Bloodborne BL4 - Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower

after an embarrassing eight hours of attempts, I finally managed to kill maria. easily the hardest boss I've ever done on one of these challenge runs (so far), and by far the longest time spent on anything I've done in a game. the first hour or two was learning a good strategy, and the next six was dying to the same exact mistakes over and over again. one big issue was getting rollcaught by the delayed sword swing, or getting hit by it while spamming r1 (the transform attacks manage to stagger her out of it 9/10 times). another thing that kept screwing me up were the charge attacks. I just kept panicking and getting oneshot by them. over and over. the quick poke move in the latter phases also is fast as fuck and kills instantly. for most of my time on the fight I was just as likely to die on any part of the fight because the problem moves were present for the whole thing, but for the last three or so hours my deaths were mostly on phases two and three. figuring out I could backstab on the charge moves made them a lot more welcome, and made the fight smoother after I figured it out six hours in. there's an element of rng to this fight where it can be hard to react to certain combinations of moves, or things like charge attacks while ur in her face attacking. this fight was extremely difficult for me but I'm glad I finally beat it.