Understanding elemental damage on bowguns

Question

First of all, I would like to assure you that I have done my homework when it comes to understanding damage calculation in Monster Hunter. My question is somewhat advanced because understanding damage calculation is a prerequisite.

Total Damage Output = ([Physical Damage Output] + [Elemental Damage Output]) * Overall Defense

And of course it gets more complicated than that.

My question is on the calculation of the Elemental Damage Output for, say, a Light Bowgun. Most weapons in the game have a stat called Element, which shows the Elemental attack of the weapon. This value is used in the computation of the Elemental Damage Output as follows:

Elemental Damage Output = (Elemental attack / 10) * Elemental effectiveness

The problem with bowguns is that they do not have any Element stat. So as I looked into the question (I told you I did my homework ^^), I found out that the Element stat for bowguns was contained within elemental shots (e.g. Flaming S, Water S, ...). For example, according to this beautifully written tutorial on bowguns that I urge every aspiring gunners to read, the stats on Flaming S is 7 + 45 Fire and I would like to know what it means:

• I think the 7 is the motion value used to calculate the Physical damage output so that it will be 7% of the weapon's effective power (which takes into account the raw damage, the weapon factorand the affinity. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

• I don't know what to think about the 45 Fire damage. If such a small value is used as the Elemental attack in the Elemental Damage Output calculation (in the formula above), it makes no sense because bowguns would be severely disadvantaged because the actual elemental damage dealt would be 4.5 times some elemental effectiveness, which is usually a low percentage. So, this interpretation is likely not correct. Or am I to see the 45 Fire damage as the result of 450 / 10, which then needs to be multiplied by the Elemental effectiveness?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

As you correctly state the 45 of elemental damage stands for the 450/10 this is why bowguns are masters of elemental damage.

About the 7 in the formula is the physical damage but it is the total damage it will add that is already precalculated from a previous example

so the final damage would be 7/physical defense and 45/monster elemental defense

source : http://gaijinhunter.tumblr.com/post/73946102476/mh4-how-damage-calculation-works-simplified