In Monster Hunter Rise, you are overwhelmed with choices and options. The worst part is probably that some things are not explained to you very well, and it's possible to miss out on the best things that Buddies have to offer.
You start the game with 2 Buddies, but you can recruit others to replace them by going to Iori instead of Buddy Plaza in Kamura. Do not think that your starting Buddies are special since you will probably have to replace them if you are looking for optimization.
Two dogs? A dog and a cat? Or two cats?
You are free to play with the animals you prefer. But in terms of performance, not all Buddies are equal. There is absolutely no point in playing with two Palamutes. By default, a Palamute and a Palico are a good compromise between comfort and performance, since the dog will serve as your mount, which will save you time. It's also more comfortable in multiplayer to have the Palamute follow the other hunters.
However, you should know that it is best to have 2 Palicoes with you. With their special tools, traps, and abilities, you will gain materials, survival, control, and power. Even in terms of movement speed, you don't lose that much by making good use of fast travel and Wirebugs.
Choosing a class for your Buddy
When you create your Buddy, by going to Iori, you can choose between 5 classes for your Palico. Each class has its own powers and advantages:
- Healer: Provides healing
- Assist: Prepares traps.
- Fight: Fights alongside the player and give buffs
- Bombardier: Fights with explosives
- Gathering: Gathers items during exploration
It is important to know that each class has an exclusive starting skill, and another at level 20. The other 3 are determined randomly. This is what determines the interest of one class over another since you can have many combinations.
Regardless of its class, Palico's damages are still relatively low compared to the Hunter's, so it's best to focus on skills that will assist you in some way, either by controlling the monster, healing you, giving you buffs, etc.
The Gathering class is considered the best since its first skill will directly poison/paralyze/sleep the monster by throwing a toad at it. Furthermore, its last skill will steal items that can be used in the forge. This will make your hunts more profitable, especially if you have 2 of them with you. They are likely to steal rare materials as a bonus, like plating and gems. A little reminder: a Gathering Palico is vulnerable to monster attacks, so be careful when fighting while your buddy is busy collecting!
The second-best class is, of course, the Healer. With his powerful healing spells, he will save your life, or at least save you from wasting time healing yourself, allowing you to attack instead.
The other classes obviously have good stuff too, but you can usually get equivalent bonuses via random skills.
Random moves
At level 20, each Palico has 5 moves. The first and the last are fixed and depend on the chosen class, but the three in-between are chosen randomly from different abilities of the same level, which gives about 5 alternatives per power. There are some more and some less desirable ones. Here are the ones that stand out the most. We recommend that you apply search criteria for the desired class in Iori, then inspect all potential Palicos when you return from a hunt to see if there is one with all the desired moves.
- Move 2 - Healing Bubble or Go, Fight, Win for weapons that use stamina like a Bow and Dual Blades. This skill will reduce your stamina consumption.
- Move 3 - Power Drum: A significant bonus to damages and armor for your Hunter and his companions, by far the best choice.
- Move 4 - Shock Purr-ison (monster capture/paralysis) or Shock Tripper. Has the merit of working on Elder Dragons and Apex monsters
Random skills
Palicos have a second layer of randomness in their stats. Their possible skills are determined during the recruitment. Ideally, you'll want the perfect combination of powers and skills. Fortunately, this isn't too important either, and in reality, there are only a few talents that really deserve your attention, and you won't be able to activate them all at once.
- Affliction Attack +: A 3-point skill that will increase the power of the Palico's weapon afflictions and techniques. By giving them a weapon with an affliction effect, it will make them much more formidable.
- Medical Touch: If you want the ultimate Palico Healer to keep you alive, this talent is highly desirable, as it will amplify their power.
- Knockout King: A skill that can help you knock out and wear down monsters a bit if you gave the Palico a blunt weapon.
- Artful Dodger: Your Palico will more often parry and deflect attacks from monsters, which will help it survive and stay active.
- Earplugs: Roars are very common in MH Rise, so this is more situational, but it will allow your Palico an opportunity to use a power or attack.
Other skills will usually increase the Palico's damage, its survival or protect it from some kind of affliction. Incidentally, Palamutes have no abilities, but they do have random skills as well.
Find the right Palico
Go to Iori and select the "Search Criteria" tab to open the special selection screen. You can determine the appearance of the Palicos you are looking for if you want to. What really matters is to select the class at the very bottom. After each hunt, you will be able to get 6 Palicos of the desired class, so your chances of finding the right combination of powers and talents in a given class will be much higher. Don't forget to train your Palicos in the Dojo, using large Chestnuts.
Equipment
Finally, you have to choose which armor pieces, and especially which weapon to give to your Palicos. For the armor, it doesn't really matter, we recommend the ones based on the materials looted from the last boss since the defense score is much higher on this set than on the previous ones.
For the weapon, we recommend that you forge the Cat-aclysm Knell, the blueprint of which is obtained by opening the small altar in the Buddy Plaza after defeating the Magnamalo. She has good damage, armor, and a solid Sleep affliction rating.
Original content by Lloyd
