Need some character build advice.

So i began playing bloodborne a week ago, i went in it completely blind, not having read anything but reviews of it and it was my first "souls" game.

As i did not know anything about it i went a head and picked lone survivor as my class since more hp and power are pretty much useful in any rpg, i have been doing pretty well, better than expected actually, i have taken down nine bosses with around 25+ deaths in total.

I am pleased with my build so far but vitality and strength have reached a point of diminishing returns now and i want to know what i should focus my leveling on now.

These are my stats at the moment

Vitality : 30

Endurance : 17

Strength : 30

Skill : 12

Bloodtinge : 7

Arcane : 7

So where do i go from here?

Leveling skill feels pointless since i already have my strength as my main "damage" stat and i do not particularly like the skill based weapons i have found so far, i primarily use the kirkhammer, ludvig's holy blade and the tonitrus ,my endurance feels fairly adequate as it is now.

Any advice is appreciated. :)

What weapons are you using? There a few good weapons for Str/Skl builds that might appeal to you.

If you're really set against bumping skill though, I think I'd recommend endurance. It's not my bag, but Str/End seems to be a fairly standard sort of build, and the strength weapons probably want a good amount of stamina to use effectively

With the hunters axe I found that putting skill up really buffed my damage more than I was expecting. I have 50 in both strength and skill though the holy blade might not scale as well. I always go with endurance. 40 is the max, and I always appreciate having to do longer combos and dodging. You should push strength to 50 at least but maybe some more endurance before then. Getting arcane to 15 or so isn't a bad idea and might slightly buff the damage on the holy blade.

If you don't want to mess with the other stats there's nothing wrong with continuing to pump points into Vitality, Endurance and Strength. Although you're at diminishing returns for the two at 30, you'll still see decent benefits (particularly using strength-scaling weapons). If you want to head into the Chalice Dungeons you'll probably find you want as much Vitality as you can, because some will cut your max HP as part of the challenge. I definitely agree that Endurance feels less useful (certainly by comparison to other souls games) and you're probably at an adequate number, but you can certainly put more points in there.

The alternative that I might suggest is to start levelling Arcane. If you like Ludvig's Holy Blade, it scales better with Arcane than any other stat (as long as you put an elemental bloodgem into it). Levelling Arcane will also increase your Item Discovery stat and damage of your Molotovs, which can be handy, as well as allowing you to play around with a few of the "Hunter Tools" (the spell equivalents) which you might find supplement your current playstyle well.

@mrasshat: You can safely keep leveling STR until about 50. My A scaling Skill weapon was getting 2-3 damage increases each time I leveled up my Skill all the way until 50 at which point I needed to raise my skill 3 points before the damage even moved a bit.

You're a STR build so keep alternative between putting points into VIT and STR. If you feel like you don't need the extra life because you've been doing just fine then hammer away at STR and maybe think about getting your arcane up. There is an item in the game that requires 18 arcane I think that buffs your weapon with arcane damage, which could be useful as a sort of hybrid build. At 15 arcane you can use the Old Hunters Bone to get really quick and cool dodges. There is also a pretty cool STR weapon that also scales with Arcane.

Alternatively you can start dumping points into Bloodtinge and either level up the Evelyn pistol or the Cannon (which requires a lot of STR to wield) for some extremely overpowered long range damage. There is no STR based weapon that scales with Bloodtinge though.

Well you only hit the soft cap for the stats, if you want you can go up to 50 where the hard cap is and real diminishing returns kick in. If you don't plan to use any skill or guns then the only other option is endurance. Those are your only real options.

I will say though that if you use the holy blade Skill is more than useful for that since it's basically the best weapon in the game because of the scaling with str/skill.

If none of that sounds appealing then you're gonna have a lot of extra blood so you have tons of things to buy from the shop. :p

Heavy weapons like the Kirkhammer use a lot of stamina, and faster str-based weapons like Tonitrus can stun-lock enemies very efficiently if you have enough stamina to fuel a long combo. I'd definitely recommend more endurance, as that stat is a bit low currently.

The benefits of increasing strength and vitality aren't as high as they used to be, but they won't drop off any lower until you hit 50. It's definitely worthwhile to continue leveling those stats as well.

Some weapons scale in both strength and skill, like the holy blade and the cane for example - you might be at the point now where even though skill isn't your primary attribute, you'd get more extra damage out of it from your main weapon that you would do from your primary skill.

Your vitality is way beyond mine (I'm on 15 or something and I just beat Rom) so I think you're all good there. I'd say stamina is probably the way to go.

Stats in Bloodborne have two soft caps, the second of which is really pointless to try to go beyond. The first is 25, after which you still get some benefit for leveling but not as much as from 1-24. 50 is the second soft cap, where you really should stop since above 50 you're looking at several levels for single points of damage increase in strength and about 5 or less HP increase per level for vitality.

Even though you're past the first soft cap with strength and vitality it is still well worth investing the blood echoes to take them to 50, especially with vitality since more health is always good. If you're using a pure strength weapon you'll certainly get a lot of benefit from leveling strength still, but many weapons scale on multiple stats. For example, Ludwig's Holy Blade scales the same with both strength and skill, and since you're skill isn't yet at the first soft cap you'll get more points of damage increase per level of skill than you would per level of strength, at least until your skill hits 25.

Endurance. Your endurance is low and that is a useful stat for any build. Also, depending on the weapon, you might reach a point where putting points into skill will raise your weapon damage more than it would if you were to put points into strength.

Endurance and if your using the ludvig's holy blade then put points into skill. Skill does some decent scaling for that weapon. I can't speak for the other. If that still doesn't interest you go arcane cause you get some items that require higher arcane (i have two that require 15) that either buff your weapon, or have some other kind of effect. I would look those items up on a wiki and see if they are worth it to you.

Keep in mind that weapon scaling improves the more you upgrade a weapon; that's why it's still worthwhile to dump points in STR for example. If you want to stick with a strictly melee build, then I suggest investing points mainly in STR and VIT. If you still want to increase your damage output even after hitting 50 in STR, then you might want to invest in SKL, especially if you're using Ludwig's Holy Blade. Alternatively, you can invest 8 points in ARC to get to 15. At which point, you have access to three Hunter Tools, including the arcane weapon buff @humanity is talking about. Investing in ARC should increases the electricity damage of the Tonitrus (not sure though).

More endurance wouldn't hurt, and more vitality is always a good thing. It looks like you are coming up to the point where leveling starts to matter and do less and player skill starts to become the focus. I'd suggest putting points into strength until 50, but you aren't going to see the kind of gains you were getting. For a first time player you did manage to put together a solid build, so good job.

That's funny - lot of people are saying go for endurance, but I am playing a Strenght character as well and only put so many points into it so I could swing the Kirkhammer three times in a row (light attack) and consider that enough. Go for strenght 50 would be my advice, those three swings crush most things dead.

@quipido: yah honestly with how fast endurance comes back in this game and considering you don't ever block so you don't need much after exhausting yourself on swings I'd say at 20 END you're probably set.

Thanks for all the replies, i will bump my endurance up to 20 then i will focus on getting strength up to 50 with some more vitality along the way, my build is pretty basic without any real depth or finesse, but boy do i hit things really really hard, i'll call this the "hulk smash" build. ;)

So i just got to that nasty maggot gandalf wannabe and his spider cronies, spent a good amount of time meticulously getting rid of his bodyguards only to have the fucker pull a houdini and summon more spiders and bombard me with ice comets, good times we here had by all.

I am guessing this boss will be a bit of a pain, good thing i like it rough.

Endurance and Arcane are the worst stats for most builds, though once you get to 50 with everything (and 25 bloodtinge) by all means get 50 endurance, too. Endurance can be insane with something like the Beast Claw but in general you get shitloads of stamina relative to other Souls games from the getgo.

well endurance lets you stunlock bosses longer which is nice, but otherwise get to 50 str vit.

Exactly, in the previous games (if played with shield) you had to account for huge chunks of stamina vanishing with every hit, in BB you know exactly how much you have left all the time - after a while you don't even need to check the bar because you just know how many swings/dodges you can afford with given weapon. On my character I got Strenght to 50, then Vitality, after that Skill and Bloodtinge and just now I am getting to pumping some to Endurance and maybe Arcane.

Speaking of which, is there any point to go above 50 in anything? Or will all the high lvl characters end up exactly the same with all stats at 50??

@quipido: I mean, stats still increase past 50 but it takes about 3 levels. On NG+ you already get SO many souls for just running a level and killing regular mobs that it almost balances out the fact that you need to level up more to get any benefits.

I just started my NG++, at level 190 (completed all the Chalice dungeons so that bumped me up quite a bit), I have all the stats at 50 except for endurance (25) and arcane (20). I killed the first three bosses on my first try without even coming close to death (which happened a lot on NG+) so so far it seems at this point it's more about knowing the enemies than the actual level. Going for the platinum trophy now and I will start a new character sometimes after they patch it I guess.

I've been half heartedly doing NG+ for lack of anything else to do and it really hits home just how pointless that mode is. All my time spent leveling up and upgrading my weapons is completely trivialized by enemies having more health and hitting for way more. You might as well be playing your first run because everything has remained the same except they took enemy stats and increased them by a magnitude of 10 to counteract your progress - now the basic villager takes 3 hits to kill again even thought you've fully upgraded your weapon to +10. Theres a new enemy here and there but man.. I mean this has been largely the case for the other games in the series but never have I felt it as strongly as here, mostly because of the lack in build variety.

For my NG+ was always like a bonus for the player. You started the game from scratch with all your abilities and it made the beginning of the game a lot more fun because you could kind of blaze through it and find cool new shortcuts. I think the Souls games, and Bloodborne in particular, are the only games I know where NG+ is kind of a chore and you're set further back than if you were playing a brand new campaign. They should at least let you keep the keys so you could mess around with story progression. It's all a little lame.

I have only finished Demon's Souls before and did't play NG+ in that game, so I don't have real point of refference, but I enjoyed NG+ in BB, I looked up a guide so I could open up areas I missed and downed all the bosses I didn't encounter. Yes, it was still a challenge, but that was awesome - why would you want it to be easy? When I finished that NG+, I run through NG++ in a couple of hours (my estimate would be around 3 hours) and that one felt really easy. Died maybe 5 or 6 times, half of that on bosses. Got my platinum, save file says 120 hours on that character, level 201. I think I'll play something else now - really tempted to buy Dark Souls II remaster, but I'll pick it up in a couple of months when it's on sale, I got scared off by the weapon durability bug. otherwise I would have bought it at launch and now I am glad I didn't, I need some time off this series.