Bloodborne: 15 Essential Tips for Beginners

Bloodborne is one of the best games put out my FromSoftware, but then is forgotten on a prehistoric console. That is a can of worms left to be opened later, though. While a lot of things about Bloodborne can be figured out by messing around, there are some rookie mistakes you should be avoiding. Here are 15 essential tips that will help you get better at Bloodborne.

Be Aggressive

 Playing defensively rarely works in Bloodborne. This game is straight-up designed for you to be up close and personal with your enemies because after you take damage, there is a brief period where if you deal some damage, you can regain nearly all your lost health if you play your cards right. Not even the gun only builds get to stray too far from the enemy because of the limit range, and that is by design. FromSoftware wants you to get up to the faces of your enemies and get yourself covered in their blood when you beat them up. That is the essence of Bloodborne, so stay close and play aggressively.

Don’t Spend Points on Endurance

In Bloodborne, your armor has no weight. This means you don’t need to reach a certain level of Endurance to not fat roll or develop poison resistance. This is one rare FromSoftware game where points in Endurance do absolutely nothing in most cases. You may think you are doing good because the Endurance bar visibly becomes larger when you upgrade it.

But in practice, the number of swings or dashes you get from upgrading that stat doesn’t go up at all unless you have invested 20-30 points, and at that point, you could get more out of simply making each of your hits meatier by spending them on Strength, Skill, Bloodtinge, or Arcane. Plus, your stamina regeneration stays the same, so it’s safe to say leveling up Endurance is useless in the majority of cases.

Look At Your Weapon Scaling

Before upgrading your stats, you should look at which stats your weapon scales best on and focus on those first. You will get a lot more out of your investment if you do so. Remember, the hard cap for stats is level 50. This means that if you reach level 50 for a stat like Skill, you are better off upgrading Strength or some other stat. This applies for all except Arcane, which scales well into 99 for items only, and Vitality. You can never go wrong with points in Vitality.

Don’t Spread Your Resources Too Thin

There are a lot of fun weapons to try out in Bloodborne, but sadly, you can only get around 3 or 4 weapons to +9 if you are good at exploring. So, it is not recommended to switch between weapons too much. You should try to stay between weapons that have similar stat priorities in each run because if you try to switch between.

Say, Blades of Mercy and Beastcutter, you may or may not see the full potential of those weapons. You can eventually work towards making a build that can make proper use of any weapon by leveling up that character’s stats as you keep playing in NG+ and onwards, or you can start a new playthrough. It’s not recommended to try to balance your stats out in NG, though.

Use Bloodgems: When in Doubt, Look for Blue

One thing I always forgot about during my early days of playing Bloodborne was to pick the best Bloodgems for my weapon. It may seem complicated with all the shapes and stats, but it really boils down to one simple thing: bigger numbers.

So when you go to the Bloodgem Workshop, just scroll through your gems and stop at the one that makes your R Hand Weapon number go blue for your melee weapon and then do the same for your L Hand Weapon. You should generally avoid gems that give you innate Bolt or Fire damage as they don’t have the same potential as the Physical damage gems.

Observe Boss Movements

The bosses in Bloodborne attack relatively fast compared to previous Souls games, so you want to closely observe their movements when facing them. Remember that if you are up close and personal against your enemy, you generally want to dodge towards the direction of the attack so you can maintain a close distance and get the most out of your dodge i-frames. If you are facing a larger boss, it’s not a bad idea to unlock the camera as well. The locked camera can be limiting and downright inconsistent with large bosses like Laurence and Ebrietas.

Don’t Be Afraid to Use Consumables

You may feel like consumables in Bloodborne are finite, and while they are, they are high plentiful enough for you to mess around and learn the best times to use them. You can buy Bolt and Fire paper with Blood Echoes after a certain point, and you get enough Insight if you explore to buy all the Beast Blood Pellets you need for your speed kills.

Remember, if your enemy bleeds red blood, use Fire Paper, and use Bolt Paper if they bleed white blood. Pungent Blood Cocktails only work on beasts, and the best use case for it is to use it against the Blood Starved Beast, which makes the fight a walk in the park. If you are observant, you will notice the game gives you enough of the right consumables right before you will need them.

Also, oftentimes, the added commitment of having used a few consumables often gives you that push and that edge that makes you play better and could finally help you beat that boss you are stuck on.

Use Chalice Glyphs

The offline Chalice Dungeons are a total skip, but there are several community-made Chalice Dungeons that use a glitch to speed farming a lot. There are dungeons for farming Blood Echoes, certain types of Bloodgems, and even ways to get certain weapons you can only get in the late game early on. Here is a community-made spreadsheet containing all the useful Chalice Glyphs you need.

Dying Is Learning

When you start, you’ll be dying a lot. If you lose your cool, you will not progress one bit. As long as you stay calm and treat each death as a learning experience, you will die less and less. Bloodborne has so many sources of Blood Echoes that you don’t even need to feel bad if you lose 100K or even 200K Blood Echoes. You will most definitely get them back as you go.

Do Your Parries/Backstabs with Confidence

When I first started, I used to shoot my gun to parry, but since I was not confident, I would dash away as well. This meant that when my parries did land, I could not do a follow-up before my enemy got back up.

This was the case until I started trusting that I would get the timing right and just dash toward the enemy right after shooting my gun. Not only did I seem like a badass when I did it, I pretty much got 100% of the Viscerals after landing those parries, and I got better and better as I kept this up.

Go For the Limbs (or Parry)

One cool detail about Bloodborne is that when you fight large bosses, if you can see a limb or a weak spot, you can pretty much assume if you attack one limb enough times, the boss will stagger and let you do a Visceral attack from the front.

Once they stagger from one limb, they just move on to the next. This works for Vicar Amelia, Ebrietas, Ludwig, Paarl—literally all the huge bosses. You want to make sure you have the damage, though. Be sure to pop a Beast Blood Pellet and use Bolt/Fire paper if possible. Even only a pellet can be enough, too.

And if you are against a humanoid enemy, you can assume they can be parried. Just shoot your gun right as they hit you, dash toward them, and do a light attack.

Combo Your Light Attacks into Transformation Attacks

If you didn’t know, all the trick weapons transition smoothly from one phase to another if you to a Light Attack right before pressing L1. It doesn’t matter what you do before the Light Attack, so long as you have enough stamina bar to do a Transformation Attack. This is part of why the combat in Bloodborne is so fun. You can make up your own deadly combos.

Consider Min-Maxing (But Don’t Be a Vitlet)

I remember when I was a wee min-maxer, and I managed to finish NG with 20 Vitality. It was not fun. It’s never fun to be one-shot killed. I would recommend a minimum of 30-40 Vitality before facing the final boss. If you are entering the DLC, you want 40-45 Vitality; otherwise, you are looking for a really bad time.

Vitality aside, you want to specialize your build for just one class of weapons. For example, if you plan on using the Rakuyo, focus only on your Skill stat, as that’s the only stat that the weapon scales with. You could also go for somewhat of a hybrid build, but in that case, I would recommend doing a little planning beforehand by looking at what weapons would go along with the weapon you want to be using at the end of the game.

If you feel like that is too complicated, just pick one weapon you really like and stick with it until the end. There are also plenty of stat distribution suggestions made by the community.

Don’t Spam

This one might be obvious. Admittedly, you are rewarded for being aggressive in Bloodborne with the HP restoration mechanic, but that doesn’t mean you can just spam your Light or Heavy attack unless you have a specific build that calls for it. You’ll just end up getting caught while you are in the active frames of your attack, and not even your inputs to dodge will register. Play it cool, hunter.

Use Caryl Runes

Remember to use those Caryl Runes you get from exploring. There are a few that make your life a lot easier, like the ones that increase damage resistance or the ones that increase the maximum number of Blood Vials or Quicksilver Bullets you can carry. If you are the offensive type like me, you can even find some that increase the damage of your Viscerals or make your Beast meter accumulate faster. These Caryl Runes are not to be slept upon.

Also, check out my Bloodborne Review and an article on the 10 Greatest Bosses in Bloodborne. It was uploaded quite recently.