monster is more useful to avoid follow-up attacks, and this skill doesn’t even give you that many iframes at max level.

Special Ammo Boost

Wyvernsnipe isn’t quite good enough to make this a strong choice for 2 levels. It’s not a really a bad choice but almost any other DPS skill is better I think.

Marathon Runner

Heavy Bowguns don’t do anything that drains stamina as far as I’m aware. We can block but that doesn’t count for this skill. We can’t even sprint with our bowgun drawn. I’m only including this so people don’t accidentally think it’s useful when looking at armor skills.

Steadiness

Bowgun deviation is not problematic. Maybe a little annoying, but you can get used to it easily. Might be worth a single level if you have free space and you have a bowgun with strong deviation.

Low Rank Armor

LR armor doesn’t matter a whole lot, you can progress into HR with basically anything, but there are some good choices you can pick up if you want.

Rhenoplos

Good skills for bowguns and some useful utility skills as well. I believe you can craft this without killing any large monsters, all you need to do is farm some Rhenoplos in the desert map expeditions.

Izuchi

Decent DPS skills, some defensive skills and very fashionable.

Shell-Studded

Annoying to craft but possible to get in LR. Great skills. Check a wiki or something to figure out how to craft it because it’s a weird list of materials.

Barroth

The chest piece is great in general. The other pieces are situational. Helmet is good, the legs and belt are only good if you use a shield mod, and the gloves are awful.

Channeler

The helmet and chest are one of the only places you can get Spare Shot. The gloves are handy as well.

Mosgharl

Chest and legs have great skills for heavy bowgun. Another weird recipe to craft though.

Anjanath

The belt is pretty good.

High Rank Armor

HR armor is a lot more interesting and varied than LR armor. I encourage you to make your own builds but here are some of my favorite choices.

Rhenoplos S

Rhenoplos gear makes a comeback in HR. Still very easy to craft and the skills are awesome for us. You can get it early in HR and use it for a long time if you upgrade it with Armor Spheres.

Channeler S

Get the head piece at least. Spare Shot x2 is fantastic for 1 piece of armor, and Wirebug Whisperer is great too. Pukei set can help you finish the rest of Spare Shot as well if you don’t want the chest piece.

Pukei S

More opportunities to get Spare Shot. I recommend Channeler head + Pukei gloves or belt.

Mosgharl S

If you get Spare Shot x1 from the Pukei gear instead of the Channeler gear, you can replace the Channeler Chest with Mosgharl chest for a great build. The Mosgharl legs are still good too.

Ingot S

The legs are a whole boatload of damage output with Attack Boost x2 and Critical Eye x2. They’re very easy to craft, too.

Nargacuga S

Belt is great if you want some Evade Extender in your build somewhere.

Melahoa S

Legs have good defensive skills if you struggle to maintain your health.

Inventory

Bringing some extra items with you before a hunt can help a lot. For Heavy Bowgun, you can bring materials to craft ammo to extend the amount of ammo you get. This is particularly effective for Sticky Ammo, which I will use in my example.

This is my basic hunting loadout. Do you see the gunpowder and blastnuts?

Those items, along with bringing some Sticky Ammo 1 with me, will allow me to craft a lot of extra Sticky Ammo 3 while hunting. Although I can only bring 9 at the start, I can craft way more overall as I run out. I recommend doing this with any ammo type you use.

The honey can be used to upgrade the free health potions you get from the supply chest, and the charms can be purchased from the HR merchant. Carry the charms around for a permanent (albeit weak) buff to your attack and defense.

Originally posted by Haethei

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