You're getting into my favorite part of the game
Right off the bat there's respawning enemies lol. KAC would love this area.
When you say "skitter" I assume you are talking about Bloodborne's version of the crystal lizards right? Skitter is a funny name for them, but suits them well.
But yes, I definitely do want to try and upgrade my weapon as much as possible. That's something I always find worth doing in every Souls playthrough. My Ludwig's blade is at +6 so I am now looking out for blood chunks. Have not found one yet but I assume the new area I'm in should start giving them to me. If I end up getting to the next boss and do chip damage to it I'll probably take your advice and search the Nightmare Frontier for chunks.
As for fighting NPC hunters, its actually one of my big complaints with this game. Because of the inclusion of guns, I find they are far more spammy than NPC enemies in previous Souls games. Its incredibly annoying when they continuously just fire at me, and of course their guns do waaay more damage to me than my gun does. Almost everyone of them I've encountered so far I've had to resort to cheese tactics to beat them. Usually finding something to hide behind and poke out every couple seconds to take a stab at them.
One of the nightmare areas (endgame one) has a lot of bloodchunks, and 1 bloodrock well hidden. The other is mostly twin and single shards. You may get some good gems though.
That's the only Blood Rock found anywhere in the game. You need DLC or dungeon hopping if you want more than one.
Parry those fookers until they shut the hell up with their gun nonsense. The only truly hard hunter is at the end of the Eileen the Crow storyline in Cathedral Ward. That dude was one of the hardest fights in the game. His gun is half health hits, he speed warps around, will visceral you, inflicts poison, and heals too! The hunter fight back where you beat Father Gasciogne is another good hunter fight. But Eileen helps you a lot in that fight. You won't get the final showdown with the really nasty hunter unless you battle with her in that hunter fight too. You get these two fights by first going back to where you beat Father Gasciogne and then to the place you beat Vicar Amelie. Assuming you didn't fight and kill Eileen when you first met her.
That hunter in the Father Gas-Coin boss room was the one I had just killed when I started complaining about spammy NPC hunters in this game. He was the worst one I've encountered so far.
Also, unfortunately Eileen died there, and I had to basically fight him on my own. I had ran up into that area while blood vial farming, and saw him run at me so I retreated down the steps to get prepared, and didn't realize he started fighting with Eileen until I noticed her health bar pop up. By the time I got back up there she was dead. But it makes sense why he was so aggressive, since he was probably coded to fight both of us.
Fwiw I did a bloodtinge build at one point to see if I could make the guns useful for anything other than parrying, not so much. One good tip with them though, is that they will break a spell caster’s spell for you and stun some enemies for a moment. There’s one optional boss (Martyr Logarius) where that technique is super useful. Other than that, meh.
Did you get the Evelyn? It supposed to be the best gun in the game. I didn’t have a blood build so it just sat in my inventory unused.
That’s a bummer because you probably won’t get the final hunter battle now. That must have been hard without her help. If you get him in the middle of both of you it is easy to cut him down. But if you accidentally do too much damage to Eileen she starts attacking you too which is pretty much insta-death.
Trust me I'm not losing any sleep over it lol.
And yeah, that duel was tough alone trying to do it legit. Like I said had to resort to cheese tactics to beat him. Fookin idiot wouldn't stop shooting his gun for 2 seconds whenever I was more than a step away from him. I trapped him behind some grave stones and jump attacked him through them from the other side. Idiot went down easy.