Elden Ring DLC - Bayle the Dread - No Hit, No Blessings

The fight is great, but the lock-on experience and that breath knocks it down a peg for me in terms of how fun it is. Don't get me wrong, lock-on becomes useful AFTER you've seen and learned the timings, but when I was still learning the fight, some deaths seemed meaningless because I was too dizzy to learn anything.

I have dozens of attempts end in the first 3 seconds because he opens up with that damn straight breath (5:12). If he does it from afar, running to the left or right doesn't guarantee a dodge because it seems to curve, and sometimes some strands of fire stray off-course. Best I can do is try to trick his aiming by running to the right, then dodging the opposite direction, but it doesn't always work from a distance. After my fight, I watched how others did it, and I've yet to see a consistent answer to this. "JuSt RuN tO tHe SiDe BrO" does not help lol

Another is his dive at the end of his aerial bombardment 1:44. The move is normally easy to dodge, but if you find your self a dragon's length away from the walls, he will end up landing on you at the end of your roll, even if you roll forward.

One more move is the aerial fire breath 4:11. First problem is when I am not locked on and I am not paying enough attention to which direction he jumped to, I won't be able to find him to distinguish this from the diving slam. To mitigate the problem, I dodge/run in the same direction, regardless of what's coming, look up to see what he ends up doing, and dodge towards him so the fire ends up behind me. Sadly, this isn't consistent - sometimes he jumps too far away so I don't end up running past the fire. A possible solution is to ignore Bayle completely and just focus on dodging the fire as it hits the ground. I ended up beating him before I could try it.

For most of the fight, I found his tail-side (our right) to be very safe. However, in phase 2, this overhead slam's (0:28) follow-up seems to have been altered, and has hit me several times while I was trying to dodge to the tail-side. So I made a minor adjustment to dodge the other way, which ends up in a more favorable sequence (6:05). I almost got very unlucky at 3:03, the follow up didn't register as a hit, it only nudged me to the side, and while panicking to run away from the breath, my thumb started to slip so I pressed harder, triggering the crouch.

Other notes:

0:49 The punish needs to be done from behind the wing and in between moves. If you do it in front of the wing and he's done with his current step, he can follow up with a quick swipe.

1:15 This roar is one of the reasons why I stopped fighting close to the head. When I'm not locked on and I'm so close and Bayle is 90% of the screen, I don't see many tells for me to react fast enough to. His foot moves slightly and his curled up tail are the easiest tells.

1:46 I used to run to the right, but got hit in several attempts. I've found dodging to be more consistent.