Dual blades and bow benefit from it the most, and charge blade a bit if you own the iceborne expansion.

Otherwise you generally pick whatever weapon that has the best combination of raw damage, affinity, sharpness, and deco slots if available.

depends on the weapon. for something like Greatsword, raw is better. For something like dual blades, elemental is better.

Originally posted by D. Flame:

depends on the weapon. for something like Greatsword, raw is better. For something like dual blades, elemental is better.

assuming you know elemental hitzones and can accurately hit them

Elemental CB, HH, DB, Bow are meta at endgame. Meaning that against most matchups, the right element is better than raw.

Other weapons are mostly better raw. There may be a few specific matchups where element is better, but they're the exception.

It doesn't really matter throughout the story. You don't have enough armour skills / decos to properly build for every element, so it might be more convenient to stick to raw/status, or just use whatever you like based on looks.

to my knowledge, Elemental damage is just a tiny faction of real damage dealt - roughly 1/10th of the elemental value you see.

It only contributes towards numbers IMHO.

I still can't see why it's a thing outside of the elemental checks of Alatreon. But hey, i know only GL and LS, with a hint of SA and CB.

Weapon attack speed & Target's weakness to said element

Originally posted by Kalameet:

It only contributes towards numbers IMHO.

I still can't see why it's a thing outside of the elemental checks of Alatreon.

Yes, it only contributes towards numbers.

In some matchups, the raw + elemental DPS of an elemental weapon is more than the raw DPS of a raw weapon. That's it.

You can't see why bigger number is a thing? Then use a Rarity 1 weapon and remove all sources of Attack Power including armour skills, Powertalon, consumables, canteen buff.

Certain weapon classes (typically weapons that deal lots of small instances of damage, like dual blades/bow) can do more damage to most monsters with elemental builds.

That said, it's way more expensive to craft and upgrade 3-5 sets of elemental weapons and associated armor sets than 1 raw weapon ands set that works on everything, so for progressing through the game I think raw is broadly better. Elemental is something you invest into when you're at the endgame and looking to push damage as far as possible.

Originally posted by ressenmacher:

Certain weapon classes (typically weapons that deal lots of small instances of damage, like dual blades/bow) can do more damage to most monsters with elemental builds.

That said, it's way more expensive to craft and upgrade 3-5 sets of elemental weapons and associated armor sets than 1 raw weapon ands set that works on everything, so for progressing through the game I think raw is broadly better. Elemental is something you invest into when you're at the endgame and looking to push damage as far as possible.

I used Raw Only on dual blades from the start of the game until MR 100, then I crafted a set of Safi dual blades for each element.

Originally posted by ressenmacher:

Certain weapon classes (typically weapons that deal lots of small instances of damage, like dual blades/bow) can do more damage to most monsters with elemental builds.

That said, it's way more expensive to craft and upgrade 3-5 sets of elemental weapons and associated armor sets than 1 raw weapon ands set that works on everything, so for progressing through the game I think raw is broadly better. Elemental is something you invest into when you're at the endgame and looking to push damage as far as possible.

and then there's the brightbulb (me) who had the idea of building all weapons for a given weapon type
only to realize the majority of them just suck big time, and have no reason to exist

Originally posted by CaimDark:

I'm still low rank, so maybe that changes, but whenever I run the numbers online to check if it's better to use my weapon with the biggest raw damage or an elemental weapon with lower raw but the monster is weak to the element in question, I'm told the real elemental damage is so small, even accounting for the vulnerability the bigger raw damage weapon is still better.

For story progression you will generally just want to use physical damage since elemental damage only applies if a monster is relatively weak to said element. If a monster for example is immune to fire, only the physical damage of your weapon will go through. Since for the story mode you're going to be seeing monsters with all sorts of resistances throughout you will just want to deal physical, sacrifice the elemental damage bonus and you do this because farming the elemental weapon you may or may not need would take much more time than the absence of elemental damage would cost.

Once you get into the point of stagnation where you're fighting special bosses, (tempered) investigations and event quests you will want to look for elemental damage because your weapon choices for each element will be settled and then the damage bonus will help clearing the boss faster.

Of course, this applies to certain weapons and not all. Weapons with high physical move values but low elemental move values for example (such as greatsword, hammer, etc.) do not benefit from the elemental bonus as much as they do from just raw physical damage. Dual blades, Bow and CB on the other hand have enough ways to actually bring that elemental damage to bear in a hunt. So generally for these 3 weapons you are looking at elemental damage as the preferred option if a monster is weak enough to the element to justify it. Otherwise you would still go with physical damage for these 3 weapons.

A special caveat on this are monsters that have some kind of special weakness to elemental damage such as ebony odogaron, where you just bring it if you can afford the damage loss. On elder dragons you will generally always want to bring some form of dragonseal, unless you have a counter element that has the same effect. So what you would do before you get to the fatalis gear is get a safi drak weapon (dragon damage) and then spec if for physical damage completely and then leave that small bit of dragon element for the application of elderseal. If you're not dealing with a monster with some specific element you would grab a weapon with blast status effect instead.

Originally posted by Kalameet:

Originally posted by ressenmacher:

Certain weapon classes (typically weapons that deal lots of small instances of damage, like dual blades/bow) can do more damage to most monsters with elemental builds.

That said, it's way more expensive to craft and upgrade 3-5 sets of elemental weapons and associated armor sets than 1 raw weapon ands set that works on everything, so for progressing through the game I think raw is broadly better. Elemental is something you invest into when you're at the endgame and looking to push damage as far as possible.

and then there's the brightbulb (me) who had the idea of building all weapons for a given weapon type:er_sweat:
only to realize the majority of them just suck big time, and have no reason to exist

I'll do you one better: me doing that very same thing in generations ultimate and it was quite the timesink with its weapon leveling and no fancy weapon tree to visualize what you've already got.

world normalized most of the elemental hitzones so unless you have a huge element attack and know the weakness its probably better to just use whatever you have already.

In base world the legiana ice sword was better than fire for most monsters that were able to get damaged by ice. even if it was weaker to fire because the attack value and sharpness were that much higher than the fire weapons.

Glaive can also use elemental very well if you helicopter attack the wings of monsters like lunastra. but smacking things on the ground is fine too.

The whole point of elemental was not to make the biggest hits on the weakest parts of the monster, but to make sure you had other areas to attack that were otherwise bad areas to hit. so it did a LOT in those cases. that mattered more when the weak points were harder to reach than they are in world.

Basically yes, you'll be able to comfortably beat Master Rank monsters in 8-12 minutes with a raw/blast weapon which then works pretty much anything in one build.

Elemental weapons need so much tinkering and changing of the build that the juice is not worth the squeeze, can they be better than raw/blast? Sure, but personally I'm not going to grind for hours more to shave a minute here and there.

It's a flat bonus, so faster weapons usually benefit more.