1) For shield weapons, you can also block instead of dodge
2) Yes. Important. At lower sharpness levels you also graze more (bounce back when attacking, breaking combos).
3) My suggestion is to join up with your brother, and then go to the gathering hub. There are two quest givers there, one for regular quests, one for special arena. The special arena lets you fight mobs with pre-set gear. That way you can try out different weapons easily, you see what weapons you can use when selecting the quest. Not sure if that is unlocked from the very start though.
The hammer is a fairly beginner friendly weapon.
Affinity is your ability to crit I think. Some weapons have negative affinity, but you can raise that with different skills to offset it. Not something you need to consider early on.
Some quick starting tips
- With flying mobs, bring flash pods (crafted by flash bugs). Can bring extra flash bugs with you and craft while out on a mission.
- You can save different loadouts, both equipment and items you bring
- In the crafting menu, craft every ? you can to see what you can make. Look at it regularly to see if new items show.
- Bring bombs in loadouts where you want to kill a mob.
- Demon dust and Hardened dust is great to bring as they buff you and the teammates/palicos in your vicinity
- While exploring, each map has two nodes where you gather them (when you get high rank, the items on those maps are different, so have to gather again), you get items that give research points. These nodes can "crit" while gathering, getting you items that can start quests or get added to the items you can cook with. You only need to crit once to get the item.
- Make sure to capture at least one of every mob
- Capturing is "easier" as you skip the last stage, but you miss out on some things you can only carve (gems)
- Go on explorations of the zones on your own. Each zone lets you get quests that befriends a different tribe of palicos. Doing those will give your own palico new trinkets to equip. When you are two people, you won't be able to befriend them.
- For guild cards, to get, or send, you can select all and send/receive all at once.
- Remember, that when you unlock the bounty part, to actually equip bounties and turn them in when you do them. Rewards from them are used to upgrade armor.
- Item rewards you see as "trade in" can be sold for money.
For things like stats, resists, abilities, I wouldn't worry so much about it at first. Until high rank, you mostly use tiers and mix and match as you go. Same with weapon elements and the likes. For the first 50+ or so hours you just scavenge.
PS: I've duoed the vast majority of the game quests, so entirely doable. However, do note that there are only two difficulties of mobs so to speak. Single player and multi player. So playing with with 2 will increase the difficulty of the mobs the same as if you were 4.
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