Insight breakpoints for bosses?

I'm at 29 insight (I have been for a while) and I heard that enemies get harder at certain insight breakpoints. I'm taking on the 4th boss and I don't think she's normally meant to two shot me. I have 18 Vitality (742 HP) and normal armor I suppose.

I'm not really using Blood Vials or bullets because I don't want to waste my resources until I figure her out. I deal about 100 DMG with my heavy whip attack for reference. I'm not going to look up videos to see the parry timing for bosses so right now I'm using my own blood to shoot at different attacks. The key is to figure out her parry so I can deal more damage than I'm currently doing.

Anyone know anything about the Insight mechanic and how it relates to bosses?

Vicar Amelia, yes? Her attacks do that much damage regardless of Insight, especially given your precariously low Vitality. The whip, while totally serviceable, is also not ideal for that fight. Her biggest weakness is being staggered, something better accomplished by weapons that hit more solidly.

She is also very weak to fire attacks, which is what I would recommend if you are doing an Arcane build or have resources to spare.

To add to what @crembaw said, don't be afraid to spend some of that Insight to invite a friend for cooperation. This idea that you need to beat a Souls game by yourself no help not ever is stupid. This game was made for coop, for PVP, for all of it.

Not to mention that Vicar Amelia heals and if you don't have a weapon that can hit hard enough and many times to stagger her out of spell, you're going to lose by attrition. Bring a friend and smash her ass if your build is gimped.

I don't think the damage she is doing to you relates to your insight level. I would recommend ringing the Resonant bell a few times to coop her on someone else's game. Ideally, you will fight her 2v1, as opposed to 3v1. That will give you ample opportunity to learn her attacks so that you can 1v1 her later. IT will also give you a ton of souls to stock up on resources. Once you have faced her enough, you'll fight that her attacks are easy to dodge and/or parry because they are telegraphed pretty well. You have the right idea parrying her though. She has a ton of health, and the fact that she heals can make her a frustrating fight 1v1 otherwise.

@oldirtybearon said:

This may be true, but as someone who just beat the game entirely solo, it just feels awesome. I like knowing I can handle anything the game can throw at me solo. Now, if you're going to give up playing the game entirely if you can't do it, then go ahead and summon someone. If you're the type of person who doesn't mind banging your head against something until you get it, there's nothing wrong with doing so.

I think I managed her with around the same stats and the same weapon, but I'm not entirely sure. My strategy consisted of trying to stay at her back/side as much as possible, buffing once or twice with Fire, and just laying on her until she was dead. Maybe I just lucked into it, but it worked quite well.

I don't use buffs. I've never used an item buff to kill any boss in Dark Souls 1 or Dark Souls 2 and I've never summoned a human to kill a boss during a first playthrough. Her healing ability is annoying as I can's simply try to whittle her down like I did with the Blood Starved Beast as she'll just heal. I might give that axe a shot.

I'm convinced that my high Insight is causing her to hit harder or take less damage because I've seen other people in co-op fights not take as much damage as I do. It's hard to gauge her behavior in another person's world compared to my world since aggro is constantly switching during those fights.

If it's Vicar then insight only gives her dialogue. You have way to much, it's not necessary to have that much. Go spend it on amazing armor!

@golguin Reddit, /vg/ and streamer tests seem to indicate that while higher Insight increases the moveset, damage doesn't greatly increase until you hit about 45 Insight. While you may technically be right, at zero Insight the biggest difference you would see is a change in mob movesets. Amelia's damage would still hit you like a truck.

Amelia having more options is definitely going to be a problem. If damage is scaling with Insight then my low vitality and high Insight for this point in the game (currently 32) is going to be a thing.

On a kinda related note I just experienced the Witch change with Insight.

I beat that boss by rolling into her jump attack and getting in some good hits with my saw spear. You can also try to roll past her other attacks, but that's a bit trickier. Also, having numbing mist is a must.

I accidentally saw numbing mist while googling Vicar Amelia, but that's not a path available to me as I can have no numbing mist and be SOL.

At this point it seems me and Amelia have reached an impasse. I can't stop her healing. A charge attack will not stun her. A flurry of attacks will eventually stop her once she regens back to more than 50% health. I went through her healing cycle 6 times before she eventually caught me off guard. At that point I had already done enough damage to easily kill her if she would simply not heal.

I'll need to think on this. I thought the axe would have the stun lock power to stop her, but it didn't.

Maybe I was over leveled but I thought compare to the other bosses she hit pretty weak. Also she's pretty easy if you just spam charged R2 attacks against her.

The whip is actually pretty good for that fight as her stagger point is her head. If you have any flame paper, when she starts to heal apply it and do a combo to her head and it'll knock her out a lot faster.

Or just upgrade your armor with insight.

@golguin: I just randomly found it while playing the game, so maybe just keep exploring until you find some? Have you exhausted every single path before fighting her?

No, spamming R2 did not work. I spammed R2 with the whip and the axe and it wouldn't stop her heals. Also, IT'S OVER! She's dead and I recorded and uploaded the fight which lasted around THIRTEEN MINUTES. Here is the video and some depressing stats. You guys can let me know how it compares to your fight because I've seen some videos and she apparently didn't care to heal in those videos.

It took me around 2 minutes and 30 seconds to get her health down to half (3:00 in video). The rest of the time was spent trying to beat her heal, which was an absolute failure.

Amelia healed 15 times during the fight.

Amelia healed herself 5 times in the span of 1 minute. (9:50 - 11:00)

I'm actually having a real hard time with this fight for some reason. Her patterns aren't especially hard but it's just that damn camera..

I feel like rolling without lock on is more effective here than the sidestepping. She looks really cool but all those ribbons and hair make it hard to see when you're upclose on what she's about to do next. Once again, something that I don't know how it went through playtesting just like the terrible boss area for the cleric beast.

Maybe I'll grind vitality or maybe I need some time off from the game. I can do the entire blood starved beast fight without getting hit once but the dodging just seems off for me here. Like I said, maybe I just need to shake it off and come back to it fresh.

@golguin: She did heal for me, but that's just her death sentence though. I think all of the bosses in the game are pretty weak and she is no exception.

Here is my fight with her:

Why are you using the whip mode by the way? Her reach is far greater than yours, I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish with it. It does less damage and is much slower then the normal Cane mode.

I was using the whip for range since I noticed she'd react more when she was hit in the face with it. The cane put me in a very unfavorable position to dodge and see her attacks. I was using the axe to try to stun her out of her healing since the stats on the axe makes it seem like it's a blunt weapon. Damaging her and avoiding her attacks weren't a problem during the fight. Given the amount of healing she employed I probably dealt enough damage to kill her 3 times over.

All the fights I've seen of her online involved a very low Insight stat. Your own Insight was 4 during the fight while mine was at 33. In all those videos she seemed very passive and willing to just get hammered on. In some videos she never healed. In a couple she maybe healed twice. I had her heal 5 times in the span of a single minute (9:50 - 11:00) and I have yet to encounter a video that came close to that kind of behavior. If someone could explain why she was so bent on healing that would be very helpful.

@golguin: Insight at 33 matters nothing for her aggression. She may have more moves at that level, but I didn't see any in your video that I haven't encountered. If you stay to her backside you will just get less hammered on, which is what you should've done more instead of staying in front of her. She is really not any more aggressive in your video than mine, I think that's just placebo messing with you.

Either way, if she never healed, the fight would actually be harder. Her healing is the thing that makes you able to kill her immediately. You shouldn't have used the whip when she healed and should've used charge attacks to stagger her. Then it's just a visceral attack party from there on.

To answer your question, it seems distance is making her heal if her health is below half. When I stayed on her, she wouldn't heal. So you actually just triggered that yourself sort off.

@zevvion: Whip mode does absolutely more damage than cane mode in regular attack.

That is correct. I just tested on Amelia and cane does 103 dmg RI attack vs the whips 120 RI attack. R2 is also stronger as the whip. There is the obvious benefit of the range as the cane will whiff even close up attacks due to her thin limbs and the cane's thrusts with R2 and charge attacks.

Using a charge attack with the cane DOES NOT interrupt Amelia's healing. I just did 2 to test and that's all the time I had before she just normally stopped healing.

Keep in mind zevvion that you used Ludwig's Holy Blade so you were able to stun lock the shit out of her. Whips and canes don't have the same stopping power. You could stagger her during her healing because of the swords power. I wasn't able to knock her out of her animation so she'd just heal up more than I can dish out.

I also just tested her healing with distance in co-op. She healed 3 times and only once were we at a distance. We gave her plenty of room for and instead of healing she'd charge right in on us and close that distance.

@golguin: charged R2 with the transformed axe definitly works against her and it's a very good big boss killer. The range, damage and stagger on it is just absurd. Definitly the best, easily attainable PvE weapon in the game IMO.

@golguin: Well let me clarify that in the case of this specific boss fight it does - generally it tends to do less on regular mobs. Also @zevvion appears to be much higher level and does have quite a powerful sword which obviously made the fight a lot easier. At my level I can't just shrug off her hits like that and have generally given up on this boss fight until I come back later since I'm probably too low level for it. An expert player will dodge everything and whittle away at the boss health so levels won't matter. I'm not that great and I just take way too much damage and my cane at +4 and 25 skill was doing like 80 damage to her.

From what I've seen this game is mostly STR based. I made the poor choice of going into Skill and thus far have seen no good skill weapons apart from the cane, while everything else works great with str and the stagger doesn't hurt either. It's a shame really because you make a dice roll at the start of the game and 10 hours later you realize it was a bad call.

Yeah, I've been using the transformed axe's R2 against the Witch and it's been working really well. I've also reached 40 Insight and holy shit can I finally "see" things. I can't imagine what people are missing with low insight throughout the entire game. I wonder if they would even know later on in the game since some items allude or straight up talk about what I'm now seeing.

EDIT: OMG my mind is getting blown. Now I have to go back to all other areas to see how enemy behavior keeps changing and I'm not talking about additional attacks/new weapons. Insight 40 is the real deal.

The problem with Amelia at low levels and non staggering weapons like the Cane is that you can't just whittle her health. She gains too much health when she heals and the cane can't stop her healing. I've read up on the fight now that I've beaten her and they all say to use a heavy weapon that can stagger her to stop the healing or use numbing mist. All trouble is made moot by coop since Amelia gets slaughtered by multiple people.

I say don't give up on Skill based weapons. I know for a fact that better stuff is coming later on in the game. Stay true to DEX.

@golguin: Blades of Mercy are supposed to be good and that is technically two fights away but still, it's sort of bad that this many hours in you still have just the cane. The drill arm, Ludwigs Holy Blade, Kirkhammer - all str weapons you unlock along the way. At least one of those should have been skill based. Right now I started leveling STR just because I want to use some of those bigger weapons and I'm pretty sure whatever skill based stuff there is won't be very good for bosses anyway. It seems skill weapons in this game are great for typical mobs but bad for bosses because of the smaller reach and worse stagger potential.

@humanity: Try the Rifle Spear it is a DEX weapon. Its standard form is a spear and it transforms into a two handed halberd that can fire a shotgun.

Its basically three weapons in one.

@golguin: The regular Cane mode can take her out of healing mode and you will do enough damage to stagger her with the charge attacks, though obviously one will not be sufficient.

@humanity I doubt that. I had a lot of points in Vitality at this point, but I barely made the requirements for Ludwig (16str), and my character was specced for Skill based weapons to boot. If I had specced properly, I would have done much more damage to her than in the video I showed. I also had to fight her twice due to save data corruption, and the first time I fought her was with Saw Spear and yielded more or less the same result, except she managed to hit me more here.

Either way, it is clear how to deal with her now and she won't ever be an issue for you again on subsequent playthroughs.

Wow I had no idea she was a difficult boss. I guess I must have lucked out since I beat her on the first try and didn't even notice she healed. I just dove behind her and used the flamesprayer. The fight probably didn't go longer than a minute.

The way insight work right now is very broken. FROM really should take a look at how they implemented the system and change the system as it stands right now.

At the moment, as soon as you use the summoning bell it consumes one insight point, so even if you get disconnected, which has happened to me, or the session gets borked somehow then you still have used an insight point and it's gone. This really comes off a big middle finger to the players. I get that they want coop to mean something and have you spend a very valuable resource for the gains of having help. However, right now it's really deterring players then making them want to continue.

I know Miyazaki gets off on players saying the game sucks and they don't wanna play it but I can't help but feel that this time around he kinda went a little bit off. To me it seems that with Bloodborne his "tough but fair" philosophy of the game has slowly shifted to "tough cause of...reasons"

I really hope they iterate as the game goes on. As it stands right now, I don't see the game having much longevity past the story line if players stick with it at all.

@mordukai: It seems broken, but less insight makes the game easier, so even if you didn't get a buddy, you tuned down the "world tendency" of BB. Which is weird because some parts of the game require high insight to even experience...

@mordukai: What makes you say this (Bloodborne not having longevity)? Just because you lose Insight when a disconnect happens? I think Bloodborne will be played for quite a while, but definitely not as long as other Souls games just because there is less to it. That said, there is an insane amount of Insight in a single playthrough. I'm not sure how far in I am, closer to the end more than anything I'm guessing, but I have like 24 Insight and 38 Madman's Knowledge and another couple of the bigger ones. And if that isn't enough, you get it for doing co-op too.

I would prefer if it took the insight once the player is summoned into your world. Not a huge issue for me since I have so much of it though lol. Plus insight from the chalice dungeon bosses.

@zevvion: It's more directed at early players. I can see a lot of Souls players just giving up.

I get that they want to make a system where you use a valuable resource to gain an advantage but it relies too much on their end of the game to work.

Pretty much my view on it.

@mordukai: I don't understand that though, why would veteran Souls players give up because the Insight mechanic for summoning isn't working optimally? Don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing it, it should work properly. But it seems like a rather minor flaw, more than a major one.

@zevvion: Because that resource is so hard to come by early on that if you keep summoning help on a difficult boss or in a difficult area and you keep getting disconnects and network error or get no one to help you then it's just deflating.

Maybe if they unlock the second fountain right off or at least lower the number of insight you have to have on you in order to use, then they would alleviate some of early game mechanics frustration.

The souls series always followed a very simplistic philosophy of "tough but fair". While bloodborne still follows that philosophy, to a degree, it seems from software overcomplicated a simple feature that worked just fine because of...reasons.

I am just saying I can see a large chunk of souls game fans just not wanting to deal with it.

if you use the pvp no-healing-juice (forgot its name) when she starts the healing animation, you can completely prevent vicar amelia from healing

The only issue is how much stagger you can deal and what your damage output is. I went away, did the next whole area up to and including the witches, then came back with a few more levels. With a bit of fire on my weapon Amelia was getting staggered from regular "weak" whip attacks as if I was using Ludwigs blade (which incidentally I had a +3 version of and it did far less damage than the whip even without the fire paper). I guess she is just more vulnerable to whip attacks, or maybe all bosses are since they're "beasts." Either way, before I was really struggling, now it was a joke since near the end there my hits were continuously staggering her out of attacks.

This has always been a souls thing where the only real effective boss strategy is "go farm up" or have a really drawn out battle where one hit from the boss can be the end of you. Apart from the obviously poor camera, I think this boss isn't scaled right in regards to the order in which you encounter it. The Witches in the next area are a complete joke for instance. Unless you are meant to bypass Amelia and come back later, as I saw Zevvion had done, then you're going to have a tough, drawn out battle like Golguin.

Here is my 2 min long fight.

Strangely enough I was told yesterday that they beat the shit out of Amelia with the whip by simply applying fire and stun locking the hell out of her. It's a fine strategy as is the numbing mist to stop her healing, but I was determined to fight her without buffs. It's very strange that the fight is designed in such a way that it might be impossible to stop her healing unless you have the right weapon or consumable items. Its very Four Kings in that way.

@humanity: This only supports my argument. You seem to be doing even more damage with the whip than I did with Ludwig. It's not about overleveling. You just need to do enough damage in a certain amount of time to stagger her, which means charge attacks and following them up. I've seen it done with the Cane on a lower level character than yours appears to be. That's not to say being properly leveled (correct stats for the weapon usage) doesn't help. But any Souls player knows that matters. Even so, in my video I was leveled very non-optimal for the weapon I was using and it still worked. She's just not a hard boss.

@zevvion: She is hard when you don't have a lot of life and don't do a lot of damage, which was the case for me before. That is a +5 Cane with two +5-7% damage buffs on it and a high Skill stat. Before I had way less health and even with fire paper the whip was doing about 120 damage and it was not stunlocking her ever apart from random face slashes - certainly never interrupting her attacks.

The point being that with perfect dodges this fight is doable on lower levels although it would be extremely protracted, and the healing makes a second weapon necessary because I could never knock her out of healing with neither whip nor cane. Her model design and the poor camera make perfectly dodging throughout the entire fight rather difficult as when you get in close you just can't see whats going on, a recurring problem in Bloodborne. In my video you can see that I wasn't even able to get behind her and had to keep attacking from the front because she kept her back to the wall and I was worried if I backed off too far she would start healing.

I guess we just have to agree to disagree. You had an easy time with her, I found her to be the most difficult boss thus for really dumb reasons. Even the Blood Starved Beast near it's latter phase when it's extremely aggressive is way easier for me to manage than this fight. Either way I'm glad to move on, although from the few other screens I saw online I can see there are just more Amelia boss types ahead.

@humanity: That's because the Blood Starved Beast is also an easy boss. Beat it on the first try as well. Like I said, I wasn't even doing max damage potential as I could've at that point in the game and there were still other area's for me to tackle first. I believe you when you say you weren't doing enough damage, but that must be a leveling/gear issue then. Because I was poorly leveled and not suited for the gear I was using and it was still not hard.

If we're going to say that Souls games are difficult when you do not level properly, then we can fully agree on that. Which is also why some are having a hard time with Four Kings @golguin. It's not about only one strategy working, it's about one very specific one not working (shield). If you have leveled properly for whatever build you chose, you can kill Four Kings just because of DPS. And yes, Amelia's mechanic is apparently that she stuns when a certain DPS is met. So yeah, leveling properly is important. I wouldn't call it rocket science, but it is Souls science I guess. This stuff happened before.

The key being "when a certain DPS is met." I was clearly not meeting the DPS threshold to stun lock her with my whip or cane so I couldn't stop her healing. The Four Kings are a DPS check in a normal game and become extremely difficult with low damage output. I know this because I specifically fought the Four Kings with a low DPS Uchigatana so I can experience fighting 4 of the Four Kings at one time to see if it was doable. I was able to do it with a lot of careful dodging and patient because I could eventually whittle their health down.

Amelia will just heal forever and if you can't stun lock her or overcome her healing rate with DPS she is literally IMPOSSIBLE. She healed 15 times in my fight (5 times in 1 minute) before achieving victory. I was literally in an endless loop until I was finally able to DPS before she healed. Amelia is unique in that regard.

Insight affects Boss battles? The hell? That must explain why I had a hard time toward the end since I had so much insight.

@zevvion: Well if you're over leveled for every boss fight then I can certainly see each one of them being very easy. In my fight I had less health than you and we both had the same skill stat and str stats, and yah, at that point the fight was pretty easy I agree. I imagine that if I stay in each area farming souls for hours then the proceeding fights will also be one-and-done sort of deals. My mistake was that I was able to beat earlier bosses at much lower levels and Amelia has a clear minimum. In that sense I agree the game is pretty easy so far.

@golguin: @humanity Some of this is directed to both of you: if you are talking self imposed runs, that's fine. But under normal conditions, you always need a certain DPS in Souls games. Heck, in any RPG really. This has always been the case. Are you just telling me that you're unaware that you need to do more damage the further in the game you get? You talk about 'overleveled'. I was most certainly not overleveled. Closer to underleveled. I'll repeat myself again, I had different area's to go to at this point in the game, and I had specced towards Skill where my weapon of choice required Strength. If I were to go to the other area's first, and actually level properly, I would have done a ton more damage to her, and then I still wouldn't have overleveled anything. It would've merely been my choice to do the other area's first. I don't grind in this games, the only thing I grind for is vials.

The next time I'll fight her, I'll dispose of her even more quickly because I'll go through the game properly specced. Yes, I agree that if you are doing a self-imposed run that you can make her very difficult. And perhaps for some reason you forgot that you need to build your character. But I was under the impression we were talking under normal circumstances. When I said she was easy, I meant under regular circumstances. No self-imposed runs where you limit yourself to a certain DPS for some reason or what have you.

@zevvion: I honestly don't know why you state the obvious and then somehow turn it around like it's a mystery to others that you're only now illuminating them on. For the past several messages I've been stating how it's absolutely necessary to deal more damage in later stages of the game to be able to progress forward, and I'm not sure what you're missing about that and why you continue to regurgitate what I've written back to me albeit in a slightly condescending and braggadocious tone. I'm not going to break down the stats of your fight but in short they were similar to mine but slightly higher so I know it's an easy boss fight at that point. In fact to get to those stats I farmed for a bit so I don't know how you were playing the game where you ended up with even higher stats than mine except with no grinding at all. Also Ludwigs blade has the same scaling for both str and skill up until +5 where str gets a better str rating, so at that point all you had to do was meet the minimum str requirements to use it and dmg output wouldn't have been significantly different.

To be perfectly honest I don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. My original point was that it's a difficult fight, unless you're a lot higher level than you normally would be at reaching that point in the game. I guess Bloodborne is just so easy for me that I reached that boss fight way quicker than you did and thus was way lower leveled, at which point it rebuffed me in a typical Souls manner of crushing me in a boss fight, letting me know I need higher stats to beat it. So I went out and got better stats and it was easier. Thats it. There is no "rocket science" or mystery to any of this, and quite frankly I'm tired of talking about and am moving on. I'm glad you're so good at the game, I hope you have a lot of fun with it despite how easily everything comes to you - and I honestly mean no offense by this, but man maybe tone it down a bit when speaking to people about it in the future because you end up sounding extremely arrogant.

@humanity: I meant no offense, but you kept talking like I was overleveled, insinuating I grinded my way to be more powerful in that encounter than intended, or whatever else. I was just explaining that is absolutely not the case. That is all.

You say I sound arrogant, but that's how you came across to me. Not my intention to annoy anyone, but it didn't really sound like I was seen on equal ground. Hence, my reaction.

Interested to see the discussion on Vicar in this forum, I would not have thought she would be one of the trickier bosses for people. I killed her the second attempt, and my first attempt was purely my error of controller input...a realllly bad dodge. I also never saw her heal, but the axe weapon transformed tends to stagger most bosses at points, so I think I just staggered her out of it without even knowing it. I find these giant bosses the easiest types in Souls games, just hug the legs and swing heavy attacks until they die.

Insight wise...I was at 15+ from pretty much the get go, so I'm assuming I've been facing the tougher version of enemies for most the game. I'm super curious to see if anything feels easier, so I'll probably start a fresh character alongside my NG+ playthrough.