You are facing formidable opponents in Monster Hunter. It is not unlikely that fights go almost the full length of the quest. Your improving hunting skills will definitely shorten that time, but the weapon choice will be even more crucial. If you hunt with an inefficient weapon your fights will be dragging, tedious and leave you with a feeling of WTF all over.
The Weapon Calculators I'm creating since Monster Hunter Freedom for the PSP serve one purpose: Finding the best weapon for a given monster in your given situation from a given melee weapon class.
It is not to be used for actual accurate damage calculation (though this one can be tweaked to) and it is not meant for comparing weapon classes (aka weapon tier).
Select a monster card from the right and double click it or drag it onto the calculator interface. It will move into place. Select from the switches the skillset and weapon class you are going to use. Also don't forget your current off- and online quest availability on the bottom. This determines the weapons available to you right now.
Press GO.
You'll receive the results ordered from best to worst. In that result window you can open a detailed result table for each weapon where you will see how the score of that weapon came to being.
On top of the result window is a table (click to open it) which presents the matrix of hitzones vs attacks used for calculation. In its basic state the calculator runs EACH attack against EACH hitzone of the monster and averages the result.
You may find this not suiting your needs since you already know where to attack and which attacks are substandard. Click on rows, columns or cells in that matrix to disable/enable attacks, hitzones and particular combinations. The result score for the weapons will change on the fly. If you disable everything but one cell, you'll have the precise damage calculation as the score for that weapon. It is the same value as the one in the according cell in the weapon's own result table.
Sounds complicated? It isn't. Just go ahead and try and you'll understand how that works.
If you run another calculation your selections in that matrix will be reset.
As this will spark lots of questions I'll address how I handle sharpness here.
Sharpness is the KEY component for determining weapon damage. Dull weapons deal miniscule damage compared to their sharpened counterparts.
I have implemented a kind of fuzzy sharpness. If a weapon has only two or one visible bars of its highest sharpness I will consider it's sharpness to be the next worse one. This is done to reflect the permanent loss of sharpness during a fight and your need to sharpen that weapon again. A weapon with three or more visible bars is considered to be in that sharpness long enough to matter during the fight.