Soulsborne games are hard, but they’re designed to teach you how to play through death. I’m gonna teach you how to play Bloodborne.

These are tips for a first playthrough, some of this advice isn’t universal but it will take the sting and uncertainty out of the game since it actually tells you very little in the way of strategies and best practices.

1. Which weapon to pick - you start out without a weapon, the game wants you to get killed, and when you do you will get a starting weapon. I’m going to make a gross generalization here, all three weapons are great, but start with the Saw Cleaver. Its arguably the best weapon in the game, and you can choose it right after you die. You can perform a light attack with r1 and if you press l1 immediately after you will do a transform attack which is 50% more powerful than your light attack and does a ton of stagger which can break boss parts allowing you to get free hits and . You can literally just r1-l1-l1-r1-l1-l1… Combo through the entire lgame. Simple and incredibly powerful. Then, pick the pistol to learn how to parry. Put all your upgrade materials into the cleaver.

2. How to level your character - if you pick the saw cleaver, it levels primarily with strength. But your first priority is to level vitality. Level your vitality to 25 before leveling any other stat. This will give you more survivability, and most of your damage will come from upgrading your weapon anyway. Skill is also okay to level, it will give you some more damage to your weapon (not as much as str) and also strengthen visceral attacks. Arcane is if you want to use hunter tools, which are neat but strictly optional. Bloodtinge strengthens your gun, but there are only 3 weapons that scale with it and they’re more difficult to use. Endurance is optional, it makes fights a bit faster cuz you can get more hits in before your stamina depletes, but you can play the whole game with base stamina no problem. Strictly optional. The max you should level any stat is 50, the exception is endurance which has a hard-hardcap at 40. Stick to vitality, str and skill until they reach their hardcaps at 50 and then you can level whatever you want and mess around cuz you’ll likely be in ng+ or higher. Honestly levels don’t matter much, you could get a cheat that levels you to level 250 and still struggle with early bosses. I’ve seen it happen.

3. How to level your weapon - bloodstone shards are used to make your weapon stronger. You can also fit gems in your weapon to make your weapon more powerful. You’ll get lots of these but level up your cleaver until it won’t take any more of a certain type. There are 4 different bloodstones, and you need 16 to level up 3 times (except the last one which only requires 1 for the final level.) Max level is 10.

4. Other tips - you don’t have to fight everything. Lots of people give up at the beginning because there is a bonfire with a bunch of enemies around it and they try to take them all on. Or you can just run past it if you know the way past. If you get stuck on a boss explore somewhere you haven’t been, or take a break. You need a clear head. Remember the game teaches by killing you so if you aren’t trying to learn a boss’s attack patterns and trying new ways to defeat them, they can be pretty difficult. Serrated weapons like the Cleaver’s untransformed mode deal additional damage to beasts, and so does fire, like fire paper and Molotov’s. Molotov’s are great, use them, and they’re pretty cheap early game. Buy bloodvials and bullets too so you don’t get caught lacking.

You can summon other players if you have PS+ so r/huntersbell is a good place to find cooperators, and they have a discord too if you don’t like reddit. This game is so good, and has tons of replay value so don’t worry if you need a little help. The story is amazing so just get through it. The DLC is 1000% worth it, if you find yourself liking the game get the dlc. Reach out of you need help or have questions, I love this game so much, and I love helping people with it so don’t hesitate!

PC version

OP said Bloodborne

I’m gonna patent the doohickey and sue the guy who shot Shinzo Abe

I just filed a patent for white rice so now all you rice eaters owe me $20

I don’t care if that isn’t how IP law works, should a thought about that before eating all that rice ya dingus

Aah you’re correct it isn’t a PC game, PS only which accounts for the sales difference for sekiro for example. Also, dark souls wasn’t really that popular until bloodborne came out, it energized the soulsborne genre. It is a very important game, a masterpiece, but unfortunately unless you get ahold of the very recently emulated version for PC, you can’t play without a PS. Sorry, didn’t realize this was a PC gaming space. I saw concord is a Sony game, and i have a bit of a one track mind.

And yet we will never get a bloodborne remaster

You see real democracy is when you subvert the will of the people and call it “checks and balances”.

Sorry to be a soulsborne weeb but I have something like 1500 hours in bloodborne and I still pick it up from time to time

The difference between gpt-3 and gpt-4 is number of parameters, I.e. processing power. I don’t know what the difference between 2 and 4 is, maybe there were some algorithmic improvements. At this point, I don’t know what algorithmic improvements are going to net efficiencies in the “orders of magnitude” that would be necessary to yield the kind of results to see noticeable improvement in the technology. Like the difference between 3 and 4 is millions of parameters vs billions of parameters. Is a chatgpt 5 going to have trillions of parameters? No.

Tech literate people are apparently just as susceptible to this grift, maybe more susceptible from what little I understand about behavioral economics. You can poke holes in my argument all you want, this isn’t a research paper.

I wasn’t debating you. I have debates all day with people who actually know what they’re talking about, I don’t come to the internet for that. I was just looking out for you, and anyone else who might fall for this. There is a hard physical limit. I’m not saying the things you’re describing are technically impossible, I’m saying they are technically impossible with this version of the tech. Slapping a predictive text generator on a giant database , its too expensive, and it doesn’t work. Its not a debate, its science. And not the fake shit run by corporate interests, the real thing based on math.

There’s gonna be a heatwave this week in the Western US, and there are almost constant deadly heatwaves in many parts of the world from burning fossil fuels. But we can’t stop producing electricity to run these scam machines because someone might lose money.

Ai doesn’t get better. Its completely dependent on computing power. They are dumping all the power into it they can, and it sucks ass. The larger the dataset the more power it takes to search it all. Your imagination is infinite, computing power is not. you can’t keep throwing electricity at a problem. It was pushed out because there was a bunch of excess computing power after crypto crashed, or semi stabilized. Its an excuse to lay off a bunch of workers after covid who were gonna get laid off anyway. Managers were like sweet I’ll trim some excess employees and replace them with ai! Wrong. Its a grift. It might hang on for a while but policy experts are already looking at the amount of resources being thrown at it and getting weary. The technological ignorance you are responding to, that’s you. You don’t know how the economy works and you don’t know how ai works so you’re just believing all this roku’s basilisk nonsense out of an overactive imagination. Its not an insult lots of people are falling for it, ai companies are straight up lying, the media is stretching the truth of it to the point of breaking. But I’m telling you, don’t be a sucker. Until there’s a breakthrough that fixes the resource consumption issue by like orders of magnitude, I wouldn’t worry too much about Ellison’s AM becoming a reality

I second this, one of my good friends only started gaming over covid. We were all hardcore souls players and helped her get through bloodborne and ds3 but she was basically just letting us handle most of the fighting. But when ER came out she got really into it and has played through solo several times. From Software took a lot of the pain points out of the format while keeping it challenging and fresh. Elden ring also has great online, I wasn’t a huge fan of the game (I prefer Bloodborne, Sekiro and AC 6) just I spent hundreds of hours just running around the Lands Between with my friends during covid.

That’s a really good point. When I first played ac6 posture was something negative that I tried to avoid happening to me, but by the time I was trying to get S in every mission, I was very much trying to inflict it on enemies. One of my favorite builds for pve was a lightweight with two pistols and two sweet-sixteen mini shotguns: the pistols build up impact until overload, then I stick the two sweet16s right in their face, which did like 220 direct hit damage. Not viable in PvP past maybe c rank but yeah once I figured out that build it def changed my outlook on posture.

And its true, in this Sekiro play through I’m very much trying to inflict posture damage. Although in my previous playthroughs I couldn’t figure out mikiri counters or low sweep kicks

That sounds epic. I can feel that flow sometimes, looking forward to the rest of the game

I guess keep coming back to it, try AC6 see if it helps lol

Lies of P is next on my list I think. AC6 is amazing, it was exactly what I wanted.

Thanks! Its amazing, I’m glad I’m getting through it this time. Might try to plat it

Thanks! Its like the perfect mix of Soulsborne and Tenshu Stealth assassin I used to play on ps1

I got stuck on the bull in one of my playthroughs too. This time he took me a few tries but it wasn’t too bad.

The fights are so exciting and the action is super slick.