I can't "at" the person "gamer at heart" because the at symbol confuses the coding. Anyway - thanks for the heads up, it makes sense and now I know why I was starting at level 1 even though there were ongoing quests.
Doomshroom Guns are a whole new ball game compared to melee! Some weird/specific stuff to guns that I've figured out - I wouldn't claim to be an expert!:-
1. Elementless jewel will work but only on guns that can't fire elemental ammo. Status ammo like sleep is ok. Off the top of my head I'm not sure if poison is element or status. Anyway, you have to stare pretty hard at each gun to figure it out.
2. Some guns are built around certain specific ammo types. For example the nergigante HBG is particularly good for Spread ammo (so using it like a shotgun). Working out which gun is good for which ammo is usually a function of clipsize and reload speed....so you have to either read it on reddit or do a LOT of comparing ammo tables.
3. The mods that should be used on each gun also depend on the ammo type that will be used...sometimes a gun may have a good clip size but the reload stat is too slow, so equip a reload mod to get that stat back in line. Again there's a lot of info on the interwebs. Note that a HBG with a shield mod acts like a lance/gunlance. I just fought Kulve with Guard 3 and the Guard up skill and tanked every hit. (Side note - the shield blocks the tick damage from lava on the floor BUT it eats a lot of stamina. I just stood in the lava (by mistake) and it used my whole, maxed, 150 stamina bar)
4. I still don't have any, but if you've got the skills/gems for normal shots/pierce shots/spread shots then these buff the damage quite a bit (10% I think)
5. Get ready to embrace crafting - ammo dissappears surprisingly quickly so gather all your nuts and seeds.
6. The Xeno jiva armour set bonus is pretty good if you can get it. There's a 30% chance that you get each shot "for free". This effectively boosts the total amount of ammo you can carry and also reduces the number of times you need to reload. For low count ammo (e.g. slicing) it makes quite a big difference to time lost re-loading
7. Guns give the best flexibility for status effects. You only have to swap ammo to paralyse/sleep/poison/exhaust the monster...it's very easy to inflict statuses which can help your team a lot.
8. Rapid fire is a good damage boost if you see it on an ammo type. For every 1 bullet you fire it actually fires 3. One at full damage and the second two at half damage. So it's a very big damage boost "for free".
Random guns I've heard about:-
LBG - Karma - A bit of a swiss army knife and it has rapid fire on Normal, as well as spreadshots. So you can create a medium range or short range build. You can also get the ammo clip of slicing ammo to 2 shots if you have full free elem/ammo up stat. With the Xenojiva set bonus that often equates to a clip of 3. This is an OP ammo type that is heavily restricted, as you're not meant to use it as your default ammo (but you can with this build)
HBG - Nergy's weapon - Makes a great shotgun build with Spread 3 ammo. Checkout some vids
HBG - New Kulve weapon - Has a 6 clip for Pierce 3. Seems pretty good for just doing default damage on Kulve. Pierce isn't so good for shooting the horns but still does some damage at least. You can also use Paralyse 1 AND Paralyse 2 so you can get two per hunt. You can also throw in some sticky bombs and poison ammo etc for variety.
The HBG machine gun mode is also great for early stage Kulve. You can just dump a LOT of shots that are all doing 10-15 on the chest. Got to be worth a few hundred damage if you get them all off.
