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Arti’s Definitive Guide to BL4 Runs

Minimum-Level Runs

All Hardest Variants of Chalice Dungeon Bosses

Arti’s Definitive Guide to BL4 Runs [source]

Hello, hunter! I am Arti, a Soulsborne challenge runner. I’ve invested most of my time in these series to understanding PvE intricacies and minimum-level runs. I have beaten the Souls trilogy and Bloodborne at minimum level without rolling, blocking, parrying or quickstepping; DLCs included. I am also one of the founders and owner of the Company of Champions Discord server. It’s a community completely dedicated to challenge runs in multiple games and currently with over 2700 users seeking to get better and better at all games. I am writing this guide because I think current ones are kind of lacking in parts and there are no good written guides for Bloodborne - they’re all mostly videos and those can be hard to follow through while you’re playing. Hopefully this will get more people into challenge runs and we’ll see great players develop from it. My YouTube channel My Twitch channel Company of Champions Discord Server (and my Discord ID is Arti#2384 in case you have questions) This guide will include: Progression route (including weapon upgrades) Items to pick up (including important gems) P.S: You should always look to grab everything you see, because I don’t mention items such as Coldbloods or Madman’s Knowledges, yet those are still very useful. Boss strategies Areas strategies This guide will NOT include: Chalice dungeons Gem and Blood Echoes farming (although I’ll briefly mention it in the next paragraph) Item duping, skips or major glitches Cheese strategies (yes, I am aware of all the possible cheeses in this game and no, I won’t mention them because I think it goes against the challenge aspect of a BL4 run) About farming gems from Winter Lanterns: I personally dislike it because from my personal experience, the gems you acquire from base game are perfect for progression and you deal perfect damage to bosses if you follow my recommendations from this guide (perfect as in not too high and not too low; with the exception of a few bosses that I will sequence break for the purposes of this guide). That being said, if you absolutely need to farm gems from Winter Lanterns at Nightmare of Mensis or Fishing Hamlet, go for it and look for Weapon Durability Down or Stamina Regen Down curses, as they’re the least punishing ones to have. The strategy to kill them usually is to just charge an R2 and spam L1 as that will staggerlock them to death. If your damage is too low to do so, try to learn how to parry them properly. About farming Blood Echoes throughout the game: I won’t mention it throughout the guide because usually you don’t have much to spend on anyway, so Coldbloods are enough for most of your needs. However, if you find yourself having too much difficulty with the run and spending too many Blood Vials, you can farm Blood Echoes from a few good spots in the game: Early game. After you kill Witches of Hemwick, you can go back from their lamp to the lamp in the beginning of the area through the gate shortcut and kill all the enemies on your way there. A lot of them will have their back turned on you so you can sneak up on them for a free kill and a decent amount of echoes. Each run through will get you about 15k Blood Echoes. Mid game. When you get to Lecture Building 1st Floor, you can go into the theater full of enemies and kill all of them very easily with Fire Papers or Bolt Papers, or even bolt/fire gems. They’re very weak to these elements. You can also lure them to the door and kill them one by one. Each run will get you about 15k Blood Echoes and quite a bit of Quicksilver Bullets, but despite getting the same number of Blood Echoes as the Hemwick farm, this is a lot faster so you’ll get way more echoes/minute. Late game. After you kill Micolash and get to the second half of Nightmare of Mensis, you can farm by running through the area with the Maneater Boars and getting them to fight the Shadows of Yharnam there. Backstab the first Maneater Boar for a free kill and then drag the other two the the Shadows and let them fight each other. Each run will get you about 60k+ Blood Echoes and take a very short time, so it’s the best farming spot in the base game. Other farming spots will either be too hard at BL4 or too slow, so these will be your best options throughout the game if you’re really in need of Blood Echoes to buy some items. Moon runes are also very useful if you want to farm for a while, but don’t forget to switch back to the runes you were using before after you’re done.

Savescumming Despite the ugly name, savescumming isn’t exactly a bad thing. Savescumming is the act of uploading your save file to the cloud (with PS+) or to an USB. By doing so, you’ll be able to redownload your file whenever you die or use too many consumables or something similar, and when you load in the game again, you’ll be back to where you were when you uploaded your file. This is very useful for bosses like Shadows of Yharnam, for example, which are very far from the lamp; if you upload your file right before their fog door, you can just download it back whenever you die and you’ll be in front of their door and full of consumables. Despite this, though, I wrote this guide while assuming you won’t savescum due to not having access to such feature or because you don’t want to feel like you cheated in any way, so don’t worry - you won’t be at a disadvantage if you don’t abuse this, it would just be a way to make your life a tiny bit easier; and was worth mentioning in case you were unaware of it. Important Concepts of Bloodborne Before we properly start the guide, some important concepts and definitions need to be addressed for a better understanding of how some mechanics work. Beast Blood Pellets and Beasthood Meter. Beast Blood Pellets are pretty much taboo across the community. Many players are afraid of using them despite the great damage increase, due to the defense reduction counterpart. Thankfully, at BL4 you have very small base defense to begin with, which means that the reduction from it will barely affect you at all! To put it into numbers, just know that by just having your Beasthood Meter barely showing up, you’ll already have a 20% damage increase with the downside of having 20% defense decrease, but in endgame that will mean a 60 attack increase for the price of 2 less defense. It is that ridiculously broken, and it gets worse. At full bar, you get 70% damage increase with the downside of having 80% defense decrease, which at 301 base damage (what you’ll have for the majority of endgame) that means a 210 attack increase for the price of 8 less defense. If you’re not sold out on this by now, you’re crazy. Backstabs, parries and viscerals. Backstabs and parries are extremely useful at BL4, but viscerals are not. While you’re usually looking to visceral at any opportunity during levelled/casual runs because they’re your main damage dealer, at BL4 your visceral damage will be very low due to the fact that it’s tied to your Skill level. Since you have low Skill and you never level it up, you’ll be stuck with bad viscerals for the entire playthrough. But if viscerals are bad, why are backstabs and parries still useful? Well, not only do backstabs and parries put enemies into a staggered state that gives you an attack opportunity or room to heal, that staggered state that they enter takes double damage. Which means, if you backstab or parry an enemy and then hit them with a charged R2 before they recover, you can deal a massive amount of damage even at BL4. You’ll be using that a lot in this run; so much so that sometimes if I mention a backstab you should already assume it’s going to be followed by another charged R2 for great chunks of damage. Beasts and Kin. These are the two main types of enemies. It’s important to know and distinguish them because some weapons deal more damage based on enemy type and some gems have reduced damage curses vs beasts or kins, and you wouldn’t want to use those against said enemies. Beasts are weak to serrated damage (such as Saw Cleaver, the weapon you’ll be using, which deals 20% bonus damage to beasts) and fire element, while Kin are weak to thrust damage and bolt element. Why Saw Cleaver is better than Saw Spear. While both weapons have extremely similar movesets and Saw Spear has the upper hand due to getting serrated on both forms and having a thrust attack, Saw Cleaver gets the win simply for having a higher base damage. You’ll barely ever use the tricked form of either weapon, so despite Saw Spear getting the best tricked form, Saw Cleaver is still the best overall choice at BL4 because the more damage you have, the better. How Insight affects your Beasthood Meter. The more insight you have, the slower your meter will fill up and the faster it’ll go down. If you’re struggling with keeping your meter up, consider spending your Insight with some items. This is also why you should never use the Madman’s Knowledge when you get them, but only when you need to buy something that you’ve been saving for. Those are the most basic things you need to know to be successful in this run. Understanding how something works usually gives you better results than mindlessly following advices or guides, so I’ll try my best to explain all my thought processes along the way so you can learn new things. Without further ado, let’s get started with the run!

Character Creation Class: Waste of Skin That’s about it. Unfortunately we don’t have starting gifts in Bloodborne, unlike the Souls series. Make sure to make your character enjoyable to your eyes because you’ll be stuck with it for quite a while. Iosefka’s Clinic and Central Yharnam Important Items: 4x Blood Stone Shards 10x Molotov Cocktails 4x Bold Hunter's Mark Tiny Music Box Saw Hunter Badge Red Jeweled Brooch (turns into Red Blood Gem) Blood Gem Workshop Tool Objectives: Kill Father Gascoigne When you wake up in Iosefka’s Clinic, run up to the werewolf and try to backstab him for a visceral attack opening. You can’t sneak up on this enemy as he will aggro to you regardless, so your best bet is to get behind him before he manages to turn around for the backstab to work. If you don’t get it and die, just grab your Saw Cleaver and Hunter’s Pistol from the Hunter’s Dream and bully him to death when you come back. Grab whatever the werewolf drops and don’t forget to get the Blood Vials inside the Clinic before heading outside to Central Yharnam. When outside, grab the Quicksilver Bullets near the gate, open it and also grab the other vials down the stairs. Run past the Yharnamite, pull the lever down to get access to the ladder and grab the vials near the lever. Before heading up, break the boxes near the sleeping enemies to grab the Molotovs. Climb the ladder, light the lamp and go to the Hunter’s Dream to grab the Saw Cleaver and Hunter’s Pistol if you haven’t already. From the lamp, you want to go across the small bridge and jump down the ledge to the left, run around the enemy and grab the Molotovs. Go through the central area with the huge bonfire, up the stairs to the left and once you’re through the small tunnel, turn to your left and break the boxes to grab a Blood Stone Shard. Keep moving forward and break the boxes near the dogs to drop down the ledge. Run past everything and break more boxes to get into the upper area of the sewers. Go talk to Eileen and she will give you some Bold Hunter’s Marks. Break the chains to drop the corpse near the door that leads to Eileen’s place, drop down and grab its Blood Stone Shards. Go to the outer side of the sewers and get to Gascoigne’s Daughter to grab the Tiny Music Box (for the Brick Troll near the ladder that leads to her, you can sneak up to him by slow walking and backstab for a free visceral). Head back down and go through the sewers as you normally would. Right before the Maneater Boar’s tunnel, head into the small alley to the right and grab some more Blood Stone Shards. Then, instead of running through the Maneater Boar’s tunnel, climb the ladder and get the elevator shortcut for Father Gascoigne (don’t forget to run through the Brick Trolls and actually open the gate, this will also make your life easier for later when you want to kill Cleric Beast). After opening the shortcut, go back down to the Maneater Boar’s tunnel and get the Saw Hunter Badge near it; that’ll be important because it unlocks Pungent Blood Cocktails in the Bath Messengers’ shop. Once it is all setup, it’s time to go for Father Gascoigne. Good luck. Father Gascoigne Health: 2031HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZomOPPM9AA There are five main strategies against Father Gascoigne: regular fight (dodge and R1), fishing for backstabs (looking for openings to charge an R2 to his back and then doing a visceral attack - my personal favorite), parrying (self explanatory), Tiny Music Box abuse (which will be our intended method as it is the easiest way without resorting to actual cheese) and cheese (throwing Molotovs at him while he’s stuck on the stairs). I will teach the Tiny Music Box abuse, as it is the most effective and easiest way to kill him. If you wish to learn the other methods, search around YouTube or try to experiment by yourself. The abuse: when you first enter the fight, good tombstone to stand behind. This way, the tombstone will be between you and Gascoigne and he won’t be able to reach you with his attacks. Once you’re safe, begin the abuse, which goes as follows: (1) use the Tiny Music Box, then (2) he gets staggered by it and (3) you backstab him for a free visceral, then (4) as he gets up, you lock onto him and throw a Molotov for free damage. Repeat these steps two more times and he will transform into phase 2. When he transforms into a Werewolf, you can repeat those steps one more time but instead of going straight to the backstab, you’ll want to R1 him four times while he’s staggered by the Tiny Music Box, then backstab him for a visceral and throw a Molotov while he’s down to finish off the fight. If he somehow survives in case you did something wrong, just stick close to him and hit him whenever there’s an opening until he dies. !!THIS METHOD IS NOT INFINITE!!; you can only do it three times before he transforms and one time once he is transformed, so you should look to finish him within these limits. Once Father Gascoigne is dead, open the gate and before continuing forward, drop down the ledge onto the rooftop and grab the Red Jeweled Brooch, which will transform into a Red Blood Gem (your first Blood Gem in this run). After grabbing that, progress normally and open the chest with the Blood Gem Workshop Tool, then go to the next area. Cathedral Ward: First Visit and Gathering Materials Important Items: 13x Blood Stone Shards Hunter Set 3x Fire Paper Tempering Blood Gemstone (1) Objectives: Upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +3 Add the Red Blood Gem and Tempering Blood Gemstone (1) to your Saw Cleaver Get to Old Yharnam Once you grab Cathedral Ward’s lantern, go outside through the door to the left of the stairs and grab the Hunter Set behind a tree, then equip it - you will be using this set until you kill Blood-Starved Beast. Go up the stairs and grab the Blood Stone Shards near the gate, keep going forward and grab all the materials you will find in the next area. This includes Blood Stone Shards near the crow behind a tree and near the Church Giant, where you will also find a Wandering Nightmare (Bloodborne’s equivalent of a Crystal Lizard) holding even more Blood Stone Shards; kill it with a Molotov to grab those and head down the stairs to open the chest with a Tempering Blood Gemstone (1). From there, you can use a Bold Hunter’s Mark to get back to the lantern safely and warp back to the Hunter’s Dream. In the Hunter’s Dream, you’ll upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +3 with all the Shards you got if you haven’t missed any. After upgrading your Cleaver, you can also put in both gems we got earlier, making you a tiny bit stronger. If needed, you can buy whatever you feel you’re missing from the Bath Messengers (Molotovs, Vials, Bullets, etc.). Head back to Cathedral Ward and go out the same door, but this time go down the stairs and into this new area full of enemies. A safe way to traverse this area is to snipe the dog with a Molotov and hug the left wall while sprinting all the way to the stairs, but you can just run past all enemies if you don’t care about getting hit once or twice. Run up the stairs, open the door and go out the door across the room to talk to Alfred and get some Fire Papers. Head back, pull the lever, get the Madman’s Knowledge before dropping down and then head to Old Yharnam’s lamp. Grab the lamp and the Pungent Blood Cocktails near it. Old Yharnam Important Items: Hunter's Torch Ashen Hunter Set Powder Keg Hunter Badge 6x Beast Blood Pellets 2x Fire Papers Optional Items: Charred Hunter Set Objectives: Kill Blood-starved Beast When you first get to Old Yharnam, go straight ahead from the door and drop down to the side of the building, then grab the Hunter’s Torch; you can also kill the Wandering Nightmare if you need Blood Stone Shards or want some extra ones to upgrade other weapons (it is worth upgrading the Hunter’s Pistol with any excess materials). Head back to the lamp and now go through the area normally. You can equip the Hunter’s Torch you just got to make the area slightly easier, since Beast Patients (the main Old Yharnam enemies) are afraid of fire and usually won’t engage you if you have it equipped. You can also make a slight detour to grab the Charred Hunter Set if you want; it’s really useful against Shadows of Yharnam and Laurence due to its extremely high Fire Resistance stats. After getting through Djura’s machine gun shots, go up the ladder on the building he’s on top of and kill him, which will allow you to buy the Ashen Hunter Set from the Insight Shop (you will be using this set for the entire run because it has decent defensive stats and one of the best Beasthood stats in the game, which is important when utilizing Beast Blood Pellets). You can easily kill Djura by shooting him three or four times as soon as you get up the on the rooftop - this will make him fall down the building and die, and you can even reload the game to pick his Powder Keg Hunter Badge which will allow you to buy Oil Urns which can be situationally useful when paired with Molotovs.

After killing Djura and picking up his badge, go back down the ladder and proceed through the area normally. I recommend using a Pungent Blood Cocktail inside the church before dropping down from the wooden platforms to distract the enemies, as they can be quite annoying if they decide to chase you. Get out of the church and grab the shortcut to Djura’s building before progressing. When you get the shortcut, head back down and continue through the area. After crossing the bridge that leads to the tower where the werewolf breaks the door to jumpscare you, head left and into the alley to grab a lot of Beast Blood Pellets; these will be your best friends for boss fights throughout the run. Head back and, when the werewolf breaks the door, go through it and head up the stairs to unlock a shortcut and grab some Fire Papers at the top. Once this is all done, you now have a free path to Blood-Starved Beast. One more optional thing you can do, as always, is to kill the Wandering Nightmare found right before the boss. Blood-Starved Beast Health: 3470HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAu3QKtIQa0 There are four main strategies against Blood-Starved Beast: regular fight (dodge and R1); fishing for backstabs (which is the strategy I will be expanding on in this guide); parrying (self-explanatory) and Pungent Blood Cocktail abuse [this is generally used in speedruns and no hit runs, and it revolves around the boss getting distracted by the cocktail while you attack it with transforming attacks (R1L1 combo) to stack up your Beast Blood Pellet and get tons of damage - it’s very easy to recreate in a casual setting but wastes a few consumables that could be important later, so I won’t be explaining it in-depth, but feel free to use this if you prefer to do so]. For the backstab-fishing strategy, you want to know two main things: how to dodge Blood-Starved Beast’s attacks and what attacks to punish. While it sounds hard, it’s hilariously easy to do so. To dodge ALL of its attacks, run into it diagonally and to the left. You’ll always want to be running to your left side (so, under Blood-Starved Beast’s right arm) and you will never get hit. You don’t even need to roll at all, which makes it even more hilarious, but feel free to do so if you don’t trust these words. That was how to dodge its attacks, but how to actively punish them? Well, there are only two backstabbable attacks: the simple swipe and the one where it rears up then slams its head down, then swipes to the side. To punish the former, you just dodge it by running to your left diagonally and charge up your R2 to its back. To punish the latter, you dodge it the same way but instead of immediately charging your R2, you’ll need to reposition yourself a little by moving forwards while it does the swipe - you start charging your R2 and it’ll hit it right as it finishes the swipe. Now this is a good time to explain how backstabs and viscerals work in Bloodborne. Visceral attacks scale with Skill levels, which you have very little at BL4. This means your visceral will deal significantly less damage the more you progress through the game. While that sucks, an amazing mechanic is that while an enemy is staggered from a backstab, they will take double damage from your next attack. That means when you backstab an enemy, it is better to charge another R2 to hit it for massive damage than to visceral it. Against Father Gascoigne, it was really early into the game and you still had a Saw Cleaver +0, which means that visceral was still better; but at this point, you have a Saw Cleaver +3 and with all the multipliers, charging a second R2 will deal more damage than performing a visceral attack on Blood-Starved Beast. This boss has three phases and all of them add more attacks and the ability to poison you through attacks (phase 2) or through an aura (phase 3). All of the new attacks can be dodged with the same strategy from phase 1, so keep doing that and you’ll be fine. The way the aura works in phase 3 is that it will only stay on the place where it casts it (so where it transforms into phase 3 and where it does the AoE explosion) and only for a limited time, so run to the other side of the arena when it casts it to avoid ever being caught. Bring some Antidotes if you absolutely cannot avoid the aura in phase 3. Also regarding phases, a minor tip is that you can backstab Blood-Starved Beast while it transitions to the next phase (it’ll do an animation before going to the next phase and you can punish that animation; phase 2 starts at around 70%HP and phase 3 at around 30%HP, so pay attention to that). Other than that, just keep up the backstabs until it dies. You can use a Fire Paper to make it easier and faster, but I will suggest to hold onto your Beast Blood Pellets for later bosses. Kill Blood-Starved Beast, grab the lantern and head back to the Hunter’s Dream where you’ll buy the Ashen Hunter’s Set for 6 Insight and spend your excess Blood Echoes on whatever you want or need, then we’ll go back to Cathedral Ward. Don’t forget to equip your new set. Cathedral Ward: Second Visit and Abandoned Old Workshop Exploration Important Items: 9x Twin Blood Stone Shards 6x Numbing Mists Doll Set Third Umbilical Cord Tempering Blood Gemstone (2) Bloodtinge Gemstone (2) 4x Bolt Paper Optional Item: Fire Blood Gemstone (3) Objectives: Upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +5 Switch your Tempering Blood Gemstone (1) for a Tempering Blood Gemstone (2) Upgrade your Hunter Pistol to +3 and add in a Bloodtinge Gemstone (2) Get to Hemwick Charnel Lane On your second visit to Cathedral Ward, the door at the right that was locked before will now be open, and that’s where we’re headed now. Go up the elevator and into the Healing Church Workshop tower. In the first level of the tower, kill all enemies and grab the chest for a Bloodtinge Gemstone (2). This will be the best gem for your Hunter’s Pistol until Nightmare of Mensis. After doing this, rush to the last level of the tower (be careful with the Brick Troll when going up the ladder) and get the Radiant Sword Hunter Badge inside a chest; this badge will allow you to buy Fire Papers and Bone Marrow Ashes from Bath Messengers, which is amazing because you’ll be using a ton of those in this run (Bone Marrow Ashes when paired with a Hunter’s Pistol +9 can get you through some stuff with relative ease and safety, such as Lady Maria’s third phase). Now it’s time to go down the tower. On the first level of the tower, instead of going directly towards the hole on the ground, go around the tower to find a Wandering Nightmare. Kill it for some free Twin Blood Stone Shards. Go down the hole and begin your descent through the wooden platforms and towards the Abandoned Old Workshop. In the Abandoned Old Workshop, you’ll find the Doll Set (you will sell this for a ton of Blood Echoes) and a Third Umbilical Cord (needed to unlock Moon Presence, the true last boss of Bloodborne). Light the lamp for good measure and continue going down the tower. When you finally reach the floor, sprint to the door and open it up. The Beast-possessed Soul kneeled near the door won’t hit you because it always gets up and turns around instead of going directly for you, so you’re safe to just get out of there. In this area, you can get a Fire Blood Gemstone (3) from a corpse; it’s not that necessary in the grand scheme of things but it’s really useful to kill Brainsuckers in Upper Cathedral Ward later into the run. After getting this gem (or not), go to the elevator and escape this area. Right after going up the elevator, climb the ladder to your left and grab the Numbing Mists (they can be useful against Vicar Amelia if you don’t manage to kill her fast enough). Go back down the ladder, pull the lever to open the gate and go open the larger gate to get access to the area full of Church Giants. Grab as many Madman’s Knowledges as you can and head towards the area where you get access to Forbidden Woods. Kill the Brainsucker in the small alley with a Molotov and grab the Twin Blood Stone Shards behind him, then head towards Forbidden Woods and get the Tempering Blood Gemstone (2). Use a Bold Hunter’s Mark to go back to your last lamp and warp back to the Hunter’s Dream. In the Hunter’s Dream, you’ll want to upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +4 and switch your Tempering Blood Gemstone (1) for the Tempering Blood Gemstone (2) you just got. Notice that this new gem gives you bonus attack when you’re at full health, so try to stay at max HP as long as possible from now on. You also want to get your Hunter’s Pistol to +3 with all the excess Blood Stone Shards you might have; if you don’t have enough for +3, you can sell the Doll Set for a lot of Blood Echoes and buy the remaining Shards needed from Bath Messengers now. Spend your excess echoes on Fire Papers, Molotovs (important for the next section), Pungent Blood Cocktails and whatever else you think you need like vials and bullets. After getting your Hunter’s Pistol to +3, equip the Bloodtinge Gemstone (2) you got earlier. Head back to Cathedral Ward. From Cathedral Ward lamp, you want to head to Vicar Amelia’s arena but instead you’ll take the path to the right and go fight the Tonitrus Hunter on the path to Yahar’gul. This is a really easy fight since your attacks are faster than his, so just (1) walk up to him, (2) R1L1 once, (3) walk away before he can retaliate. Repeat these steps until he dies and you’ll get 4x Bolt Papers. Continue going towards Yahar’gul’s entrance while ignoring all enemies. When you get to the area with two Executioners and two Wandering Nightmares, get close to the Wandering Nightmares and reload the game. Doing this will reset spawns and prevent the Executioners aggroing onto you. Keep doing this until you’re near the door and behind the second Executioner, this way he will never aggro onto you when you enter the game. At this point, you want to load the game, Molotov one of the Wandering Nightmares, get its Twin Blood Stone Shards and quit out again. Load the game one more time and kill the second Wandering Nightmare with another Molotov for even more Twin Blood Stone Shards. If this goes against your way of playing the game or you think it’s too cheesy, just try to do it normally. It might take a few attempts, but you can do it. After killing both Wandering Nightmares and getting their drops, use a Bold Hunter’s Mark and go back to your lamp. From here, it’s time to head to Vicar Amelia’s arena again, but this time we’re going to the left path and towards Hemwick Charnel Lane. If that small forest area before Hemwick’s lamp is being too annoying at low health, you can spend a few Pungent Blood Cocktails there to distract the dogs. If you feel like that’s unnecessary, just run towards the gate in a zigzag motion to avoid any shots and dog attacks. Open the gate and light the lantern. Before starting Hemwick for real, head back from the lamp and to the left of the gate you’ll find a Twin Blood Stone Shard behind a few rocks. After getting this shard, go back to the Hunter’s Dream and upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +5. Time to start going through Hemwick Charnel Lane.

Hemwick Charnel Lane Important Items: 10x Twin Blood Stone Shards 8x Bone Marrow Ash Rune Workshop Tool Optional Item: Lake Rune Objectives: Kill Witch of Hemwick Upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +6 Upgrade your Hunter Pistol to +4 Change the order of gems in your Saw Cleaver - since getting it to +6 unlocks the last gem slot, you’ll want the order to be Tempering Blood Gemstone (1) (the one with 1.1% attack up), Tempering Blood Gemstone (2) and Red Blood Gem in the last slot and the reasoning behind this is that the last slot does not accept Radial gems, which means Red Blood Gem is the best one you have at the moment that fits it. Hemwick Charnel Lane is supposed to be a quick part of your run, mostly important for upgrade materials and the Rune Workshop Tool, so I’ll try my best to keep this section really brief. From the lamp, you want to go down the stairs and either kill or avoid all enemies there. Behind the circle with tombstones and a statue in the middle of the area, you’ll find some Twin Blood Stone Shards. Continue progressing through Hemwick and when you reach the Brick Troll and enemies throwing molotovs, you want to go and grab some more Twin Blood Stone Shards near a ledge close to one of the molotov enemies. From there, just progress through the area normally until you get the elevator shortcut. From the elevator, kill the enemy hidden near the wooden bridge before she pushes you off and grab the Bone Marrow Ashes behind her. Go inside the dark house and be careful with hidden enemies; especially the dogs. Go up the ladder and, on the second floor of this dark house you’ll find a Wandering Nightmare and kill it for some more Twin Blood Stone Shards. From there, go through the rooftop while avoiding the hidden enemies that try to push you off and then instead of dropping down the ledge into the main area, run towards the gate side while keeping yourself near the wall, trying to avoid all enemies. You’ll find more Twin Blood Stone Shards behind an enemy near the wall. After getting these, drop down and unlock the gate shortcut by pulling the lever. From here, I recommend you to go directly to Witches of Hemwick and kill them first, as that will unlock their lamp and make your life a lot easier to get the remaining items. Witches of Hemwick and Finishing the Area Health: 2611HP each Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJzzSR4InI There’s not much to talk about Witches of Hemwick aside from the fact that Insight affects the fight; unlike any other boss in the game. If you go into the fight with >1 Insight, they will summon Mad Ones (the tall enemies). If you go into the fight with no Insight at all, they won’t summon anything and the fight is even easier. For the purposes of this guide, I am going to assume you’ll fight them with >1 Insight, so this is a good fight to learn proper camera management. You need to keep an eye out for Mad Ones at all times, and you’ll want to always be a few meters away from them as they can run really fast and if you keep your distance you can have time to react properly. Other than managing camera and avoiding Mad Ones, you should know that one Witch of Hemwick starts with the health bar showing up while the other is not even in the arena; it also always have a fixed spawn point near the entrance of the arena. The second Witch of Hemwick only shows up when the first one’s health bar drops below 50%. At this point, the second one’s health bar will still be invisible, but you can damage her (and you will want to do so). Try to get both of them as low as possible before killing either, because then you’ll have 50 seconds to finish off the fight before the dead one respawns. So, those are the mechanics of the fight. My recommendation regarding strategies is to backstab them with a fully charged R2 and combo it with a transforming attack (L1). When you do so, they’ll try to teleport away but you have enough time to untrick your weapon and do the same combo over and over again. So it would basically be: R2L1, L1, R2L1 and repeat the process until they get really low, then go for the other one. If you can’t get this combo’s timing down, you can perform a backstab into a visceral and repeat the process until they get low. Again, basically: R2, visceral, R2, visceral and repeat until they get low, but this time kill them and then go for the other one. After you kill Witches of Hemwick, light their lantern and grab the Rune Workshop Tool in the basement at the back of the boss arena. After lighting the lantern, you want to reset the area by either going to the Hunter’s Dream or using a Bold Hunter’s Mark. Go up the stairs to exit the arena. You’ll want to slow walk as to not aggro the enemies, and when they start walking outside you’re free to break a few of the boxes in the room which will reveal another Wandering Nightmare with more Twin Blood Stone Shards. Kill it and grab those, then head outside and go all the way to the cliff at the side of the area opposite to the gate to get a Lake Rune (optional, since you won’t be using that for too long). Go back to the Hunter’s Dream, upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +6 and change the order of its gems to get full use of them (refer to the start of this section, at the “objectives” topic), then upgrade your Hunter’s Pistol to +4 and equip the Lake Rune if you got that from Hemwick Charnel Lane. Time to head back to Cathedral Ward and get killed by the Snatcher right outside the church, which will lead you to our next area: Hypogean Gaol. Hypogean Gaol Important Items: 6x Twin Blood Stone Shards Spark Hunter Badge Objectives: Kill Darkbeast Paarl Upgrade your Hunter Pistol to +5 Hypogean Gaol is an even quicker visit than Hemwick Charnel Lane. You’ll wake up inside a cell and, from there, you want to work your way out and find the lamp on top of the stairs. These stairs are around a circle pillar, in a spiral-like form. If you always take the staircase to the right side of this pillar, you’ll run into a Wandering Nightmare and kill it (preferably with a Molotov) for some Twin Blood Stone Shards. From there, continue going up until you get the lamp. After getting the lamp, you want to head down the first set of stairs and run across the room with both Snatchers to go outside. When you’re outside, head left and into an alley and you’ll find another Wandering Nightmare full of Twin Blood Stone Shards for you to get. After you kill it, keep heading forward until the end of this alley, where you’ll find a door that leads back to the lamp you just lit. From here, you can either finish cleaning up the area if you wish to do so since it’s a fairly small location or just head straight to Darkbeast Paarl. Darkbeast Paarl Health: 4552HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFDCAmEnoOw Darkbeast Paarl isn’t that interesting of a boss. It has camera issues and an annoying moveset, so our goal will be to end it as fast as possible. There are three main strategies for Darkbeast Paarl: normal fight (dodge and R1 to the legs, as always), speedrun staggerlock (which will be our intended method) and AI loop (which is mostly used in no roll runs but it’s also moderately complex to learn and recreate, so we’ll stick to the staggerlock - but the basic gist of it is that by standing on a certain position, you’ll get him to repeat the same attack over and over again, which is easy to dodge and punish if you get consistent). The speedrun method is fairly simple to explain and recreate: while Paarl is still sleeping, you want to use a Fire Paper and Beast Blood Pellet and run straight to his right front leg (the one to your left, in case you’re bad with directions). When you get there, you’ll perform three R1 attacks while he gets up and charges up the AoE explosion. If done correctly, you’ll break Darkbeast Paarl’s leg before the AoE explosion comes off, which will make him fall to the ground. When it’s on the ground, you’ll want to circle him clockwise, breaking all legs as you go - the best combo for this is R1L1L1 as it stacks a lot of beasthood and increases your damage. So the breakdown of it is: (1) run to the front right leg and R1R1R1, (2) go to the back right leg and R1L1L1, (3) go to the back left leg and R1L1L1 and (4) go to the front left leg and R1L1L1. If you do this correctly, Paarl will never get up from the ground and will never have a chance to fight back at you. When you finish, it’s going to either be dead or really low on health. In case it’s the latter, hit its head with a few R1s as it’s down until you break it, which will give you a visceral opening. In case you miss the visceral, just stick close to Paarl and R1 him to death. Since you got it so low, it’ll start jumping back immediately and it’ll do two transformations: the first one to reacquire its buff (getting lightning all over its body) and the second one to start phase 2. Both of these transformations take 2 or 3 seconds to go through and they’re free damage openings; so just spam R1 until it dies. In case you make major mistakes and everything goes south, you’ll just have to try it again but with a little more difficulty since Paarl will now be already awaken when you reenter the arena. In this case, you’ll just fight normally while focusing one of the legs until it breaks. When the first leg breaks, repeat the process I mentioned (go through all legs clockwise, breaking them) and finish off the fight. Killing Darkbeast Paarl will reward you with the Spark Hunter Badge, which unlocks Bolt Papers in the Bath Messengers - and just like Fire Papers, you’ll be using a ton of these throughout the run. Light the lantern, head back to the Hunter’s Dream and upgrade your Hunter’s Pistol to +5, buy whatever you need (Fire Papers are recommended) and then warp back to Cathedral Ward. Cathedral Ward: Third Visit and Vicar Amelia’s Death Important Item: 1x Twin Blood Stone Shards Objective: Kill Vicar Amelia There’s really not much to talk about here. From the lamp, head straight to Vicar Amelia and let’s take her down.

Vicar Amelia Health: 5367HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdEqks9P2Dc Vicar Amelia is, unironically, one of the hardest and most complex bosses in the game… if you have low damage. Since that isn’t our case with this route, she is going to be one of the easiest and fastest bosses to kill in this run. You’re welcome. Before you start the fight, you’ll want to use a Fire Paper and a Beast Blood Pellet (speedrunners usually use them after the fight has started, but it’s unnecessary in this case since you already have a Saw Cleaver +6; just be safe and pop it before the cutscene plays). Run up to Amelia and, while she does the scream that starts the fight, you hit her left arm (the one to your right side) with an R1L1 combo, which will break it and stagger her. While she’s staggered, you want to untrick your weapon and R1L1L1 either of her legs to make her fall on her knees. While she’s down, R1L1L1 the other leg to break it too. At this point, you can break her head while she’s down and then the other arm to stagger her again, but either way your beasthood meter will be filled up quite a bit, so you just spam R1 until she dies. That’s it, that’s the fight. She won’t have time to attack you because at this point, Amelia will be so low that she’ll start transforming into phase 2 and will try to heal off her broken limbs. These are all free openings for some safe damage. Once again, backup strategy in case you make a major mistake and die: when you reenter her arena, wait until Amelia does the scream from a distance and then she usually will do a jumping attack. Just dodge it and break either of her legs, then repeat the process mentioned before. Bonus tip: the Numbing Mists we picked up earlier prevents her from healing. Congratulations, you bullied Vicar Amelia to death. After killing her, interact with Laurence’s Skull on the altar to trigger a cutscene and get the password to enter Forbidden Woods. Light the lantern and head straight to Forbidden Woods’ entrance. Say the password, enter the door and interact with the corpse for a Madman’s Knowledge, then head down the stairs. When you exit this tower, drop down the hill in front of you and you’ll fall on top of a Twin Blood Stone Shard. After getting the Shard, head straight to the lamp and light it up. It’s time to get lost in the Forbidden Woods. Forbidden Woods: First Visit and Gathering Materials/Key Items Important Items: 6x Twin Blood Stone Shards 1x Blood Stone Chunk Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (1) Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (1) 7x Beast Blood Pellets 11x Poison Knives 4x Blue Elixir Tonsil Stone Cainhurst Summons Eye of a Blood-drunk Hunter Objectives: Unlock all shortcuts Upgrade your Hunter Pistol to +6 Get all key items to unlock optional areas Forbidden Woods is a very convoluted area, but thankfully we don’t need to spend as much time here because our weapons are well upgraded already. This area has more than 20 Twin Blood Stone Shards in it, but we only need 6 more to upgrade our Hunter’s Pistol to +6. So, from the lamp, you want to go across the bridge (be careful with the trap) and run forward while keeping yourself near the wall to your right. When you get past the Large Huntsman (werewolf-ish looking guy), you’ll want to drop down the ledge and kill the Wandering Nightmare in front of you for some Twin Blood Stone Shards. After doing so, turn backwards and go towards and across the yellow flowers on the ground. You’ll want to enter the broken house right after the yellow flowers and get the Beast Blood Pellets behind the Large Huntsman. From there, keep progressing through the area normally. Go across the small village and swamp (again, be careful with traps and molotovs) and once you’re right at the end of the small swamp, look to your left and you’ll see a Large Huntsman, so go towards him and grab the Twin Blood Stone Shards behind him. From there, keep moving forward for a little bit and you’ll notice that to your right there’s kind of an alley leading up to a door. Go through that place while getting the items on the ground for some more Twin Blood Stone Shards and open the gate to grab a few more Pungent Blood Cocktails. With this, you already have enough shards to upgrade your Hunter’s Pistol to +6, but you can keep getting them from Forbidden Woods if you feel like you want to upgrade another weapon for whatever reason (upgrading your Hunter’s Torch could be a good idea because it deals decent damage to certain enemy types, but I won’t mention it from now on and won’t route for it in this guide - this is just a friendly suggestion but by no means necessary). Now that you’re set on Twin Blood Stone Shards, keep progressing normally and right before you reach the cannon, enter the broken house to your left and grab a few more Beast Blood Pellets behind the Large Huntsman. Again, keep going forward and in the dark area with the Snake Parasite (dude with snake head), instead of going towards the shortcut you want to go straight across the room and drop down the ledge and onto the rooftop. Then, go up the ladder and across the giant windmill gears to get some Poison Knives. Then, continue going towards where you find the Afflicted Beggar and you’ll get even more Poison Knives on the rooftop where you find him. Speaking of the Afflicted Beggar, you have two choices: if you’ve been bringing NPCs to Oedon’s Chapel, you can send him there for some free Beast Blood Pellets whenever he kills a NPC. If not, you can safely kill him by blocking him on the door and using the Poison Knives you just got. Killing him will get you a decent amount of Blood Echoes and a rune (that you honestly won’t need). From the Afflicted Beggar, just go back down and keep progressing as you normally would. Right after the small bridge you’ll find another Snake Parasite. Get through him and go up the hill to your right, where you’ll find an elevator shortcut. Don’t forget to actually go up the elevator and open up the door, or else you’ll still be blocked. Now that the shortcut is unlocked, we’ll go through the second half of Forbidden Woods. Thankfully, all items we still need are fairly easy to reach. From the elevator, you want to follow the lanterns through the main path until you see the Giant Snake Ball coming out of the woods to your right… you’ll know it when you see it. Then, go to where the Giant Snake Ball came from and next to a wall you’ll see three Snake Parasites around an item; run up to them and grab the Blood Stone Chunk. If you die, just go back to where you found the Giant Snake Ball and instead of going to the right, you’ll want to go to the left and drop down to a place where you’ll see a lot of Small Celestial Emissaries (the blue aliens). In this area, you’ll find the Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (1) (which raises your maximum stamina by 10%) behind a few tombstones, guarded by two Small Celestial Emissaries with tendrils coming out of their head. It’s good that they’re there, because it’ll be impossible for you to miss it. From here, you can either go directly towards Shadows of Yharnam or, if you died while getting the rune, you can just follow the lanterns’ main path until you reach Shadows of Yharnam. Now, instead of going into the boss arena, you’ll want to go to the direction opposite to it. You’ll find a gate, open it and grab the Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (1) (which raises your maximum HP by 5%) right in front of it. Now, just use your Bold Hunter’s Mark to go back to your lamp safely. Now that you got everything you needed from Forbidden Woods and unlocked all the important shortcuts, you have a free pathway to Shadows of Yharnam; but instead of going for that fight, we will begin our sequence break to upgrade our Saw Cleaver to +9, which means we’ll visit a few optional areas before progressing through the main game. To do so, you’ll need to venture into the Forbidden Woods one more time. Go across the path with the yellow flowers again and, instead of going to the small village, go up the hill to your left where you’ll find a bunch of dog cages. Kill all the dogs and interact with the window on the wooden house which has a lantern beside it. By doing so, you’ll talk to Patches and he will give you the Tonsil Stone; and that’ll be your key to get to Nightmare Frontier. After getting the Tonsil Stone, go towards the giant gate and enter the big house to your left. Inside, you’ll find a few Blue Elixirs which can be helpful to go through a few rough areas (use them at your own discretion - I would recommend them for Nightmare Frontier, Nightmare of Mensis and Hunter’s Nightmare in the DLC). Go outside the house and enter the cave behind the area with the cages. Go through the poisonous swamp and into another cave where you’ll find some ladders. Use an Antidote before going up the ladders, then start your ascent. When you finally get all the way up there, unlock the gate behind you and start going forward towards Iosefka’s Clinic. Avoid the Brainsucker and go up the ladder, then go through the rooftop and into Iosefka’s Clinic. When you’re inside, do NOT go for Impostor Iosefka, as killing her now will prevent you from getting the last Third Umbilical Cord you’ll need for true ending. You’ll come back here later, don’t worry. From the window, just head straight to your right and get the Cainhurst Summons in the room with a Small Celestial Emissary. As a bonus reward, kill the Small Celestial Emissary for Iosefka’s Blood Vial. Open the door, go to the lamp and get back to Hunter’s Dream. In the Hunter’s Dream, upgrade your Hunter’s Pistol to +6 and equip both runes you just got from Forbidden Woods (Clockwise Metamorphosis (1) and Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis (1) - you’ll be using them for the rest of the run). On the stairs that lead to the house in Hunter’s Dream, you’ll now find an item called Eye of a Blood-drunk Hunter. This is a key item and will grant you access to the Old Hunters DLC. Spend any excess Blood Echoes on whatever consumables you need and head to Cathedral Ward. Now that you’re in Cathedral Ward, remember the path full of Executioners and Wandering Nightmares where you got a few materials? Yeah, you’ll have to go back there. When you get across that area, go into the church and head towards the door that leads to Yahar’gul. When you’re near the door, an Amygdala will grab you and teleport you to Lecture Building’s First Floor (thanks to the Tonsil Stone we picked up earlier). There is quite literally nothing noteworthy in this area, so just talk to Patches who is behind a door across the room where the lamp is and then proceed to Nightmare Frontier.

Nightmare Frontier Important Items: Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2) 4x Blood Stone Chunks Objectives: Upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +7 Progress Patches the Spider questline Nightmare Frontier is a fairly confusing and annoying area with all the poison and enemy ganks going around, but thankfully you won’t need to spend too much time around here. From the lamp, progress through the area normally until you get to the hunter NPCs. From there, enter the cave behind the hunter to the right, near the poisonous swamp. From there, just run and keep going through the main path while avoiding all enemies. You can also ignore all Wandering Nightmares, as they just drop Blood Stone Shards and you don’t need those anymore. At some point, you’ll get to a big tombstone that looks like a ramp. Go on top of it and it’ll fall down, becoming a small bridge and a very comfortable shortcut for you. Go back through this new bridge and head to the right, where you can see the Shining Coins left by Patches on the ground. Instead of following them, keep heading forward and into the cave where you’ll see a Giant Lost Child (the enemy that throws rocks at you). Instead of heading towards it, drop down the ledge to your side and you’ll find a Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2) which increases your HP by 10% when equipped. After getting this rune, head back to the Shining Coins and trigger Patches’ cutscene to progress his questline (it’ll be important to get a nice Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2) when you reach Lecture Building’s Second Floor right after The One Reborn). When the cutscene ends, use a Bold Hunter’s Mark to get out of the pit that Patches’ pushed you into. From the lamp, now it’s gonna be time to progress through the poisonous swamp and towards Amygdala’s arena. Just sprint across the entire swamp and bring Antidotes. Get through the Giant Lost Child and avoid the Winter Lantern (humming lady that frenzies you) to go straight to the area in front of Amygdala’s arena. From there, keep going forward and get the elevator shortcut near the Loran Silverbeast. Now that you got the elevator shortcut, dying won’t matter that much since the items you’ll need are really close to it anyway and you won’t need to go through the poisonous swamp again. When you go down the elevator, head towards Amygdala’s arena and when you reach the first “tombstone bridge” you’ll be able to see a Large Wandering Nightmare in the poison pool near a few Crawlers. I highly suggest sniping it with a few Molotovs because this kind of Wandering Nightmare can actually fight back and with the enemies near it, it can be a little dangerous. Don’t be too worried, though, because if you kill it and die, you won’t lose the item. The Large Wandering Nightmare will actually respawn and you can kill it again for the item in case you missed it before. Either way, kill this Large Wandering Nightmare for a few Blood Stone Chunks, then go back up to the area in front of Amygdala’s arena. From there, you’ll want to go back to where you found the Winter Lantern and you’ll notice that there’s another Large Wandering Nightmare near her. Kill it and grab some more Blood Stone Chunks (be careful not to make it fall off the map, or else you’ll have to reload the area and do it again). If both Large Wandering Nightmares mentioned never showed up for you, you’ll likely need to use a Bold Hunter’s Mark to reset the area and get them to spawn. After killing both, you’re safe to get out of Nightmare Frontier and head back to Hunter’s Dream because you’ll come back to kill Amygdala when you have a Saw Cleaver +10 and better gems. In the Hunter’s Dream, you’ll want to upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +7 and equip your new Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2) - at this point, the runes you should have equipped are: Clockwise Metamorphosis (1) and (2), and Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis (1). These are the best runes you’ll have until you get Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis (2) from Patches to substitute your current one. Now that you’re all set up, head to Witch’s Abode lamp (Witches of Hemwick boss lamp) in Hemwick Charnel Lane. From the lamp, you’ll want to head outside and run straight to the obelisk right in the middle of that area, which will trigger a cutscene (thanks to the Cainhurst Summons we got earlier) and a chariot will show up next to you. Go aboard the chariot on a journey to visit Forsaken Cainhurst Castle. Forsaken Cainhurst Castle Important Items: 5x Blood Stone Chunks Tempering Blood Gemstone (3) Optional Items: There are a lot of armor pieces and weapons scattered around Cainhurst; you can get them to sell later if you’re struggling with Blood Echoes Objectives: Upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +8 Unlock all shortcuts From the lamp, your first goal is to go to the middle of the outside area instead of going inside the castle. If you go forward from the lamp, you’ll eventually see an alley full of Parasite Larvae with a Tempering Blood Gemstone (3) at the end, so you really want to grab that one because it’s a big upgrade to your current Tempering Blood Gemstone (1), so even do a suicide run to grab it if needed. Now that you got the gem, it’s time to head inside the castle. When you’re inside, go up the stairs and to the right balcony to get a Blood Stone Chunk. From there, continue progressing through the area until you find the first few Lost Childs of Antiquity (the gargoyle-like enemies). You’ll want to go up the tower to the left and grab another Blood Stone Chunk up there. Again, continue progressing until you get to the elevator shortcut. After unlocking the elevator shortcut, go up the stairs and on the second floor you’ll grab another Blood Stone Chunk on the corner opposite to the open window where you’ll head out next. Grab that chunk and head outside from the window and drop down the ledges and, instead of going inside the room (unless you want the items in there to sell later), keep moving forward through the ledges until you find another door to go inside, where you’ll find a lever that moves the bookshelf to reveal a ladder. Go up the ladder and instead of heading towards Martyr Logarius, you want to go all the way to the other side and find a Wandering Nightmare near the handrails; kill it for some Blood Stone Chunks and you’re done with this Forsaken Cainhurst Castle run through. Go back to the Hunter’s Dream and upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +8, then switch your Tempering Blood Gemstone (1) for your new Tempering Blood Gemstone (3). Now you want to warp back to Cathedral Ward, where you’ll head to where you first picked up the Hunter Set. There, you’ll get grabbed by an Amygdala and teleported to Hunter’s Nightmare, where you’ll light the lamp and start your DLC materials run through. Hunter’s Nightmare Important Items: 6x Blood Stone Chunks Eye Pendant Objectives: Upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +9 Unlock all shortcuts Light the Nightmare Church lamp From the first lamp, the first thing you’ll want to do is head straight to Laurence’s arena and grab the Eye Pendant on his hand. This item will be important to get access to Research Hall later. Don’t forget to unlock the gate shortcut on your way to Laurence’s arena in order to make your life easier in case you die. From Laurence’s arena, you’ll want to head to where the Yahar’gul entrance was in the normal world, so to the left side of the stairs (right if you’re coming from the lamp). Get through the machine gun traps and head inside the house (a small tip: wait outside for a few seconds until all enemies get outside, this way you won’t get trapped on the door) then immediately turn right to get out and onto the blood river. Here, I recommend using a Blue Elixir to become invisible and get through the Bloodlickers with more safety. Go forward and below the bridge and then immediately turn right to go up the stairs and into the building to unlock a shortcut near Simon. This shortcut will make your life much easier, so now you can actually go grab the materials. From the lamp, go back through the shortcut door and head all the way back through the blood river until you find a cave. At the entrance there will be a Wandering Nightmare, so kill it for some Blood Stone Chunks. Pull your Hunter’s Torch out and go inside the cave, immediately sprinting to avoid the Gatling Gun shots from the Djura’s Disciple inside. Near Blood-Starved Beast you’ll find another Blood Stone Chunk and some other items. Then, continue exploring the cave and you’ll find another Blood Stone Chunk near a ramp and Beast Patients. Now you can either suicide or use a Hunter’s Mark to go back to the lamp. From the lamp, go through the shortcut door again and onto the blood river, but this time you’ll progress forward. When you reach the area with an Old Hunter and a few dogs and crows, I recommend using another Blue Elixir and throwing out a Pungent Blood Cocktail to distract the dogs. Then just sprint straight through them all and go up the ladder, as the Old Hunter likely won’t have enough time to kill you since you used the Blue Elixir. After you get up the ladder, run as fast as possible through the blood river to avoid cannon shots from the Nightmare Executioners and head to the right to light a new lamp. From this lamp, head down the stairs and kill the Wandering Nightmare for a few Blood Stone Chunks. Head back to the Hunter’s Dream, upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +9 and warp back to Forbidden Woods… time for Shadows of Yharnam. Forbidden Woods: Second Visit and Shadows of Yharnam’s Death Objective: Kill Shadows of Yharnam From the lamp, head down the elevator shortcut and follow the lanterns’ main path until you get to the river. Get through the Maneater Boar and head left (opposite to the path where you got your rune). It’s time for Shadows of Yharnam, good luck getting ganked. Shadows of Yharnam Katana Shadow Health: 3645HP Weakness: Bolt Candle Shadow Health: 2302HP Weakness: Bolt Fireball Shadow Health: 2046HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdpkmJnk3MQ Shadows of Yharnam is a chaotic fight with a lot going on, so I’ll try to breakdown everything you should be aware of and give you a general idea of what the main strategy is going to be.

First off, it’s important to understand how different phases work. First phase is the normal fight and what you’ll be facing for the majority of it. Second phase begins when they all stagger almost at the same time and start transforming themselves, getting new attacks and a slightly different look. Second phase only starts if one of the Shadows of Yharnam drops below 30% HP, or if all of them drop below 50% HP. With that information, the best way to fight them is to focus two Shadows (Katana and Fireball) until their HP is near the 30% threshold, and then kill Katana Shadow while they’re transforming into phase 2. The reason why we kill Katana Shadow first is because it’s the most aggressive enemy and it has the highest HP, so killing it makes the fight easier, safer and faster. After killing Katana Shadow, it’s time to kill Fireball Shadow; and the reasoning behind that one is because it has the lowest HP out of the three, which means it’ll go down within a few hits, leaving you on a 1v1 with Candle Shadow. Now that the core strategy of the fight is laid out, I’ll go into a few particular tips. Start the fight with a Bolt Paper because, as you can see above, Katana Shadow is weaker to bolt than fire. During first phase, you’ll want to separate them as much as possible, avoiding direct contact with Fireball Shadow and hitting Katana Shadow only when it’s within a safe distance from Candle Shadow. There are a lot of tombstones (including a giant one) in the arena, so use those to your advantage to separate them all and block fireballs when needed. Another important note is that your attacks will stagger them every single time, as they have no hyper-armor attacks. This means if you’re going to get hit and don’t have time to roll, you can try to hit them in order to stop their combo. The best way to get a lot of damage onto Katana Shadow is to parry him and hit him with the R1L1 combo (if you have a safe opening to do so), but just hitting it with R1L1 or R1R1 and running away is fine too if you want to be extra safe. What I usually do to make this fight easier and faster goes as follows: (1) separate the Shadows of Yharnam, (2) Katana Shadow will get to you faster, with Candle Shadow right behind, (3) R1L1 or R1R1 Katana Shadow, (4) run to the other side of the arena, avoiding Candle Shadow’s attacks and (5) on your way, hit Fireball Shadow once, twice or as many times as you think it’s safe. Repeat these steps until they’re both close to 30% HP, then use a Beast Blood Pellet and another Bolt Paper (if needed) and R1L1L1L1 Katana Shadow to death while it’s transforming to phase 2. If the combo isn’t enough to finish it, just stick close to it and spam R1 until it dies as it should be pretty low by then. Now that Katana Shadow is dead and second phase has started, your strategy will be to separate Candle Shadow from Fireball Shadow so you can safely kill it. Usually running to the other side of the arena will be enough to separate them, as Candle Shadow will follow you but Fireball Shadow will not, so you can then run back to it and hit it a few times and repeat the process until it dies. Once Fireball Shadow is dead, you want to kill Candle Shadow as fast as possible because phase 3 will start and he will gain a new attack where it can summon a giant snake to hit you but, thankfully, there’s an AI loop to kill Candle Shadow very easily and safely. Get close to Candle Shadow (wait for an opening if you’re afraid of getting too close), lock onto him and hit it, which will make him sidestep. When he finishes the sidestep, hit him again, and he will sidestep again. Just keep hitting and he will keep sidestepping, and will never attack you. Repeat this whole process until it dies and you’ll have beaten one of the most stressful fights in the game. Congratulations! Light their lamp and head through the woods to find yet another lamp. Be careful with the Garden of Eyes (stupid fly looking enemy) on your way! Light the lamp and welcome to Byrgenwerth. Byrgenwerth Important Item: Lunarium Key Optional Item: Eye Rune (2) Objective: Kill Rom, the Vacuous Spider Byrgenwerth is a fairly small area, but there are a few strategies to be discussed here in order to traverse through it safely. The first thing you want to do is, from the lamp, head through the gate to the left of the building and make your way over to the other side of the building, where you’ll find a closed gate. Pull the lever to open it up, as it’s a pretty good shortcut that avoids pretty much every enemy in the area. After opening this shortcut, reset the area by either dying or using a Bold Hunter’s Mark. Now, from the lamp, go through the shortcut and into the building. Inside this building there is a Hunter NPC called Yurie, the Last Scholar. To avoid Yurie completely, you’ll want to go halfway up the stairs and then back down and hide behind them. By going to the middle of the stairs, you will trigger Yurie to start walking but without noticing you. While you hide behind the stairs, Yurie will go all the way down and notice there’s no one there, which will make her go back up and face the wall with her back turned to the stairs. What this means is that you’re now safe to progress through the area without being noticed, so go up the stairs (never sprint, only move normally) and to the left. You’ll find a ladder, so go up and grab the Lunarium Key which will allow you to open the door next to the stairs. Go back down the ladder, open the door and you’ll see Master Willem sitting on a rocking chair. Interact with him for some free Insight and, if you wish, kill him for an Eye Rune (2) (which can be good if you need to farm for Blood Vials or Quicksilver Bullets). Now, you’re free to drop down to Moonside Lake and fight Rom, the Vacuous Spider. Rom, the Vacuous Spider Health: 4235HP Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdEqks9P2Dc There are two main strategies for Rom, the Vacuous Spider: the one cycle (where you kill her before she can teleport, usually done in speedruns and no hit runs) and the regular fight (where you fight all three phases properly, which is a little bit harder but more consistent than the one cycle). For the purpose of this guide being really complete, I’ll explain both strategies thoroughly so you can choose whichever is your preferred method. Rom’s One Cycle Strategy Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9sYqcEvYz0 If this is your first time getting to the fight, the spiders will only spawn once you hit Rom. The safest way to make them spawn is to shoot Rom from far away, so none of the spiders will fall onto your head and damage you. For the one cycle strategy this HAS to be the way to start the fight, because you don’t want to ever hit Rom before the spiders are all dead. To get the one cycle strategy down, you’ll first need to kill all spiders. The safest way to take them all out is to rotate Rom either clockwise or counter-clockwise and always kill the one that is further away from the others - and remember to always hit its body because it takes a lot more damage than the head. This might take a while, but it’s the safest and most consistent way to take them all out; if you get really good at doing this and understand their AI better, you can start experimenting with different ways to kill them even faster during openings or when you notice the others aren’t targeting you. After you take all the spiders down, you’ll want to unequip your Saw Cleaver by pressing right on the d-pad (don’t unequip it from the menu, it’ll be way slower and unnecessary). Use a Beast Blood Pellet and start doing R2 punches to Rom’s head (because she doesn’t take any real damage to the head) with your fists to charge your beasthood meter. Once the beasthood meter is full, equip your Saw Cleaver again by pressing right on the d-pad and follow these instructions: Hit Rom twice with R1, and she will stagger; Hit her with another R1 and use a Bolt Paper while waiting for your stamina to regenerate; Your next hit will make her start channeling the teleport, so you’ll do the following combo: R1R1R1 and a fully charged R2; Be careful not to hit her head with the fully charged R2, or the strategy will not work. Following these steps will always stagger her out of the teleport. Using the Bolt Paper only after doing 3 R1 attacks is important because if you use it early, you’ll deal too much damage and Rom will teleport earlier, which makes this strategy impossible. I tested it extensively and managed to get it several times in a row, so if you follow these steps perfectly with the setup we have by this point in the run (Saw Cleaver +9 with Tempering Blood Gemstone (2), Tempering Blood Gemstone (3) and Red Blood Gem), you’ll be able to stagger her every single time. After getting the stagger, one of two things will happen: she will either (1) backstep, giving you enough time to recharge your stamina and kill her by spamming R1 without her ever managing to teleport or (2) start teleporting, which you’ll punish by spamming R1 but won’t actually manage to kill her. If the latter happens and she does teleport, though, not everything is lost. She will be very low, so you can rush up to her and spam R1 until she dies while ignoring all spiders. This is not as safe or as consistent, but it gets the job done. Good luck! Rom’s Regular Fight Strategy Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5aUwdbIV0Y Unlike the one cycle strategy, in Rom’s regular fight you’ll actually have to learn all phases and how to deal with her new attacks. This is also going to be a long fight, so be patient! In phase one, Rom has no attacks at all, so you don’t need to pay any attention to her while clearing out the spiders. Just like I mentioned in the one cycle strategy video, the best way to deal with the spiders is to just circle Rom clockwise or counter-clockwise and kill whichever spider is the further away from the rest. A good to approach these spiders is to always run towards them diagonally, as to avoid any attacks they might come up with. And a bonus yet important tip is to never stand directly behind or in front of the spiders, as they have some attacks that can come out pretty much instantly and kill you. After you kill all the spiders, you can use a Bolt Paper if you’d like and just hit Rom until she teleports away. Be careful not to get her too low, or she will teleport directly to her third location and you’ll have to deal with a lot more spiders than usual. Once Rom teleports once, second phase starts. In this phase, Rom starts attacking you, so you’ll need to always have your camera on her and pay attention to how she is telegraphing the next attack. There’s only three attacks, and here’s how to recognize each: If Rom stands up with her head aimed at the sky, she’s going to summon a sequence of meteors that will fall from the sky and track you down. To dodge this attack, simply run in any direction and everything will miss - but be careful not to run into any spiders. If Rom arches her back in a “U” position with both her tail and head up, she’s going to do an AoE explosion. To dodge this one, simply run away from her as you would for any other AoE attack. If Rom rolls and lays with her belly up, she’s going to summon meteors that will rise from the ground in a circular area around her. Similarly to the AoE explosion, just run away to dodge this attack.

Now that you know all of her possible attacks, all you’ll need to do is to keep an eye for whatever she’s doing and kill all the spiders while Rom tries to somehow hit you. Be extra careful because Rom can cancel an animation into another attack pretty much instantly, so be aware of what she’s doing even when dodging an attack. It’s really important to manage your stamina in a way that you’ll always have enough to outrun her attacks. Once all spiders are dead, simply walk up to Rom, use another Bolt Paper and hit her until she teleports again. Once Rom teleports twice, third phase starts. You should try to immediately find her because she can start doing an attack as soon as she teleports. This phase is really similar to second phase, the only difference is that now Rom will do melee attacks and flop around when you get near her, so you should always be careful and only get close if there’s an opening. Kill all the spiders while being careful with all that you learned in phase 2 and, once it’s just you and Rom, use a Bolt Paper and get close to finish her off. My recommendation for this last part is to always wait for Rom to flop around before going in for a hit, and to always only do 1 or 2 hits to avoid being caught by her next attack and to save some stamina in case you have to run away. Once Rom is dead, run up to Queen Yharnam and you’ll get teleported to Yahar’gul, Unseen Village. Go through the door, run past the enemies and light the first lamp. Welcome to one of the hardest areas in the base game! Yahar’gul, Unseen Village: First Visit and Gathering Materials Important Items: 8x Blood Stone Chunks Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5) Upper Cathedral Key Objectives: Upgrade your Hunter Pistol to +8 Unlock all shortcuts From the lamp, walk up to the ledge near the corpse sitting on a chair and drop down, you’ll find a Blood Stone Chunk behind the deformed statue. After getting the Chunk, run down the stairs full of enemies and go through the building while avoiding rifle shots. When you’re out of there, enter the next building through the hole on the wall and progress through the corridor, then open the door near the Brick Troll that will spawn from the ground. Head to the left to get out of there and then up the stair steps right in front of the exit. In this area, there will be a few of those Hemwick enemies and they can easily overwhelm you, so try to keep yourself always moving. Once you’re up those steps, go down the next stairs to your right and turn left and backwards to get another Blood Stone Chunk from a corpse on the ground. After getting this Chunk, go back near the stairs you just came from and you’ll notice the handrail is broken, so drop down that ledge and head into the door, then drop down another ledge into the cell to grab the Upper Cathedral Ward Key. When you get the key, just head out of the cell and backtrack to where you were before dropping down (in the area with Hemwick enemies). I highly recommend using a Blue Elixir here to be extra safe, and then run down the staircase while an Amygdala shoots lasers at you - it shoots it in a zig-zag motion, so I usually dodge it by standing still and waiting for the ground to explode before running all the way down. Once you’re down there, light the next lamp for a very useful checkpoint. From this new lamp, right outside you’ll see a Wandering Nightmare - kill it for a few Blood Stone Chunks. Keep progressing through the area until you get to a very familiar area; remember the lamp from when you visited Hypogean Gaol? Yeah, you’re in that place now but the lamp is broken and unusable… this is still good, though, because you recognize this place and it’ll be easier to navigate through it. From the broken lamp, go all the way down to the jail cells where you first spawned in when you got to Hypogean Gaol, then go down to the basement where Adella was located. Instead of finding Adella, you’ll see a Snatcher’s corpse holding a few Blood Stone Chunks. So, from there, go back up the spiral stairs and head into the room that leads to Darkbeast Paarl’s arena. Near the room where there previously was a table and two Snatchers gathered around it, you’ll find another Snatcher’s corpse holding more Blood Stone Chunks. Once you got those Chunks, go back to the main room of the building where you’ll find three Hunter enemies and just run all the way across the room while avoiding them. Get out of the building, head to the left and up the stairs, then continue going forward until you find an open door. Inside this room, you’ll find an elevator that leads you to the first lamp of the area, so you just got a great shortcut. When you go back down through the elevator, you’ll notice there’s a broken wall that leads to a rooftop. Jump off the elevator and onto the rooftop, then go into the room with the teleporting bath. Examine the bath to teleport to another location, where you’ll head out the door to your left and down the stairs. You’ll find a Werewolf there, but you can slow walk behind it to avoid aggro. Head into the room to the left right after the stairs and keep going down until you find another Werewolf. Right behind him, you’ll find a Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5). Grab that and use a Hunter’s Mark or die to get back to the lamp, then you’ll warp back to the Hunter’s Dream. In the Hunter’s Dream, you’ll upgrade your Hunter’s Pistol to +8 and switch your Saw Cleaver’s Tempering Blood Gemstone (2) for the Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5) you just got. An optional thing you might want to do for the next area we’re going to visit is to switch your Red Blood Gem for the Fire Blood Gemstone (3) that I recommended back when we visited Cathedral Ward for the second time and went down the Old Workshop tower. If you didn’t grab that gem, a few Molotovs and a Hunter’s Torch +6 will be enough. Warp to Cathedral Ward and go all the way up the Old Workshop tower, and now you’ll be able to open the door on the last floor. Welcome to Upper Cathedral Ward! Upper Cathedral Ward Important Items: 2x Blue Elixir Great Lake Rune (2) Cosmic Eye Watcher Badge 2x Blood Stone Chunks Orphanage Key Objectives: Get Cosmic Eye Watcher Badge to be able to buy Beast Blood Pellets from Insight Shop Unlock all shortcuts Right at the start of Upper Cathedral Ward, you’ll find a Blue Elixir next to a big gate, near the bridge that leads to the lamp. Grab that and head to the lamp to light it up. From the lamp, go up the stairs and head all the way to the right where you’ll find a Great Lake Rune (2), which can be useful for any bosses you’re struggling with if you switch the stamina rune for it (though, personally, I’d still recommend sticking to the stamina rune). Now head back and go all the way to the left and up the stairs, get past the Scythe Church Servant and go to the main room with the big candelabrum. In this room, you’ll eventually need to clear both sides, so I’ll recommend going to the left first because that’s where most items and the door key are. Pull out your Hunter’s Torch and go down the staircase, then the candelabrum will fall down and the room will become completely dark and filled with Werewolves. Head to the back left of the room (near the staircase) and go through the pathway that leads to a corridor. At the end of this corridor, you’ll find a Wandering Nightmare; throw a Molotov to kill it - be careful because it’s close to a door and right behind that door is a Brainsucker waiting to surprise you. Avoid him and kill it with fire (Molotovs, Fire Papers, the Saw Cleaver equipped with the Fire Blood Gem (3) or Hunter’s Torch are all really effective) because that’s its main weakness. Grab the Blood Stone Chunks from the Wandering Nightmare’s body and head up the ladder. Right after you go up the ladder, you’ll notice a corridor full of items and another Brainsucker. Grab all those items (the most important one will be the Blue Elixir) and kill the Brainsucker - behind him, you’ll find a closed door that you can open and get a good shortcut in case you die. Head back to the ladder and go out the door next to it, and you’ll find yourself in a balcony with two Brainsuckers. The one further away and next to the small door will be holding the Orphanage Key, so kill it to grab that one. In order to do this safely, just kill both of them separately and grab the Orphanage Key. Bonus tip: if you ever get grabbed by a Brainsucker, immediately quit out the game through the menu and reload it, as that will reset their spawn point and release you from the grab. Once you have the Orphanage Key, you can go back to the main room (with the fallen candelabrum) but this time you’ll head to the back right of that area and you’ll go through the pathway that’ll lead you to another big corridor. In this corridor you’ll find a Brainsucker and an item on the ground, behind a pillar. Avoid his attacks and grab the item, which will be a Cosmic Eye Watcher Badge, and it’ll allow you to buy Beast Blood Pellets and Blue Elixirs from the Insight shop. If you die to that Brainsucker, it doesn’t matter as long as you got the badge. Now you can just go all the way to the other end of the candelabrum room and open the main door with the Orphanage Key, and then unlock the gate shortcut. We’ll use this shortcut later, but for now, it’s time to get back to the Hunter’s Dream. In the Hunter’s Dream, you’ll want to restock on Beast Blood Pellets (buy enough to get to 10, any excess will go to your storage box) and change your Fire Blood Gem (3) back to the Red Blood Gem. You might also want to restock on any papers you might be missing. Bolt Papers are recommended for the next boss fight. Once you’re done in the Hunter’s Dream, you can warp to the Yahar’gul, Unseen Village lamp. Yahar’gul, Unseen Village: Second Visit and The One Reborn’s Death Objective: Kill The One Reborn From the lamp, you’ll want to head to the elevator shortcut and jump off onto the rooftop on your way down. You’re going to be using the teleporting bath once again. Once you’ve teleported, you’ll want to go straight ahead and drop down the ledge near the Bell Ringer. From there, just run straight to the big gate and you’ll get to One Reborn.

The One Reborn Health: 10375HP Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj4Cu2kQ40M Unlike most other bosses, there’s no such thing as “different strategies” for One Reborn. You either know how to fight him properly, or you don’t know the fight. So, here’s the proper step-by-step guide on how to easily finish him off! The first thing you’ll do once you enter the fight is to head to the back left of the arena and head up the stairs to get to the Bell Ringers on the balcony. There are six Bell Ringers and you can kill each of them with an R1L1 combo. The way that most runners prefer to do this (no hit runners, especially) is to ignore the first Bell Ringer and come back to it later; so the order would be: (1) ignore the first Bell Ringer, (2) kill the second one right at the middle of the balcony, (3) kill the third one and go through the bridge to head to the other balcony, (4) kill all three Bell Ringers in this balcony in the order you get to them, (5) head back through the bridge to the first balcony, (6) go all the way to the Bell Ringer you ignored and kill her. Doing this makes it a little safer to dodge One Reborn’s projectiles, but you should still be wary of those. Always keep an eye out for whatever One Reborn is doing, as it can still hit you when you’re up in those balconies. Once you finish off the last Bell Ringer, head down the stairs and use a Beast Blood Pellet and a Bolt Paper. One Reborn will always do an AoE explosion while you’re walking down the stairs, so it’s a good time to buff up. Once he does the AoE attack, you can get straight to the limb right beneath its head and start hitting it with R1L1L1 until it staggers. Once One Reborn is staggered for the first time, the fight is over. Similarly to Darkbeast Paarl, you’ll want to circle it clockwise while breaking all of its main limbs [front right, back right, “tail”, back left, right left and “head” (or, rather, its actual body)]. A simple R1L1L1 combo will be enough to break each of its limbs and keep it eternally staggered. Once you rotate all the way and get to its head/main body, just spam R1 until it dies. Congrats, you just killed one of the easiest and most uninteractive bosses in the game! Light its lamp and go interact with the body sitting on a chair to get warped to Lecture Building’s Second Floor. Lecture Building, Second Floor Important Item: Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune(2) Objectives: Finish Patches’ questline Get to Nightmare of Mensis The Second Floor of the Lecture Building is going to be a very quick visit. From the lamp, simply go all the way to the other end of the area and you’ll see a Church Giant to the right. Behind him, there’s a hole you’ll want to drop into where you’ll find Patches inside of a small room. Interact with Patches and he will beg for his life. If you pardon him, he will start appearing in Chalice Dungeons as a vendor which can be rather useful and he will give you an Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2), which you’ll be using until you finish the run. If you don’t pardon him, he will just give you the rune but won’t help you in Chalice Dungeons as a vendor. Your choice really doesn’t matter much, so it just boils down to personal preference and if you hate Patches or not. Once you’re done with him, open the big door at the end of the hall to get teleported to Nightmare of Mensis. Nightmare of Mensis, First Half Important Items: 6x Blood Stone Chunks 6x Shaman Bone Blade 2x Blue Elixir Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5) Objectives: Upgrade your Hunter Pistol to +9 Kill Micolash, Host of the Nightmare From the cavern where you spawn in, progress through the area until you find the first Loran Silverbeast near a tree. Here, you’ll have two choices: you can either slow-walk up to him and backstab him for a free kill (be careful with the Parasite Larvae that will come out of its body afterwards) or throw a Pungent Blood Cocktail to distract it and just run past it. Either way, after getting rid of that Loran Silverbeast, you’ll see a Wandering Nightmare - kill it for some Blood Stone Chunks and then light the lamp right ahead of it. After lighting the lamp, you’ll now have to deal with the hardest part of this area. There are three Loran Silverbeasts here, one right after the other. Again, you’ll have two choices: run like hell and pray they won’t get you or use two or three Pungent Blood Cocktails to distract them while you run away safely. I highly recommend the latter, so go spend some Blood Echoes or Insight on Pungent Blood Cocktails if you don’t have any with you. After getting through these three Loran Silverbeasts, you’ll go up a small hill while some Giant Lost Children throw rocks at you. You’ll notice while going up that there’s small areas to your left where there’s a Giant Lost Child standing on it - you’ll find two entrances, one after the other and each holding one Giant Lost Child. If you go into the second entrance, you’ll find a Blood Stone Chunk behind the Giant Lost Child there. After getting that Chunk, just sprint straight to the giant door but instead of opening it, go to the left and grab another Blood Stone Chunk behind a pillar. Now you’re free to go and open the door to enter the building. Inside this building you’ll find a ton of spiders, including a giant one. Just take the stairs to your right and avoid all of them and, at the other end of the room, you’ll get a bunch of Shaman Bone Blades which can be useful for bosses like Celestial Emissary and Living Failures. Get the Shaman Bone Blades and head out of the building, and you’ll find yourself on a bridge. In front of you, there will be a Hunter enemy and, to avoid him, you just need to run diagonally to the right and you’ll get past him without any trouble. You may want to wait a few seconds when you get on the bridge because after the Hunter enemy, a Mergo’s Attendant will be walking towards the door and, if you go too fast, he might end up blocking your exit - so just wait for a few seconds and he’ll already be away from the door by the time you get there. When you get past the bridge and into the new building, go down the stairs to the left and keep running towards the left side and you’ll see a broken mirror board that you can get behind, then run through the balcony to grab a few Blue Elixirs. You can also grab the elevator shortcut to the lamp from this building, but it’s not really necessary unless if you’re really afraid of dying here. After getting the Blue Elixirs, use one and go through the rest of this area while avoiding the enemies and holes (Hunter’s Torch is recommended here) until you get to the elevator. Enter the elevator from behind to avoid the enemy in front of it and, once inside, stay behind its small cage wall to avoid getting shot by the crossbow enemy in front of you. From the elevator, avoid the dog-crows and crow-dogs and just go straight to the elevator shortcut just to be extra safe and not need to redo this entire area again. Light the lamp and go back up. Near the stairs you came up from, there will be a cage with an item in it. Run into the cage (no need to jump or roll, just run into it) and grab the Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5) which will be useful against Micolash. Go back up the stairs and head to the side area to the left with a few dogs and you’ll find another Blood Stone Chunk. After getting that Chunk, just head back to the lamp and warp to Hunter’s Dream. In the Hunter’s Dream, you’ll upgrade your Hunter’s Pistol to +9 and switch your Tempering Blood Gemstone (3) for your new Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5). Also, you’ll want to finally switch out your Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (1) for the Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2) that you got from Patches. At first, you might think I’m crazy for recommending you a rune that only increases your stamina by 4 points, but those 4 points are almost exactly what you needed to be able to do three charged R2s in a row, which will be useful for bosses like Orphan of Kos. Buy some Beast Blood Pellets and papers if you’re missing those and head back to Nightmare of Mensis - time to fight Micolash, Host of the Nightmare. Micolash, Host of the Nightmare Health: 5250HP Weakness: Fire (fun fact: his fire resistance is literally one point lower than his bolt resistance) Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYvUqLI9GYU Micolash is not an exceptionally hard boss - in fact, he’s pretty simple. However, it gives a lot of trouble to people who might not completely understand how the fight works, so let’s try to break it down a little in order to understand what is really going on in this fight. This fight starts off with a chase; you’ll need to lure Micolash into a small room to be able to actually fight him. The way this part works is that Micolash will always run directly away from you (except for a few rare cases where he’ll turn back and run into you or something similar). Think of the arena like a football field (a rectangle) with six main corners - back right (where you start), back left, mid left (where Micolash starts), top left, top right and mid right (where the door to the room is). Micolash will always run from one corner to the next one. Also, there will be puppets around the arena trying to attack you while you chase Micolash, but you can just ignore them. With this in mind, from the fog door you’ll want to chase him down until he stops in front of the door of the room that you want to lead him into. Once he’s in front of the door, never come at him from the side. You want to come from the middle corridor, in a way that he’s between you and the door which will force him to run into the room. Enter the room right after him and buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and a Fire Paper. In this room there will be two puppets alongside Micolash, so lure them away from him and kill them before engaging; a simple R1L1L1 will do the trick.

Once the puppets are dead, you can go for Micolash. He only has one attack in this phase, which is the Augur of Ebrietas. That attack won’t oneshot you with the runes you’re using, but it’s also really easy to avoid by just walking around him to the left or to the right, either will do the trick. First phase will basically just consist of dodging the Augur of Ebrietas and doing an R1L1 combo, then backing out. If he’s close to a wall, you can R1L1L1L1 until your stamina runs out as he won’t be able to dodge it, then back out once your stamina ends. That’s it for the first phase. Once Micolash is below 50%HP, he will teleport to another location and you’ll have to find him once again. Just keep climbing up the building while avoiding the enemies and you’ll eventually find him on top of some stairs and near a door. From here, you’ll want to lead him either into the room he’s next to or into the mirror that’s inside the room ahead of him - either will lead him to the same place. He will now be right below the balcony of the room to the left and if you drop down, he will run into another room where a gate will close behind him. To get into this room, simply climb all the way to the top (to the room with the mirror he runs into sometimes) and to the right you’ll see a room with a hole to drop into (bonus commentary: there’s a Blood Stone Chunk next to this room in case you missed any earlier). Buff yourself up with a Fire Paper and Beast Blood Pellet and drop into the hole while doing a plunging attack. Sometimes it hits Micolash and pancakes him into the ground and sometimes he dodges it - either way, right after dropping in you’ll want to stick as close to him as possible because in this phase he has a few new attacks. On top of the Augur of Ebrietas, Micolash can now cast A Call Beyond which will instantly kill you if you get hit and he suddenly became a karate master, so he will try to punch you around (fortunately it doesn’t deal too much damage in case you get hit). The basic strategy for this second phase is to stick close to him, R1L1 whenever there’s an opening and move a little away to avoid getting hit by his punches or the Augur. You can also roll through these attacks easily. In case he somehow gets enough distance and time to cast A Call Beyond, there’s two things you can do: (1) if you read the attack early enough, you can shoot him to stop him from casting or (2) if he does cast it, you can dodge by quickstepping twice forward as soon as it’s about to hit you. Do NOT try to quickstep away from it, because you WILL get caught and die. Other than this, just stick close to Micolash and R1L1 whenever there’s an opening. Similarly to the first phase, if he’s close to a wall you can just spam R1L1L1 until your stamina ends because there’s nothing he can do in that scenario. Just keep at it and you’ll kill him in no time! After killing Micolash, a cutscene will play and a bridge will come up giving you access to the next area. Go back to the top floor of the area and cross the bridge to light the lamp, then go back to the Hunter’s Dream. From the Hunter’s Dream, warp back to 1st Floor Sickroom lamp to clean up some unfinished business in Iosefka’s Clinic. Iosefka’s Clinic Important Item: Third Umbilical Cord Objective: Kill Impostor Iosefka From the 1st Floor Sickroom lamp, just head back through the door you unlocked when you first visited Iosefka’s Clinic and head to the upper floor of the area where you’ll find Impostor Iosefka lying on a bed, going insane. Finish her off and you’ll get an One Third of Umbilical Cord, which will be important to unlock the true final boss of this run. By now, you should have two of these (one from the Old Workshop and the one you just got) and you need three to unlock Moon Presence’s fight. Fortunately, the last one drops from the next boss we’re going to fight in this run, so warp back to Hunter’s Dream and then go back to Nightmare of Mensis on the Mergo’s Loft: Middle lamp (post-Micolash). Nightmare of Mensis, Second Half Important Items: Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5) Damp Bloodtinge Gem (5) Nourishing Damp Blood Gem (4) Blood Rock Third Umbilical Cord Objectives: Upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +10 Kill Mergo's Wet Nurse The second half of Nightmare of Mensis is the last area of base game and, thankfully, the last time we’re going to need to grab some really important items. From the lamp, you’ll want to go and grab the broken elevator near the ledge after the stairs. Instead of going all the way down, you’ll drop into an open window halfway through by rolling into it and then go through the bridge full of Winter Lanterns. On this bridge, you’ll find a Tempering Damp Blood Gem (5) near a Winter Lantern in the latter half of the bridge. After getting this gem, continue progressing through (bring Sedatives if you need) until you find a lever. Pull the lever to trigger a cutscene, then drop down the hole on a room near the lever. Go out through the door and you’ll find an area full of items laying on the ground, grab them all and before you drop down the ledge to get the Blood Rock, keep moving forward and go down a few stairs and turn around so you’ll find a Damp Bloodtinge Gem (5) for your Hunter’s Pistol. Go back, drop down the ledge in the middle of the area (be careful not to fall down the big hole) and grab the Blood Rock, then use a Hunter’s Mark to go back to the lamp. Before going back to the Hunter’s Dream once again, you’ll want to progress towards Mergo’s Wet Nurse arena now. Avoid the Shadows and, after the first Maneater Boar, you’ll find a Nourishing Damp Blood Gem (4) to your left, near a tree. After getting this gem, you can go straight to the area where you find Queen Yharnam and unlock the elevator shortcut near her - if getting to this shortcut is being a little too hard for you, you can use a Blue Elixir to easily avoid all the Maneater Boars and Shadows. Go back to the lamp and warp back to Hunter’s Dream. In the Hunter’s Dream, you’re going to upgrade your Saw Cleaver to +10 and equip the gems you just got. Also, switch your current Hunter’s Pistol gem for the Damp Bloodtinge Gem (5) you just got. Your final Saw Cleaver gem setup will be 15%/18%/18%, giving you 121 bonus attack for a total of 301AR without any buffs. Now, from my extensive experience with BL4 runs, this is the perfect amount of damage to deal with all late game bosses as it isn’t too low and it also isn’t too high, giving you the perfect amount to experience a nice challenge... so I really suggest you to stick with these until the end. If you feel this is too low and you absolutely need more damage to deal with bosses, go take a look at the first page of this guide for a brief explanation of where and how to farm for good gems without going through Chalice Dungeons. Once you’ve got your whole setup ready to go, warp back to Mergo’s Loft: Middle lamp in the Nightmare of Mensis and go straight to Mergo’s Wet Nurse with the shortcut you just unlocked. Mergo’s Wet Nurse Health: 14081HP Weakness: Fire and Bolt (Wet Nurse has the same resistance to both) Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AEuZnMzmjc Note: This video is a few minutes longer than it should be because I was waiting for Wet Nurse to do the Shadow Realm attack one more time so I could showcase both how to avoid it completely and how to deal with it if you get caught in the same video. Mergo’s Wet Nurse, just like some of the previous bosses, isn’t too complex. She only has a few attacks and one very interesting mechanic, so let’s get right into the fight. First off, you’ll want a Beast Blood Pellet and Bolt or Fire Paper active at all times because she has quite a bit of HP and these will help to speed up the entire thing. Unlike most other bosses, Wet Nurse doesn’t really have a second phase. At some point in the fight (usually when she falls a little below 70%HP), she will start doing an attack that will teleport you to what we usually call the Shadow Realm or Nightmare Realm (in the game’s code it’s called Nightmare Veil, but we don’t talk about that here), but that’s the only change during the fight and it can barely be called a different phase… we’ll get back to it later, though. Her attacks are very slow and telegraphed, and you dodge them all pretty much the same way. In a way, Wet Nurse is really similar to Blood-Starved Beast. If you always keep close and dodge/run to the left, she will always miss you. The best way to punish Wet Nurse is to stay behind her and R1L1, and an optimal fight would usually look like this: (1) dodge her attack and get behind, (2) punish her with R1L1, (3) she hops away and you follow her, preparing to dodge to the left and (4) repeat all of the previous steps. Another important note is that, in order to dodge the 360º uppercut slash that she does, you’ll need to circle her body clockwise really quickly instead of just running towards the left like all other attacks. And another exception is the lawn mower attack - in this specific case, you’ll want to go a little further back and position yourself perfectly behind her and then follow her around while hitting her back. If you do this correctly, you’ll never get hit by it and you’ll have quite a nice damage opening. If you don’t feel comfortable enough to do this, just run away and come back when she finishes the attack - but know that this will make the fight a lot longer than it needs to. Other than those general tips, we should get into one of the most important mechanics in the fight: the Nightmare Realm. In this attack, Wet Nurse will put her hands up and summon some sort of black magic ball that works as an AoE attack. There are two ways to deal with this: you can dodge it (yes, it is dodgeable!) or if you get caught, you can go to the border of the arena and run around clockwise until you’re out of the Nightmare Realm. If you simply run around clockwise, none of the attacks will hit you; the hardest part of doing this is managing your stamina so it never runs out but my recommendation is to just stop sprinting for a second or two after dodging an attack for your stamina to recover properly, then start sprinting again. So that’s how to deal with it if you get caught, but if you want to dodge it and never enter the Nightmare Realm, all you’ll need to do is to lock onto her as soon as you see her doing the attack and then dodge twice to the left or to the right as soon as you see the black magic ball. Just apply all of these tips to your fight and you’ll kill her very quickly! Once you’re done with Mergo’s Wet Nurse, it’s time to head back to the Hunter’s Dream and stock up on consumables because now we will warp back to Central Yharnam and head straight to the Cleric Beast through the shortcut we opened at the start of the run, and then we’ll begin our little boss rush section to clean up optional bosses! Cleaning up Base Game Objectives: Kill Cleric Beast Kill Amygdala Kill Martyr Logarius Kill Celestial Emissary Kill Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos

Cleric Beast Health: 3015HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inUPwhTjiR8 Cleric Beast can be quite a challenging boss if you fight him at the start of the game with a Saw Cleaver +0, but there’s no reason to do so and that is why I routed this run in a way to fight him only after you kill Mergo’s Wet Nurse. If you kill Cleric Beast early, you’ll get a badge that lets you buy a key that unlocks the big gate in Cathedral Ward, which in return lets you skip Blood-Starved Beast; but this is not an optimal route because you get a lot of good resources from Old Yharnam and Old Workshop Tower, so you should never look to skip Blood-Starved Beast in a low level run - plus, you get to save the 10k Blood Echoes that otherwise you’d need to spend on the key. Anyway… about Cleric Beast? In this route it’ll be your punching bag to relieve stress. Simply walk up to it and spam R1 while focusing each limb to stagger it down for the entire duration of the fight. Even if you don’t want to break each limb, you can just randomly spam R1 and it’ll die in a few seconds. Have fun! After killing Cleric Beast, warp back to Hunter’s Dream and then warp to Nightmare Frontier where you’ll go directly to Amygdala using the elevator shortcut you’ve unlocked earlier into the run. Amygdala Health: 6404HP Weakness: Fire and Bolt (Amygdala has the same resistance to both) Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai-hJmx2fIM Upon entering Amygdala’s arena, buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and a Fire or Bolt Paper - and as a bonus tip, Bone Marrow Ashes will also be extremely useful in this fight as her head takes a ton of damage from buffed up shots, especially considering your Hunter’s Pistol is at +9 right now. She will walk up to you and your best bet will be to either wait for an attack and then run past her to get more space to fight her or just run straight forward and pray she doesn’t hit you when you get close (this latter method relies a little more on RNG than skill, so I wouldn’t do it - I prefer to bait an attack to safely run under her). Once you have more space to deal with Amygdala, your preferred way to approach the fight will be to stay at mid-distance. Just away enough for her arms to never hit you, but close enough to bait her attacks and punish. The basic gist for the first phase will be to bait out an opening and you’ll have two ways to punish: she will either do an attack that puts her head near the ground, which you can punish by running into her and attacking with an R1 or two, or she will do the laser or the acid pool attack, both of which you can punish by hitting her right front arms (the ones to your left). To reach her arms while she’s shooting the lasers, you’ll want to trick your Saw Cleaver and hit it with an R1 since it reaches higher up. At some point, you’ll end up breaking her head. Take that opportunity to perform a visceral attack. If you calculate it correctly, you can even do a fully charged R2 to her head as soon as she falls down and still get the visceral attack done. Once Amygdala is below 70%HP, she will go into second phase. There are no big difference in her moveset, except for the fact that now most of her attacks will have a small lingering AoE explosion attached to them, so be careful not to get it by it and even if you dodge it, don’t run into it immediately or you’ll get hit by the lingering hitbox. Other than that, her only new attack will be another variation of the acid pool where, instead of just dropping it into the ground, she will flop her head around and hit a much larger area - so this attack is not punishable anymore because you will get hit. With these changes in mind, just keep fighting her exactly as you did in the first phase. Same punishes, just need to be a little more careful. Once Amygdala is down below 30%HP, she will go into third phase by breaking her front arms and using them as weapons. Her attacks have a much larger range now, to the point that it’s almost undodgeable. Because of this reason, your strategy for this phase will be to stay under Amygdala (near her tail) and wait for her to jump up. If you’re under Amygdala’s tail and she jumps up, you won’t ever need to roll because she will never hit you, and this becomes quite a good opening for attacks. When she jumps up, she will do a complete 180º so move a little forward (towards where her tail was, not towards where her head was) and once she lands, you’ll be right below her head and able to hit her with one or two R1s. Repeat this step until she dies and you’ll be done with Amygdala. Once you’ve killed her, warp back to the Hunter’s Dream and then go to Forsaken Cainhurst Castle where you’ll head directly to Martyr Logarius with all the shortcuts you’ve unlocked earlier in the run. Martyr Logarius Health: 9081HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_bWi699hkU Martyr Logarius is a very interesting boss that can give a lot of trouble to newer players due to all the magic attacks he throws at you, but he’s easily manageable if you play this fight patiently. Upon entering the arena, you’ll want to approach Logarius by running through the side of the arena and using the pillars as a shield to his magic. Buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and a Fire Paper once you’re close, and go for him once there’s an opening. The best opening to engage him is when he casts a bunch of skulls - just dodge through them and punish Logarius. Once you’re close enough to hit him, you’ll start a bit of an AI loop on him. If you hit Logarius two or three times, he will always backstep and try to attack you, but his attack is pretty slow. So what you should look to do is to always follow him after the backstep and hit him two or three times again. It goes like this: (1) you hit Logarius with two or three R1s or an R1L1 combo, (2) he backsteps, (3) you follow him and (4) you hit him again with two or three R1s or an R1L1 combo, then repeat steps 2 to 4 until the start of the second phase. Once Martyr Logarius is a little below 70%HP, he will drive his scythe to the ground and start channeling an AoE explosion. It takes a few seconds for the explosion to come out, so you can attack him a few times before interrupting it with a backstab. So, what you’ll want to do is as soon as you see him putting his scythe on the ground, attack him with three or four R1s or do an R1L1L1 combo. After doing so, wait for your stamina to regenerate to a little over half the bar and then perform a backstab (fully charged R2 to his back and another fully charged R2 for double damage while he’s staggered) - this will stop his channeling but second phase will start regardless. During second phase, he loses his magic attacks and will focus a lot more on chasing you around and performing melee attacks with either his scythe (slower, easier to avoid attacks) or his sword (faster attacks, harder to predict). He will also sometimes fly up to the sky and plunge at you or straight up dive you, and these will be the main openings you’ll look for. You should approach this phase by playing with an unlocked camera and walking/running in and out of Logarius’ range to bait his attacks out. The last and most dangerous thing he can do in second phase that you should know of is that sometimes Logarius will drive his sword into the ground and it’ll start summoning a lot of flying swords that track you down. To avoid this, you’ll need to destroy the sword he drove into the ground and the best way to do so is to lock onto Martyr Logarius and then spam your right analog stick until it switches the lock-on to the sword, then shoot it with your Hunter’s Pistol. One shot is enough to destroy it and end that attack, and you should roll right after destroying it because sometimes a sword will still fly into you and deal some damage if you don’t dodge. Now that you know how to deal with his most dangerous attack, it’s important to talk about the openings. There are three main safe openings: He will fly directly up and plunge at you after a few seconds. To avoid and punish this attack, you’ll want to turn your camera up to look at him and roll as soon as he drops down, preferably towards his back side. If you dodge this correctly, you’ll be positioned perfectly to backstab him before he recovers from this attack. He will fly up and backwards, then dive at you after a few seconds. To avoid this one, you’ll want to roll to your right, right before he hits you. If you dodge this correctly, you’ll be positioned close to his back so you can either do a backstab or R1L1 if you feel like you don’t have enough time to charge your R2. He will try to hit you with his scythe, which is usually a three-hit-combo. You can parry any of these attacks for a free visceral or R1L1 opening, but the easiest attack to parry is definitely the third hit as you can position yourself quite well for it. If you prefer or feel comfortable, you can also dodge the third attack into Logarius instead of parrying it, and by doing so you’ll be near his backside and it’ll become a good opening to backstab him for a lot more damage than if you chose to parry him. These will be your main sources of damage in phase 2. It is also important to note that your gun deals decent damage to Logarius, so using Bone Marrow Ash a few times to speed up the fight isn’t a bad strategy either. Also, other than looking for these openings, you should always be running around the arena and away from Logarius in order to never get caught by his fast sword slashes. Apply all of these tips to your fight and you’ll eventually kill Martyr Logarius. After killing him, you can pick up the Crown of Illusions and go talk to Annalise to enter the Vileblood covenant and get a kinda decent rune, but it honestly doesn’t matter that much. Whatever choice you make, light up the lamp after you’re done and warp back to the Hunter’s Dream, restock on consumables and warp to Upper Cathedral Ward because now we’ll take on Celestial Emissary. Celestial Emissary Health: 2764HP Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EXR3oPwEpU Celestial Emissary is considered an extremely easy boss even by new players and, as you might have guessed, it isn’t much different in a BL4 run. Upon entering the arena, you’ll want to move towards the stairs near the area where they spawn; you’ll fight them on top of those stairs. Buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and a Bolt Paper and, as they come up to you, you’ll want to R1L1 and hit as many of them as possible in a single combo to build up your beasthood meter really fast. To recognize which of the aliens is the real boss, you can just lock onto them and if a health bar doesn’t show up on top of their head, that’s the real one. After killing everyone but the real boss, you’ll have your beasthood meter almost completely built up which means you have a huge damage buff. From now, all you need to do is to just spam R1 until they die as it’ll only take a few hits. If you want to completely avoid the second phase and its transformation, you can backstab Celestial Emissary while it crouches down to channel the transformation and interrupt it, then finish the fight off with more R1s. But yeah, that’s basically it… that’s really all that there is to Celestial Emissary. Just another boss to relieve your stress. Bonus note: another fun strategy (but rather unnecessary if you have decent damage) is to use a Shaman Bone Blade against the real boss and see all of the other aliens punch him down until it dies. It's really quite hilarious. After killing Celestial Emissary, light up the lamp and break the window near it, then it’s gonna be time to move onto Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos.

Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos Health: 12493HP Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqowIVc0lBk Ebrietas, much like any other big bosses, is best fought at medium distance. You’ll always look to stay away enough to react to her attacks properly but close enough to bait more attacks and punish whenever you have a chance. Once the fight starts, you’ll want to buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and Bolt Paper to deal tons of damage to her. If it’s the first time you’re walking into the arena, Ebrietas will only engage once you start hitting her, so that’s a good chance to build up a lot of beasthood. If it’s not the first time, once you enter the fog door she will not engage you until you get close enough, so you should always look to only use your buffs once you get closer to her. Speaking of buffs, Bone Marrow Ash is recommended in this fight since she will often do attacks that are dangerous to get close to so you can punish them with a shot to her face. With your Hunter’s Pistol +9 and a Bone Marrow Ash, you’ll deal 600+ damage to her per shot. Ebrietas has two phases, and both play out just the same. In the first phase, you’ll stay in front of her and a little away and only punish a few attacks; mainly the head slam and the tentacle slam. For the head slam, she’ll fly a little bit towards you and slam her head down, which you can punish with a charged R2 if you’ve positioned yourself correctly or an R1R1 if you’re not that comfortable with the charged R2. You’ll eventually get used to this attack in such a away that you’ll know exactly where she will land, and you can start charging your R2 even before she slams her head down to hit her exactly as she lands. The tentacles slam is much easier to punish. Just stay away and as soon as she slams her tentacles down, walk up to them and R1L1 with your camera aimed at the ground in order to hit them, then back away again. Another attack that you can consistently punish is her charge. Yes, that one charge that everyone complains about is punishable! Instead of trying to dodge and getting caught by it, it is much better to just start sprinting to the right or left as soon as you see her starting the charge animation. It will always miss you (unless if you’re close to a wall or too far away from her, which in the latter case you should run backwards instead of sideways) and you can hit her “leg” after she gets past you, so it’s a decent opening. So that’s pretty much it about Ebrietas, and that’s how you fight both phases. Stay away, wait for the head slam or tentacles slam for a good punish. If she charges, sprint to your right or left to dodge it and then hit her leg. You should always be moving around to avoid attacks like her blood spitting. If she isn’t giving you good openings, buff your Hunter’s Pistol with a Bone Marrow Ash and shoot her face to speed up the fight. Once she’s below 50%HP, she will bow down and start channeling an aura which will damage you if you stay too close to her, but it’s a very small amount of damage and won’t hurt you much if you stay at the distance I recommended. While she’s bowing down, you can spam R1L1 to her head for a lot of free damage. It is also worth mentioning that, with this strategy, her head will eventually break and you should take the visceral opening and then attack her as she’s recovering from it, but always be careful not to waste all of your stamina so you can still run away or dodge her attacks. In second phase she gets two new attacks (other than the damaging aura, which isn’t really an attack). The first one is a flying charge into a head slam, which is really rare because she only ever does it if you’re really far away. In case she does it to you for a reason, just run to your left or right just like you did for the normal charge and you will be fine. Other than that, the only other thing worth mentioning is the attack where she will summon three sets of projectiles that will track you down and one-shot you if you don’t avoid it. Thankfully, these are very easy to avoid by just sprinting around the arena, much like you dodge Rom’s homing meteors; but keep an eye at Ebrietas while you dodge these projectiles because she can still do other attacks while you’re running around. Apply all the tips and strategies mentioned here and you’ll kill Ebrietas pretty quickly since you deal so much damage to her. This fight shouldn’t be more than two or three minutes long if executed correctly. After killing Ebrietas, light her lamp and warp back to the Hunter’s Dream. Restock on consumables and warp to Nightmare Church lamp in Hunter’s Nightmare, where you’ll now be going to take down Ludwig, the Accursed/Holy Blade. Ludwig, the Accursed/Holy Blade Health: 16658HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LF-g6jCi18 Ludwig is the first boss of the DLC and one of the hardest bosses in the game, but thankfully your damage output is still quite high at this point in the DLC so the fight won’t end up being that long. There’s a lot to learn about this fight too, but I’ll try to keep it a little brief (which is going to be hard, since Ludwig is my favorite boss in the game). When you enter through the fog door, immediately buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and Fire Paper. Ludwig will always start the fight by jumping at you, so your first move will always be to dodge to your left and hit his body with a L1 (doing a L1 after rolling/quickstepping will do a trick attack without the need to R1 first). For some reason, Ludwig has a glitched hitbox and it functions as he had two models at the same time, which means your attacks will charge your beasthood meter twice as fast as against other bosses... and that is absolutely amazing for you. After this first opening, Ludwig will turn around and face you. From here on, you’ll want to always stay in front of him and fight from mid distance. By doing so, you’ll be able to react to all of his attacks much better and you won’t get caught by attacks like the headbutt or the claw swipe that oneshots you. Unlike most bosses, almost all of Ludwig’s attacks in first phase are punishable, so I’ll list them here and exactly how to dodge and punish them: Triple swipe combo. This attack is dodged by walking backwards during the first two swipes and then dodging diagonally to the left, as if you were going under his arm as it attacks. You can actually walk under it without even dodging, but do whatever you feel more comfortable with. This is probably going to be your most used opening. Headbutt. This attack is dodged by simply keeping distance between you and Ludwig. You can punish it by attacking his head with an R1 as his head comes back down, but you need to be fast and immediately start walking backwards after it. Double stomp and swipe combo. In this attack, Ludwig will stomp around twice and then swipe to your left. Just like the triple swipe combo, you can dodge this by walking backwards during the first two stomps but then dodging diagonally to the right as he does the swipe, as if you were going under his arm once again. And just like the triple swipe combo, you can actually just walk under the last swipe and he won’t hit you; but feel free to dodge it however you feel most comfortable with. 180º swipe. This attack is usually followed up by a headbutt, so you have two choices here: either run in diagonally to the left after the attack has finished and hit his body as he headbutts, or bait off the headbutt and attack his head. The problem with the first way to punish this attack is that sometimes, instead of headbutting, Ludwig will do two swipes and backstep to quite far away, and if you weren’t positioned correctly, those swipes will hit you and hurt a lot. Bite combo. Dodge to the left and hit his body. Charge. Dodge to either left or right as soon as he’s about to hit you or just start sprinting to either side as soon as you see him starting the charge animation. You can sometimes punish this attack by hitting his sides if he lands next to you. Spitting attacks. Both are dodged the same way, just run diagonally to the right and he’ll never hit you. If it’s the longer variation, you can even run towards him and hit him on the head or on the side as he spits. Ceiling drop. Ludwig will jump up to the ceiling and drop down after a few seconds. There’s two ways to dodge this attack: you can either start sprinting from one end of the arena to the other when you see blood dripping from the ceiling or you can roll as soon as you hear him screaming before he drops down. The first strategy is much more consistent and easier to pull off. After he drops, you can turn around and hit his head once before backing off. And that’s all the decent openings for Ludwig. You should always be looking to R1L1 him to charge up your beasthood meter and deal tons of damage. At some point, you’ll break his sides which is a huge opening for tons of damage. When you break either of his sides, spam R1L1L1L1 and back off as soon as he sidesteps. You can also break Ludwig’s head, which can be either a visceral opening or a free opening to R1L1L1 while he’s down; whatever you choose to do is fine. Unlike most other bosses, you’ll probably need to fight Ludwig a few times to get a good feeling for how the fight works, but apply these tips and you’ll get good at the first phase really fast. Once you’re done with the first phase, a cutscene will play and Ludwig will now fight you with his Holy Moonlight Sword. If your buff from the previous phase ran out, it’s a good idea to rebuff right after the cutscene. If it’s still active, just fight him and rebuff whenever it runs out and you get a safe opening. Ludwig usually starts off his second phase with one of these three attacks; here’s how to dodge and engage him: Double moonlight waves. Just strafe them and then run up to him. When you’re getting close, stop running so you can actually roll/quickstep instead of jumping. Big moonlight wave. This attack takes almost the whole arena, and you can dodge it either by staying close to the fog door (if it’s his first attack) or running all the way to the left or to the right or by simply quickstepping through the wave. After dodging, run up to him and engage just like you would in the double moonlight waves. Running slash. If he doesn’t do either of the previous attacks as an opener, he’ll probably walk towards you for a bit and then do the running slash, which can be very quick and take you by surprise; however, this is the best and easiest opening for you. Simply dodge to the right diagonally and engage him. After the opener and finally engaging Ludwig, you’ll want to stay close to him for as long as possible. Always stay either at his right side or his left side, preferably switching sides whenever he does an attack trying to reach you; but it’s a matter of personal preference. Much like his first phase, it’ll take you a few attempts to get a real feeling for how the flow of this fight works. You can bait his attacks through good positioning, but writing that down word for word would take too much space, so I’ll leave you with some general tips and what attacks you should be aware of: Ground circle AoE. Ludwig will drive his sword to the ground and do an AoE attack in a circular area around him. You can attack him a few times before the AoE goes off and then back off, only to go back in after the attack is done to re-engage him. Double swipe backstep into slam and uppercut. If you see Ludwig holding his sword up, backstep away because he’ll swipe twice in an almost 180º area and slam down his sword after the swipe, which will be followed by an uppercut. You can immediately run up to him after he’s done with the uppercut to re-engage. These are the weirdest attacks to be aware of, but both are easily manageable. Once you take a little of his HP down, Ludwig will stagger and you can attack him a bunch of times during that for some free damage. As soon as he gets up, back off because he’ll do a new attack. Ludwig will hold his sword up and charge it up for a few seconds, then release a huge AoE explosion which will be followed by him slamming his sword down and casting a very large wave that will immediately kill you. As scary as that sounds, this is by far the best opening you’ll have in phase 2.

Walk away while he charges the AoE explosion, then as it comes off, start running towards him and by the time he slams, you’ll be at his side and the wave will miss you completely. As soon as you get to his side, you can start spamming attacks at him until the attack is done; it’s a huge opening for some great free damage. Make sure to not waste all of your stamina because as soon as he finishes the attack, he will start attacking you again and you’ll need some stamina and good reactions to dodge it. Thankfully, though, after that attack the fight is pretty close to the end. At around 20%HP, Ludwig has another scripted stagger, and after you get that, the fight is over. Just spam R1 once he’s staggered and you’ll get the kill. As I’ve mentioned, it’ll take you some tries and a bit of experience to get the hang of Ludwig, but you’ll get it done eventually. After killing Ludwig, you can talk to his head and kill it to grab the Holy Moonlight Sword, which can be sold for a lot of Blood Echoes. Go through the subterranean passage and through the church with two Hunter enemies, grab the elevator by using the Eye Pendant you got back when you first visited the Hunter’s Nightmare and the light the Research Hall lamp. Research Hall Important Items: 2x Blue Elixir 6x Beast Blood Pellets Laurence's Skull Objectives: Kill Living Failures Kill Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower After grabbing the lamp, the first thing you’ll want to do is warp back to Hunter’s Dream and then warp to Ludwig’s lamp. Since you just got the elevator that leads to Research Hall, the bottom part of it will have moved up which will reveal an item called Laurence’s Skull near the NPCs. This item is what will give you access to Laurence’s boss fight later into the DLC. Now that you got Laurence’s Skull, you can go back to Research Hall’s lamp and start going through that area. The first thing you’ll notice on the bottom floor is that there’s a poisonous pool full of items in it. Grab them and you’ll get some Blue Elixirs (which are the only really important items of the bunch at this point). Speaking of Blue Elixirs, you’ll be using a bunch in this area. You can use your first one at the bottom of the first staircase and run up to the first floor (take the staircase to the right), then turn left instead of entering the door to the room full of patients. Run through this corridor until you find a bunch of objects blocking a door to your right; break them, open the door and go up the ladder inside this room (pulling out your Hunter’s Torch is recommended). Once you’re up the ladder, use another Blue Elixir if your current one ended and go through the room with the room while avoiding the crazy patient (he’ll sometimes attack the air for nothing, just ignore him) and open the door to the second floor. On the second floor, you’ll want to wait for all the patients to go up the stairs and get killed by the machine gun wheelchair enemy, and only then go up while avoiding his shots. If you go up the stairs alongside the patients, you might end up getting shot by the machine gun and fall down the stairs. You can also wait for you current Blue Elixir to end and then re-apply it before going up the stairs to traverse safely. It’s slower, but a lot more consistent. Once you got all the way up the stairs, there will be a patient near a ladder. Just run past it by strafing its attacks (running diagonally to the right is what works the best) or bait an attack and dodge it, then run towards the ladder. Start going up the ladder before the patient gets to you and you’ll be safe. Once you’re up, walk through the rafters carefully while avoiding the rats (and don’t go grab the item, you’ll get jumped by a crow and could end up getting killed by it) and go straight to the lever on the platform in the middle of the rafters to move the staircases up, giving you access to Living Failures and unlocking Adeline’s shortcut room. Now, either die or Hunter’s Mark back to the lamp. From the lamp, walk to the right to enter Adeline’s room and grab the elevator. When you get out, you’ll be in a room with three wheelchair enemies, but you can easily kill all of them and grab the Beast Blood Pellets in there. You’ll notice there’s a door and an elevator in this room, but you won’t need the elevator at all. Just go out through the door and onto the stairs that will lead you directly to Living Failures. One last commentary about this area is that, right before Living Failures arena’s door, there will be a patient mumbling about Lady Maria. Kill it to avoid the annoying dialogue everytime you walk up to the fog door. Or don’t. Your call. Either way, it’s time for another boss fight! Living Failures Health: 20646HP total Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0-9na2nC5E Living Failures can be quite a chaotic yet boring fight. With this in mind and in order to not waste much time at this boss, we will fight them by doing what is known as the spawn-camp loop/strategy. When you first enter the arena, there will be one Living Failure up. Your goal will be to kill it as fast as possible, so buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and a Bolt Paper and come close to him. He’ll open the fight with an attack that you can usually parry and then punish, or you can fight him by dodging the melee attacks and doing an R1L1 combo. If you’re in front of him, he’ll usually try to stomp you down with a headbutt to the ground, and that’s a good opening for a backstab if you dodge it and get behind him. Each individual Failure has very little HP, so it shouldn’t take you long to kill it. Once the first one is dead, another one will have already spawned and, to the left of the arena, another one will start spawning soon, at that’s where the loop starts. You can hit the spawning Failure as it gets up and, by the time it fully spawned, it’ll be dead already. If you repeat this step by killing it every time it spawns, the other two Failures will never spawn, so you’re left in a 1v2 instead of a 1v4. The only thing you should be careful with are the magic attacks that the other Failure will be throwing at you, but those are easily strafeable and you can keep up the loop after dodging them. Since it’s a little hard and rare to keep up the loop until the fight ends, at some point it might get broken off and you’ll have to fight them normally but they’ll be a lot lower already so the fight is more manageable. So, to fight Living Failures normally, what you should know is that there will always be two magic casters and two melee attackers. You should recognize which is which as soon as possible and then always focus down the magic casters, since those are easier to punish and you’ll never have to deal with the melee attacks - be careful though, because despite being magic casters, they can still headbutt stomp you out of nowhere. Recognize their roles, run around the arena, hit the casters once or twice and repeat the process. It’s slow and tedious, but it gets the work done. The only other thing worth mentioning is the meteor rain attack, which you will avoid by staying behind the tree in the middle of the arena. They don’t move and don’t attack you while they cast this either, so you can hit any of them while they’re casting the meteors as long as you’re safe to do so. Unfortunately, this is a pretty bad and unfun boss fight, but it’s not particularly hard so you’ll kill them easily as long as you’re patient. There are also two other strategies worth mentioning in case you want to do something different: Shaman Bone Blades work on Living Failures, so if you hit one of them with a Shaman Bone Blade, they’ll attack each other and give you some free damage. Rapid Poison gems work on Living Failures, so if you got those from a Chalice Dungeon in case you were doing them, you can use them to take big chunks of health from them after every few hits or so. You can also farm these gems from the Mergo’s Chief Attendants (also known as Axe Ladies) in Nightmare of Mensis. These enemies only drop radial gems, so you still need a waning and you can find it in the Research Hall right before the staircase where Gatling Gun Wheelchair enemy shoots down the patients; instead of going up the stairs, go into the room to your right and you’ll find a Dirty Damp Blood Gem (5) on a corpse, guarded by one of the big patients. Personally I’d just suggest to do the spawn-camp loop as that’s the most reliable and easy way to kill them, but feel free to test different things out. Once Living Failures are dead, you can light their lamp and head straight to Lady Maria’s boss fight. Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower Health: 14081HP Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1DX7qn3BfM Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower is a fan favorite boss and one of the most cinematic fights in the series, but unfortunately this fight has a few design flaws that get extremely noticeable and annoying at BL4. When you go through the fog door, Lady Maria will walk towards you and engage when you’re close enough. Buff yourself up with a Beast Blood Pellet and Bolt Paper before she engages and prepare yourself for the first attack. In the first phase, Lady Maria will always engage you through a gap closer; meaning she will always do an attack that kinda makes her body dash towards you. So, once you get to the distance where she usually does an attack to engage you (just a few meters), you can preemptively dodge the incoming attack by quickstepping diagonally to the right. Once you dodge her first attack, you can bully her. So, the way Maria’s AI works is that she will always try to either punish you or quickstep away after getting hit. Whatever she does, it’s gonna be pretty easy to abuse her openings because 99% of her attacks are dodged by simply strafing. Here’s how first phase is gonna play out: (1) you dodge her opener attack and punish with R1L1, (2) you preemptively strafe to the right before she starts attacking, (3) her attack misses you completely, (4) you walk up to her and R1L1 again, then just repeat steps 2 to 4 to completely bully her while being basically untouchable. While utilizing this strategy, you should be aware of two things that can go wrong: If Lady Maria quicksteps away from you, you’ll need to dodge her incoming attack just like you dodged the opener. This is easy, though, because she will try to attack you immediately after the quickstep. This means you can preemptively dodge her incoming attack as soon as you see her quickstep animation end, and then engage her with an R1L1 and restart the “loop”. If you attack Lady Maria with an R1L1 and you notice that her body doesn’t flinch while she’s charging an attack, it’s because she will be doing the downcut that gives her hyper armor. Hyper armor is a mechanic in the game where the enemy enters an unflinchable state and you cannot interrupt their incoming attack. If you notice this attack, dodge as soon as she tries to hit you. If you dodge too early, you will get caught by it. This attack is not easily strafeable, so you should quickstep diagonally to the right to avoid it instead of just strafing to the right. With these tips in mind, it won’t take you long to get really good at the first phase and just completely bully her into the second phase.

When Lady Maria gets below 60%HP, she will dash away from you, stab herself with the Rakuyo and do an AoE explosion after a few seconds. If you follow her when she dashes, you can safely hit her three to four times before the explosion (which also doesn’t have that big of a radius). After the explosion, second phase will start where Maria’s attacks will now have longer range and higher damage due to the trails of blood they leave behind, but the attacks are still the same and you’ll approach her the same way you did in the first phase, except for a few differences: Instead of strafing, you’ll now be safer if you dodge all attacks diagonally to the right. The reason for this is that, while some attacks are still strafeable, others will start hitting you from now on due to the increased hitbox. Some of these attacks also have a little delay before coming out, so the best way to dodge Maria in phase 2 is to: (1) R1L1, (2) strafe to the right for about 0.5s and (3) dodge diagonally to the right; then repeat these steps. The strafe step is important because it means the faster attacks won’t hit you, and dodging is important because this way you’ll avoid the delayed attacks. What this means is that you’ll never have to react to her attacks. Preemptively dodging like this will avoid her entire moveset in phase 2. The other difference is that she’ll now also get three new moves where she sheaths her Rakuyo and charges up a powerful attack. The three variations can be recognized by looking at where she’s holding the Rakuyo. If it’s on her left side (your right), she’ll do a slash. If it’s on her right side (your left) and pointing towards you, she’ll do a very long range stab that can be followed by a slash if you’re still in front of her when you dodge. If it’s above her head, she’ll do a slam (and this is the attack you should be most careful of, because it comes out faster than the other two). The last difference in her moveset is that now she’ll have a dive bomb attack where she will lunge up in the air and do a plunging AoE attack. This attack has some minimal tracking and you can easily dodge it by either running under her or running away from her. All of her charged attacks can be dodged either by standing beside her (which is difficult to do properly) or by simply quickstepping at the right time. You can tell she’s going to attack you when you notice a blue particle effect; or you can simply get a good feeling for it after dodging it a few times. The best tip I can give you when she’s charging an attack is to not panic; stay calm and quickstep only when you have to. Once Lady Maria is below 30%HP, she will dash backwards and start levitating while charging yet another AoE explosion, and this signals the start of the third phase. Much like the second phase transition, you can follow her after she dashes and hit her a few times before backing away to avoid the explosion. Don’t forget to rebuff with Beast Blood Pellet and Bolt Paper in case they ran out already. In the third phase, Lady Maria’s attacks will once again remain the same but with yet another twist - now fire particles will follow her attacks after a short delay. This is what I meant at the start of this section when I said she has some bad design choices - due to the delay between her attack and the fire effects, you’ll almost always get caught by the fire’s lingering hitbox if you try dodging her like you did in the first two phases. So, instead of engaging on Maria and having a close-up fight, this phase will consist of you running away from her while avoiding her attacks and waiting for a good opening - the charged attacks. Ignore everything else she does, just run away and avoid getting hit; roll when necessary. In this phase, you should be always extremely aware of the arena’s walls and be careful not to get trapped by her. Once you notice she’s charging up an attack, start running towards her and prepare to roll/quickstep when she’s close to releasing the attack. Don’t run into the slam, as you will get caught by that one since it comes out faster than the stab or the slash. After dodging her charged attack, you can either R1L1 and run away or, if you’re behind her when you finish the quickstep animation, you can backstab her for a ton of damage. And that’s all you’re gonna repeat for phase 3, making it a pretty boring yet stressful phase - but thankfully she’ll be pretty low already and it’ll take you two or three openings at worst to finish her off. If you find this third phase strategy too slow or boring, you have three other choices: Trading hits with Lady Maria. If you want to keep fighting her one-on-one in melee range, you’ll get caught by the fire trails a lot but you can heal up through the rally mechanic by punishing her - which means the third phase will be played very similarly to the second phase, only a bit more dangerous. Shooting her with Bone Marrow Ash buffs. While you’re running away from her, you can shoot her up sometimes from a distance and deal some decent damage if you buff your Hunter’s Pistol with a Bone Marrow Ash. Doing this will certainly speed up the third phase. Parrying Lady Maria. Unlike the first and second phase where it’s never worth it to parry Maria since you can just stick close to her and deal a ton of damage, you can actually abuse parry openings to dish out a lot of damage. All of her attacks are parriable. Whichever turns out to be your chosen strategy, just keep at it and you’ll eventually beat Lady Maria. Once she is dead, light her lamp and pick up the Celestial Dial near her to get access to Fishing Hamlet by moving the clock. Go through the clock and light the Fishing Hamlet lamp to start out the last area in the game. Fishing Hamlet Important Item: Blood Rock Objectives: Upgrade your Hunter Pistol to +10 Kill Orphan of Kos Fishing Hamlet is a rather short area that you can finish off in just a few minutes. From the first lamp, you’ll want to go to the center area with the Sorcerer Fishman (where you find the well with the Rakuyo sharks inside) and use a Blue Elixir a little bit before he sees you. By doing so, the Blue Elixir effect will remain until you get to the second lamp, so you can traverse through Fishing Hamlet without any problems. Just follow the main path and occasionally strafe spears and dogs, and you’ll get to the cabin lamp without any issues. Once you light the second lamp, your first goal will be to unlock door shortcut inside the cave after Brador. Just enter the cave, turn left and stick close to the wall until you find the door, open it and now you’ll be able to go through it from the lamp instead of running past Brador every time you die. After opening the shortcut, you’ll want to drop down the ladder near the Fishman that casts lightning at you and run inside the next cave while avoiding the Snail Women attacks. Upon entering the cave, you’ll want to take the left path and when you get close to the Sorcerer Fishman at the end of this path, you’ll notice another path to your right that leads to a ledge where you’ll drop down and pull a lever to unlock the elevator shortcut. Go up the elevator and open the door that leads back to the lamp. After unlock this shortcut, go down the elevator again and, instead of going to Orphan of Kos, take the other path that leads you further inside the cave and when you get to the bifurcation, go to your right. Run through that entire room until the end and you’ll find a Blood Rock. Bonus tip is that in this bifurcation you’ll find two Winter Lanterns, and they drop the best gems you can get outside of Chalice Dungeons. Refer to the start of the guide to see how to kill them and what gems to look out for, but once again, I really recommend sticking to the 15%/18%/18% gems you already have because they deal the perfect amount of damage. Use a Hunter’s Mark to go back to the lamp and warp back to Hunter’s Dream. Upgrade your Hunter’s Pistol to +10, restock on consumables and go back to the Fishing Hamlet where you’ll now go fight Orphan of Kos. Good luck! Orphan of Kos Health: 19217HP Weakness: Fire Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev99xJUIXfE Ah, sweet child of Kos. Arguably the hardest boss in Bloodborne, or even in the entirety of Soulsborne. Orphan of Kos has two phases and the way they play out is pretty different, so let’s start off with the first phase. When you first enter the fight, Orphan will be standing on his mother’s corpse and staring at the moon. Once you get close enough, he will turn around and start approaching you. Right before he turns around is a good time to buff yourself up with a Fire Paper and a Beast Blood Pellet. And yes, you read that right, Orphan’s main weakness is fire. Despite what many people think, he is not a Kin, and his resistance to bolt is surprisingly quite a bit higher than his fire resistance. Anyway, Orphan will engage onto you and his first attack is always going to be one of the following two: Orphan jumps and plunges at you, which you’ll dodge by running under him and then punishing with a backstab followed by another charged R2. Orphan runs/dashes at you while dragging his placenta (yes, that’s his weapon) on the ground, followed by an uppercut. This attack is tricky to dodge and punish at first, but it’s important to learn it because Orphan likes doing it a lot and it’ll make the first phase faster if you manage to punish it every time. When he dashes at you, he’ll do an uppercut. Dodge away from that because if you dodge towards him he’ll hit you behind his back. After that, Orphan will slam his placenta which you can easily avoid by keeping distance, and then you want to immediately start walking towards him and circle him clockwise while he does another slam. If you circle him correctly, the last attack will always miss and you’ll get a free backstab opening. This is tricky to do and it’s an adaptation of a “no roll” dodge, but it’s the best way to punish him. Now that we got his possible openings out of the way, let’s go to the fight itself. Much like a lot of the other bosses, you want to fight Orphan of Kos at a certain distance and walk in and out of his range to bait his attacks. He will swing his placenta at you in many ways, and all of them are dodged by simply keeping your distance. Orphan of Kos is extremely complex and pretty much all of his attacks are punishable, but for the sake of keeping this guide easily accessible to beginners, I’ll focus on the easiest openings in both phases. Here are the attacks you want to punish and how to do it: Jumping attack. He will do this quite a bit during the first phase… as I stated in the point about his openers, just walk under him and backstab him after he lands. Dash while dragging the placenta. Once again, already explained previously. Overhead placenta slam. Orphan will start walking towards you with his placenta over his head, then he will slam it to the ground. To dodge and punish this, you can either just walk up to him and circle him if you were close enough when he started walking, or you can walk up to him and quickstep towards him once he is slamming the placenta down. Either way, you should end up behind him after dodging, which means you get a free backstab opening since it takes him a while to recover from that attack. If you were too far away and afraid of walking up to him, you can outspace the attack and parry it for a free opening. Getting the backstab is better, though. Charged placenta 180º circle. Orphan will stop for a second and start charging up an attack, then he will throw his placenta and drag it in a 180º circle motion from your right to your left. To punish this attack, stay a little close to him and quickstep diagonally to the right in a way that it looks like you’re jumping the rope that connects his placenta to his hand (also known as his umbilical cord). If you dodge this properly, walk towards his back and backstab him as he does the follow-up slam that will miss you. If you were too far away to begin with, instead of risking yourself and going into this attack, it’s better to just back off and let him do it while you just watch.

Four hit combo. Orphan of Kos will stop for a second while screaming and proceed to do a quick 4-hit-combo. Unlike the other attacks, your best bet to punish this one is to parry him and then use the opening to hit him. All of the other attacks are punishable too, but you’re better off just running away from them and waiting for the openings mentioned in the previous paragraph. Be extra careful with his projectiles, always dodge them forward instead of backwards because otherwise you’ll get caught by the splash damage. In case you’re curious about how to punish all of the other attacks, you can check out this gif album made by Dargonsouls with all possible phase 1 openings. Once Orphan of Kos gets below 50%HP, he will start his transformation animation that starts off the second phase. He slams his placenta down while screaming and acquires some sort of wings. This animation takes a few seconds and, right at the end of it, you can backstab him for some free damage. Now, you might remember that a while back in the guide I recommended the Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2) and said it’d come in handy for Orphan of Kos because you can do three charged R2s in a row. And here’s the explanation of why it’s useful: during the second phase, you can backstab Orphan into a charged R2, at which point most bosses recover and you have to back off; but it’s different this time. If you backstab and do a charged R2, Orphan will fall on all fours and get staggered for a few seconds, which is enough for you to charge a third R2 and backstab him once again. So, in this unique scenario in the game, you can punish an enemy with three charged R2s to the back and a visceral. In the second phase, this is how you’ll always punish. Get on his back, backstab him, charge an R2, charge another R2 for a second backstab and then visceral him because you’ll be out of stamina to do anything else. After the visceral, back off and wait for another opening. Another very important point to his second phase is that, as soon as it starts, you should go to the water as fast as possible and fight him there. The reason for this is that Orphan has an attack where he screams and lightning comes out of his mother’s corpse, so if you stay in the water, you’ll have a good view of that attack and be able to react to it properly and dodge it every time instead of getting one-shot out of nowhere. His second phase is even more complex than the first one but, once again, I’ll only list the easiest opening for the sake of this guide remaining approachable to all levels of skill. Your approach to the second phase will be to run away from everything he does, with a few attacks to be cautious about. If Orphan throws a bunch of sacks at you, outspace it or run backwards and then run the other way because he will jump over you and throw them again in the opposite direction. And if he steps back and stops for a second, he’s going to charge at you, which is one of his most dangerous attacks. Just dodge to the right or left at the right time or parry him if you’re confident. Other than these, he can do a bunch of combos that are easily dodgeable by just running away from him. And if he jumps high up in the air, he’ll either attempt to fall onto you or do an AoE attack that goes towards you in three separate lines that kinda form a triangle, so to dodge it you just need to walk a bit to the side. Other than these attacks to care for, the only attack you’ll truly look to punish in this phase is when he starts stomping around and jumps over you. Count the stomps and run under him (with the camera unlocked, or else he will hit you) and then backstab him. It’s always going to be three stomps followed by the jump. Stomp, stomp, stomp and walk under him for the free backstab opening. Once again, if you’re curious about how to punish all of the other attacks, you can check out this gif album made by Dargonsouls with all possible phase 2 openings. Just apply all the tips given regarding how to avoid his attacks and punish the easy ones I mentioned and Orphan of Kos will soon fall to you. Once he is dead, make sure to hit the shadow near Kos’ corpse to get the “Nightmare Slain” message, then light the lamp and head back to the Hunter’s Dream to restock on consumables. Warp back to the first lamp of Hunter’s Nightmare because it’s time to go fight Laurence, the First Vicar. Laurence, the First Vicar Health: 21243HP Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCcfSuYBQDk Laurence is also considered one of the hardest bosses in the game and one that people have the most trouble with at BL4 due to its enormous healthpool and damage. A valid recommendation for Laurence is to switch your set for the Charred Hunter set that I recommended you to get from Old Yharnam if you’re having too much trouble with his damage. Charred Hunter set has one of the highest fire resistances in the game, so it helps a lot against Laurence. You can also switch out your Anti-Clockwise Metamorphosis Rune (2) for the Great Lake Rune (2) you got from Upper Cathedral Ward to further increase your defenses. However, if you’re not having that much trouble, you can just keep using what you already have equipped. Every time you enter Laurence’s fight, he will always start with a scream and walk towards you, then do his slam into explosion attack. With this in mind, you can consistently deal 1500+ damage to him in this opener; buff yourself up with a Bolt Paper and a Beast Blood Pellet and run up to him - he will do the slam and you can just run past it as he slams behind you. This attack actually consists of two openings. As he slams, you hit his leg with R1L1 and back off a little while untricking your weapon (press L1 again). He’ll take his hand off the ground, causing an AoE explosion (which is why you have to back off a little, the radius of this explosion goes up to his leg so you’ll get hit if you stay there); after the AoE, turn back and R1L1 his leg again. After this opener, Laurence will always either hop back or do a backhand attack to you. He usually does the former, but always be prepared to dodge if he does the latter. Still regarding the opener, if you farmed gems from Winter Lanterns and have higher damage output, you can break his leg in this first attack and, if you do so, he will always hop back and do another slam into explosion - which means you can always consistently go for the other leg and break it too, making the fight a lot faster. Since I recommended 15%/18%/18% gems for the whole guide, I’ll still write as if you didn’t farm gems at all. After the opener, the fight starts. Unlike what most people think, Laurence actually has THREE phases. He starts off by having pretty much Cleric Beast’s moveset and at around 80%HP he gets completely new follow-ups, new attacks and his AI becomes more aggressive. Since the first phase only goes on for his first 20% of HP, it ends pretty fast if you break his legs, so that is going to be your focus at the start. Always focus the leg that you hit the most at the start, and then start focusing the other one down. Every limb break is a big opening for huge damage. The main openings you’ll be looking for are: Laurence’s main combo. He does this combo a lot throughout first and second phases, and it consists of 4 attacks. He starts by slamming the ground near him and then does a swing from your left to your right, followed by a reaching swipe and another swipe closer to his body. To dodge and punish this attack, you want to wait for the slam and first swing, then run under his legs and start hitting his right leg (the one to your left). You can hit him up to four times during this opening if you get used to it, but BE CAREFUL. His last hit is really close to the leg you’re hitting, so if you’re not positioned correctly he will get you. 180º swipe from your left to your right. This is one of the easiest and best openings to punish in this fight. Laurence simply does an 180º swipe from your left to your right that you can usually outspace, but if you’re close enough, he will follow it with another swipe; this time from your right to your left. To punish this, you want to quickstep forward during the second swipe and start hitting his legs. This attack has quite a big window for damage, so you can safely hit him 3 to 4 times before backing off, or even more in case you break one of his legs during the opening. Big slam into AoE explosion. Same attack as his opener. During the actual fight when you can’t react to this fast enough to run under the slam and stick close to him, you should move back to avoid the slam part and then run up to Laurence and hit is leg twice after the explosion, and back off again. Medium slam, no explosion. This attack is really similar to the big slam, but there’s less charge up and the ground doesn’t explode after he takes his hand off. Instead of running up to him and hitting his leg, you’ll want to run up to his hand and hit it instead. Be careful with the lingering hitbox right after he slams the ground. Punch, punch, double-handed slam. I guess there’s just no better way of describing this attack. Laurence punches the ground with one hand, then the other, and follows up with a double-handed slam and puts his head at ground level. To dodge this, just outspace the entire attack and then go in after the slam to hit his hands or his head. It’s quite an opening and you can hit him up to three times very safely, or more if you break one of his hands or his head during this opening. These are pretty much the best openings in the first phase and what you should always be looking for. Once Laurence drops down below 80%HP, he will get some new follow-ups to some of these attacks. Going in order: for the first attack (Laurence’s main combo), Laurence will sometimes fall to the ground and start swiping in front of him. You dodge it exactly the same way I described before, but now it’s even better because the opening is huge and you can hit him for a ton of damage while he’s on the ground. For the second attack (180º swipe from your left to your right), sometimes he will follow it up with a forward punch instead of the second swipe, so be aware of that. The big slam into AoE explosion stays the same. For the fourth attack (medium slam, no explosion) he will now slam two more times closer to his body if you get close to his hand, but it’s really hard to get hit by that even if you’re unaware. Punch, punch, double-handed slam also stays the same. The tips for both phases are pretty much the same: punish the attacks I mentioned and run away or dodge all of the rest. Before moving on to the third phase, there are two things I want you to be aware of: Laurence’s attacks are based on your positioning. Don’t stay too far away from him or he will do annoying jumps or other attacks that reach very far and are hard to react to. Don’t stay too close or you’ll get caught by his lingering hitboxes. You need to stay at a medium distance and keep walking in and out of his range to bait the attacks you want. Since his attacks are based on your positioning, there are two dangerous things that can happen if you’re behind him or at his side after punishing and you should always be aware of it: (1) on either of his sides, he will do a backhand attack whenever you’re staying near a leg - back off immediately after punishing him or prepare yourself to quickstep the backhand whenever it happens. In phase 2, he will sometimes drop to the ground after a backhand and that can be used as a good opening too. And the other thing you should be aware of is: (2) sometimes, instead of doing a backhand, Laurence will do a 3-swipe-combo where the first swipe is a little delayed, so be careful when dodging that. You should always be prepared for that attack to come out and quickstep at the right time and away from him, or else you will get roll-caught and die. Apply all of these tips and put some time into learning his first two phases and you’ll get consistent at it in no time. Once Laurence drops down below 40%HP, he will lose the bottom half of his body and start fighting you by crawling through the arena while dripping lava from his torso. Thankfully, this is his easiest phase and if you got this far you can kill him by just staying calm and reacting to his attacks. Unlike how most people play against this phase, I will recommend you to stick close to Laurence at all times - right beside his small arm. I know it sounds scary, but trust me, it’s the best way to fight him.

Laurence will often crawl around the arena, and there are two variations of the crawl combo and you should be aware of them. He will either crawl by slamming the ground 7 times or 3 times, and you should always be counting these slams. These are the reason why you should stick close to him, because if you fight from afar and wait for good openings, he can easily start crawling around and corner you at one side of the arena, stunlocking you to death. Since you’ll be fighting him by sticking close, the crawls are very free dodges. Just stick to your left (his right side) and follow him in a circular motion as he crawls. He will never hit you and you can stay very safe beside him. If he crawls by slamming the ground 7 times, he won’t follow it up with any attack so you can punish him by hitting his head a few times (I recommend two R1s just to be safe). If he crawls by slamming the ground 3 times, he will follow it up with a swipe that you can dodge simply by staying close to his body, which turns into a free opening for two or three hits. That’s why it’s important to count the slams. Other than when Laurence is crawling around the arena, he will always attack you by doing some side swipes or backhands, so only punish him once or twice and always be prepared to react to the next attack. Also, always be careful not to go too far behind his back or you’ll get caught by the lava on the ground. On top of these swipes, backhands and all the crawling, there are two main openings for you to get good damage in. Laurence will stop for a second and start vomiting lava. If you’re already close to him, hit him for the entire duration of this attack (be careful with the tracking, you should always hit and move a little or you’ll get caught by it). If you’re far from him when he starts this attack, run diagonally to the left until you reach him and then start punishing. Laurence will hold his hand in the air for a second and slam the ground, and a lot of lava will start coming out of his torso for a few seconds. For this one, just quickstep the slam and start hitting his head for the entire duration of this attack. If you were far, run up to him and punish. The last and most dangerous attack you should be aware of is Laurence’s delayed slam. You’ll dodge this by either waiting until the last second and quickstepping it, or by walking/running away from him when you see him charging it up. This attack is almost always followed up by a side swipe, so be aware of that and stay ready to dodge it if you’re close to Laurence. Take this fight slowly and patiently but, most importantly, stay calm. Make good use of all these tips and you’ll be able to take Laurence down. Once he is dead, it’s time to head back to Hunter’s Dream for our last segment. Hunter’s Dream Objectives: Kill Gehrman, The First Hunter Kill Moon Presence Finish the game Before heading in to the last two fights, you’ll need to restock on all the consumables you used against Laurence (and make sure to repair your Saw Cleaver, Laurence’s huge healthpool breaks your weapon pretty fast). !!VERY IMPORTANT - USE YOUR THREE ONE THIRD OF UMBILICAL CORDS BEFORE HEADING TO GEHRMAN!!, if you don’t, you’ll get locked out of Moon Presence’s fight and end the game without fighting that boss. Once you’ve used all One Third of Umbilical Cords, head to Gehrman and hit him. I recommend this because you might end up choosing the wrong option in his dialogue by mistake, ending the game then and there without the chance of fighting him. If you still want to see his dialogue, be careful and choose to refuse his offer when prompted. Time for the two last bosses in the game. You got this! Gehrman, the First Hunter Health: 14293HP Weakness: Bolt Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Hci0E860vo Gehrman is one of the most beloved fights in the game due to how cinematic it is, especially when paired with that beautiful soundtrack. Gehrman has two phases, but his first phase is divided into two (so… three phases?). He will start off with his Burial Blade in scythe form, and it’s the easiest form to fight. Keep your distance and walk in and out of his range to bait his attacks and combos. He can only do a few things, and here’s how to deal with all of them: Three hit combo. Gehrman will combo you with three separate attacks that track you. Outspace or quickstep backwards for the first attack and parry the second for a free opening. The best way to punish parry openings is to quickstep onto him and do a L1L1 combo (L1 right after the quickstep will do a trick attack). Scythe pull. Gehrman will attempt to pull you with his scythe and follow it up with a slash or a jumping attack that goes over your head. If he does the slash, you can parry him and punish. If he jumps over your head, you can unlock your camera and backstab him as he lands; but if you’re not comfortable with that, dodge away and not into the attack or else you’ll get hit by the hitbox behind him. Charged attack. There are two variations of the charged attack: it can either be faster and then Gehrman will perform an uppercut into a downslash or it can be longer and Gehrman will spin onto you. For the first one you’ll want to outspace him and parry the downslash for a punish, and for the second one you’ll want to wait right before he spins to shoot for a guaranteed parry. You can also wait until he spins and shoot, because he actually spins twice and you can easily parry the second spin for an easy punish. That’s really pretty much all that Gehrman does and it all boils down to good old parries. Once Gehrman is below 75%HP, he will trick his Burial Blade to curved sword form, which is the trickiest one to deal with. It’s very easy to dodge everything he does, you can just quickstep diagonally to the right and everything will miss you. The problem ends up being that he will sometimes randomly shoot you, even at close range, and there’s no secret to dodging that - it all boils down to reaction. The other problem is that, after dodging his attacks, it’s hard to get an opening because Gehrman dashes away from you very quickly; so most of your openings will be one or two hit attacks - be extra careful because he can dash away and shoot you immediately after a punish. The only attack that you can reliably parry is when Gehrman does his big combo. Shoot him at any point in the combo and you’ll get a nice parry opening. If you don’t parry him, beware the shot that comes off at the end of this combo. Outside of these general tips, there’s not much I can say about the curved sword form. Quickstep diagonally to the right, hit him once and avoid his shots. Keep it up and you’ll get to the next phase hopefully very quickly. Once Gehrman gets below 50%HP, you he will scream and get a blue aura around him - that signals the start of phase 2. During the scream, Gehrman gets hyper-armor and you can hit him during it. Right after the end of the transformation, you can backstab into a charged R2 for a huge chunk of free damage to start this phase off.

The important thing about this phase is that now Gehrman doesn’t get staggered by R1 attacks, only by parries or backstabs. He will get a few new attacks that you should be aware of: In curved sword form, he pulls his gun out while kneeled and shoots a single bullet that will parry you if it hits regardless of what you’re doing. Always dodge this or you’ll be open to Gehrman’s follow-ups. In scythe form, he can dash across the arena and then dash onto you again while attacking. This attack has very bad tracking, so usually just walking backwards or moving at all is enough to dodge it. Also in scythe form, he can jump up in the air and summon a wind attack to you that works as an AoE. To avoid this, simply spam quickstep backwards as soon as you see him go up in the air, or just sprint away from him. In both forms, Gehrman can sometimes stop and stare at the moon. This is a free opening for a few hits, but back away from him after punishing or else you’ll get caught by his AoE explosion. Other than these new attacks, the fight is functionally the same. Since he doesn’t get staggered by normal attacks anymore, you should always be careful with damage openings since you can’t interrupt his attacks anymore and he can try to hit you out of nowhere. I find that the best way to deal with this phase is to wait until he tricks back to scythe form and perform a few easy parries until he dies. Keep at it and this fight shouldn’t take you long since you beat much harder bosses already. Once Gehrman is dead, a cutscene will play and you’ll immediately start fighting Moon Presence, the true last boss of Bloodborne. Moon Presence Health: 8909HP Weakness: Fire and Bolt (Moon Presence has the same resistance to both) Strategy Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJUscgB_DJM Ah, Moon Presence. The last boss of this hellish run. If you got this far, I have no doubt that you don’t need a guide anymore and Moon Presence will die like it’s nothing. You probably noticed that Moon Presence has only 8909HP, which is about 40% of Laurence’s total HP and less HP than Martyr Logarius. Needless to say, it dies pretty fast. It is a very anti-climatic ending to this run, but you need to get it done, so here’s some general tips. When you enter the arena, immediately buff yourself up with a Bolt Paper or Fire Paper and a Beast Blood Pellet. Unlike many other bosses, Moon Presence is really fast and will get to you in no time, so buff quickly. The general idea against this boss is to always dodge diagonally to the right, punish it with an L1 transforming attack and back off. If you’re feeling confident, you can extend the punish to an L1L1 (after dodging). The reason to back off and fight it from a distance is that, if you stay close, it will always either do an uppercut with both hands which is very tricky to dodge or it will back off while spinning and hit you with its tail. Now that you’re aware of those attacks, just repeat this process. It’ll come charging at you, you quickstep diagonally to the right and punish it with an L1 transforming attack. Once Moon Presence gets below 70%HP, it’ll back off and cast its AoE that puts you at 1HP. It’s undodgeable, so take this opening to spam R1L1 or charged R2s at it and recover all of your health through rally. After this attack, second phase starts where Moon Presence will often stop and cast bubbles that go up in the air and pop, making it rain blood onto you. You can either back off from those attacks and wait for her to come to you, or tank it and keep hitting her while she’s casting the bubbles. The blood doesn’t deal much damage, but it prevents you from healing (similar to Numbing Mist’s effect). And that’s pretty much the fight. Your best opening is always going to be the 1HP AoE, as you can dump all of your stamina onto Moon Presence by spamming attacks. You can also break its head and arms if you hit them enough times, which are also great openings to deal huge chunks of damage. But as I mentioned, if you got this far, you got this. Just apply these basic tips and play aggressively - you’ll kill Moon Presence and finish this run for good. Epilogue and Special Thanks If you managed to get this far and complete this run despite all the stress and frustrations, you have my serious congratulations. I hope that doing this run has sparked something in you and that you’ll seek to do even harder challenges and improve yourself. Maybe you’ll do it again but without upgrading your weapon? Or you could go a little easier on yourself and do a BL4 run without any consumables! Perhaps you could even take my route and try to beat all the bosses at BL4 and without rolling or quickstepping, as that’s a very nice way to reinvent yourself. Whichever choice you make, even if you decide to put away the game and retire for good, I want to thank you for sticking with me until the end of this run. Have some rest, you deserve it. I’d also like to thank a few friends and fellow challenge runners, as without their help and support throughout the years I probably wouldn’t be writing this guide by now. Thank you to StochasticGD for being an amazing friend and one of the most knowledgeable Bloodborne players that I know. Thank you to Parallax2137, G-S0ul and Tolomeo for inspiring me to get into challenge runs and do everything that I’ve done. Thank you to LedZepphead for helping me by proof-reading through almost the entirety of this guide. Thank you to Dargonsouls for being the first player to completely dissect Orphan of Kos and bless the community with wonderful resources such as his gif album full of punishes. And a very big and special thanks to the entire Company of Champions community for being so amazing and doing so much for challenge running in general, but especially the moderation team - Unsafekibble716, Qizzok, LookingGlass, Parker, Demofreak, Evoryn and, once again, LedZepphead - for making it all work and keeping the community great. To whoever stuck with the guide until the end, I hope you enjoyed it. Much love, Arti.

Minimum-Level Runs by Arti [source]

Minimum level weapons list with optimal class used for damage output. BL4 - Waste of Skin Saw Cleaver - 188AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: none Saw Spear - 179AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: none Hunter Axe - 205AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: none Threaded Cane - 164AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: none BL5 - Waste of Skin Beast Cutter - 195AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia BL6 - Waste of Skin Beasthunter Saif - 192AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia Blade of Mercy - 146AR (and 61 Arcane AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: none Tonitrus - 183AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne and Blood-Starved Beast BL7 - Waste of Skin Burial Blade - 175AR (and 61 Arcane AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia, Shadows of Yharnam, Rom, One Reborn, Micolash, Mergo’s Wet Nurse and Gehrman BL8 - Waste of Skin Rifle Spear - 182AR (and 174 Blood AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne Boom Hammer - 214AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia BL9 - Waste of Skin Church Pick - 200AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia and Ludwig BL10 - Military Veteran Beast Claw - 172AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia and Amygdala BL10 - Noble Scion Reiterpallasch - 172AR (and 160 Blood AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia and Witches of Hemwick

BL11 - Waste of Skin Kirkhammer - 261AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Cleric Beast Amygdalan Arm - 199AR (and 82 Arcane AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia BL12 - Waste of Skin Stake Driver - 203AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne BL12 - Military Veteran Ludwig's Holy Blade - 259AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne and Blood-Starved Beast BL12 - Noble Scion Simon's Bowblade - 195AR (and 189 Blood AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia Chikage - 206AR (and 218 Blood AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia, Witches of Hemwick and Martyr Logarius BL14 - Military Veteran Whirligig Saw - 256AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia BL15 - Waste of Skin Rakuyo - 221AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia, Ludwig, Living Failures and Lady Maria Kos Parasite - 93 Arcane AR at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia, Ludwig, Living Failures, Lady Maria and Orphan of Kos BL17 - Waste of Skin Bloodletter - 210AR (and 225 Blood AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia, Ludwig, Living Failures and Lady Maria BL18 - Waste of Skin Holy Moonlight Sword - 225AR (and 117 Arcane AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast, Vicar Amelia and Ludwig Logarius' Wheel - 277AR (and 51 Arcane AR) at +10 Bosses to kill before getting it: Father Gascoigne, Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia

All Hardest Variants of Chalice Dungeon Bosses by Arti [source]

Disclaimer: Total HP was always rounded up by 1 point since they were always broken numbers. Glyphs expire after two weeks of not being active - for that reason, I cannot list glyphs here and expect them to be active forever. Instead, I suggest you to search for active glyphs using the following spreadsheets: Farming spreadsheet (most likely to have active glyphs): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q9enxffA3dyKGu6IVg-P4IVgmKSUYSP9UOOiThHmPIU/edit Chalice Dungeons Exploration spreadsheet (it has all glyphs listed with details on what you’ll encounter from each glyph, but it’s hard to find an active glyph): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1psfenhcQJ06EUQgcEHBIQcfLD5Iq-kyKGTZINvy6228/edit Japanese spreadsheet (if you’re patient enough to translate and dive into it): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KCn9_1ERe7cdCVNBDoA1Nhnn1XliOUPTg26O6z_xLek/pubhtml# Basically, you need to look at the list below to find out what’s the hardest variation of each boss, then try to find a glyph that contains that boss in that chalice and layer. Pthumeru Ihyll Layer 4 (15,49546719370388x multiplier) Headless Bloodletting Beast - 26343HP - wwt8eamt (1D 32 00 1B) Bloodletting Beast - 26343HP - ctemuyxn (1D 32 00 31) Pthumerian Elder - 20919HP - g4c2f5bb (1D 32 00 1E) Pthumerian Descendant - 19370HP - k9a5gmc8 (1D 32 00 0B) Watchdog of the Old Lords - 30991HP - yr4g8iiq (1D 32 00 0F) Rom, the Vacuous Spider - 15496HP - 9qg22reb (1D 32 00 57) Pthumeru Ihyll Layer 2 (14,14803491462875x multiplier) Maneater Boar - 21223HP - ctemuyxn (1D 32 00 31) Keeper of the Old Lords - 20374HP - wwt8eamt (1D 32 00 1B) Beast-possessed Soul - 17686HP - yr4g8iiq (1D 32 00 0F) Merciless Watchers - 8489HP + 8489HP + 6367HP (23345HP) - k9a5gmc8 (1D 32 00 0B) Undead Giant (Curved Blades) - 25467HP - g4c2f5bb (1D 32 00 1E) Undead Giant (Club and Hook) - 25467HP - b6yzn3fq (1D 32 00 23) Undead Giant (Cannon) - 25467HP - jtf24x7q (1D 32 00 48)

Lower Loran Layer 4 (14,03574962127208x multiplier) Abhorrent Beast - 16703HP - xf9crmk6 (1D 34 00 18) [FRC] Loran Darkbeast - 22458HP - 7rga2u2i (1D 34 00 0D) [FRC] Amygdala - 25265HP - p7n57i2s (1D 34 00 14) [FRC] Ailing Loran Layer 4 (13,12265001747608x multiplier) Blood-starved Beast - 21653HP - 4mdsvd6j (1D 2A 01 63) [F] Lower Loran Layer 2 (12,8152493379116x multiplier) Loran Silverbeast - 3076HP - 7rga2u2i (1D 34 00 0D) [FRC] Isz Layer 4 (14,03574962127208x multiplier) Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos - 22738HP Celestial Emissary - 11931HP - k7jijs7x (1D 35 00 4B) [FRC] Isz Layer 2 (12,8152493379116x multiplier) Brainsucker - 4486HP Bosses with no variation Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen (Pthumeru Ihyll Layer 3) - 23176HP Forgotten Madman and Madman's Escort (Lower Hintertomb Layer 2) - 4880HP + 1828HP (6708HP)