Playstyle

SnS is not a complicated weapon, it has no gauges to pay attention to or any other mechanic except for sharpness. This simplicity allows you to focus on just the monster and your dance with it. Its quick slashes make it a really good elemental/status based weapon that is very strong in almost all situations.

SnS also has one of the fastest extreme running speeds with high turn radius making it super quick to run around monster attacks. The Shield is also very useful, especially so if you have PD equipped. Something that you will also notice is the hitlag this weapon has, which can be a blessing and a curse.

General Weapon Info / Tips and Tricks

• The Shield attacks deal KO damage when hitting the head of the monster but are generally bad damage dealers. Status is also applied.

• The sliding slash has i-frames although less than a normal evade/roll

• After many attacks you can turn slightly by turning your joystick in a direction which helps aiming your attacks

• You can draw into a block by pressing both attack buttons + block at the same time.

• Adv. Slash (your unsheath attack) has super armor, which allows you to not get staggered by teammate attacks or some light knockback montser attacks

Combat Styles

Earth Style

This is the most basic style. To avoid monster attacks try to move around or roll through it, in emergencies you may also block but be aware that SnS has the weakest shield in the game.

For DPS, I like to mostly use the standard triangle combo and try to fit as many roundslashes as combo finisher as possible. Most other attacks are sadly not as useful. This early in the game you might be able to get a ko with your shield attacks but its generally not that helpful in my opinion. Basically just your normal Gen 2 SnS experience.

Heaven Style 

Generally Storm is preferred over Heaven but you can still use it if you want. The DPS rotation doesn't really change other than having roundslash replaced by the jump slash 2. For evading however you get access to the hop which does have i-frames and basically replaces your roll.

Storm Style

Storm style is very interesting for SnS since it replaces your bread and butter with a stabbing combo that has a massive 1.4x multiplier to your elemental damage. Basically if your weapon uses element try to use it as much as you can. This style also gets access to the hop which basically will replace your roll mid combat.

Extreme Style

Extreme Style is by far the best style to use as soon as you unlock it in g-rank. SnS has one of the best extreme runs in the game, its very fast and can turn around quick. You'll be able to just outrun many monsters attacks with just this. Not to mention you get access to evade-slash which is a very powerful dodge you can do after any action, although it has the same amount of i-frames as a normal roll, hitlag can extend these i-frames to make it easier to evade. 

Because of evade-slash, your best DPS combo will change. If you don't have the sigil Beam Slash yet you want to spam Adv. slash -> evade-slash -> repeat. Once you unlock the Beam Slash sigil it changes again to Beam Slash -> evade-slash -> repeat. To avoid getting hit either run around the monster attacks or use evade-slash or hop or one after the other to i-frame incoming attacks. Since Frontier is heavily focused on not getting hit, it is key to understand the timing of monster attacks and evading through them in most cases rather than running away. 

In reality you'll have to improvise your attack patterns slightly by fitting upslashes or normal triangle slashes in between to delay your evades. But don't worry you'll be getting it down pretty quickly. The difficulty generally lies in the monsters moveset not yours.

Advanced Techniques and Hitlag

Hitlag

Once you get the Fencing +2 armor skill active, you will notice an incredible increase in hitlag. This will unfortunately haunt you for the rest of the game but it does bring some benefits. During hitlag the game is essentially stopped and things like stamina recovery, or item timers are stopped too, that also means you are completely invincible during hitlag which synergises very well with the hit from evade-slash. 

This means using evade-slash gives you more i-frames due to getting hitstop when hitting the monster. Be very careful though since not knowing how long these hitframes last, will get you hit more often than not when trying to fit in just one more attack.

With white or higher sharpness, SnS has 2 frames hitlag at a HZV of 31+ or 4 frames on a HZV of 70+, Fencing will double these Hitlag frames.

Animation Cancelling

SnS has a unique mechanic where you can completely cancel the animation of an attack. 

To perform this you need the Zenith Skill Stylish Up active. If the stylish up hitbox hits the monster at the same time you perform an attack, it will cancel its animation and let you act immediately again. Since you need the stylish hitbox, you can only cancel animations right after evade-slashing or hopping. The only moves that I was able to cancel the animation of, were upslash and beam slash. Realistically it is too difficult to consistently animation cancel the beam slash or using evade slash to start the cancel. 

Therefore the best way perform the cancel consistently, will require you to hop through a monster attack, do an upslash as fast as you can (you can buffer it) and if the stylish damage hits the monster you should cancel the upslash animation.

Perfect Defense

PD is a caravan skill that allows you to perfect time your block for no knockback and chip-damage, it also allows you to roll right after the block. With the medium/large version of the skill you get a 4 frame window. The large version will also deal some counter damage. 

As for SnS PD is either used to stack up the Obscurity skill or gain Furious levels during road by pd'ing small barrel bombs or teammate attacks.