- Good Hunters,
I've been working on Bloodborne the last 2,5 years with the Tomb Prospector community when it comes to editing dungeons and what you can do with them, which has increased our understanding of the Chalice Dungeons significantly. In this post I want to explain how Bloodtinge gem farming has changed now that we know all this new information about the Chalice Dungeons, to inform everyone about the odds you're really facing in an attempt farming these awesome gems. There is also a lot of old/wrong information out there, which made me want to write this up as well. To give an idea what save-editing has done for Bloodtinge gem farming, I want to compare old fashioned farms with new edited ones and estimate how long it takes to get a certain gem in each of them. There are only 2 different viable farms to get pure Bloodtinge gems: Shotgun Watchers (31,5% max) and Merciless Watcher bosses (32,6% max) (ignoring the Madman farm that gives 25,2% Blood ATK UP gems with a double secondary). Ultimately, I want to do this as detailed as possible, but Reddit or a Wiki is really not the place to do that. So I will try to keep it as concise as possible to hopefully make it understandable and readable for everyone. For the whole write-up I would like to refer you to our Hex Research sheet which shows all the explanations on the right side of the document.
Gem pools and Discovery - Our research made us able to understand how gem pools work in Chalice Dungeons. What I mean with gem pools, is the likelihood of each gem effect (like Tempering, Fire or Nourishing) that can appear on gems with non-fixed stats. You can read how exactly this works in great detail in the Gem Pools tab of the Hex Research document. This has been thoroughly tested with real game farms and proved to be very accurate.
From this, we know that the chance to have the Bloodtinge primary gem effect on a non-fixed primary gem (Merciless Watcher boss) is extremely low, 1/11892 in Pthumeru Ihyll, 1/10407 in Lower Loran and 1/39018 in Isz. Next to that, it made us able to identify that there is a certain edited gem pool that has the highest probability of 1/408, this is called the "slot machine" gem pool. We were also able to explain how the Discovery stat works in Bloodborne. Here is a quick recap: Whenever the player is in a Cursed dungeon and is wearing any number of Discovery enhancing runes (Eye runes or Milkweed Oath), they get a hidden bonus of 1000 points on their Discovery stat. Whenever the player is in a dungeon that uses one of the two unused "Terrible Curses" that drop the player down to 25% or 12,5% HP, this bonus is increased to 5000 instead. The total Discovery of your character influences how likely it is for non-boss enemies to drop a gem. Some enemies that are not part of the dungeon layout but are spawned in later by random effects like the Rotted Rite, seem to not be affected by this bonus. We think that the bonus should be applied to Shotgun Watchers, although we don't have confirmation in the form of real farms as of yet. The Discovery stat only matters for the Shotgun Watcher farm since they have a <100% chance to drop a gem when you kill them. Bosses already guarantee a gem when you kill them, so the Discovery stat only matters there when you farm Blood Stone Chunks/Blood Rocks from them. Presumably, the Terrible Curse will increase the chance for a gem to drop from Shotgun Watchers from 51,21% with a normal Curse to 54,33% at 439 base Discovery. This concludes that there are the two main ways to upgrade our existing old fashioned Bloodtinge gem farms:
- editing the gem pool to a "slot machine" gem pool for the Merciless Watchers boss farms,
- using a Terrible Curse for the Shotgun Watcher farm.
Method - Now that we know how we can update our existing farms, we need to talk about how and where we farm before we can make actual comparisons. I tried to make sure this post is most useful for what I think is the most common build that wants these kinds of gems. But you can simply edit the information a little bit when you use other builds as well.
There are two parts doing this comparison, the first is the actual odds the gem will drop the way you want which is generally the same for everyone. Base Discovery won’t really matter much at all according to the calculation as long as you use a single Discovery enhancing rune while farming Shotgun Watchers (though it is always advised wearing all of them). The second part is the time it takes for you to farm a single time in each dungeon which heavily depends on the character, how fast your loading screens are and your own farming experience. It is of course extremely important that you find a way of farming that is best for you, but speed should always be prioritized to be the most efficient.
| - we use a character that is around Blood level 100-150, which has no investment in the Skill, Strength and Arcane stats,
- we equip all Discovery enhancing runes which brings our base Discovery to 330 (5330 with the Terrible Curse) when we farm Shotgun Watchers,
- we equip all Clawmark runes to increase our Visceral Attack damage and use the beasthood save scum method when we farm Merciless Watcher bosses,
- we use a normal ps4 (ps4 pro or modified ps4's may have faster loading times which will make you farm faster).
I think the best way to kill Merciless Watchers with a build like this is with Visceral Attacks. Using the beasthood save scum method will make sure you can do this as fast as possible. Save scumming means you upload your save file to a USB device or Cloud before the fight, and when you don't get the gem you want, you quit the game and reload the save and try again. Make sure to build up beasthood in the dungeon before you upload the save file. Once you have max beasthood, quit to main menu and reload. You will see that the beasthood is still there when you load back in and has max duration. Also make sure your insight is as low as possible and you're wearing attire with the highest beasthood.Farming Shotgun Watchers is much more straightforward and should be no problem, even with the Terrible Curse active and low Vitality. You can just R1 spam with a tricked Chikage, or use a bit more thought and use the L1 transform attack followed by R1s. | - Normal: naapatbx (layer 3, under the lift in the cave)
- Edited: gvpuuz84 (layer 1, main layer immediately to the right in the dark room, Terrible Curse, this is actually an edited Sinister Pthumeru Ihyll layout)
Merciless Watcher boss farms: - Normal: pwmf22gu (radials, stairs arena), 5pwujscd (triangles, stairs arena)
- Edited: x69bm25r (radials, single pillar arena), g23a3ed3 (radials, stairs arena which is more safe but slower), 74rpt7p6 (triangles, 4-pillar arena)
| | As a reminder, most of the explanations for assumptions can be read in our Hex Research document about this topic.The total chance a Bloodtinge gem drops with the stats you want can be described as following: Desired gem chance = [chance a gem drops from an enemy] x [chance of the gem being Bloodtinge] x [chance of the gem being the right shape] x [chance the gem has the right rating] x [chance the gem has the right curse] Once you have the average farm time for each farm as well, you can get an estimate how long it would take to get a certain gem with a certain success rate. For the fastest farms we’re comparing, it will look like this. At first the chance a Bloodtinge gem with the desired shape, the highest rating, the best curse are shown. Then the average times it takes to do one run including loading screens are shown. | Dungeon | Chance | Average farm time | | Shotgun Watcher farms: | | Normal: naapatbx (OOS radial) | 1/7288 | 35 seconds | | Edited: gvpuuz84 (OOS radial) | 1/6827 | 28 seconds | | Merciless Watcher boss farms: | | Normal: pwmf22gu (radial) | 1/218337 | 150 seconds | | Normal: 5pwujscd (triangle) | 1/716370 | 150 seconds | | Edited: x69bm25r (radial) | 1/7491 | 140 seconds | | Edited: 74rpt7p6 (triangle) | 1/7491 | 140 seconds |
The chances shown here are pretty much fixed for everyone, The only ones that can change a little bit are the chances for the Shotgun Watchers depending on your Discovery stat. But the influence this has is really small so you can assume these to be fixed as well. The average times for the Shotgun Watcher farms are already really fast but the Merciless Watcher farms can be faster than mine with some practice. But you always need ~40 seconds to kill this boss. Most time is spent on resetting the run after a failed attempt. Perfect runs will be around 100-110 seconds with a normal ps4 but it is probably impossible to be that consistent.Note the difference in chance for the Merciless Watcher boss farms for normal and edited dungeons. Getting OOE Bloodtinge radials/triangles in normal dungeons is almost impossible. I’ve seen people conclude things with their own farms with sample sizes way too small. Confirmation bias plays a large role farming gems, people feeling one farm is better than the other because they got (un)lucky. With the information we have now we can make way better estimates on how long it would actually take to get the gems you want. It is impossible to say that you need to farm X times to guarantee a certain gem. We need to find a way of comparing farms. Therefore, I will use the binomial distribution function which can say things like: “you need to farm X times in a dungeon with a Y chance to get a certain gem and it will result in a Z% chance of success.” Then we are able to compare old and new farms by noting down the time it takes to get the same gem given the same success rate.
Conclusion - If you want to stay away from edited dungeons, I would advise to only farm naapatbx for 2 perfect radial 31,5% Bloodtinge gems which will take around 15000 farm runs (140 hours) with a ~60% success rate or around 22500 farm runs (210 hours) with a ~80% success rate. Merciless Watcher bosses have extremely low Bloodtinge gem drop rate to even consider farming for.
If you want to use edited dungeons, you need to choose how much time you are willing to spend on this. If we simply compare both Shotgun Watcher and Merciless Watcher boss farms to get 2 perfect radial 31,5% or better Bloodtinge gems (and a circular one): The Shotgun Watcher farm gvpuuz84 takes around 13650 farm runs (106 hours) with a ~60% success rate or 20500 farm runs (160 hours) with a ~80% success rate, where the Merciless Watcher boss farm x69bm25r takes around 7500 farm runs (292 hours) with a ~60% success rate or 11200 farm runs (438 hours) with a ~80% success rate. This makes gvpuuz84 about 2,75 times faster. Note that x69bm25r has a chance to drop 32,6% Bloodtinge gems and that you need to farm gvpuuz84 for a couple hours for a perfect circular 31,5% gem as well. On the other hand, gvpuuz84 is much easier to farm. This also makes our edited Shotgun Watcher farm gvpuuz84 about 1,3 times faster than the unedited naapatbx. If you are certain you want to get a full 32,6% Bloodtinge setup you need to farm 2 different dungeons, one for radials and one for a triangle. This makes getting an estimate much more difficult, because if you get lucky in the first dungeon and you get a perfect triangle OOS Bloodtinge gem, you can skip the triangle dungeon farm. If we ignore this small chance, we can assume you need to farm both dungeons a certain amount of times. Then we can estimate the success rate if we combine both answers. Note that choosing the success rate for both dungeons is kind of arbitrary in this case. But I’ve chosen these ones because it’s consistent with the other examples, You would need to do 15000 farm runs (580 hours) with a ~60% success rate in x69bm25r (2x radials) and 7500 farm runs (290 hours) with a ~63% success rate in 74rpt7p6 (triangle) to get a ~37% chance of getting all 3 perfect 32,6% Bloodtinge gems. We can up this chance to ~69% if we do 22500 farm runs (873 hours) with a ~80% success rate in x69bm25r and 15000 farm runs (582 hours) with a ~86% success rate in 74rpt7p6. This combines to around 1455 hours of farming. Number of runs and total hours needed to farm in all examples can be divided by X if you consider X number of curses to be acceptable and can be divided by Y if you consider Y number of ratings to be acceptable. There are 6 curses, Stamina DOWN, Kin DOWN, Beast DOWN, ATK DOWN, WPN DOWN, HP DOWN, There are 3 ratings for each farm, 16-18 for Shotgun Watchers and 17-19 for Merciless Watcher boss: 29.3% (16), 30.4% (17), 31.5% (18) and 32.6% (19). If you use a character with more stat investment, more Discovery, have a faster ps4 or more skill than me, you will farm a bit faster than I will assume in this post, certainly the Merciless Watcher boss farms. That is why it is always good to try out different farms and see how fast you can farm there and use this data so you can make an estimate for yourself how long it would approximately take to get the gems you want. It might be the case that a Terrible Cursed dungeon kills you more than a regular one. The couple percent bonus to gem drop chance you get from the Terrible Curse might be nullified because you’re overall slower in that case and it might be better to farm in a normal Curse dungeon. You can try to swap Discovery runes (remember to always keep one on) for runes that make you survive as well. The Terrible Curse Discovery bonus is way more than you will ever get from the Eye runes. Generally I would just advise to stick with the Shotgun Watcher farms. I’m fine with Stamina or Kin curses, so farming in gvpuuz84 would take around 7000 farm runs (53 hours, ~60% success rate) to get a complete set of 31,5% Bloodtinge gems which seems doable to me, but remember it is still a lot of time. Let me know how your experiences have been farming Bloodtinge gems, if my estimations are in the right direction and how fast your runs have been. I would be very interested to see all that. I would like to thank the Tomb Prospector community that helped me work on this for a long time. This post wouldn’t be possible without all the new information we have about the game. I hope you all liked it!
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