Bloodborne: [PS4] (From Software)

[DieH@rd]

I don't think that's how the weapon's supposed to work. You use gems or enchantments to get weapons without arcane abilities to do arcane damage. Blades of Mercy already have natural arcane qualities. You cannot enchant them with fire paper, bolt paper or empty phantasm shells either. Besides, when you put a non-physical gemstone in them, you'll lose out on that tasty A grade skill scaling.

BTW, that are soft/hard limits for stats?

 

[rabidrabbit]

Ha! Just realised the game has no map of any sort!
Managed to kill first boss (Cleric Beast), had to grind to around level 20 so that the lesser monsters before the boss would not consume all my Blood Vials and Molotovs
Explored the sewers and found some more handy shortcuts opening the map more. Got near to the place where Boss Gazza supposedly is, but got scared and went back to the Realm
Speaks highly of the brilliant level design that I didn't even notice there wasn't a map, nor ever felt lost. True, I've only explored a small part of the game and walked the same paths many, many times. Still, I think I could draw a pretty detailed and accurate map of the places I've been through right now from the top of my head, the places are so memorable and not at all repetitive.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Soft/Hard Limits just means hitting a point of diminishing returns basically. In Bloodborne the first soft cap is at 25. Going from there, every additional point has a notably lesser impact. I think the next barrier is at 30, and at 50 it would be damn near pointless to invest into anymore stuff if it wasn't for resistances. That said, supposedly there are some really powerful gems you can find in Chalice dungeons that scale massively with your stats.

 

[McHuj]

I'm in new game+ now. Did just about everything (witches, Cainhurst, upper cathedral ward, amygdala, Darkbeast Paarl, secret final boss, etc.) Unfortunately I missed the final weapon upgrade. Thing is, I have no idea how to get into all but the first Chalice dungeon. I have quite a few chalices all right, but I lack the items needed for performing the necessary rituals. Any idea where I can farm or buy those items? (my insight messengers only sell low quality ones)

Just start doing the first dungeon and you will discover the ingredients for the next one along the way.

The root dungeons are the randoms, any time you do a ritual with a root chalice, you'll get a random layout and treasure.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Thanks. So basically just have do them over until you find the required items. Thank goodness Chalice dungeons aren't supposed to scale with new game+, so I should be able to plow right through some of them.

 

[London Geezer]

Soft/Hard Limits just means hitting a point of diminishing returns basically. In Bloodborne the first soft cap is at 25. Going from there, every additional point has a notably lesser impact. I think the next barrier is at 30, and at 50 it would be damn near pointless to invest into anymore stuff if it wasn't for resistances. That said, supposedly there are some really powerful gems you can find in Chalice dungeons that scale massively with your stats.

Really? I didn't feel that at all. But then again, most of the deeper inner workings of the game's stats have clearly completely eluded me.

 

[ultragpu]

Blades of Mercy have arcane scaling. Seems to do fuck all for them, though. No idea where that arcane damage is supposed to be. I only ever seem to do physical damage. Your best bet would be slotting an elemental gem into a weapon with some decent base damage. At that point all the other scaling stats will become null and void, and the weapon damage will scale purely based on your arcane stat. You can make pure fire or lighting based weapons that way. Very handy for bosses. Eventually you'll get some very useful magic spells too, and don't forget that items like Molotov Cocktails have grade A arcane scaling on them.

The problem is that your choices as a pure arcane build are incredibly limited early on. The game pretty much expects from you to pump points into strength or skill first, Bloodtinge and/or Arcane second.

Ah I see, a bit more complicated than how I imagined the weapons system works. Also reminds me of choosing Charmander for starters in Pokemon where the fire special attack doesn't get fully utilized till fairly later. Thank god for new game plus, that's where I can fully experience how powerful my build is.

 

[Sigfried1977]

^actually new game+ ratchets up the health bars and the damage output of just about every single grunt enemy to such a degree that you'll feel weak and pathetic all over again despite being armed to the teeth and specced out like a boss

 

[London Geezer]

And by that point, each upgrade will cost a ridiculous amount of echoes, right? Ouch.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Weapon upgrades are actually fairly cheap. Even the final upgrade is just a throusand echoes or so. The materials get rarer the further you go, but safe for the final upgrade material (of which there's just a single one per playthrough outside of random Chalice dungeon drops), but there are still plenty to go around. If you search the world thoroughly, you'll find enough materials to get at least 3 weapons to +9.
Leveling gets fairly expensive of course, but enemies in new game+ drop massive amounts of echoes. The villagers at the start drop well over a 1000 compared to the 50 or so they used to drop when you first encountered them. Yesterday I got a random group together (1 npc hunter and 2 human ones), and we basically started new game+ together and made it all the way to Father Gascoigne. At that point I had amassed more than 150.000 echoes. (which made me rather nervous and got me killed)

 

[ultragpu]

^actually new game+ ratchets up the health bars and the damage output of just about every single grunt enemy to such a degree that you'll feel weak and pathetic all over again despite being armed to the teeth and specced out like a boss

I expected that, but still would be nice to use all my maxed up weapons, favorite gears and move sets just to get some variation going. I also wanna observe the bosses in still frame to soak in all the details I would miss when fighting, need my Photomode damn it!

 

[DrJay24]

You can swap the Gemstones around as you wish, but only the hunters dream workshop. It's not a one time use item.

Nice! I'm always afraid of upgrading a crappy item and losing the component.

 

[London Geezer]

Weapon upgrades are actually fairly cheap. Even the final upgrade is just a throusand echoes or so. The materials get rarer the further you go, but safe for the final upgrade material (of which there's just a single one per playthrough outside of random Chalice dungeon drops), but there are still plenty to go around. If you search the world thoroughly, you'll find enough materials to get at least 3 weapons to +9.
Leveling gets fairly expensive of course, but enemies in new game+ drop massive amounts of echoes. The villagers at the start drop well over a 1000 compared to the 50 or so they used to drop when you first encountered them. Yesterday I got a random group together (1 npc hunter and 2 human ones), and we basically started new game+ together and made it all the way to Father Gascoigne. At that point I had amassed more than 150.000 echoes. (which made me rather nervous and got me killed)

Is +10 the max level for a weapon? Is the last blood stone I need something I get from the story? My Holy Blade is at +9 now and the next upgrade surprisingly only need one single item.

 

[McHuj]

Is +10 the max level for a weapon? Is the last blood stone I need something I get from the story? My Holy Blade is at +9 now and the next upgrade surprisingly only need one single item.

Yeah. +10 is max. You need a Blood Rock of which there is only one in the game, otherwise you need farm in very high level chalice dungeons.

 

[DieH@rd]

And by that point, each upgrade will cost a ridiculous amount of echoes, right? Ouch.

But monsters give muuuuch more echoes.

 

[Strange]

nah, weapon upgrade isn't limited by echoes. You can probably upgrade your whole arsenal to +10 with ~100k echoes if you have the materials (which you'll be lacking.)

 

[London Geezer]

Yay! Got my weapon to +10!
And I got to the almost-last boss. Need to sleep now, I'll finish her tomorrow. Thank god for the new rest mode. Literally changed my gaming life.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

So I tried co op and was expecting a super fun fight but instead he/she didn't even last for a minute:
Bloodborne™_Blood Starved Beast!:

Pretty disappointed, wasted my fire paper for nothing.

But boy, the game has thrown me in a completely mysterious new area and I am happy again !

 

[Cjail]

Somebody invaded my game when I had 56k Blood Echoes.
It was actually very fun enjoyable to go against a human player change, humans are a bit less predictable then the game's AI

BTW I lost because I was stuck into a 30cm tall rock/gravestone/whatever and my character could not move away for some reason

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Apparently the BSB is this easy: