Ok so this weekend was kind of an unexpected epiphany (and not exactly welcome). I have been using charge blade the entire time I've been playing, and I am currently in Rotten Vale, MH 8, 4-5 Star quests ready to take on the blue wyvern in Coral Vale to progress the main story. However, I noticed that my elemental charge blades weren't really doing as much damage as my impact ones, so I did some research. Come to find out the slower weapons really don't take full advantage of elemental damage like quicker ones do, so I figured I'd split my elemental collection off to dual blades. So in the process of creating those, I was seeing that I was killing shit WAY faster compared to my charge blade counter parts. IE, Tobi Kadachi took me roughly 15 minutes to kill with my best impact charge blade, I could take him down in less than 10 with my water DBs.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I know I can definitely tighten up my play on the CB, and I'm going to work on that, but as it stands right now I feel like the game is a bit more balanced towards the dual blades. However, due to how the CB is so techical in nature, it may be I just need to figure out how to be quicker on the phial build up phase of the weapon, and get better at determining when it's best to use the phial spender for the big damage. So, I'm not totally ragging on DBs. Besides, they are fun as hell to play too, so it wouldn't hurt if I was just better suited for those. However, I really do love the ebb and flow of the charge blade, and building up phials, to transform and spend it on the bigger damage combos. It's super satisfying.