- The aforementioned flasks issue really fucks with the pace of one's progression. It feels grindy to a new player who dies a lot. Incredibly repetitive and therefore frustrating and somewhat boring.
After I experienced the first area, in which I had to farm some too, I always had a surplus until the end of the game just by buying vials with the remaining echoes I had after doing level ups. It's a bit of a slog in the beginning of the game but Bloodborne has a weird V curve in difficulty which leads me to this point :
- Its much, much harder in the early game than ER. The starting area is probably just as difficult as the Farum Azula or Consecrated snowfield. I think it drops you in the deep end a bit too much. Give me a chance to learn how to play!
First, learn to parry. Really, learn the timings. They're some of the easier of souls games, and the most forgiving because it's a ranged parry and you have chances of not always being hit when you miss. Second, use strong charged attacks often against slower but hard hitting enemies. Try to get them from the back whenever possible. But really learn the parrying, it's fking OP. Doesn't work on all things, but on the things it does work on, you're thankful it's there.
I chose threaded cane because I want to lean into the aesthetic.
The cane.. isn't the worst weapon ever, but honestly the saw cleaver and the saw spear are the more versatile weapons and offer the most damage against most enemies (damage type matters in this game, so some weapons will fare better on some stuff than others, but let's say the saw weapons at their worst are good, and at their best are amazing). The transform attack can be useful too when things move around.
Threaded cane has serrated in its transform but I find it profoundly unwieldy against fast enemies and mostly useful for wiping groups of trashes or playing it safe against enemies where its range protects you when you attack from maximum distance but this turns fights into slow slogs and I prefer to dish out rapid damage at higher risk of taking some myself.
If that can reassure you, I died more times to one of the first two bosses of the first area than I did for the entire rest of the game, with the exception of one boss, Ebrietas, at the end, that kept kicking my arse. Game's a V curve. It seems impregnable when you're new to it but after you kill Gascoigne everything will suddenly seem easy and it'll mostly remain like that for the rest of the game, the rate at which you grow with better tooling like blood gems and runes outpaces the enemies IMHO. After I learned parrying, got some decent build going, it felt like the easiest souls game by far. 'Till Ebrietas. Bitch ass eldritch cunt.
Quick stepping is very different from dodge rolling. Do you even get iframes? I swear you don't.
You have as much iframes as something like a medium roll in DS3 and the recovery time is much faster, plus it covers a solid amount of ground so if you dodge against the direction of an attack it works pretty well. If you feel too nostalgic for the roll, learn how to play without lock-on. You do a traditional roll instead of a step when you don't lock on and there are a few times in which this can be useful, to dodge straight into some of the larger bosses. Was particularly helpful for me against a certain electrified cunt. It's a bad habit to be
too reliant on lock-on in souls games anyway, and it's not that difficult to manage the camera yourself and orient the direction of your attack with the left stick, particularly in tighter areas when the camera goes apeshit.
My DPS sucks but I'm guessing that's because I went skill. I sort of expected STR would be better but at least I have reach to compensate and I chose threaded cane because I want to lean into the aesthetic.
Your DPS sucks not because of your stats but because your weapon is one of the worst at dishing damage, although it gets better later on but it really starts off weak. Whichever stat path you pick almost doesn't matter in practice, as long as you focus on it. In the early game whatever little amount of stats you grow doesn't change shit, you don't have good gems, your weapon barely has any scaling before getting upgraded, it takes some time before you can truly experience the growth and you need more than just stats - gems are very, very important to a char build. You have gems that add +% to your damage, others than add flat amount of damage, some will give you elemental damage and scale with arcane, some boost physical stat scaling to further specialize your weapon into the stat you invest points in etc. Consumables can be very useful too.
Of all the damage stats, the only bad stat to start with would be bloodtinge. It's powerful late game but you'd suffer a lot before getting there. STR and Skill are both great and equally usable with the saw weapons (cleaver leans STR, spear leans skill), and arcane has a bad reputation but the flamethrower can carry you for a decent while with that and the saw weapons do good when turned into elemental weapons (in that sort of build, go pure arcane, only have as much physical as needed to wield a weapon and not a single point more).
You're already invested in skill, so buy the saw spear and go to town. Upgrade mats aren't too plentiful, but enough to bring a second weapon to your cane level and better.
Join the saw spear religion. We have swipes, we have decent range of attack, we have THRUSTS! and we have the non transformed almost as fast as dagger let me DPS this motherfucker state for when there's downtimes in patterns or staggers. Saw spear is life. Saw spear is death.
