There is so much information in this game I’m trying to wrap my head around. What are the skills? How do I use them, so confused!
There's quite a few systems and subsystems, and they come on rather quickly in low rank. Each weapon has a set of skills that are generally considered better than others. A lot of the time, you can get by with generic survivability skills and damage skills etc. A few pages ago I posted a link to Reddit that had a decent list of skills per weapon that would be useful. Also, don't worry about any of this too much until High Rank. You'll cycle through stuff very quickly until the latter half of high rank and beyond.
Here's the link:
Anyways, you can get skills from 3 sources.
Armor skills are just baked in to each armor piece. They vary in number by each piece of armor. This usually leads people that prioritize skills at the endgame to wear a mishmash of different armor sets (commonly referred to as clownsuits). You can hit the Right stick while examining the armor piece to go into a help menu of sorts and see what each of them do.
High rank armor and beyond also have decoration slots. There are 3 sizes of deco slots, and each HR armor can have between 0 and 3 slots, of varying size. Decorations are craftable once you hit high rank, and they allow you to supplement armor with slots with extra skills that otherwise wouldn't be available on that particular armor piece. When you get to be able to craft the decorations, you will see if it's a size 1/2/3, and each decoration can only go into a slot that's the same size or bigger. In other words you can put a size 1 decoration in a size 3 slot, but usually the size 1 decoration skills are considered less desirable, so keep track of which decorations you put in which slot. Weapons can also have decoration slots, but they're uncommon usually until the endgame.
Then you have Talismans. You make these at the merchant/melder. They are just a RNG-dependent necklace that you wear that you can get essentially a free skill on. With the vast RNG in this game, this is pretty much the end game grind currently, trying to get that "perfect" talisman to finish out your clownsuit. They can have between (I think) 1-3 skills, and 0-3 decoration slots.
No matter which weapon you are using, there are some Quality of Life skills that you should have if you play online. Mostly Flinch Free (just 1 point is fine) because otherwise when you play with others, particularly longsword and bowguns will friendly fire hit you. This doesn't do damage, but it will interrupt you and make you unable to move, so you can run into all sorts of shit because of it. If you are still getting used to the game and get hit/have to heal a lot, Free Meal and Divine Blessing are also good QoL skills. The first allows you to use potions and healing items without consuming them a certain % of the time, and Divine Blessing just flat out decreases damage taken based on RNG.
If you have any particular questions, let me know.
Holy hell, anyone know a sure fire way to get a Anjanath plate? Killed over 30 of them now and not one plate even though I break every part I can and cut the tails off.
Unfortunately, you're getting hit by the desire sensor. It's all RNG. Plates in High Rank look to be 7% droprate whether captured/reward/carved, so I'd personally go capture for the reduced hunt time.