Bloodborne: how to kill the Blood-Starved Beast, with strategies for dealing with poison

This article explains how to kill the Blood-Starved Beast, with strategies for dealing with poison in Bloodborne, following on from Old Yharnam, survive the Hunter's gunfire and deal with the region's beasts.

If you're interested in more advice, our complete Bloodborne walkthrough and for the DLC our The Old Hunters guide and walkthrough can help.

While this boss fight might seem fairly simple at the start, things soon get tougher, so make sure you take as many Antidotes as you own into battle, up to a maximum of ten. Given this Antidote limit, you'd be wise to head into the fight with lots of Blood Vials in your pockets too. Switch your weapon into long-form as well, as the Blood-Starved Beast likes to leap around all over the place.

How to kill the Blood-Starved Beast

When the fight starts, leg it towards the Blood-Starved Beast and just wait for it to prepare an initial attack. When its arms start moving, prepare to dodge either to the left or the right of the creature, or into a safer position at its rear. The boss moves so far each time it attacks that one dodge should be enough to get you out of harm's way. Unfortunately, that also makes the boss rather tricky to attack yourself!

Here are the attacking patterns you need to be aware of during this fight. If you're right in front of the Blood-Starved Beast, the creature might grab hold of you and take a good solid chomp out of your face. This will inflict serious poison damage, so do everything you can to avoid this manoeuvre.

From medium range, the beast is fond of jumping towards you, before throwing around a frenzy of vicious swipe attacks. You'll likely need to dodge a couple of times in rapid succession to avoid the worst of this assault. The boss also uses a swiping attack that can combo a couple of times, but if you're quick to react you should be able to dodge out of harm's way.

Should the Blood-Starved Beast use that leap-from-range attack, you may be able to time your evasive move such that you are in a good position to launch a Charge Attack to its rear. Follow this up with as much critical strike damage as you can. The main challenge is to time your positioning just so here, to ensure you're lined up for the initial attack. If you can't land a critical strike, just go for the old two or three-hit combo to at least get some damage in.

For the first part of the battle, just stick close to the Blood-Starved Beast and play things defensively, getting your own damage in whenever it feels relatively safe to so.

Avoiding the Blood-Starved Beast's poison

At around 50 per cent health, the Beast will pause and then stand up on its back legs. When this happens, get as far away from your opponent as possible, because there's a huge poison attack coming your way. Get too close and you'll be knocked back and quite possibly poisoned as well. You want to avoid this damage, because the fight's about to get much tougher from this point on.

During the fight so far, you might have seen some icky fluid flowing out of the Beast's body. This stuff is seriously poisonous, and there's more of it flowing in the second phase of the fight. Get close to the creature and you'll be poisoned - keep an eye on the bar over your character's head to track this effect. As the bar increases, you get closer to being completely poisoned, which will drain your health bar drastically.

Because you only have a very limited number of Antidotes, it's really important to hold off from using one if you've a good amount of health when this poison bar appears. Use Blood Vials to keep your health bar nice and full, as you have so many more of these to take advantage of. Only use an Antidote when that bar becomes around halfway full. If things go badly wrong, you can grab more Antidotes from near the statue in this room.

>When the bar appears, consider backing away from the Beast so you can heal up or use an Antidote if necessary. The bar will go down a little on its own accord as well, but the boss is so aggressive at this stage of the battle that you'll struggle to maintain range for long. Make sure you have a bead on the Beast at all times, and be ready to dodge at a moment's notice.

Caution is the key to surviving the second half of this boss fight. Avoid as much damage as possible, and dish out your own damage only when it feels relatively safe to do so. Get in there, do a few jabs, and get away before the poison can consume you. Only the real pros will want to try the first half's Charged Attack manoeuvre while this creature is enraged!

As soon as you've beaten the Blood-Starved Beast, you'll be able to light the Church of the Good Chalice lamp. Oh, and don't forget to grab those Antidotes by the statue if you didn't have to use them during the fight itself.

- Carry on reading for our guide to making it through the Healing Church Workshop.

- You can find the rest of our Bloodborne walkthrough from the first page of this article.

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