Bow knowledge 

Monster Hunters is a confusing game. 

Mostly because the devs have a "hobby" to hide true information and burry it deep into the game. 

And a lot of noise creators in the community spreading questionable opinions. 

In this section, I will try my best, and with help from others with a good reputation for accuracy, distribute information as accurate as it can be. 

Core skills:
Ideally, all of these skills should be maxed

2. Mighty bow: Grants bow the 4th charge.
Mighty bow is perhaps the most important skill for bow. 
Especially with the changes made in Iceborne 
However, due to Legiana armour pieces being terrible, mighty bow is forced to rank lower over others. 
It is advised that players prioritise other skills over mighty bow if they don't own the deco. 

3. Weakness Exploit 3: Grants 50% affinity on softened weak zones.
What is crit element builds without crit. 
And there's no better skill to efficiently increase affinity than weakness exploit. 

4. Elemental attack up 6: Adds around 40% extra elemental damage relative to the base element of the bow.
Elemental attack up is the most efficient way to increase bow's damage due to the high scaling with elements and low scaling with raw. 

5. Constitution 1-3 paired with at least SS1: Reduces fixed stamina consumption/ increase stamina regeneration rate.
Reaching 50% Stamina reduction is BIG for bow as unlike any other weapon, bow's DPS is directly tied stamina consumption. 
However, overcommitting on stamina management skills is oftentimes very inefficiency. Hence why all builds assumes the consumption of Dash juice. 
Iceborne monsters are more aggressive with higher thresholds. This makes at least 1 level in stamina surge a core skill. 

6. Crit eye: Increase your affinity up to 40% 
The other piece to the max affinity puzzle, however, ranked lower due to its inefficiency in terms of slots. 
The reason why crit eye is lower on this list compared to Ele attack isn't that one increases damage more than the other. In fact, they have a very similar impact to the DPS of the build. 
However, elemental attack up has a level 5 charm while crit eye has only a level 4 charm, and both skills are heavily skewed towards the last level. 
This is why you will see poverty builds cut affinity more than elemental attack up. 

Non-essential skills:
Most of these skills are effective ways to increase damage outside of the core skills, but still plays a relatively small role and thus opened to adjustments. 

1. Spread/Power shot: Add 10% of the base raw to the raw damage of power shots. 
Spread shot is perhaps the most slot efficient way to increase raw damage and improve dps. However, it is still raw damage and relatively less important. (Unless you're playing a raw bow)

2. Crit boost: Increase raw critical damage multiplier to 1.4 x 
Very much like spread shot. A slot efficient way to increase the raw component. but its still raw. 
Ranked slightly higher on the list due to it being a built-in skill for Silver Rathalos set and Safi'jiiva set. 

3. Stamina surge 2 
Stamina is damage and more stamina is better. 
However, the diminishing returns going from SS2 -> SS3 make 2 usually the optimal number of levels for this skill. 
I strongly recommend beginners to cut some raw dps skills such as the ones listed below in favour of higher stamina surge levels. 

4. Normal/Forceshot: Add 10% of the base raw to the raw damage of Normal shots.
Another efficient raw boosting skill but ranks lower overall due to the heavy emphasis on spread shot and dash dance for bow. 

5. Other Raw skills such as attack boost, agitator and etc.
Bow's motion values are very low and therefore scales very poorly to the simple addition of 3-4 raw per skill. 
Raw skills usually has the lowest priority for bow unless its tied to affinity. 

To the right, you will find 2 mega posts analysing the slots efficiency and DPS trade-off from using the Silver Rathalos essence. 

Give it a read if it interests you but in short, Silver Rathalos essence awaken is pretty much a zero-sum game. 

What I mean by a zero-sum game is that by trading 1 inefficient armour Silver Rath piece for a more efficient one at the cost of losing 70 elemental damage is similar to cutting damage boosting skills on a standard build.

Based on a series of comparisons, the replacement will roughly yield 1 size 4 worth of extra slots. 

However, 70 base element is the highest scaling damage increasing factor for bow in which no other skills can compare. 

Furthermore, applying the analogy above, we can easily swap out both shot type decos, or some affinity to attain a similar level of flexibility without losing significant elemental stats. 

Swapping out these decos will lose Dps similarly to losing 70 base elements without the burden of rolling five 5 star rarity skills on 5 different bows. 

Hence, a zero-sum game with no winners since the end result is just an even trade-off between damage and utility.

Check out this build album and posts below!

https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunterWorld/comments/ekcma5/is_silver_rathalos_essence_awaken_on_safi_bows/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunterWorld/comments/fbaokf/is_silver_rathalos_essence_awaken_on_safi_bows/