real simple breakdown on the difference between bow, lbg, and hbg
Things must do: bringing extra mats to craft during hunts. Binding fast crafting into hot keys.
Bow - Very spammy playstyle and the hardest one in three range weapons.
Lowest effective range (good damage, you'll see inner aiming circle turn orange), basically almost melee range. Using a lot of stamina, because players have to charging up arrows and dodging between attacks. Most effective weapons are elemental. They are kinda similar Dual Blades in those regards.
Preferably using
Power coatings as much as possible.
Fire herb + empty phials for power coatings.
Bowguns only consume stamina when dodging or blocking with a shield HBG.
LBG - easiest one to play.
Very mobile, has better range than bow. Lots of ammo types can be used. Beside typical normal/
pierce/
spread (r
aw), it can use elemental ammo (fire, ice, thunder, water, dragon) or status (poison, sleep, paralysis) for utility similar to bows. But its specialty is the rapid fire. Firing 3 shots but only consuming one ammo.
Lower recoil comparing to HBG, basically bullet projectiles won't deviate or be inaccurate as much from crosshair.
Elemental ammo is pierce but with lower tick rates and more match up dependence. Unless it's Sunbreak, raw are meta, don't pay too much attention for this ammo type.
HBG
Obviously very slow (dodging and strafing), which leads to dodge roll being slower but has further range than lbg. More emphasizing on raw ammo types. But since World, it can equip shield modification (in game, not 3rd party mods) to auto-block when not shooting. So it should ease the difficulty a bit, "not dying as much" because of slowness. Otherwise, people would use other modification to increase its damage based on spread or pierce type.
Pierce will hits multiple time through long hitbox.
Latchberry + Gunpowder. Gunpowder Lv2 is from flamenut and Lv3 is from blazenut.
Spread is shotgun.
Needleberry + gunpowder.
These two ammo types are like the most common to use. Check carefully what kind of ammo each gun support in the crafting or detail menu. Otherwise, you don't want to mismatch the ammo type.