Double palicoes > why
Even if Palamutes can potentially out dps palicoes in some specific scenarios and are overall a traversal boost while walking flat terrain, the reality of the situation is that they are terribly under powered compared to the sheer utility and strength of Palicoes.
- Palicoes can enhance your hunts and, most importantly, will gather you HUGES amount of items if setup in the correct way.
- SLOT 1: Healing Bubble > basically this saves potions, by saving potions your hunter is actually saving precious zenny in the early stages + new hunters can play a little bit more aggressive and still have a backup heal ready.
- SLOT 2: Summeown Endemic Life > this basically allows the palico to spawn a wirebug anywhere, is so extremely good in both combat and traversal, especially for weapons that relies often on wirebugs to be effective.
- SLOT 3: Shock Tripper > makes the palico able to apply the thunderblight that can translate into a KO really easely
For skills...
For this type of cat the "Status attack" skills or "Medic's Touch" are the best as well as resistances to abnormal status like "Earplug" etc... There are a lot of nice and useful combos of skills that can be obtained; for the beginning of the game, you can ignore that part; you will most likely scout new cats later on.
Behavior
REMEMBER TO PUT YOUR PALICOES BEHAVIOUR TO "SMALL FIRST", I really can't stress how useful that is; not only they will take care of small stuff that can annoy you during the hunt, but they also gather small monster materials SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO WASTE TIME ON SMALL HUNTS.