I personally have only played the game with dex or quality builds until now and have not tried pure bloodtinge or arcane at all. Dabbled a little with strength weapons but can’t quite get used to the slower movesets, so I haven’t finished that run yet. What are your experiences and preferences?
Oooh yea, I have. An entire playthrough actually. But I mainly used it in its tricked form. I enjoy its moveset a lot more like that because of the added gap closer when running R1 and its fast attacks that follow it
I love the transformed R1 -> L1 -> L1 -> R1 combo. Jumping in and out of the action, its extremely fun. Did you ever go for the 99 arc build? I saw someone recommended it. There’s def a certain order to do things, and its very CD heavy, especially once you start grinding arc scaling gems. I’ve done a few arc runthroughs and they are extremely fun. I just dusted off one of my 99 arc characters to do a fire stake driver run. Its…okay lol. Charged r2 + oil is extremely satisfying but hard to pull off
I never really got into arcane tbh. It didn’t feel as intuitive as just smacking enemies because of the bullet requirement. And most spells didn’t seem too appealing to me. It did look fun in videos, though.
Fire stake driver sounds funny as hell
My first arc run I just used hunters tools basically, and was able to defeat every boss, + chalice dungeons basically with a call beyond spam. It is kinda boring, it’s just like run away, acb, run away, blood bullets, run away, heal.
The last couple arc runs I actually try to gem up my weapons and play it straight, using hunter tools as support. This I find to be a lot more satisfying. I think as the other poster said, the fire gig saw is a terror to beasts. Also the parasite is so good its broken, especially in CDs, very fun. At that point, just need a bolt weapon for kin type enemies and you can take on anything. Admittedly, is performance much different than a dex or quality build? Eh maybe a little? Playstyle is a little different. But the path through the game is very particular in order to stay strong enough with arc weapons, so it’s kind of a different adventure than pumping points into stats. The CDs are no longer optional, since you have to hunt for and grind gems.
Ever play with the blood letter? I procrastinated playing with it for so long, but once I got the hang of it I did 3 playthroughs in a row with it. Very fun, and having to manage frenzy buildup adds a wrinkle to gameplay. With the cannon, its ridiculous!
Huh, that sounds kinda intriguing. When I go back to the game (inevitably, sooner or later), I’ll give this a shot.
I’ve not tried the blood letter either. I didn’t quite understand its mechanics and might have been scared off by the negative component lol. What does it playstyle compare to? Any parallels?
I would say the BL is pretty unique. The regular form has a pretty decent move set, maybe like the tonitrus or 1h axe, nothing surprising there. But the tricked form has so many neat mechanics. When going to tricked form for example, you stab yourself with it to transform, which takes a section of your health. But when used in a combo, you turn around and stab the enemy through yourself, using their blood instead of yours so that you lose only a tiny sliver of health on transform. Its pretty wild. It has surprisingly good dodge attacks too, it attacks really quickly for a larger weapon and has a long reach similar to the axe.
And here I am thinking I’ve tried enough. Turns out, just playing a bunch of dex weapons isn’t really a whole lot of variety after all :D I’ll have to give those a shot for sure
It is a lot of variety! The dex weapons are amazing. But to me, each weapon is practically its own game. Enjoy!