I have been upgrading the Blades of Mercy and at +6 they are still complete garbage against most mobs and practically unusable for boss fights. I have a ton of Skill, yet, they don't really stunlock very well and they deal very low damage to the point where dual wielding doesn't really make up for it. I was holding out hope the entire game that this might be the one skill weapon to finally replace my cane, but nope, it looks like I will beat it with a +9 cane - which is kinda sad in a way, to beat a souls game with your starting weapon.

It's sad that the game only has 15 weapons when it took 3-4 years to make. Mercy Blades don't stun lock, but are fantastic for PVP! Cane was my starter too. I love that weapon it really grew on me.

I find the mercy blades are great for in and out hits. the dash dodge attack is particularly nice when L1'd. I've used them exclusively since getting them. I love em to bits.

Still fairly early (just finished off Blood-Starved Beast and Vicar Amelia), and try as I might, I just can't get away from the Saw Cleaver. The Kirkhammer, Ludwig's Holy Blade, the Hunter's Axe--I just don't trust the attack speed of any of these weapons. The Cleaver just excels at hitting hard, hitting quickly, and accomplishing both of those goals with a reliable moveset.

EDIT: Also, this is the second thread in which I call it the "Axe Cleaver." Weird.

I started using the stake driver in the current build that I'm running with. Might be the coolest weapon in the game. If you retract the weapon and go for a charge attack, you effectively do an exploding punch that will send smaller enemies flying and do whole tonne of damage.

@historyinrust said:

The Saw Cleaver is a great all around weapon. It doesn't excel at any one particular thing, but it does enough reliable damage and has a robust enough move set to see you through most of the game. The problem with the Saw Cleaver is that the scaling sucks. And on some of the hidden areas, some of the bosses, you're going to sorely miss the extra damage you could be getting from a better scaling weapon.

I'm on my third playthrough right now (NG++) and after spending my first with the Kirkhammer, second with the Burial Blade, I'm now getting around to the Holy Blade and I have to admit I still love my greatswords. Any of those are fine, fine weapons in my view.

I started with hunter axe which I didn't like so I deleted the char by the time I killed the first boss. I loved the thread cane, fair dmg input and the whip was amazing for luring and dealin dmg from a distance, even tho I liked the cane, I had to get those daggers in early game xD so I killed eileen to get the blades of mercy which I really loved, great fast dmg input, while it sucks against a group of mobs, it doesn't matters if you got the cane's whip to back you up and clear the group to go back to the daggers, it's amazing for individual fights like bosses or pvp, it's good for fast aproaches as you can dodge and easily counter back and the dual daggers combo does incredibly nice dmg. I tried the reiterpallasch and HATED IT xD and well don't get me wrong, the blades of mercy are lovely and can be used just fine thro all game as they scale on skill to S but as I like the idea of dual daggers, the idea of a katana is even better, so in late game when I was around lv 60 I started investing in bloodtinge to get ready to use the Chikage, it is an amazing weapon, it does LOTS of damage and is actually not really slow, it's fast enough to keep mobs from hittin you :) the buff is kinda deadly but man, the dmg is outstanding, I can tell the Chikage is by far my fav weapon xD I've been using it ever since I got it, no need for a second weapon really, it goes very well with the evelyn in the other hand as it scales to S in bloodtinge too, my chikage is already +10 and my evelyn is +9 I'm lv 107 and I already beat every boss, I'm just playing with the chalices a few before killin final boss and clearin game to start over again.

Rifle Spear and Blade of Mercy. Rifle Spear was one of the best until I got the Blade. The Blade is so great with it's combo potential.

I am only a few hours in, and started with the cane/whip thingy. I liked the look of the rifle spear from one of the GB videos so I looked that up and saw it was a skill weapon. So when it came to starting the game I have sort of been going for a skill build.

Just curious if I should still keep leveling strength every once in a while even if I stick to skill weapons?

@honkalot: For the most part, yes. Scaling works weirdly in Bloodborne and it seems that most weapons get a decent boos from both stats. In fact some skill weapons that have high arcane scaling and poor str scaling will still get a bigger damage boost from scaling str rather than arcane.

@humanity: Oh okay, thanks for the info! :)

Don't mean to hijack too much but how about upgrading weapons. From what I could see there are several different tiers of upgrade materials and so far I've only found the first tier. Just with those mats though you can upgrade a decent amount of times.

I'm curious if the upgrade mats are finite, like should I be saving it up until I find and try a few different weapons? I've upgraded the cane one step so far but am sort of hesitant to take it further for that reason.

@honkalot: no man, dw you'll be fine, they're easy to farm, right now I got 83 blood stone shard and I sell them whenever cuz I don't need them anymore