Bloodborne October/November Book Club

I also had no clue how the stats worked (but don’t tell me)

clearly i should just do a Blood Only Build and see how that goes.

blood for the blood god

saw cleaver’s great tho, i actually think it’s the best out of the three for raw damage output and the serration bonus makes the first bosses a breeze. the saw mode has very good attack speed, so it gels with fire/bolt paper and the phantasm shell really well. the cleaver is decent crowd control, but the transform attacks are where it’s at - fast and huge multipliers, you can make scrambled beast for days just mashing L1. really really awesome. It’s the most straightforward of the starters and definitely doesn’t have as many tools but it’s certainly good enough to carry a run

Saw Cleaver is pretty basic but also consistently smooth, comfortable and its damage never feels lacking (like the cane’s does), so I always come back to it. I never attempted a run with Hunter Axe because it seemed awkward and slow testing it out in the Dream, and the damage output didn’t seem high enough to compensate. Hearing this high praise, my snap assessment must’ve been wrong – I’ll make my next run an axe run.

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I’ve mentioned it before but with my cane runs I usually start out the build by getting skill to 25 before putting points in anything else, which more or less takes care of the damage output problem and has the side benefit of making your parties/backstabs about twice as powerful as usual. Cane really really needs the scaling in order to shine, but it’s def my favourite. You can hack a lot of the bosses with the crazy reach of the whip mode

jesus hell this game is so good about giving you a variety of distinct satisfying attack verbs, reading those last few posts made me feel like such a nerd because i knew and could appreciate the specific qualities both of you were describing about these fucking dorky anime videogame weapons. (no shame; good posts)

Is the Kirkhammer or Ludwig’s Holy Blade more anime? i have never seen Hellsing but both of them seem like Hellsing.

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Healing church in general is anime as heck

Kirkhammer always looked like a tombstone to me and that is so so anime

I mean, you can just write “Hey, spoilers!” at the very top of it and that should be fine.

Also, should I know what a transforming attack is? I’ve basically just had my saw blade set to open since I started and try to charge attack people with it.

Also I got abducted, which was unexpected. I’ve poked around a bit in that new area, even came across a boss there but just feel out of my depth at the moment.

L1 when done from another attack or from a sidestep/roll is a transforming attack, which changes your weapon’s form and attacks. Cleaver in particular does gobs of damage going in and out of transform.

some weapons need it a lot, some don’t.

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In my post, I almost compared the Saw Cleaver to Blue Bottle coffee, but then I figured that reference only makes sense in SF. Anyway it’s really smooth and mild coffee with a sweet aftertaste

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Logarius’ Wheel is the dumbest weapon in Berserk making it’s appearance as the dumbest weapon in Souls

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Kirkhammer by a mile. Ludwig’s Holy Blade is a claymore which gives an anime its name, but Kirkhammer is also a new level of dumb, and dumb always takes the lead in anime.

When I played this, I only used the saw cleaver and the boom hammer (which I stumbled upon very early), barely touching any other weapons. This thread has made me want to try the axe if I ever revisit the game.

I still find this and all of the Souls games intimidating, though, even after having finished them.

I have always liked the way they give you all the starting weapons you didn’t pick at the end of the first big Yharnam level right before Gascoigne.

On my first playthrough I didn’t finish the music box quest before getting to him because it seemed like a very involved side story to have its entire payoff come before the first non-optional boss but in hindsight they do a very good job of ensuring that both new and old players are fully on the same page by the end of that first area, no matter how big it seems to you and how much of the optional stuff you’ve found and how long it takes.

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Yeah I feel some of that too. It’s the stuff I barely squeaked through on my first playthrough. Those challenges will still be no joke. Only DkS1 is not the least bit intimidating to me (partly because I beat it five times, and partly because unlike in the later games, it wasn’t a design objective to make its challenges resist cheeses).

i crashed the game earlier playing around with my skill/blood alt, so i’ve gotten all the important achievements now.

chikage is weird to use correctly. i’m still not sure how i feel about it, other than that it is extremely chuuni. okay so, it’s the game’s rendition of Makoto from Demon’s, where it’s a katana that saps your life-force passively. but in this game it’s only when in transformed mode, so you want to be transformed as little as possible.

it is, as far as i can tell, the only weapon with an actual attack animation coming out of a neutral transform, too. try it! do a neutral l1 and r1 before it finishes and you get a special animation. so you end up doing goofy stuff like learning exactly how many hits each enemy will take, and doing dash in l1 r1 l1 (transform -> attack -> transform attack out) to minimize the amount of hp loss.

i have had to plan ahead with this weapon more than any other. it’s weird. and that’s also a real handicap on fast-moving bosses.

sadly the transformed attacks seem to have less horizontal range than the untransformed attacks so it’s basically ‘kill this one thing dead.’

So, have a bit of a meta-game question here: how worried should I be about blood vial usage during boss encounters? Back with the Father I normally got six or so vials running from the lantern to him, so that is how many times I would heal unless it felt like a battle I could realistically win. A couple other ones I’ve come across have virtually no guaranteed vial drops on the way to said bosses, which has basically resulted in me refusing to heal until the boss health gets down to maybe a third. One boss I abandoned fighting (it was big, electric and fast) as there we no drops and I was healing a few times to get even a quarter health off just trying to learn the basics.

Should I just go all out healing and just grind for vials as needed, or is there some aspect of this that I am overlooking.

…Kinda miss the estus system.

Personally, i havent figured out the perfect vial balance yet, BUT i think in general Bloodborne wants you to spend more souls (blood echoes, whatever) on items. Leveling up is very expensive, and you are going to die a lot and probably have less blood to spend on level ups. So i think you should spend as many vials as you need to on bosses, and buy more vials constantly as you return to the dream.

i don’t think much of blood vials as a healing system tbh. Maybe if they were a fixed price, but making vials both limited and more expensive as you progress the game adds up your mistakes (or just encounters that you struggle with) too punitively, imo

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Yeah, you only level up when you have plenty of vials, and when needed you even go to echoes farming spots to buy more vials.

It’s pretty dumb. I don’t think anybody loves it. I think it was an attempt to resurrect the Demon’s grass system, but without the Demon’s situation where it feels virtually unlimited and therefore a bit meaningless.

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yeah go ahead and spend echoes on vials.

i have a route i’ll run through yharnam to get a whole pile of vials quickly:

  • start at central yharnam
  • run down through the shortcut door, get the blood vials from the walking blood vials (hulks)
  • elevator down, make sure to click it so it goes back up before you continue
  • run across the bridge, take down the hulk there, get the two wolves up the stairs from there
    • you can just take the lantern back now if you have enough
  • turn around, take the ladder before the bridge down, sneak up behind the pig and charged r2 it
  • run down the sewer ignoring everything, take the ladder up on the other end (to near where the girl with the music box was)
  • there should be a hulk with a big sack, just take care of him
  • past the music box girl to take the hulk out in the plaza
  • go up the stairs to the bridge with the two wolves and another hulk for another 8 vials
  • return to start!

written down like that it sounds pretty long but it doesn’t take more than ten minutes for a huge pile of vials, which is nice early in the game. you don’t get a lot of echoes this way though.