So, Bloodborne is eight years old, and I beat every boss in it on multiple characters. So I don't have any qualms about something that is nearly an exploit.
This is old news - perhaps over a year old - but a player discovered a Chalice Dungeon that, with nearly zero effort on the part of the player, yields about 80k Blood Echoes.
It took me a while to figure it out (I actually succeeded but ran past the place where the echoes drop too quickly) so here's a step-by-step set of instructions.
First: this is not going to be available from the very start. You'll still need to clear the game through the Blood-Starved Beast. But given that this is usually the third-fought boss, it's not too bad (there's no easing of the difficulty of that initial trip through Central Yharnam. Bless Elden Ring for having an actual tutorial and easy areas before sending you into the meat grinder).
Now, you're going to have to clear two of the three layers of your very first Chalice Dungeon, the Pthumeru Chalice (this is why you need to take down Blood-Starved Beast). After defeating the second boss in that one (a trio of giants, who are pretty easy - though the undead giant who is the first boss will be a little tough as he hits hard). These three drop the Pthumeru Root Chalice, and now you're qualified to enter the... sigh... "Cum Dungeon."
The reason for this gross name is that the Glyph Password for the dungeon is CUMMMFPK. Open up this Chalice in your next slot (do the "search by glyph" option and enter this code) and walk in. Now, before you even get to the Layer One lamp, simply step into the very first alcove beyond the lantern that you zone in on and walk up to the first metallic panel on your left - literally the first notable object in the first room past the lantern - and watch. You should see a health bar taking something like 717 damage from multiple hits, and then they die. And you get 80k Blood Echoes.
At this stage of the game, likely before you even get to Hemwick (the path from Hemwick Charnel Lane to Witch's Abode after the second shortcut is opened has historically been my early-game farming route, especially because if you can parry the executioners consistently you also farm a bunch of blood vials along the way) this is an absurd number of Echoes. My Strength-based character was a little farther into the game - I'd gotten past Vicar Amelia and into the Forbidden Woods, (and frustratingly either got the sequence of Eileen's quest wrong or it's bugged because while she did tell me about Henrik, when I go to the Tomb of Oedon she isn't there) and the first time I did this, I got enough Echoes to level up six times. In short order, I hit level 98 - at a stage when I only had a +6 weapon. That was only two shy of the unwisely-hybridized Skill/Bloodtinge character I'd gotten up to Laurence and Orphan of Kos. With ease, I traipsed through the Nightmare Frontier and Castle Cainhurst (though Martyr Logarius still managed to kill me once) and I zoomed through the first part of the Hunter's Nightmare to get my hands on the Whirligig Saw.
This character is meant to more or less replace my original character, because there's some bug in the transfer from the PS4 to the PS5 where my old characters can't play online, and so the Whirligig Saw is my main weapon (as a note, I was very hesitant to use its L2 Transformed ability before and going through Castle Cainhurst with it, I regret not being more liberal with the buzz-saw shredding that it's capable of. Utterly absurd and over the top. (As a note, I think I'd like to homebrew all, or at least most of, the Trick Weapons to be used in D&D.)
Going back to the Chikage-wielding character, I used the dungeon to correct his error (to an extent) by grinding it out to get his Bloodtinge to 50 (though I'd still wish I could reinvest the points I put in Skill into Vitality and Endurance - that said, having a bit of skill is nice to make Visceral Attacks more effective). I was able to take down Laurence after a few attempts (I want to say three - though that was just today, and I'd tried a couple times prior) but Orphan of Kos is... well, Orphan of Kos is a hard fight.
Given the Chikage's S-scaling with Bloodtinge I'm curious to see if it has less punishing diminishing returns past 50. Ironically, I have put a bit into Skill on my Strength character (up to 25) but in this case, there is actually some benefit to it (beyond visceral attacks) because physical damage does actually scale with both stats (though this was when I was primarily using the Hunter's Axe, which has more spread-out scaling, whereas the Whirligig Saw is much more definitively a Strength weapon, with poorer Skill scaling - but still some).
With this available to me, I'm tempted to re-make my Arcane character, which is honestly I think my favorite build for Bloodborne, though the game (at least outside of the Chalice Dungeons) is pretty stingy with the elemental gems that really make the build work.
Again, I'd love to see a Bloodborne II that adopts some of the elements of Elden Ring (and, honestly, even Dark Souls) that make hybrid builds perfectly viable if you have the right things to enable them. Bloodborne obviously has more simplified stats, without needing to worry about weight, for example (though Elden Ring making the Stamina stat and the Carry Weight stat the same thing was very welcome). I'd also like to see a system where there's either a stat that increases Quicksliver Bullets carried or that we get something like a Focus meter to power Hunter's Tools and special Trick Weapon abilities, much as we saw with Weapon Arts and Ashes of War. That was, of course, an innovation of DSIII (well, an innovation relative to the series - Mana Bars long-predate this entire genre), which came out a year after Bloodborne.
In essence, I'd be so excited to see FromSoft revisit Bloodborne with all the game design lessons they've learned in the last eight years.
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