You know I've already been treating this like a general gaming thread. I may not be interested in reading about the Souls games, but in general I like hearing what you have to say about things. In general.

Speaking of souls games, **** Master Logarius. Iz turning into Manus all over again.

While doing a little side venture, I decided to go do the Nightmare Frontier while I'm trying to think of a strategy for Logarius. Well and um....... well first Jack got hopelessly lost, and then Jack beat Amygdala on the first try.

For an area that is definitely harder than Castle Cainhurst, I don't understand why the boss is so much easier or why some people say this is one of the hardest bosses in the game. Amygdala basically has her arms and face as weak spots, with the rest of her not taking much damage. As long as I stood to the side of her and used blood vials a bit I had absolutely zero trouble staying alive throughout the fight. This is with a bland +8 saw cleaver, when I really should have been using the transformed holy blade.

On a side note, I've been using the 20 ghost room in the nightmare lecture hall to farm a bit. Um...... you walk in. You ghostbust. And with the 10% more echoes rune you walk out 13K a clear. Buy a bunch of hunter's marks to speed up the process and you easily can do 10 runs in 30 minutes for 130K souls. I leveled up my bloodtinge to 21 this way, although I haven't touched anything else with it. that means I have 30 vit, 25 Str and skill, and 16 Endurance.

Speaking of, I'm going to leave my endurance at 16. The saw cleaver uses 20 stamina per r1 attack, so that is the bare minimum you need to get a 6th attack. This is similar for a lot of weapons, and 102 stamina (what have at 16 endurance) is basically a nice place to be with the next nice place being a bit too far away for my liking (I would need to get to 122, which is another 10+ levels easy for not much reward).

So let me explain why the covenant system in Bloodborne sucks.

1) The only npc you ever give anything to does not give you anything other than a gesture, and that after the first one.
2) The other two covenants don't even have someone to give things to.
3) There are only 3 covenants.
4) The only benefit of a covenant is that you get to equip its rune...... whenever you want. There's no way to leave a covenant once in it and you technically end up in all 3 at once.
5) Equpping runes directly messes with co-op. Your co-op summons or world host will randomly be hostile to you based on these rune selections. That's the only major effect of these covenants in game, outside of the rune effect.
6) One rune gives you health regen as long as your health is below 12.5%. One lets you heal an extra .8% with blood vials (literally less than 15 more health at any reasonable vit level). And one gives you 10% faster stamina regen, making it so much better than the other two that there is no reason to ever unequip it.

Trophies You do not get automatically in Bloodborne:

- optional boss trophies
- optional area trophies

^^ I am assuming one will try to beat every boss, so these are technically missable but I don't consider them that missable.

- 3 different ending trophies

^^ This is just the game being slightly mean, since you have to play through 3 times (or do some finagling with the save file).

- get the caryll rune from oedon chapel after beating the blood starved beast

- get a weapon to +10 (if you don't do this regardless of trophy hunting or not you are doing the game wrong)

- get all weapons and hunter tools

- get 15+ level blood gem

- beat the yharnum boss

^^ Those last 3 are the hardest, and thus the most rare, because they require you to do a lot of the chalice dungeons. Ignoring the fact that a few weapons and hunter tools are easily missable, there is a hunter weapon that can only be gotten from the hintertomb chalices. In addition, you can only get level 15 - 20 gems from depth 4 and 5 chalices, and yharnum is the final boss of the depth 5 pthumeru chalice. With a recommended level of 140. And co-op recommended.



Basically, the list is not too bad but I'm keeping it in mind while playing.

Edit: More to come later.

Master Logarius:

This guy is probably the hardest boss in the game, and he's available at the end of Forbidden Castle Cainhurst. For this fight, you will want both high physical defense and high arcane defense.

Phase 1:
In phase 1, you will be forced to contend with a boss who isn't that aggressive? He has melee attacks, but he feels absolutely no need to close in and smack you around. Instead, this boss would like nothing more than to stand back and spam homing magic that can clip through walls. So um........ you have to get in his face and get out of his face? Basically you have to chase him down, stagger him a bit, dodge the retaliatory melee strike, and then repeat this cycle. Once he is at slightly over half his health left, he will try to enter stage 2 vis self buff transformation. It is possible to stagger him out of this move, but it's very hard.

It is recommended that you use the pillars around here in both stages of the fight to dodge his attacsk.

Phase 2:
This guy has now received 3 buffs.

1) He is a melee nightmare now, since he can't be staggered at all any more and he gets an aura that mostly protects him from interrupts. He also does A TON of melee damage.

2) He can do a meteor attack that goes over the pillars now. And um.... its very easy to mistime the dodge roll for this.

3) He will keep summoning an aoe bladestorm that will rain blades down upon the arena that home in on you. <- You can prevent this when he is trying to do it by striking his sword, but realistically you are going to have to deal with it. Which means hiding behind the pillars out of its line of fire while the boss is also trying to melee you to death. Fun fun fun.


This boss took me 7 tries and 17 blood vials on the successful attempt with a +8 weapon, 30 Vit, and 25 str and 25 skill. He is a true successor to Manus as hardest boss so far.



Rom, the Vacuous Spider:
I'm kind of torn on this boss. On the one hand, it took 5 tries and I had quite a bit of trouble with him. On the other hand, I was having trouble because I was dealing so much damage to him with bolt paper that he would skip phase 2 and go directly to phase 3, summoning double the number of spiders for phase 3 in the process. And the way I finally beat him was to single cycle him, which means I did so much damage to him that he staggered via one of my heavy attacks while trying to teleport and this meant I could kill him before he ever left phase 1.

Um.... I don't have much advice for this boss, except that each phase is much harder than the last and he won't attack you personally until phase 2 (at which point his melee is very dangerous as well). His main attacks are summoning close range meteors up from the ground, a close range aoe, and raining meteors down from the heavens. And of course the little dudes who are quite hard to dodge.



The One Reborn
Sigh. The guide ranks this guy (along with Darkbeast Paarl, Rom, and Logarius) as an S rank difficulty boss. At the same time, just like Paarl, anything I can do on my first (or 2nd) try isn't as hard as the guide rates it. I got lost, just as I did with the Nightmare Frontier, and just as in the Nightmare Frontier I killed this boss on my first try. The problem here is that I also can't describe his attacks that well? The main difficulty of this fight is actually the 6 bell witches up on the parapets, which means it heavily behooves you to climb up there and kill them before it becomes an issue (you can reach them via one of two sets of stairs in the far corners from where you came in).

There are two ways to fight this boss. Once all the bell witches are dead, you can actually fight him by baiting his attacks and then retaliating when you are standing up on the parapets. While somewhat hard, it's doable. The other option is to go down and try to stagger him so you can hit the weak spot (the body on his forehead) when he falls over. This is best done with bolt paper and a beast blood paper equipped, but it can be done with any weapon that inflicts decent enough poise damage (why I like the Saw Claever so much; perfect balance between heft and fast attacks).





You get to the Nightmare Frontier pre-Rom by going to the right of the Great Cathedral and standing near the locked door at the very end of that path. Post Rom you can either go down to the 1st floor of the Nightmare Lecture Hall once you have reached floor 2F, or you can sit in front of the open door you spawn in front of after beating Rom until the thing grabs you (assuming you have the tonsil stone I think it will still do this).

Past that locked door (unlocked during paleblood moon) is the main area of Yahargul. The first part before the 2nd lamp (only area in the game with two lamps not including the boss one) is where you have to deal with 3 bell women and their minions, followed by an Amygdala shooting a deadly laser. The third bell women can be found by dropping off the right side of the building where the laser is shot at you. After killing her, you can drop down inside the cage to get the upper cathedral key. This allows you to reach the upper cathedral ward via the previously locked door at the top of the workshop tower you access by exiting the right door (after blood starved beast) of Oedon Chapel.

After the 2nd lamp you are now going to have to deal with more bell women and their minions, skeletal scourge beasts (with like 5x the health and buffed damage), and cramped caskets. At the end of the area is the boss the One Reborn, although there must be a shortcut elevator somewhere that I just didn't find. If you didn't come here in the evening, you will also have to fight three very hard hunters you could otherwise skip in the room previously inhabited by the lamp and two kidnappers (if you were here and opened up the side door you can easily just go out that way).

The bell women are a severe threat not only because they revive enemies but because their buff (which removes itself and staggers everything for 2 seconds after bell woman dies) effectively almost doubles the stats of the minions they are buffing. This is a severe problem, especially when they are buffing rabid dogs.

Cramped Caskets are a severe threat because they probably have the highest dps in the game with certain attacks and can easily one combo kill someone at 30 VIT and full hp.

The skeletal scourge beasts in this area are the 2nd enemy we have encountered that can drop blood chunks, but if you really need those the ones in the upper cathedral ward are better farming targets. The ones here aren't near a lamp and are near a lot of other things you won't want to deal with.
On a side note, between Cainhurst, Nightmare Frontier, Yahargul, and soon the Nightmare of Mensis and Nightmare Lecture Hall 2F you should easily be able to get a total of at least 16 chunks to get your first (and hopefully main) weapon up to +9. I managed to do so just after entering the Nightmare of Mensis, right before I found the first lantern.


The 2nd floor of the nightmare lecture hall, unlike the first, has very little worthwhile loop and the main features here are the church giant guarding the shortcut to the first floor and patche's room, where patches will give you (if you keep talking to him) a +15% stamina rune. The first floor on the far side takes you to the nightmare frontier, while the 2nd floor on the far side takes you to the nightmare of mensis. It should be made known now that the nightmare of mensis's main gimmick is that almost everything there can frenzy you really easily, so when we go there we will need sedatives, but the upper cathedral ward is the next area on the agenda (when next I play) after reaching the Mensis first lamp.

Micolash, Host of the Nightmare:

You know that person who you play games with who spams that one "op" move. And how it works the first time they do it but the 2nd time they lose very badly?

That's Micolash, Host of the Nightmare. Going in I already knew how to actually trigger the **** fight, since half of this boss is just you running from room to room trying to get him into the arena. Then, when you get him in there the minions are far more of a thread (which means you just kill them immediately) the first time around while the second time he has no minions but spams the cosmos spell over and over. And...... that's it. That's the boss. He spams Augur of Ebrietas in both phases and if you aren't in his face in the 2nd phase he spams the 40 Arcane spell. And um... if you have enough arcane resistance and/or health to eat an attack from either of those then this fight is really easy once you know where to go. .... I think this is the worst boss fight in the game. Just sayin'. If I can beat it on my 2nd try in the last dungeon, it's too easy for the area. And when the game of hide and seek is more challenging than the encounter, you know you have screwed up.

Celestial Emissary:

You know the little blue guys that have been running around? Well how would you feel about fighting a bigger one with the exact same moveset that can't be staggered very easily? Yeah sounds like fun. Um......... anything I can not only beat but pubstomp on my first try is not something that should be right before Ebrietas. The fight starts out with you fighting a bunch of little blue aliens in a field. And they keep spawning in. But where is the boss? Well it can't be the only one that is running away from you instead of chasing you can it?

Once the boss loses half its health, it transforms into a bigger one and...... the little mob where you 3 hit everything is still the main challenge of the fight. And um..... I have heard that he can grow tentacles? People on the internet claim he can grow tentacles. I have heard he has a phase 3. But um...... I never saw it. And um.... I left him on 1/10th health for a solid minute while playing COD Zombies with the little dudes. So while the guide claims it is true, it did not happen for me and I have no advice on it other than.... just hit it a couple more times.

This is probably the easiest boss in the game for where it is placed, except for Amelia if you are severely overleveled.

Mergo's Wet Nurse

The final boss you MUST beat for the Yharnum sunrise ending, I think there's a running theme here. Anything Jack can beat in his first try is not that hard of a boss. The main difficulty of this fight is when she summons "nightmare clones" at half health....... in which case you run around the arena and roll out of the way of attacks until they go away, then you resume the fight. Almost all of her moves can be dodged by rolling towards and behind her. The ones with a little bit of a backswing give you PLENTY of time to pop a blood vial. In fact that's where all the difficulty of the fight went away. The boss does 800 damage a pop with some of the nastier attacks but only managed to make me afraid of dying once because it's too easy to heal AND retaliate. Basically they gave it a giant *** pool of health and made it do a lot of damage, but they didn't put any urgency into this fight except for the one nightmare mode where the boss blinds itself to make apparitions chase you for a bit.

^^ In fact I forgot to equip the gems I picked up pre battle that gave me a lot more damage and still won.


Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos

I've only made one attempt on this, so I can't say too much but um...... this boss doesn't seem that bad? The real issue with this fight is that this boss can frenzy you, which if you don't have sedatives to deal with is a problem. In fact...... that's how that attempt ended. I was winning. The boss had 1/4 health while I still had 8 blood vials (it seems these later battles are becoming more attrition based than skill based unfortunately due to giant health pools for the bosses).







By the way that's starting to be my main complaint about bosses in this game. Manus, one of the better fights of the original Dark Souls, was the most challenging boss in the game with 6666 health. That was the most any boss had in that game. Dark Souls 2 had bosses with 10,000 hp, but that game also had weapons that could easily deal 1200 damage in one cycle with well defined openings. AND those bosses were in the dlc, not the main game, with the highest hp of a main game boss being I think 9K? And that was the final boss, with most bosses not even passing 7K.

Ebrietas, the boss i'm currently trying to deal with, isn't even the final boss and has 12.5 K. Mergo's Wet Nurse has 14K. The boss after that has 14.3K, and the one after that has ..... well that one is a joke. But basically a lot of end game bosses have 1.5x the equivalent of what they would have in any of the other souls games. In fact...... early game bosses feel like that too.

Bloodborne feels like they extended the boss hp just to make sure you have a good grasp of the fight, but because of this it feels like some fights, which are a bit too easy for the part of the game they are in, drag on way too long. And the fact that everything has 2 or 3 phases doesn't fix that so much as make you wonder why phase 1 needs to exist.

Well, after 118 hours of play, I finally feel like I'm finished with Fallout 3. I haven't done the Pittsburgh/Into The Pitt DLC quests, and there's maybe a dozen spots on the map I haven't gone to explore (I got the Explorer perk*), but I feel like I'm done with it. It was a long and heartbreaking journey, but I can now move forward to things like New Vegas. I don't think I'll be modding FO3 because it's rather buggy and I think I've spent too much time on it to get enjoyment out of that.


*The Explorer perk sounded good in theory, but that moment when I took it was when I stopped experiencing Fallout and started playing Fallout. It was an awful turning point for me because I haven't truly enjoyed my play time ever since I took that perk.

In my opinion it's not worth spending the point? Like.... I would rather get a more useful perk that does something in combat.

I did it quite some time ago, but I think you're approaching the issue from a fundamentally different mindset than I was. I wanted to experience the world of Fallout, and I thought that taking the Explorer perk would allow me to find places I might otherwise never come across. The problem is that before I even got back to the mainland (I was in the Point Lookout area at the time), exploring had changed from an act of discovery into checking items off a checklist.

Like, I don't really care about the combat? I sneak past and talk my way out of combat 9 times out of 10. I'd have to start up the game again to check what perks I did choose and how many are combat-related. I know I took both levels of the Animal Friend perk, but I wouldn't really consider that combat-related since it lets you avoid combat rather than making it easier.

I completely get that, but let me explain my mindset a bit.

Originally, fallout 3 limited you to 20 levels. This meant you had to choose between Grim Reaper's Sprint, Explorer, Ninja, and Solar Powered. <- This is when I about originally played the game, and I got into the mindset that Explorer was always a waste vs the other 3. Especially Grim Reaper's Sprint, which is probably hands down the best perk in the game.

Even when you increase that to 30, we still have 3 out of the 4 at level 18 I want, and there are tons of skills before that are good even outside of combat. There are so many useful perks in the game for every facet of it, and all explorer does is act as a convenience feature you will eventually lose most of the use for that replaces a permanant buff or experimentation or whatever else you could have had.

Oh, in that case; yeah I agree with you. I took Grim Reaper's Sprint at level 20 as well and if I recall correctly, I took Explorer at level 25 (I went straight from level 18 to something like 27 while in Point Lookout). I definitely do regret having chosen Explorer now, and will be avoiding it in future games.

The biggest disapointment of New Vegas for me (other than the glitches making it unplayable on release) is that there is no way to beat the main story, have the main story quest marker leave your map for good, AND keep your character. <- I don't understand why they did this either, since I think Fallout 3 did it perfectly.

Strangely enough, I've been hearing lately (admittedly almost exclusively from TotalBiscuit) about how bad the original Fallout 3 ending was before Broken Steel extended it. I, on the other hand, felt really fulfilled with the ending of Fallout 3, especially since I made Fawkes the hero of the wastes.

I will have to see for myself how New Vegas compares, though.

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I forgot to say earlier, but apparently, and it wasn't clear before I downloaded it, Valiant Hearts on iOS is only free for the first 3? levels. I do love when they do that, but at the same time I feel like what I got is not really indicative of what would be to come. That's important because touch controls can make or break an experience like that, and from what I experienced in the early levels, it might be nearly impossible to beat on iOS in the late levels.

Gonna try to download the free first episode of Wolf Among Us again tonight. Tried many months ago but the download got corrupted or something and it would never actually start up.

Anyone who has been over in dotp has heard me complaining about blood chunks, but where is the blood rock?

In the nightmare of mensis, the "mother brain" enemy is something being guarded by a LOT of winter lanterns, and it's probably the most dangerous area in the game. You don't have to cut it down to reach this, but it helps. Um..... basically the blood rock is almost point blank under the **** thing, although not literally under it. So not dealing with the brain of mensis means you .... well it's going to see you a lot.

So for the 2nd chalice dungeon the bosses are a bigger version of a main game enemy, gandalf, and someone who really should have switches places with the gandalf guy.

It's also worth noting that right before the beginning of layer 2 is a treasure route that eventually leads to the hintertomb chalice. Since this is the most recommended one to visit third, of course we want to go there.


The bosses of the hintertomb chalice are ...... a tougher version of a main game enemy, a tougher version of the first chalice dungeon boss ever, and the blood starved beast. Neato. It's worth noting that this is the last chalice dungeon you are expected to be able to beat before the end game, and it's the 3rd to last one you are expected to be able to beat before some serious end game grinding.

Yay, now I can tick off one checkbox from the bucket list. Ol' Gwyn's dead and his fire has gone out.

After thinking about it a little while, I've decided I actually do want to go and do the Pittsburgh DLC for Fallout 3. From what I remember reading about that DLC before I bought it (I checked out reviews to know if I should skip any of the DLCs when buying), you're stripped of your equipment and stuff when you get there, so I'm hoping that means I can immerse myself a bit more than I have been recently.

@eph, did you beat Manus?


I've decided to do some challenge runs. However, I almost immediately decided I don't like the level 4 run's options so we are going to go with 3 leveling variants:

1) No Bullets
2) No Armor except for the Doll Armor
3) No Upgrading Weapons

And to make it more interesting I can't go to the next boss with any of them until I've beaten the current one with all 3.

No bullets. First true test of how good I've become at this game.

Still died at the wolf..... I've chosen the military veteran as my starting character because no bullets means we are dead-ending Bloodting and Arcane most likely, so 7 and 6 respectively let my other stats be at 10/10/14/13.

There are no additional rules for any of these runs, although if I have to get to level 200 to do Doll Armor I'll feel slightly depressed. And **** it the doggie killed me again. There goes me echoes.

Disclaimer: I have never used the hunter axe at two shot range. Or..... that much at all.

2nd Death: Got corned at the square.

Anywho, without dying a 3rd time we have opened up both the dark house shortcut and basically the entire loop. We have not gone down the big central square or sewer routes..... because this is not an exploration run. I know what's down there and we are going for the cleric beast first. We've also got enough blood shards for an axe + 1 . And with a single trip down to get 88 more blood echoes, we can spend all our echoes on the Yharnum Hunter set instead of just losing them to the boss.

Now it seems the trick ot using the axe, at least when we can't abuse its rally potential, is like a slower but more damaging saw cleaver for right now. Now, this might sound weird but out of the 3 this is probably the hardest one to do the Cleric Beast on due to no gun. There's a much easier way to beat him (that I didn't learn about until halfway through my first playthrough) to deal with this guy with the hunter pistol. But we are limiting ourselves to no bullets.

And **** it death #3 at the brick guy on the bridge. No viscerals sucks man... When getting revenge it turns out I can stun them with how hard the axe hits.

And lo, at 7:22 PM Jack did the noobiest thing ever, defeating the game's first boss with a 2 handed hunter axe he has almost no experience with on the first try. The lols. Oh the lols.

So now I can level up. And since we are doing this per area I still have through Gascoigne to go. Of course I leveled up Vitality by 6. This might be the noobiest run I've done in a souls game in forever but we are going for it and I want some survivability to be able to swing my halberd some more. Using 2 of the insight, I also bought the bells but don't plan on using them.

And um...... well then. I did not die a single time before completing the rest of the area and unlocking the Gascoigne shortcut as well as getting all the loot without going back to the hunter's dream. Hmmmm..... I think I might be getting better at this. The +2 weapon and only 3 death's so far seem to think so.

Um....... so I'm level 20 already with 20 vit, 14 str, and 13 skill. I wanted to see how fast that happened vs last time....

First of all only 28:47:32 on my main? Anyways, it seems I am level 20 at Gascoigne at 1:04:19 with a no bullet run and only 3 deaths. Let us see if ye olde Hunter can rectify that?

Um..... I might be having too much fun to start doing the other two runs now, so I think I'm just going to keep going with this one?

It's become tragically obvious that I'm going to find either of those either handicaps a bit too much until I've gotten more used to this one, so I don't want to deal with them yet.

Well then. I ...... beat Gascoigne on the first try. And I've kind of cleared all the areas of the cathedral ward open so far? And um........ at 1:33:03 we are sitting at the entrance lamp to Old Yharnum at level 24, where we've also picked up almost all available items prior to that lamp. Only dying 3 times .

Good times.