How does enhancing status work with bow coatings?

I have a bow that does not have poison as one of its coatings. I am using the Poisoncoat Jewel to allow poison coating. I now want to make the poison more effective. I am trying to use Venom Jewels.
Does the Poison Attack skill affect the bow, or is it only for melee?

Also the Poison Attack skill states that there is a cap similar to elemental damage. I know how to check this by adding jewels to a weapon and seeing how many until there is no change in the elemental number. I don't see this number for a bow's poison. How do I know how much poison skill I need, and if it's effective?

Solution 1:

The Bow's status coatings apply a set amount of their respective status to all of the Bow's attacks, temporarily overriding any natural element or status the Bow might have. Coatings do not convert a Bow's natural element to the status, but instead have their own values. Whether a Bow has a status or not, either naturally or from Free Element, has no effect on the coatings.

With regards to ways to increase the potency of abnormal statuses, such as armor skills or the Apothecary Mantle, they work exactly like they do for melee weapons: they increase the potency of the coating's status by a set percentage. For Poison Attack 1/2/3, that's a 5/10/20% increase in Poison status per hit.

It is not possible, however, to see the coatings' potency ingame, so there is no easy way to check if you've hit the status cap for coatings. The only way is to count how many shots it takes to apply a status to a monster, and test it again with various levels of the Poison Attack skill.

Solution 2:

To start, here are the basic mechanics:
What a coating does to a bow is simple: it converts the element of the attack to the associated coating. As far as I can tell, coatings convert the shot entirely to the coating's element, so a 300 Thunder bow with Poison coatings would be 300 Poison until the coatings ran out or were removed. By using the Poisoncoat jewel, all you've done is allow the Poison coating to be used, as some bows do not allow it.

When not using the coating on a non-Poison bow, the Poison Attack skill will do nothing at all. When using the coating, the bow will function exactly like a regular Poison bow.

With that information, it's easy to see what the Poison Attack skill will do.

• Level 1: Poison buildup +5%. Bonus: +10.
• Level 2: Poison buildup +10%. Bonus: +10.
• Level 3: Poison buildup +20%. Bonus: +10.

The skills will work just like they say. Add 5/10/20%, then +10. So long as you don't hit the cap for the bow, anyways.

To see if you hit the cap, though, there's a simple process: equip the bow, and preview armor pieces that add that elemental attack. Does the attack go up? Not at the cap. Preview another piece. Attack doesn't go up? You're at the weapon's cap.

When converting your element, however, this process is a bit more involved, as the cap may or may not be the same for the converted element as for the original. Best you can do for that is enter a hunt with +1/2/3 Poison Attack, equip the coating, and see how it affects the stats.