Bosses

We cover two of Yharnam's encounters in full, and the pair happen to be built on the same idea. Neither is one health bar with a moveset attached. Both of them react to a hunter who is not doing enough damage by putting another body in the arena, so the fight you finish is only as crowded as your own hesitation made it. Everything below is drawn from our fight pages for the Witch of Hemwick and the Shadow of Yharnam.

Witch of Hemwick: get there before the room doubles

She is the fifth boss most hunters meet, and she is not on the critical path. Our game progression guide files Hemwick Charnel Lane as an optional detour reached by going left of the Grand Cathedral from outside, which makes it easy to postpone for a long time. Take the detour anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the fight itself.

The opening is a small trick. A Soot Monster stands in front of you when the door shuts, and the boss is not it. Turn left instead, find the witch there, and open with a run of fast strikes rather than a wind-up. Her only attack worth respecting is an area spell announced by a purple glow around her body. The other purple glow, the one that flares as she vanishes, does nothing at all, so do not waste a roll on it.

At about half health she splits: a second witch appears, faster and more dangerous than the first. Fail to put that one down quickly and a third joins, at which point you are fighting the entire room. The Soot Monsters that gather during all this are a distraction rather than a threat, and chasing them burns Quicksilver Bullets you do not have in quantity. Our page's advice is blunt and correct: raise your damage before you come here, ignore the small stuff, refuse to be surrounded.

When the arena is clear, light the Witch's Abode lamp, then walk to the alleyway beyond it, take the steps down and go through the door there. The Rune Workshop Tool is inside, and it is easy to warp home without it.

Shadow of Yharnam: three health bars and a snake keeping time

The name is singular and the encounter is not. Three guardians walk in together, each with its own bar and its own job: a swordsman who closes the distance immediately, a mid-range fighter with a katana and a second weapon that throws fire, and a sorcerer who stands off and lights the ground with fireballs. Because the charger commits first, most hunters answer him first, which is fine so long as you keep circling out of the middle.

The complication is the snake. Once one guardian is dead or badly hurt, it starts bursting out of the ground, and it does two things: it bites for a large chunk of your health, and it upgrades whoever is left. The two melee guardians pick up fire damage, the sorcerer gains a summon, and a magic cloud in the arena means three more snakes are on the way. That is the timer on this fight. Kill one guardian fast enough and you are dealing with two ordinary opponents; kill one slowly and you are dealing with two upgraded ones and something under the floor.

The reward is worth naming, because it feeds a build. Blood Rapture, the rune this fight drops, restores health on visceral attacks, and our Caryll Runes guide lists two more tiers of it in a Root Chalice and on the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst. The Cainhurst Assassin loadout in our builds guide memorises it precisely because that health has to come back from somewhere.

The doors these two fights open

The optional fight is the one that changes your game the most. Killing the witch is what makes the Witch's Abode lamp appear, and the progression route uses that lamp to reach the obelisk that summons the carriage to Forsaken Cainhurst Castle. Cainhurst is where the Vilebloods, the Chikage, the Knight's Set and the Executioner's Gloves live, so an encounter you can skip forever is the gate on a large share of the gear in our items guide. The Rune Workshop Tool she leaves behind is the other half of it, since without that tool the Memory Altar in Hunter's Dream will not accept a single rune.

The Shadow of Yharnam is the opposite: it sits on the main road. Past it lies Byrgenwerth, the Lunarium Key and Rom, and Rom is the point where the world itself is rewritten, so the ordering advice in our mechanics guide matters far more once these guardians are down.

For the rest of the run, from the Cleric Beast on the Great Bridge through Darkbeast Paarl, Vicar Amelia, Amygdala, The One Reborn, Ebrietas, Micolash and Mergo's Wet Nurse, our progression page lists every fight in the order you should meet it. Two boss pages is what we have written up in detail, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.