Bloodborne PS4!

[LandR]

Steven_RW said:

No worries. I'm normally someone who quite thoroughly reads a thread before getting involved to make sure the answer isn't already there but not in this case.

I had my first issue of "weapon broken" as I am still playing through the opening area after the first save point. I had to beam back to dreamland and then speak to the old chap in the house and learn how to repair stuff.

I've made it up to the two werewolves twice now (got wasted quite quickly each time) but the general journey to get to them is getting much more reliable and controllable as I learn how to distance myself from enemies and attack with good timing. Really enjoying a game that initially seems impossible but with practice and some good thinking, becomes much more possible.

I opened up the area to the left of the door with the two females that laugh at you at the house with the red lantern (just behind the big enemy that is bashing on the door after the fire) and opened up a much bigger area of the town. I had a great time getting about and decided to try and come back up to the area near the red lantern but was killed by the second of the bigger tough guys after a much longer roam around the sewer areas (big rats, big crows, weird half dead people crawling through the sewer muck). Great game and really enjoying it.

Where is the second save point? IE how far do I need to go to get to a point that means I don't need to keep re-doing the initial streets? Is it after the two were wolves?

Cheers and loving the game.

SRW

Where the werewolves are, dont go right and fight them. Go straight on and fall off the edge of the bridge down a slight slope. follow that. The drop off is directly opposite the house you opened the door to (assuming you have opened that shortcut). if you are finding the two wolves too hard, you can pretty much ignore them. They can be tough if you're low level.

Have you opened up the shortcut by the house with the little girl who is looking for her mother & father ?

IIRC that path I said to take will let you open up that.

Edited by LandR on Wednesday 15th April 10:17

[LandR]

Blood Starved Beast in depth 4 chalice dungeon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFf4Mgb_z-k

Spent ages on him last night, failed all attempts. He has a fairly quick and brutal one hit kill.

[LandR]

Those big guys with the bricks are very very easy to parry. Much easier than dodging and attacking.

[LandR]

It's bizzare that the hardest enemies in the game are those bell maidens in the chalice dungeons that summon red spiders.

Put 2 or 3 of them in a room and it's nearly impossible.

Edited by LandR on Wednesday 15th April 20:09

[LandR]

Baryonyx said:

At what point are you supposed to go to Castle Cainhurst? I'm level 70, and have just beat the Shadow of Yharnam, but I note that Cainhurst appears on the third tombstone along with the unseen village (which is full of high level wkers).


EDIT: I can see, I'm not ready for Cainhurst yet! Make sure, if you go there, the first thing you do is activate the lantern behind the gate!. Stumble a little further and you're likely to be killed very, very quickly be enemies that you won't see coming. If you don't activate the lantern, you can't go back to Cainhurst as the carriage that takes you there will only appear once.



I've had quite a productive night, anyway. A friend of mine finished work late so tried to summon me to fight Paarl. Well, that was tricky. I didn't know the way to Paarl, so I had to take directions. Then on getting there, we couldn't connect, even using a password. Then we ditched the password and miraculously connected. However, he didn't realise it was me he had connected with, so as I fought Paarl he ran off to a corner to text me and tell me someone else had entered his game! I was under the impression that Paarl was going to be rock hard, but we flattened him. I then went back and beat him again on my own on the trot, as I had no other option but to forge on. I fking whopped him then too, he's as soft as ste!


I ended my session after finding Rom. He seems a bit tougher (or rather, his minions do) but I think I can beat him, if I just flank him.

Edited by Baryonyx on Thursday 16th April 02:12

I did Cainhurst at lvl 70. I didn't think it was that bad, and I managed to kill the boss first time.

I don't want to go higher than 70 on this character, I think that's enough to finish NG and it seems to be a good level to get consistent PvP in the nightmare frontier.

ROM I did at 59, I think.

My Rom fight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i98lchYROYU, just stay to the side of it. I just ignored the spiders but it is easier if you clear the FIRST batch. ROM doesn't aggro until you take a chunk of his health off and he teleports. So if you clear the first batch, you get free hits into ROM and after he teleports you have half the number of spiders to deal with.

Also kill it with fire.

Later on you can fight ROM again in a Chalice Dungeon, in a small room. He can be a real problem in a confined space!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4KgAcTWxRE - ROM in Chalice Dungeon

Edited by LandR on Thursday 16th April 08:22

[LandR]

I got to depth 5 defiled chalice dungeons last night, these are tough. They force you to have 50% HP. The boss fights are really hard, Keeper of the Old Lords took so many attempts. You can take at most 2 hits, but a lot of attacks are 1 hit kills.

[LandR]

I agree about Dark Souls, I think it goes:

Dark Souls > Bloodborne > Demon Souls >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Dark Souls 2

Dark Souls just got PvP right. They took what they had in Demon Souls and perfected it. You could invade anywhere, get invaded anywhere, summoning was a lot easier and you could tell if someone was available to be summoned or not. Also all the covenants worked great and the DLC had some of the best boss fights in any FROM game.

[LandR]

Now that you are levelling up you need to make sure you are levelling up stats that will increase the damage your weapon of choice does.

Some scale off skill, some scale of strength, some scale of arcane etc.

You can tell if you go into the weapons screen and look at the section where it has A, C, D, E etc next to the strength / skill / arcane / blood symbols. This tells you how it scales.

So if you use, e.g. the threaded cane. You wouldn't go upgrading strength as the threaded cane doesn't scale that well of strength. Instead you would increase skill.



If you see on that screenshot under attribute bonus you can see that weapon scales C from strength, D from skill and D from arcane. It has NO scaling off blood. The number on the left column for the weapon (in this case 150) is the base damage the weapon does. The number on the right ( + 115 ) is the bonus damage you get from gems and your attribute scaling.

As you upgrade the weapon with blood shards you will increase the number on the left. As you upgrade your stats you will increase the number on the right.

There is a good write up here of weapon damage stats and scaling if you want in depth details of how damage is calculated. Although this is only important once you start getting to the point where you need to stop levelling a certain stat as you start hitting diminishing returns.

[LandR]

Steven_RW said:

Thanks very much. I was beginning to wonder what to level up and why. Most of my fighting is done with the threaded cane not on its special long range mode. More using it as a sword.

I have levelled up my health and endurance so I can do a couple of hard attacks without immediately becoming vulnerable.

Out of interest, how was I supposed to know all the stuff you have typed above? Should it have been obvious (bearing in mind I have been gaming since we bought a zx speccy 48k back 30+ years ago).. or is it that I should have picked it all up from previous games of this genre/style?

What was the name of the guy with the shotgun that I found myself attacking? He is clearly a boss as you cannot retreat.

Thanks very much.

Stevn RW

I only know this as I have played the previous games. But their is a button you can click on the stats screen, I can't remember it right now, but it lets you scroll through all the stats and it tells you what each of them does.

Since you are using the threaded cane you want to level up skill as the threaded cane scales highest off skill. Right now it's probably got a C scaling for skill and D for strength and arcane. As you upgrade it you can get that up to 'A' for Skill.

The soft cap for attributes is about 25. After that the additional scaling you get isn't great.

You can see below, after level 25 the additional dmg you get per 5 levels more than halves.

[LandR]

Steven_RW said:

Okay thanks. I am fairly resilient as long as the game makes it feel worth the effort and this one does.

I had a similar experience when I played Skyrim. I had been away from RPG for so long (last proper one was ultima 6...) but it was so worth the effort that I stuck at it.

I wonder if I will play through this game quite quickly now I have traction or if it will take a solid number of hours and dedication. How long were the other games in the genre/series?

Cheers

Steven RW

I think 45-50 hours, if you explore everything would be about right.

[LandR]

Steven_RW said:

Ah. Good and bad. Will be fun for the time but unfortunately no Skyrim mega epic 300hrs plus.

Still, well worthy of the ££

Get a decent build made and get into PvP.

You want to be invading and murdering other players. That's where you test yourself. Right now I'm a few bosses from finishing it but have no interest in finishing right now as I have access to some prime PvP areas. Instead im running deep dungeons to get loot drops to make my weapons better for PvP.

You are soon also going to be able to create chalice dungeons in the Hunters Dream. Beat a few off these and you will be able to create Root chalice dungeons, these are randomized dungeons with randomised loot / bosses / layouts. Some bosses only ever show up in Chalice dungeons, some are harder versions of the bosses in the main game.

Once you beat some chalice dungeons you will have access to deeper dungeons then eventually defiled dungeons. Which are dungeons that force you to beat them at 50% HP, then root Defiled dungeons which are the randomised versions...

And if FROM actually fix matchmaking in dungeons, you will have sinister dungeons where you can invade / be invaded.

Lots to do outside the main game.

Edited by LandR on Friday 17th April 12:18

[LandR]

How do you get back to Lecture Hall ? I didn't light the lamp and now I can't warp back...

[LandR]

Thanks,

I haven't found the one reborn yet. That's probably the next boss I have to face. I think the last main game non-optional boss I beat was Amygdala.

[LandR]

Are those the things with big red distended bellies ?

They are pretty tough! They have a chance of spawning in chalice dungeons if you kill something, leave the room and come back in. You randomly find them standing over the dead body.

Another annoying enemy outside Cainhurst are those snakes / worm things. They are so hard to hit.

I leave both of those enemies the fk alone.

Oh, and you can charge attack & backstab Logarius. Takes a chunk of his health off.

Edited by LandR on Friday 17th April 14:57

[LandR]

The Abhorrent Beast...

• sigh*

It's so aggressive.

[LandR]

Haha, it's so easy to be an asshole to people in the Nightmare Mensis area!

Hosts thinking they can just run away

Edited by LandR on Saturday 18th April 15:53

[LandR]

Baryonyx said:

I've not had any invasions yet, are they limited to the endgame areas?

Indeed, having just entered the Vileblood Covenant, I think that is the first real mention of PVP made in the game so far, other than the invasion bell that the messengers sell. I'm glad of that to be fair, as PVP has always been dire in Souls games. At least in DS1 and 2, you could easily bring up the dash window and start a party with just you in it which would cut off the invader and allow you to quit. Dark Souls 2 was also laudable because the main PVP areas were well signposted and you could just play in offline mode until you were safely through them. It didn't help that there were so many cheesy builds and weapons available in the previous games that dedicated PVP trolls were everywhere.

The end game area NIghtmare Frontier and Nightmare of Mensa are both PvP hotspots. THis is because they are the only areas that have a bell maiden ringing a sinister bell regardless of whether or not you ring your beckoning bell. If you don't want PvP, don't jsut disconnect and kick the invader, go and find and kill the bell maiden.

You will get invaded a LOT. It's great.

Edited by LandR on Saturday 18th April 21:47

[LandR]

Durzel said:

Just play in offline mode if you want to avoid PvP, simple?

:nods:

[LandR]

More messing with people in Menis. I had a couple of derpy deaths...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2kpe_40eYc

Baryonx, treat us invaders like an additional, more unpredictable enemy. When we come into your game we get penalised with a 30% deduction from our max HP, so any invader has a lot less health than you!

[LandR]

dunmow70 said:

Aarrrggghhh. Biggest loss so far now stands at 41,000 blood echos

There I was, minding my own business, running round the Cathedral Ward, killing off enemies, when I spot a new enemy just to the left of the spawn point. No worries, I think, he's on his own, I can take him before I cash in my lovely bounty. STOP CRUSHING MY HEAD!! STOP CRUSHING MY HEAD!!

I'm now stuck in a spiral of death trying to get out of the Unseen Village.

I love this game

You CAN warp out of there from the lamp, but you won't be able to go back till later on if you do.

It's worth persevering and beating one of the bosses in that area, but yes it's tough when you first go their early on.