The arcane scaling for bleed effect is absolutely negligible, specially under NG.
The only big advantage between bleed and frost is that bleed doesn’t have cooldown.
Like you freeze a boss and then he spends sometime frozen (cool freeze effect around it). Only when that effect disappears, which signifies that the boss frozen bar is going down, can you start building up the frozen bar again.
Bleed, you build up the boss bar, it bleed, and right after that it starts bleeding again.
In NG you can pass absolutely fine with speed, and katanas are rather fast enough.
yeah, I appreciate that difference, but while frostbite is active you do get a damage boost for each hit which still makes up for the delay, even if not fully. I’m sure that in most cases bleed still does more DPS, but the damage you do per hit is still a huge part of that. the arcane scaling is more a concern for raw damage output. my uchi’s were getting like 200 more right/left hand weapon damage stat with frost because my int is significantly higher than my dex at this point (wanna say int is like 65 and dex is 38 or something). it just made more sense with my stats, though I’m sure that my build was more dex focused bleed would have won out in the end even without arcane.
I’m almost certainly gonna do an arcane bleed build next playthrough though… it sounds so fun.
I’m at very similar numbers (37 dex, 68 int) and trying to figure out if I can be bothered with malenia so this is helpful. I guess I need to put hoarfrost stomp and frost scaling on something that bleeds? maybe I’ll do claws or something, I use moonveil enough as is
yeah I mean, I’m not sure if proc’d bleed on her at all when I won. the main benefit of either bleed or frostbite on malenia is that it stuns her on otherwise unstunnable attacks, so if you can keep constant pressure on her with mimic tear she won’t really get a chance to pull any of her one shot kill moves. katanas are good both bc of bleed but also bc of relatively fast attack speeds – but the first hit of their combo is relatively slow for a dex weapon, so I bet you could find other weapon types that work even better, especially if you explore powerstance movesets. even if the weapon doesn’t naturally apply bleed or frost, I bet two weapons with either of the same affinity on them would still work effectively. the first hit of the katana powerstance moveset does two rapid hits in succession which is excellent for her.
I should reiterate that hoarfost stomp doesn’t triviliaze the fight on its own… and I’m not sure how much of my victory was based on luck. but it made managing her attacks a lot easier and I’d be willing to bet it’d be just as beneficial in a solo, summonless strat. you still need to learn her basic tells and patterns either way.
I also highly, highly recommend a greatshield for dealing with waterfowl dance. it’s possible to dodge but only if you see it coming well in advance and aren’t up in her face, which is difficult to do if you’re going for the stunlock strategy.
that’s probably the hardest thing about her… she’s low poise so you want to be aggressive and stun her as much as possible, but you get punished for being too aggressive… but because of her health regen, you also get punished for playing too passive – you can’t block too many attacks, and if you fail to dodge even 2 or 3 in succession you’ll probably just die. (I recommend the crimson bubbletear for this reason – it basically gives you an extra life. probably one of the best crystal tears in the game against bosses)
it’s such an incredibly sadistic design. you can’t stick to a single mode… you have to adapt and pay close attention, and unlike even the hardest sekiro bosses her most punishable attacks are easy to miss and often are few and far between.
Nothing more satisfying than going back to the Selia Crystal tunnel 100 hours later and blowing a single bubble from my delightful trumpet and absolutely decimating those hateful insect creatures.
I beat rykard by just spamming L2+R2 with the plot weapon they give you for both phases… is that like, not supposed to work? because it totally does. it keeps him stunlocked the entire fight and can be done from a fairly safe distance.
Rykard was pretty easy for me, although he did almost get me because my mind stat is a bit low and so I had to keep chugging blue flasks which gave him time to get some hits in
Rykard wasn’t particularly hard but it certainly wasn’t fun. Spamming the special worked until I ran out of FP. Then its you usual flask managment whilst not eating a face full of flaming skulls.
afaik you don’t need FP for that fight. you can just use the normal r1 and r2 moves and those are free. feel like i played a different fight than y’all.
yeah the combo second hit is pretty spectacular as an audiovisual feedback thing and does a ton of damage, but then there’s a significant cooldown before you can stagger him with the special move again, so it’s arguably maybe easier to just ping him with the first hit until he’s dead if you’re worried about surviving the cooldown period
Oh, I did ask someplace back if dex was your primary. Got no reply on that end so I just assumed it was because you kept mentioning dex first. Harmful misunderstanding, or I failed to see your reply properly.
Yes like DS2, a simple knife with fire AoW does the trick, but does imply changing weapon or keeping one hand just for that attack during a stressful fight. Things can get hairy (Gael PTSD).
yeah I agree… it was a let down how easy it was to stunlock him. just kind of felt underbaked. maybe I’ll try to do it without the skill next time.
maybe the stunlock only happens with high enough dex… I think it functions similar to agility in ds2, but I haven’t seen anything about it affecting skill execution speed specifically.
Holy shit after being super busy with work stuff for like the last week, I actually get to play this tonight! I’m going to try to find where that monkey guy needed me to meet him.
