Chikage and Learning How a Bloodtinge Build Works

I've played Bloodborne on a few different characters, typically picking a primary damage attribute and focusing on that. My first character was Strength based, then I did a Skill-based one and an Arcane-based one.

Strength and Skill are two pretty straightforward stats - your weapons just deal more damage as you build the stat. Arcane is weird, but ultimately very satisfying, as your weapons don't scale with it until you get elemental gems for them, but then they become very powerful (and allow you to take advantage of weaknesses the bosses have) while also giving you access to the Hunter Tools to effectively cast Bloodborne's equivalent of spells.

Bloodtinge is one that I avoided for a while, but I'm finding my new character has become quite powerful with it. That's due to the fact that I have gotten the Chikage, which you need to defeat Martyr Logarius to attain.

Logarius is of course one of the harder bosses in the game if you're at the appropriate level range. Sequestered off as the boss of Castle Cainhurst (an ironically easy dungeon for such a tough boss) I think one of the biggest challenges is the long run back to fight him. But on top of that, he avoid you during the early stages of the fight, making it hard to just get in and hit him. Then, as he gets lower on health, he starts attacking more in melee while casting spells that force you to hide. The good news is that, like Pontiff Suleyvahn in Dark Souls III, if you get really good at parrying, the last phase becomes surprisingly easy - assuming you time it right.

Anyway, once you join the Vilebloods, you get the Cainhurst badge and can pick up this blood-katana.

The way it works is that it typically scales with Skill (maybe a bit with Strength as well,) but when you transform it, it starts to scale with Bloodtinge (at a better rate,) though it now starts to drain your health at a gradual rate.

Thus the way I've been using it - quite effectively - is to only transform it briefly when I have a window for big attacks. The damage it puts out is profound - this was I think the first time I solo'd Shadows of Yharnam (I couldn't remember where the summon spot was... or maybe it's Henryk you summon, so if he's already dead you can't summon him?) While I did see my health drop to scary levels now and again, I was able to carve through those snake-infested Ringwraiths with remarkable speed.

Darkbeast Paarl went down very easily too - especially given that you can extinguish his electrical aura if you damage him quickly enough, so having a high-damage-at-a-cost weapon worked well.

I'm now thinking of either doing Nightmare Frontier, continuing into Byrgenwerth, or possibly trying my luck at some early Hunter's Nightmare to see if I can pick up Simon's Bowblade or some other cool weapons.