Even though there are other damage sources in Bloodborne, the primary way of damage is using melee weapons or Trick Weapons. Bloodborne’s more aggressive playstyle, compared to its other FromSoft siblings, forces you to get extremely intimate with your weapon cause that’s the only meaningful mode of damage.
I have seen many players go through the entire game without understanding how weapon scaling works or how to get the most damage out of their weapons. So many factors determine the Trick Weapon’s attack rating, and I feel if you want to be a true Hunter, you better KNOW everything about weapon scaling and damage in Bloodborne.
Bloodborne Trick Weapon Damage Types
There are three main damage types hunter weapons use: Physical, Blood, and Arcane. Physical damage can be divided into three categories: physical, thrust, and blunt damage, and Arcane damage can also be divided into three categories: Arcane, Fire, and Bolt damage.
Some unique weapons have multiple types of damage, like the Tonitrus, which has both physical and bolt damage. In contrast, most other weapons are dedicated to one specific type of damage, more commonly the physical damage type.
Attack Combos and Transforming Attacks
Each right-hand weapon has a series of basic and transformed attack combos, and certain attacks can deal with certain types of damage.
The Saw Cleaver has a pretty straightforward slashing moveset that deals damage of the same type. On the other hand, the Church Pick‘s moveset alternates between damage types, where the initial hit of the light attack combo deals thrust damage, and the second and third attacks are only physical.
Furthermore, each weapon has unique damage modifiers applied to each attack in a given sequence or combo. A standard untransformed 5-hit R1 combo from a Saw Cleaver is as follows: x1, x1.02, x1.04, x1.06, and then x1.09. I’m not going into the math, but you get how damage output varies even when chaining combos.
All you need to know is this: the incremental combo damage multiplier is why you should approach combat in Bloodborne more aggressively.
Taking the Saw Cleaver example, the heavy attack has a higher x1.2 initial multiplier, while the charged heavy attack hits x1.9 times harder.
Pressing L1 after an R1 attack will perform a special transformation attack. In the case of the Saw Cleaver, the multiplier on these attacks is x1.3. An L1 or transformation attack of any weapon has a high multiplier and will cause significantly more damage than spamming an R1 combo.
Another vital thing to know is the damage type your weapon deals. E.g., Church Pick’s second and third hits of the R1 combo deal physical damage, while the first and fourth hits deal thrust. Some enemies like Kin are particularly weaker to thrust damage thus bumping the damage output of those specific attacks in the chain.
Blood Gems
A large deal of the weapon augmentation in Bloodborne will be from the blood gems you collect from enemies, in chalice dungeons, and all throughout Yharnam. Every weapon has a maximum of three blood gem slots that unlock at these levels:
- The first Blood Gem slot unlocks when you upgrade the weapon the first time, i.e., +1.
- The second slot opens at +3 weapon level.
- The third and final slot unlocks at +6.
Blood gems can range anywhere from increasing a weapon’s physical attack, arcane attack, bolt, or fire attack all the way to boosting a weapon’s scaling.
Lots of blood gems have specific conditions. The Poorman’s Blood Gemstone only increases physical attack when the player is near death. Tempering Blood Gemstone will increase a weapon’s physical attack overall.
At the same time, Adept Blood Gemstone will increase a weapon’s specific type of physical damage, being either blunt or thrust.
A Nourishing Blood Gemstone will increase all attack attributes of a specific weapon, both physical and non-physical, and is best paired with weapons with multiple attributes, like the Chikage or the Holy Moonlight Sword. There are many more gems that either give a percentage increase or straight number value bump.
Bonuses received from blood gems are always multiplicative. If you were to have three Tempering Blood Gemstones equipped that each give its weapon a bonus of 18% physical, the resulting bonus would not be 54, but instead, the bonuses would chain together to give you around 64.3% physical attack damage in total.
Weapon Buffs
Imbuing your weapon with any consumable buff, like Fire Paper, Bolt Paper, or the Empty Phantasm Shell (Arcane), gives your weapon a flat damage buff of 80 of that particular elemental damage type. This is on top of the damage your weapon already deals.
This consumable buff damage wouldn’t be affected by blood gems or attack modifiers in a sequence; it will always stay at 80 damage.
Weapon Scaling
Those Attribute Bonus letters stated below mean quite a lot and have much more depth. Attribute Bonus or weapon scaling depends on how much a weapon’s attack rating increases per point invested into a specific attribute or stat. Here are all the scaling grades and their impact on AR:
- “S” = 101%+
- “A” = 81% – 100%
- “B” = 61% – 80%
- “C” = 45% – 60%
- “D” = 1% – 44%
- “E” = 0%
Taking a weapon that scales primarily with strength, like the Hunter Axe, has a x0.65 scaling for Strength, but also scales with Skill at x0.35. Meaning, investing 5 points into Strength will increase the axe’s AR by just about twice as much as investing 5 points into Skill.
Most weapons scale with multiple attributes, but some unique weapons dedicate themselves almost entirely to only one or two attributes.
Left-hand weapons like the Evelyn Firearm scale only with Bloodtinge but do so at an excellent rate of x1.35. Subsequently, the Rosmarinus only scales with Arcane but has an impressive x1.21 scaling modifier.
Some weapons deal different types of damage based on whether or not they are transformed. The Chikage, for instance, deals only physical damage in its default state but deals exclusively blood damage in its transformed state.
In this case, upgrading your Skill attribute will increase the AR of the Chikage’s physical attacks while upgrading the Bloodtinge attribute will increase the AR of the Chikage’s transformed attacks.
Weapon Scaling Caps
You probably have heard of “hard or soft caps” while searching for scaling. The technical term for this concept is Attribute Saturation.
Attribute saturation refers to the amount of damage potential you have reached for a certain weapon. For all attributes, the saturation value is referred to as 1 once the attribute hits the max level of 99. A saturation value of 0.5 is reached at level 25, and a value of 0.85 is reached at 50.
If you’ve ever observed that weapon scaling increases minimally once leveling a stat past 50, this is pretty much why. Levels 25 and 50 are referred to as the attribute’s soft caps, and it’s why most players don’t really see the point in leveling any attribute past 50.
Enemy Type Weakness
There are three types of enemy in Bloodborne that you will encounter, which are enemies of the beast variety, enemies labeled as kin, and enemies that aren’t really either of the two.
Every weapon has a dog icon (Beast) and a worm icon (Kin) with corresponding numbers under the Special Attack heading which shows the weapon’s effectiveness against that particular enemy type.
Beast enemies include the Scourge Beast and the Loran Silver Beast. Kin enemies include the Brainsucker, Emissary, and the Fluorescent Flower. And neutral enemies like the Snake Parasites in the Forbidden Woods, or the many Yharnamites you find spread throughout the town.
There is an assortment of beast and kin related blood gems that allow a bonus percentage of damage towards each type of enemy. These gems are labeled as either Beast Hunter or Kin Hunter gems..Gems of one kind of enemy, while offering a massive damage bonus to that type of enemy, tend to also come with a damage penalty to the other.
Kin enemies share a common weakness to certain types of damage like thrust or bolt, while beast type enemies are more known for their weakness to fire and serrated weapons like the Saw Cleaver. Beast enemies are also weak to an entirely hidden damage modifier known as Serration.
Serrated damage adds an extra 20% damage to beast type enemies, and is inflicted by weapons that have jagged surfaces.
There is another damage type, Righteous Damage that can have varying percentage bonuses against unholy enemies, or enemies of the Healing Church. This damage is dealt by Church weapons such as Ludwig’s Holy Blade, the Kirkhammer, or the Church Pick.
Weapons like the Threaded Cane can deal either Serrated or Righteous depending on what mode is being used. The Cane form deals an extra 20% Righteous Damage, while its whip form takes advantage of the Serrated Damage modifier.
Most enemies in Cainhurst are weak to Righteous damage, making Church weapons the most effective weapons of choice in this area. But since beasts are much more plentiful in Yharnam, weapons with the Serration Damage have wider use.
Weapon Scaling and damage you deal in Bloodborne isn’t as straightforward affair as other soulslike. When I first played the game, I was dumping points in every attribute and equipping generic gemstones which wasn’t resulting in the most optimal damage output. With time I understand all these concepts and soon my trick weapons were doing all the hunting for me.