Really depends. Honestly, I’d say to just use tools (since they’re natively supported by humanoids) and just use your own scripts for displaying it, detecting input, all that stuff.
I tend to avoid tools and go for something more manually based. You can still have Humanoid support for any Model and so you can utilize that for animating.
The models in question would be the weapon models, the viewport arm models & everything external could just be the characters as is or you can have custom animations on the characters.
In order to do those custom animations, you can either use Motor6D (my favorite) and have the motors recreate themselves in order to animate without the overriding properties set from the server.
Most of the stuff I talk about is targeted towards client logic and so it’s best to stick to the client for smooth interpolation. I love to use inverse kinematics for my animating work and that’s usually where people tend to struggle so I’d say choose your animation type based on what’s best for you and the game.
Tools are good but viewmodels are easier to script with physics like bobbing etc. And are also used in most popular games as they are easier to animate too
I think you can make the tools into Accessories, which attach to your hand. When the gun is attached to your hand, all you have to do is add some animations for when the player equips it. Then all that has to happen is adding a custom 1-10 hotbar for your weapons.
When you use the default Tool class, it makes weapons easier to rig, as you can connect events to tools and the inventory and equip system is already handled by default.