I made a mini-project draft about 5 days ago. It’s about learning to beat a final dlc boss in Bloodborne during a challenge run. I meant to post it but didn’t get to it. I like it cuz I feel like I actually made some progress to beat the boss:
Mini-project 1 draft
Im going to draft a project about beating a boss in Bloodborne.
Mini-Project 1:
Project Summary:
The project is mostly about beating the first phase of the boss. There’s some exploration about what failure criteria looks like and what my goal really is based off that. There’s also errors I wrote about when doing the plan. I wanted to at least talk about them to maybe postmortem.
Goal:
The goal is to beat Orphan of Kos using only the boom hammer. Sidearms and riposting is allowed. No chalice dungeons allowed to upgrade weapons.
This goal can be separated into two sub-goals. The first sub-goal is finishing the boss’s first phase. Sub-goal two is finishing the boss’s second phase.
The boss’s first phase can be easy until I miss a lot of my parries that I end up taking enough damage to die. Maybe, some sub-sub-goals could be surviving certain attacks and doing damage. I might write about this to this as I play.
Success criteria (& optional failure criteria):
Failure criteria for sub-goal 1:
Failure looks like dying. I think dying is probably going to be normal until I learn to kill the boss tho. It’s just that dying too many times is going to be an error. It’s going to waste time and game resources. I have about 160 health vials for health and about 70 bullets. I don’t want to waste all that and farm for some more. I would be ok with that but it would be nice if I didn’t need to. I could back up my save file so that after attempting a bunch, I can reload my back up save. That way I don’t have to worry about my resources.
So to rephrase my last failure criteria: Dying so much that I lose my time and resources is an error. It would be nice to beat the boss and it would be ok too if I was able to get past his first phase consistently. Honestly I think the goal is to learn to beat his first phase. I think if I had the goal to beat him now then I would be screwed. I could try to fight Orphan of Kos with my hammer but its primary hit damage kind of sucks. Its heavy damage and riposte is so much better.
I think failure would look like not understanding how much health the boss has. I won’t know how many hits I have to do. I would have to focus on getting so good that I do enough damage. Idk this failure criteria seems kind of random.
I think failure would look like getting killed by an attack more than twice. That’s cuz I’m not learning about the attack that my errors keep causing failures at my goals.
Failure looks like getting enough damage from Orphan that I die. I could take health vials and use my bullets a bunch but if I don’t keep my health up then I could be exposed to a lot of damage.
Big picture goal, why you want to do this, or CF relevance:
I want to learn about failure criteria and about errors.
Plan:
The plan for the first phase is to give myself blood bullets. That takes away some hp. I’m going to take a vial to give myself full health so I don’t die. My approach is to parry some attacks and dodge others. One attack that I dodge lets me do a bunch of damage from behind. I want to do enough damage until the boss drops to the second phase. I don’t think this is a well enough plan cuz there are times the boss ends up killing me. It happens so often that it’s about 70-80 percent of the time that I barely get to the second phase.
What are some errors I found while doing the plan?
I saw about 5 things that looked like errors for sub-goal 1. I haven’t written failure crtieria yet as I skipped and wrote this part first. I’ll write the things that looked like errors first and then ill come back to them after writing failure criteria.
Things that looked like errors:
- Error I was heavy attacking at the wrong time/place after boss does his big leap attack. Because I didn’t stagger him for a riposte, it left me open to his next attack.
- Something else that looked like an error was dodging to his left side after he does that one attack that slides himself really fast to you to punish your backwards movement. His scythe hit me after the dodge.
- A potential error that was going to happen was when orphan of Kos was about to swing at me from his right to left. It’s an attack that’s hard to describe for me. I feel like the timing is short to parry that I could’ve gotten hit at other times.
- Another error happens in another attack that’s hard to describe where he swings from his left to right. It’s a large sweeping attack. I parried too late that his attack hit me. Also, I noticed that my shot that parries didn’t even connect to him. The bullet went past him. Would the parry have been successful if the shot hit at that time? Idk
- Another thing that seemed like an error was that after I riposted his back, he did a sweeping like attack that hit me at a range. I thought I had enough distance from him.
- Another thing that I think for sure is an error is that something that led to my death. I already had lower health than normal (~75%), and when I tried parrying, it missed the timing window and when I dodged to avoid danger I went straight into his long range attack. It hit me and I died.
What are some errors I ran into the second phase?
- One is that I stayed next to him for so long when he did that aoe attack from putting his “pus” in the ground. I dodged at the wrong time and that messed me up.
I’m going to make a second mini-project draft for beating the boss’s 2nd phase. I’m having a hard time beating it. Since writing a project helped last time, I thought it’d be a good idea to do it again:
Mini-project 2 draft:
Project Summary:
This project draft is about finding attacks to parry or dodge. There’s some goals I didn’t fully set out to do; i did like 2/4 of them. There’s failure criteria for some of the goals. There’s also a plan for the first two goals and some context.
Goal:
The goal is to learn the Orphan of Kos’s second phase. There’s some sub-goals involved here. I have experience with beating this boss, but usually I’m at a high level and I mainly parry him. For some reason I’m used to beating him primarily with parries, and that’s where it makes this challenge difficult. If I knew his attack patterns to dodge then I could punish him easily. The only thing is that the challenge weapon I use does really low damage while swinging. Also, I’m at a low level for this challenge and I’m choosing to not upgrade my weapon. U can go to a dungeon/chalice to do that.
Sub-goal one is to determine whether I want to parry or dodge the boss’s attacks. What combination of parries and attacks do I want to do? Sub-goal two is learn his attacks. Learn what? Learn the start of each attack and name them. Should I learn all attacks? not really probably just enough to survive and beat him. Maybe this sub-goal helps with with the first. I’ll know which attacks to parry and which ones to dodge. I think another sub-goal is to get the boss to 25-30% health. If I’m able to do that then that’s a good sign. This could instead be a failure criteria for the goals.
A fourth sub-goal could be have a list of errors that stop me from killing the boss.
Success criteria (& optional failure criteria):
Failure criteria for sub-goal one is not name at least 2 attacks to parry and 2 attacks to dodge. I have to have a name for them at least given by the internet or made up by me. The attacks have to have a description. This also works for sub-goal 2.
For sub-goal 4 the failure criteria is not having descriptions of errors. Another is to have not more than 2. It’s also success if those three or more errors include attacks that are hard to dodge or parry.
Big picture goal, why you want to do this, or CF relevance:
Learn projects and failure criteria and goals.
Plan:
Gather attacks to observe either through screen recordings, memory, or online information. Write down descriptions and names for them. Get at least four of them. Include how the beginning of the attack looks like or how long the attack takes. Find when an opening window is available. During this part of the plan figure out if I want to parry or dodge an attack. That way it limits the amount of research I have to do.
Context: (optional – fill out or delete the context section)
I’m at level 45 in the game and I’m excluding using chalices that boost my weapons attack power by a lot. The only primary weapon I could use is the Boom Hammer. Parrying and ripostes are allowed. I have like 120 blood vials for health and ~50 silver bullets to parry. It’d be nice to learn the second phase and beat him so I dont have to re-farm items.
Plan in action:
I found four attacks to name and describe:
Attack one: Sidestep to swing to overhead slam. I’m thinking about parrying this attack. There’s two windows to parry here. After his sidestep, the boss swings his glaive/axe from his right to left and then follows up with an overhead slam. Both look parriable. I don’t which one to parry. I’ll try in testing.
Second attack: Quick swing from his right to left. This attack is too quick to parry for me so I’ll just dodge and punish the boss.
Third attack: Two hit attack. Boss starts swinging his axe from his left to his right and follows it up with a similar attack from the other direction. It also propels him forward. I think this would be easy to parry on either swing. The first swing has a big window to do it.
Fourth attack: Another attack to dodge is when he swings his scythe from his right to left. It propels him forward and is very risky if I miss. I could parry the flurry of attacks that follow or dodge at the end and punish him
Review:
There’s a lot of errors I found in second phase. I just didnt write them down. I’ll do it later. I also ran into errors in the first phase that prevented me from practicing much in the second phase. I figured that happened cuz I tried to sneak more attacks than usual and that lead to more danger. It was fixed after a few runs.
I was able to finally parry Attack one 3 times. It helped to look at recordings cuz I instantly learned how dangerous some attacks could be and how much they repeated. That helped give me a general idea about what to do dodge and how to live longer. I think there’s something missing from the project to actually learn the boss’s second phase and win. It was hard to anticipate attacks in the fight. They happen too fast.
