What will increase my Hunter Rank?

Solution 1:

During the main story, your Hunter Rank is capped and only increases as you progress through the story. For the most part, each major quest (or group of quests) raises your Hunter Rank by 1, all the way through 15, once you defeat

Xeno'Jiiva.

After that point, all of the extra HR experience you'd accrued but hadn't been counted towards your actual HR is applied. For instance, when mine became unlocked, I jumped from 15 to 26 immediately. Hunting large monsters will further raise your Hunter Rank, with more difficult hunts granting more experience (low rank gives almost nothing, whereas high rank gives a decent amount). Multiple monster hunts seem to grant a lot of experience, as well, scaled with the number of monsters you hunted. For example, I completed the five-monster Event quest earlier this week and went from about a quarter of the way from 40 to 41 all the way to 41.

The major exceptions I can recall to this 1:1 rule were when multiple story quests were assigned to you simultaneously and you could do them in whatever order you wanted. For instance, when you get three quests to slay Kushala Daora, Teostra, and Vaal Hazak, none of them raise your HR for completing them.

However, it's not very important to know which quests raise your HR, because the Assigned quests work differently than quests in previous Monster Hunter iterations. In previous games, you were given generic quests, but only a small subset were required to progress through the game and the game did not explicitly tell you what they were. In World, to uncap your HR and complete the story, you must complete all of the Assigned quests, without exception.

Additionally, there are two other caps on your Hunter Rank that are removed once you beat the corresponding Assigned quest. You will have one at 29, which requires you to beat 2 tempered Bazelguese, and one at 49, which requires you to beat a tempered Kirin.