back playing this again, but all I’m doing is dying to the blood starved beast over and over and then farming souls (echoes, whatever) for more antidotes because the boss has a dumb design
yeah I got stuck on him for way too long too (despite beating a lot of late-game bosses in a single try) and it seems to be a somewhat unusual and unanticipated bottleneck for some players. there’s an NPC summon right outside which trivializes the fight and I suggest you use it if you’re on your 4th+ attempt
I summoned that guy until I ran out of insight 
going back and forth between having him and not having him didn’t seem to make any difference because he was never alive in the third phase anyway. if I get hit in phase 2 or 3 I’m basically dead, and in phase 3 I don’t even need to get hit to die. I’m definitely worse at this game than the souls games
I completed it after 12 tries solo (the first time I fought it) and managed to do so largely by simply staying close to it for the entire battle. It has an extreme amount of mobility for being as large as it is, but taking advantage of its generous hurtbox did help. Stay out of its midrange attacks and the fight, while I was never able to trivialize it, is more manageable.
I agree that the design is poor and its placement somewhat confusing - but then that is the case for many of the encounters in Bloodborne (the difficulty curve of the game is pretty awkward all around). Kind of a flaw and an interesting kink to my perspective though. Facing things much stronger or weaker does, on occasion, give some perspective about relative difficulty (though some bosses are also completely ridiculous by all accounts, BSB being one of them).
I want to stay close to him, but in phase 3 that’s not very feasible since he poisons me anytime I’m within a mile of him
I got the Bloodborne card game for Christmas. The players in the example text are Eileen, Henryk, and Ludwig.
I thought you’d appreciate that.
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appreciated
Is the card game any fun? I’ve been curious about it. The Dark Souls board game didn’t look very interesting to me so I was hoping the Bloodborne card game might be good.
I think what finally worked for me was to stop worrying too much about curing poisoning and just use up all my blood vials instead to heal through the poison, the antidote didn’t work fast enough. also any bit of poison resistance you can get helps. I can’t remember what specific strategy i used re: attacks, though. that was one of the hardest for me too.
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The BSB is optional. As far as material rewards go, you should bother with it if you want access to the chalice dungeons, but maybe you’re at a point of frustration where you feel compelled to defeat it no matter the practical purpose. I posted a video of myself taking on a super-powered variant earlier in this thread. It may not be helpful, since the arena’s layout is different and I’m using a weapon you probably aren’t. Who knows.
I don’t think the BSB’s design is poor. It’s just particularly hard to get used to even if you have experience with the Souls games because its visual design and animations have a certain ambiguity to them that makes capitalizing on tells more difficult than it otherwise might be. My biggest pointers would be to go for critical attacks as often as you can in the earlier phases and then to actually stay as close as possible during its last phase while striking at its sides and back. Staying far back when it’s gone Full Poison Mode it only heightens the fight’s intimidation factor and sets you up for what is basically an instant-kill attack. If you have a full stock of blood vials, the poison debilitation isn’t necessarily a fatal threat unto itself; it only compounds the harm of the BSB’s sequences of slashes.
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this is true but I don’t like revealing that to people because it’s not otherwise clear how you open the gate and it gives you enough echoes to do so almost by itself, when the alternative is grinding
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Kinda want to fire up Bloodborne every time I enter this thread, gimme the viscous blood.
I usually see less item/gear/stat variety than Souls as its one negative. But damn if it isn’t probably the best to just pick up and hackslashthrough.
It has as much if not more than Demon’s Souls, and Demon’s Souls is a great game.
man, if only these games didn’t have stats
Get rid of all stats except Mystery indicating how many anomalies you’re bound to see
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Does it? Considering all spells, weapons, armor, items, etc?
I’m not numerically comparing atm, and sure all that combined with stats still boils down to maybe a handful of core playstyles. Still, even if we called much of that stuff tenuous, it is more options, calculations, variety, and arguable “depth” than BB’s. Then there’s the method of grasses/spices vs mashing blood vials, and so on which leads to their obvious differences by era and approach.
IMO BB is their greatest overall work in this vein, though I am bound to the nexus. I just personally would’ve liked a bit more variety is all, nuanced as the weapons were.
More “stuff” may have messed with it’s own cohesive design, sure. J u s t a l i t t l e d e si r e
I’d say Dragon’s Dogma is a better game but is considerably less cohesive. Dark Arisen comes closer to connecting but is much more akin to Let It Die and loses a lot of its more “out there” personality in the process of becoming a straight-up dungeon crawler.
Demon’s Souls and BloodBorne are close together on my list of favorite games, though I still prefer Demon’s for its personalities. Rarely have I seen a game that so completely fleshes out archetypes in such a short amount of time, and even fewer that tie it all back into the world ever so subtly.
The melee combat is really the thing the Dark series (or whatever comes after it) would most benefit from if something was going to be stolen from BloodBorne. Really great and visceral interactions - would be improved even further with more subtle tweaks for dodging (e.g. carrying the Kirkhammer vs the Threaded Cane changes start-up speed or iframes).
Yeah in this case I’d have to call them the greatest vidcons of all time probably
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I like a stat
If they were sci-fi titles I wouldn’t give a fuck, indeed they’d be tonally necessary