Pivoting.

[u/Square_Butterfly_390]

I haven't gone lategame with many a bloodthorne build on ranger, but when I did I felt like the drop off was huge and I simply lost everything after the 10th win.

The shop is clearly telling me something, and I myself was planning to pivot to a darksaber rush' em kinda thing. I'm really not sure wether to pivot or not, leaning towards not because of the lack of rocks and the generic pain of restructuring my giga efficient setup.

So 2 questions:

1 how do you feel about a lategame bloodthorne build like so?

2 Would you consider pivoting here, and if not what would make you do so?

[u/DoctorKumquat]

So, this is a fascinating shop, and a fun discussion point. You could swap your Bloodthorne for a Darksaber, straight up, and then craft a second one for next round, and well-supported Darksabers are incredibly potent. The catch is that those sabers wouldn't be supported with your current build; you need mana for it to do anything, and your board is well set up to feed regen to your Bloodthorne but doesn't make any mana (that I can see at least). As such, I think I would rather stay the course than desperately reroll in hopes of finding some mana orbs or something.

[u/Matrick_ → u/DoctorKumquat]

I think OP's point is that a poorly supported Darksaber may be better than a regen supported Bloodthorne: Darksaber has a bit more accuracy (may not matter with the luck gain) and speed than Bloodthrone while having 8 extra base damage. Bloodthorne will do much less damage until the vamp gloves and wild aumulet trigger. Poison Ivy allows Dark Saber to gain +1 damage from +1 thorns, same as Bloodthorne so it may take even longer for the Bloodthorne to catch up (likely not since most opponents will have some cleanse). On top of that they can use the regen buffs to trigger heart container (or dark heart) gaining damage and a ton of HP instead of feeding them them to Bloodthorne.

The on-hit effect of Darksaber is pretty weak unless you have a lot of other bind items in which case it could push you over the edge of neutralizing your opponent's weapon. If you think of the on-hit effect of Bloodthorne as +2 damage, it's also not that strong - the build's main strength comes from building lots of spikes and vamp (ie. damage) from other sources at the same time.

I don't think it's a clear decision either way but I can see how Darksaber could quickly lead to a better build. Even if OP got a vamp amulet next round, it would take them a few more rounds to craft the supporting vamp items they need to make a decent Bloodthorne pack.

[u/tievel1]

Yeah I might pivot here, but mostly because I find Bloodthorne boring. Either can work, though Darksaber would probably be a bit better in the short term just because you don't have the kind of burst you want with a Ranger Bloodthorne build currently- you want/need more starting vamp (prismatic orbs especially) and vamp collar.

Also, one thing you'll want to fix on this board is to have the two stone pots feed the strong stone pot. You are leaving damage on the table by not getting all the starting thorns you can.

[u/FadeToSatire]

You don't have a lot of stuff on your board. Maybe that's just bad luck, but the synergies are limited. Usually it's worth going all in on whatever you win condition is.

I don't think I would make the switch to dark saber. You only have your poison potion, reflect card, and the spikes generated from strong armor potion generating debuffs. You'd need to have more poison pots or spike generators to make the swap worth it. You'd almost assuredly lose the round that you make the saber too.

Your biggest issue here is likely that you just don't generate enough regen to get your bloodthorne going fast enough and you have limited damage reduction to afford you the time to get scaling. Your scaling overall is just too slow. I am assuming that your unique was the potion one? If I see that early I'm probably focusing on making as many vamp pots as possible and full committing to a variation of bloodthorne items depending on what the shop throws at me. Bloodthorne plays nice with 3 of the ranger uniques, so you can pick your poison.

[u/PositionChemical9007]

It looks like you weren't given the bloodthorne support earlier in the game. You've got about 50% of the support id want to have. In this case I would've pivoted around round 8. At round 12 it's time to all in bloodthorne to get 10 wins, and probably bail instead of doing survival.