For Elder Dragons and the like, yeah, I'll roll with this for the most part. I still need the numbers on the raw damage over time though. I'm never entirely sure if its worth it
Been playing for like 35 hours and this shyt is like a foreign language to me
Do what....with what??
How do you "stack" anything? I just build the armor, as far as I know there are no attributes to level up.
What the hell is a phial type and/or a tyrannous and affinity?
Blend and stack what
....sharpness? I just use a whetstone
Speak English breh
It'll make sense the further you get in the game and move into high rank. Most of those skills have to do with raising critical chance and how you can increase elemental damage/part damage/etc on each crit.
As for Sharpness, its not just keeping your attacks from bouncing off (and even that can be mitigated on certain weapons). Red = 50% damage. Orange =75%. Yellow = 100% or the actual attack value on your stats page. Green =105%. Blue=120%. White = 132%
Elemental damage is affected by Sharpness as well. Just not as drastically. Red/Orange/Yellow stay the same, but Green/Blue/White are 100/106/112 respectively.
Sharpness also directly effects what things you can or can't hit due to a monsters armor. A green attack against a Barroth might bounce off many of its armored parts for example, but white would cut through it like butter. It also makes it MUCH easier to cut off monster parts. For the most part, any single attack is taking -1 off your sharpness but any attack that hits a strong area will take more. Blocking will also reduce it by a lot.
So keeping it high will allow you to knock off parts quicker - and knocking off parts is how you stop a lot of attacks that'd otherwise change the way you play.
Phials are for Charge Blades and one of the lances I think. Its basically the mechanic they use to power up their abilities. They get two types of Phials (may as well call them charges but Japan so whatever), Impact and Elemental. Elemental takes on whatever element the weapons is - so for better or worse you're hitting with all of that element on all of your charge attacks. Impact however is flat, non-elemental damage based off your raw attack damage. It ignores affinity. Both of those don't obey the rules of Sharpness/Armor either. So for enemies that are armored to hell and back like Kirin, a well placed charge attack will hit it harder than anything else in the game could ever hope to.
^regarding that, the Tyrannis weapons have the highest attack numbers but the worst affinity overall. Affinity effects crit in BOTH directions though. So positive affinity = chances to hit for 25% more damage. Negative affinity = chances to hit for 25% LESS damage. For some weapon types that's a complete after thought. Won't ever matter due to how they do damage. For weapons like Dual Blades or Glaive though? Huge problem unless you've got ways to mitigate that.
You'll see plenty more ways to add skills and elements to weapons/armor the further you get into the game though. Early on just do what feels good for you, keep upgrading your equipment, and git gud. High Rank is when things open up. Then the 'real' endgame after that is where shyt gets crazy.
Sorry if that came off long winded or sloppy, trying to summarize as efficiently as I can because the game loves to over explain everything or simply not tell you. Hunter games in general will let you drop 100+ hours easy so don't even sweat the early stuff.
I'm still trying to find ways to fluff the numbers using that Odogaron armor set ability. I feel like I've seen all there is to see from Charge Blade at least. While its fun (especially once you get the guardpoint punishes down), its pretty straightforward no matter what the situation is. For weapons like that, the Poison weapon actually makes a lot of sense since you're throwing pebbles at a monster until you get your charge ready.