Bloodborne October/November Book Club

Axe is easy mode

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the sheer number of encounters i cheesed by letting them run directly into my spin-to-win…

stake driver best weapon

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the more i play the more i disagree with this tbh

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I enjoyed cane / shotgun

The shotgun timing is arguably harder to learn but it’s balanced in other ways

?? i’m curious to know how! afaict pistol has better damage, better scaling, better range, easier timing, more utility. the blunderbuss is a resourced crowd control option in a game absolutely bursting with way better crowd control options. i can’t think of any crowd situation in which i’d want to fire a shotty instead of just swing or gtfo of there. actually, i can’t think of any reason to fire a gun if you’re not looking for a parry/splitting up a group/it isn’t a cannon

i figure it might be useful if you play unlocked most of the time? is that a thing?

this is maybe the least interesting conversation to be had about bloodborne tho

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I think it parries … harder?

I agree crowd control is useless unless you’re using one of the Big Gunz

granted it does look significantly less silly than the pistol

shotgun isn’t for crowd control. shotgun is for dealing with enemies that move too fast for the pistol to track!

like, if you’ve ever tried to parry anything with the pistol, and you had the timing correct but they leaned over Just So that you couldn’t hit them, the blunderbuss would have got them.

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i regret picking the blunderbuss on my first go, because i didn’t quite understand how i was supposed to incorporate guns into my playstyle yet (in other words, didn’t get how OP and good parries are in Bloodborne). i think once you understand gun parrying it’s a great pick, but the pistol is better for first-timers because it helps you figure out parry timing from a safe distance (even if you don’t always get to take advantage of the stagger) and is a bit more well-rounded – you can use it to knock down fast stunlock-y mobs like dogs or pick off wounded targets, since it’s got better range and damage.

Blunderbuss also has the advantage of consistently staggering even if you mess up the parry timing, which is the closest thing BB has to a half-parry.

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i liked dark souls 2 parries so i’m an anomaly anyway

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Hey cool i like DS2 parries too! It took me awhile to “get” them though. in Demon’s Souls or DkS1 i think parrying is best treated like an elemental weakness, really strong and useful against specific enemies but not generally applicable. It’s more about memorizing attack animations there. In 2 you can parry a lot more attacks, and you can do so reactively instead of memorizing, which is great and how parrying ought to be, but you also have to spec for it more – i can’t parry for shit unless i have a buckler/target shield/parrying dagger, but with one of those equipped i can riposte all damn day. (disclaimer, talking about PvE here because i am a casual PvPer)

i haven’t tried a fencer build in DS2 (doing a dual caestus playthrough now, which is basically Super Punch Out! Souls and very fun) but it seems like the most viable game in the series for that kind of character. 'sides Bloodborne, which obviously sought to make parrying more accessible for all characters.

As a filthy casual this is interesting to me, tho

I never learned to parry in any Souls. I use the cannon like a Berserk

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I am terrible at parrying so… does the pistol do anything else meaningful or should I just ignore it?

It’s got a really wide parry range and makes certain bosses a lot easier.

I am finding that the Cane still has the best reach of any weapon in the game and was actually much easier to use starting out (mostly finding this after playing more standard builds on recent playthroughs and particularly in the case of the Kirkhammer build), even if, due to the scaling of power, it was less useful later in the game.

The game really expects/wants you to learn how to parry, at least for some fights, particularly in the beginning. Later on it matters less (or not at all if you once you get some of the magic items).

Am also pretty sure the shotgun was intended for PvP exclusively, because the spread actually makes it fairly unreliable for parries (since the pellets don’t seem to be consistent, meaning shots that you’d expect to create a parry sometimes don’t).

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mikey yr at the very least friday-after-beast-hunt casual

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Jeez, tell me about it >_>

Today I got to my first boss, Father… (*checks google) …Gascoigne, and several notes beforehand kept mentioning visceral attacks and bullets. They weren’t lying as while the first chunks of the battle weren’t bad with practice, it really felt like the game was shouting “I’ll only let you pass once you learn to parry him.” I eventually had a lucky run where I got a couple when he was at low health, but it was a rough go until then.

Yeah, was and still is pretty much my experience. The boss is really obnoxious considering how much more aggressive it is compared to Cleric Beast. And of course, Cleric Beast has a number of ways to be taken down, whereas Gascoigne covers distance so easily and quickly it’s difficult to do anything other than parry him. Again, it’s a wide window, but it’s still a parry system where the only way to make it work is to die a few times and learn the patterns. The windows are still short in relation to the action speed of shots, and they don’t occur quickly enough to perform as a reaction without already knowing what you’re getting into - or at least they weren’t for me.

Demon’s Souls remains the gold standard, where bosses are combinations of puzzles and reactions, but ever since Dark Souls the bosses have continued to become more and more like straight up action games. While Bloodborne is not as aggressive as Nioh, it still cleaves towards reaction-based combat.

You don’t have to parry to beat Gascoigne. Totally viable to take him down just with dodges and R1 hits. Gascoigne is not there to train you to parry, he’s there to train you to increase your pace and aggression.

Parrying in Bloodborne isn’t so much critical to any fight as it is a totally optional mixin you can use to juice up any fight, or not, depending on what works for you. With the earlier parry timing and the fast animation you can still dodge after missed parries. That’s why they needed to limit the total number of bullets — it’s just optional free extra damage at no risk. I never parried in any Souls game except against Gywn, and I parried all the time in Bloodborne.