Monster Hunter Rise: Top 3 Great Swords

With Monster Hunter Rise out on PC, this series will recommend weapons to build for with a few skills and sets to try and get — similar to what we did for Monster Hunter: World. With the return of charm farming, may the Desire Sensor be ever in your favour. The weapons featured go from easiest for story, best for endgame, and a customisation for the Rampage weapon. Whilst Rise’s armour has great mix and match potential, the armour’s meta is more limited than World/Iceborne and will use the same, or similar, cookie-cutter sets.

Easiest for Story: Bone Tree

Affinity 3

Just make sure to craft onto Bone Tree 2, as the 1 swaps raw for element.

The great sword isn’t a weapon designed for dealing tons of hits at once. Despite the lower levels of sharpness, it can be considered the easiest to build for. That said, if the end goal is making your life easier, the Kamura line is better for reaching the best-in-slot weapon. You can easily build towards the Nargacuga line or the Tigrex tree. However, the issue with this is that, until you hit the Narga or Tigrex, the base attack of the Kamura line is lacking.

Best for Endgame: Tigrex Great Sword (210 Raw/No Element)

Attack Boost 3

Affinity 2 will yield lower damage on average as explained later.

Once you hit the endgame, Tigrex takes the lead and will take the crown for most powerful weapon for the majority of weapons in the series. That said, Rajang in terms of min-max is easier and isn’t as charm dependent. With endgame though, you want peak damage and Tigrex is a marginal improvement over Rajang, and that means unlocking its final form.

Rampage Blade S (210 Raw/No Element)

Attack Boost 4, Attack Surge, Non-Elemental Boost

Unless you want fashion, this doesn't topple the best in slots.

In terms of best-in-slot, it’s always about how high the base attack is and how much you boost it. Whilst you do take a hit in the affinity department, the reality is that in terms of calculating the effective raw (attack power multiplied by crit modifier and rate) it doesn’t beat Tigrex or Rajang because of its lower base raw attack. This is because raising attack (i.e. Attack Boost) is harder and doesn’t scale as well compared to crits and stacking affinity skills (i.e. Critical Eye, Weakness Exploit, Maximum Might). In the long run, higher raw attack weapons stack better than the extra affinity you could get (thus neutralising any gains you would’ve gotten from a combo of both).

Unsurprisingly, the great sword continues to be reliant on raw, with how difficult it is to fully build and stick every skill on. It makes some skills more potent, but unfortunately (even with the tweaks and reworks) the cost has pushed certain skills like Weakness Exploit, Critical Eye, Critical Boost, and Attack Boost to being the all or nothing. That said, due to the rework, certain things like quality of life skills (such as Quick Sheath, Focus, and Speed Sharpening) have also increased in value due to their ease with filling in empty slots.