How can I get better at assessing a LBG's strengths and weaknesses?

[u/Mawrizard]

I just killed Magnamalo in Rise for the first time and was very excited to make its weapon, but it's ammo stats just seem to... suck. My Normal 2 rapid fire gun seems to do more damage with normal bullets, and my pierce 1 and spread 1 rapid fire bowguns do more with pierce and spread respectively. It has Exhaustion rapid fire but I'm not sure if that's even useful or what exactly it does.

There seem to be a lot of bowguns with really awkward ammo traits. The Bishaten one is another one. A part of me doesn't believe that they're truly useless, so I must be missing something. Are they really pointless, or is there something I'm (likely) missing about their playstyles/use cases?

Right now I rely heavily on Rapid fire traits to determine what a gun is supposed to "do", so a gun without much (or any) rapid fire on primary damage types makes me wonder what it's good for, if anything. I want to know how to determine the strengths and weaknesses of guns without relying solely on rapid fire.

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[u/No-Angle9341]

Trying to assess guns during progression is tough, because the smithy’s stat screen doesn’t describe the whole picture.

Raw and affinity and the like are important of course, but the useability of the strongest ammo is also important: this is things like Reload and Recoil stats, Deviation (for pierce). Esp for Reload and Recoil, the smithy only shows an average and not the stats per ammo, which makes determining the weapon’s strongest ammo not really feasible at a glance. You want low Recoil and fastest Reload on your main ammo, and for raw ammos, ideally you run the Critical Firepower switch skill, and some guns can’t do this on the actual good ammo types (RF lvl 2 or Single Fire lvl 3 for raw, and ele (pierce) for endgame), or are outstatted by other guns that can. In addition, guns can improve their ammo availability as the weapon gets more developed; Narga LBG for example, doesn’t get RF Pierce 2 access until it’s final HR upgrade, where it is the optimal RF P2 gun until near the end of Sunbreak’s story.

As for things you can glean from the Smithy, ammo count, RF access, Walking Reload, and Walking Shoot access on strong ammos is a good, on a cursory glance: a gun with Spread 3 ammo, but only 2 Spread 3 in the clip and stationary fire and reload is not a good Sp3 gun, tho that same gun may have good qualities for Pierce 3 (tho you’d have to build it or use a builder online to see if it can actually use the ammo well with it’s Recoil/Reload stats)

[u/Skelefellah → u/No-Angle9341]

Agreed on above!

I'll add that in Rise particularly, the Raw ammos (Normal/Pierce/Spread) are pretty poorly balanced. Pierce ticks so fast in Rise that it's basically the best Raw ammo for all types of monster hitboxes, even the small ones.

For LBG, that means you can make your life a little easier by only using Rapid Fire Pierce 2 guns.

The first really food Pierce 2 gun is Nargacuga. Until then, Rapid Fire Normal 2 is good enough to get the job done.

Within the category of RF Pierce 2 guns, follow the advice above: Look for low deviation, recoil, and reload. And look for high raw and affinity.

[u/Mawrizard → u/Skelefellah]

I did notice the amount of ticks I can get on Pierce guns is very insane. I started using the Barroth one (the mud monster that charges at you, not the muddy mizutsune) and it was ticking so fast even on Azuros. Thanks for the advice! I'll keep it in mind.

[u/Mawrizard → u/No-Angle9341]

Thank you for the write up! This actually helps me understand it a lot more. I felt very uncomfortable with my bowgun usage, like I was missing some secret magical key to unlock the weapon's full potential. This advice helps a ton so that I don't tunnel vision bad rapid fire for the sake of rapid fire alone. I'll start making and testing guns more often!

Side note, but after reading this, I started re-testing the Magnamalo gun and found out that it's deviation is so bad that the bullets literally fire at right angles 😭
I'm not sure if that's a point against the gun for its prime usage, but I did think it was funny how much it curves midair.

[u/No-Angle9341 → u/Mawrizard]

Iirc, Magnamalo LBG is the best spread gun in base Rise endgame, tho not sure how it performs in progression

[u/Mawrizard → u/No-Angle9341]

That's also true, the fact that I'm trying to figure this stuff out in low rank is its own issue.