Visceral Attacks are the equivalent of ripostes in Bloodborne. Performed after a successful Gun Parry, players can inflict massive damage on enemies that are in a susceptible state.
Visceral Attack Basics
A Visceral Attack functions much like a riposte from the Souls series. There are two ways to set up a Visceral Attack:
- Parry the enemy right before it attacks. To parry you need a pistol, a shotgun or Augur of Ebrietas, and the Quicksilver Bullets to fuel these tools.
- While directly behind an enemy, hit that enemy with a fully charged R2 attack. This works on most, but not all enemies.
If the trigger is successful, you will hear a very specific sound, and the enemy will go into a "stunned" animation.
From this point on, walk up to the enemy and press R1 to perform a Visceral Attack, which will knock the enemy down.
Visceral Attack Specifics
- Visceral Attacks scale with Blood Level and the Skill stat.
- Visceral Attacks deal Thrust damage.
- Visceral Attacks scale with a weapon's projected Thrust AR.
- This means that weapons specced for Blunt, Arcane, Fire or Bolt, will have considerably weaker Visceral Attacks.
- Weapons that deal primarily Blunt damage, but are not specced to do only Blunt damage (Adept Gems) have normal Visceral Attacks.
- Some bosses can be parried, while others will be left open to a Visceral Attack after absorbing sufficient damage.
- A Visceral Attack will restore all orange health.
- For the duration of a Visceral Attack, you are invulnerable.
Runes Affecting Visceral Attacks
- Heir (increase Blood Echoes gained)
- Clawmark (increase Visceral Attack damage)
- Blood Rapture (regain health with Visceral Attacks)
- Oedon Writhe (regain Quicksilver Bullets with Visceral Attacks)
Visceral Attack Super Specifics
- Visceral damage increases dramatically between 1 and 10 points in Skill.
- Visceral damage increases additively by roughly 2% per point in Skill (between Skill 10 and Skill 50)
- Visceral damage increases additively by roughly 0.5% per point in Skill after Skill reaches 50.
- Visceral damage increases from Blood Level end at Blood Level 200.
- You may be visceralled by hostile hunters and certain bosses (Maria and Gehrman).
- Visceralling an enemy can disrupt adjacent enemies.
- After a Visceral Attack, there's enough time to heal or dash away.
- After stunning an enemy, there's enough time to perform a single roll towards them, and press R1.
- The Visceral trigger (R1) may be disrupted by a height difference between the enemy and the player (like when fighting on stairs)
- The player need not be in front of an enemy to trigger a Visceral, but the player does need to be directly in front of a boss if that boss is not otherwise parryable.
-Base visceral attack damage is not connected to the weapon you are using. This means that the damage is the same regardless of whether you are using the Blade of Mercy, Kos parasite, the beast cutter, or even just your bare fist.
-The damage does not depend on your weapon’s attack rating or on the weapon you use per se. However, any blood gems that increases thrust damage will increase visceral attack damage as well since viceral damage is considered a thrust attack. But, the effect any gem has on visceral damage is independent of the regular effect it has on your weapon. For example, you could stack thee adept thrust up gems on a beast cutter, a weapon that has no thrust attacks. This would not increase the damage of regular attacks. But, it would increase your base visceral attack damage by the amount indicated by the gems.
-The threaded cane's whip form increases skill scaling by +15%. This has the same effect on visceral damage as a +15% Sharp gem when the cane is in that form.
-Logarius’ wheel’s transformed form decreases all physical damage by 30%. This includes the damage of visceral attacks.
You can read a detailed article on visceral attacks here.
Lore
- Viscerals are one of the darker hunter techniques.
Shouldn't the name of the boss who can visceral you be an "[SPOILER]"?
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
So I'm a little confused about something from my most recent playthrough. I did a quality build, used Stake Driver mostly and a Blunt Spec'd LHB as backup. Despite Specializing LHB as blunt attack, it still has a higher thrust damage than my stake driver, which was more generally set up to increase all 3 physical types, and importantly nothing that adds thrust damage specifically. LHB had a flat 300 Thrust damage, and Stake Driver had 281 at 40 SKI/40STR. However, my Stake driver was doing 2400 damage on viscerals with Clawmark runes +1 and +2, while LHB viscerals are 1900 damage.
Anyone know what's going on here?
- Anonymous
something cool i noticed btw: usually when u ludwig's health down to around 5%, he gets stunned and therefore, can be finished with a visceral attack. im pretty sure the devs intended it to be this way to make his death more cinematic or somethin.
- Anonymous
what even is a visceral attack, lore-wise?? like i mean what does the hunter do in a visceral attack, do they like, insert their whole hand in the body then pull out?
- Anonymous
50 skill + Church Pick with the best thrust gems + two best claw mark runes = over 5400 damage on each visceral minimum. Destroys in PVE and will GURANTEE one shot anyone in PVP
- Anonymous
Beasthood increases viceral damage as well especially when full meter. I was doing the 67 mil echoes on Living Failures, using beast claws + embrace viceral from 3k to 6k screwed up my timing for the second viceral since the first one ends the fight early.
- Anonymous
I really hate how you specifically have to press the light attack button and be right in front of or behind the target. So often I will get a parry in, but instead of visceral attacking, I'll just uselessly slap them with an r1
- Anonymous
Binding it to skill is quite possibly the worst combat decision they've made in this game. Unlike the guns and invasion problem, this hurts PvE too
- Anonymous
Be careful using visceral attacks in the Chalice Dungeons. If you kill an enemy with a visceral attack, when you return later to the scene of the crime there will be a bloodlicker slurping away.
- Anonymous
Does anyone have theories on what it actually IS? Is it the act of shoving one's hand into a victim's soul, and ripping it out? Are you LITERALLY stabbing your hand into someone and tearing out some chunks? Is this explained anywhere?
- Anonymous
Some things to note. No matter what weapon you are wielding, It is considered a thrust attack, and is affected by any blood gems that would affect thrust attack of the weapon currently equipped. ([odd] tempering, nourishing, adept, [possibly?] finestrike, fool's, poorman's, beast/kinhunter, and sharp) I am currently looking into other gems that can affect visceral attacks and have found that the "odd [element]" (arcane, fire, bolt, BUT NOT BLOOD) gems also increase the damage as well. What is left for me to look at is "heavy" blood gems. I don't have one, yet, but I need it to see if it affects visceral attacks. If it does, it opens up a new avenue for strength based visceral builds.
- Anonymous
"Likely Branched of from lifedrain" euhm no? Bloodborne lore and Dark souls lore are unrelated. Same goes for the 2nd point where it conflates Demon's Souls Lore with that of Dark Souls. They're just simular gaming mechanics, because all three games are made by the same director.
- Anonymous
I love me some bloody criticals in the morning-I mean, night. >:D
- Anonymous
am i just lucky or do enemies, killed by visceral attacks, drop more rare stuff?
the hunters in the dlc seem to drop more often gems and the werewolfes in upper cathedral ward tend to drop more bloodstone chunks.
- Anonymous
This needs an update: you can do an opening for a visceral attack with Augur of Ebrietas on the back.
- Anonymous
So satisfying to get the stagger and then see a large chunk of health disappear. I've done a skill build specifically to take advantage of this mechanic and it was a lot of fun :)
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