Best Long Sword build in Monster Hunter Wilds: Skills, armor sets & how to play

The Long Sword in Monster Hunter Wilds is an excellent weapon for newcomers and veterans alike that rewards fight knowledge and an aggressive but considered approach to encounters.

Core to the Long Sword is the Spirit Gauge mechanic. Maintaining this buff and choosing when to offload stacks for big damage windows will make a world of difference between a smooth and prolonged hunt, and Wilds has plenty of gear designed to facilitate exactly that with synergistic skills.

The Long Sword is an S-tier weapon so here’s everything you need to know about its best build.

Best Long Sword build in Monster Hunter Wilds

Best low rank Long Sword build

The best low rank build for Long Sword will use most of the Balahara set. This is due to the Equipment Skills each piece provides facilitating the weapon type’s gameplan – staying in combat for as long as possible without having to spend downtime healing and subsequently wasting precious Spirit Gauge.

While Quick Sheathe is great to have in a pinch when you need to dip out and chug a potion, it’s the maxed out Evade Extender provided by having three pieces of Balahara equipped that matters most here. The skill makes evading enemy attacks a breeze, allowing for swift repositioning during a fight. You’ll also get access to the Master Mounter Group Skill, making it far easier to mount and cripple all monsters‘ weak spots for huge damage windows.

HEAD	TORSO	ARMS	WAIST	LEGS
Rey Sandhelm Equipment Skill: Latent Power Lv1	Balahara Mail Equipment Skill: Quick Sheathe Lv1	Balahara Vambraces Equipment Skill: Evade Extender Lv1	Balahara Coil Equipment Skill: Evade Extender Lv1	Balahara Greaves Equipment Skill: Evade Extender Lv1

For helmet, this slot is largely down to preference, but we’d recommend something like Rey Dau’s helm for the modest DPS boost provided by Latent Power. Check out how to hide your equipped helmet if you’d rather not wear it

The above sets will give you the following skills:

• Latent Power Lv1
• Quick Sheather Lv1
• Evade Extender Lv3
• Scaling Prowess

Plus, it also makes you look really cool, so you may want to whip out photo mode right after Gemma‘s done crafting it. However, you can transmog your gear if you want a different look.

Best Long Sword skills

While the Longsword excels at dishing out high damage with large combo strings and breaking enemy parts with its large reach, it’s also susceptible to interruptions and requires frequent sharpening due to its attack speed. That being the case, skills that play to those strengths and account for its weaknesses will provide the best bang for your buck.

• Quick Sheathe
• Speed Sharpening
• Protective Polish
• Earplugs
• Health Boost
• Part Breaker
• Latent Power
• Power Prolonger

Best Long Sword skills explained

Quick Sheathe

Reduces the time it takes to sheathe your Long Sword. As the Spirit Gauge continuously degrades when not in use, all forms of downtime reduction are a big help.

Speed Sharpening

Reduces the number of sharpening cycles with a Whetstone to max out the Long Sword’s sharpness. Similar to Quick Sheathe, reduces downtime and subsequent Spirit Gauge loss.

Protective Polish

One of the very best skills for Long Swords. Prevents sharpness loss for a set period of time after sharpening your weapon.

Earplugs

The biggest damage from Long Swords comes from their long windup skills such as Helm Breaker. Earplugs will drastically reduce the chances of your Hunter being interrupted when attempting to pull off such skills.

Part Breaker

While Long Swords struggle to break heavily armored enemy parts without maximum sharpness, they’re still terrific at doing so in most situations due to their incredible reach. It’s worth building Part Breaker on Long Swords for the ability to sever tails faster than any other weapon type and your teammates will love you for it.

Latent Power

The best source of Affinity. Long Swords already deal excellent damage but if you’re going for weak spots and Wounds as you should, the bump in crit rate Latent Power provides makes it always worth considering.

Power Prolonger

Like Dual Blades and the Insect Glaive, Long Swords require users to build a resource during battle in order to dish out maximum damage. Power Prolonger slows down the decay of the latter’s Spirit Gauge, making acts like healing and sharpening much less punishing than they otherwise would be.

How to play Long Sword

The Long Sword is best used in an aggressive capacity but that doesn’t mean you’ll want to swing away with wild abandon – the weapon type rewards pulling off long combo strings and knowing when to use its Spirit Helm Breaker finisher at the perfect opportunity.

The general gameplay loop is simple. Build Spirit Gauge – the bar will fill on your HUD – until full and then unleash your multi-hit Spirit Blade combo to raise your gauge color. This will begin as yellow, then progress to orange, and then, finally, red.

Once the Spirit Gauge turns red, this will overclock the Long Sword, unlocking a much faster, more damaging alternative Spirit Blade combo, Crimson Slash. This alternate mode depletes much faster than the standard Spirit Gauge, and you’ll want to use it as much as possible before ending the cycle and beginning again with Spirit Helm Breaker.

While the above will be your bread and butter DPS rotation, don’t sleep on Fade and Foresight Slash. These both deal high damage while also performing evasive backsteps, reducing downtime and gauge reduction.

Likewise, if you know you’re going to have to disengage the enemy or need to protect your rear blindspot, Special Sheathe can be performed at any point during a combo to holster your sword and perform a wide slash follow-up.

That’s everything you need to know about the Long Sword. If you want some more help, make sure you’ve locked in the best settings before checking out all of the monsters’ weaknesses.