first time beating it took a while for me, now i can just breeze through the first two trials quickly (fuck the third trial, not counting that).

charms i use are kinda cheese charms but i’ve found they are really helpful. not sure how many charms notches you have but i use a variant of these charms:

grubsong weaversong defenders crest sporeshroom quick focus baldur shell

sometimes i’ll sub out either defenders crest or spore shroom with something to do with the nail or shaman stone/soul twister. but the best thing i’ve learned is to stay away from the bigger enemies in the first few waves of the first two trials, let weaversong or spells deal with them from afar and only attack with the nail when it’s safe so you can gain soul, quick focus to get your health back between each wave so you’re never on low health and unexpectedly get hit, and if you really want to power through the last waves, just try and hit the easier enemies in the beginning with spells/ weaversong from afar and then really go at the harder enemies in the last few waves with the nail arts or spells using the soul you’ve gained from the first waves. quick focus and sporeshroom/defenders crest means they get damaged if they come close to you and baldur shell can protect you while you’re doing that, quick focus means that you can heal quicker so there’s less chance they can attack you while you heal as baldur shell only staves a bit of damage before it breaks.

not sure if you have weaversong or not, it’s one of those charms that really ended up helping me a LOT alongside grubsong, as the little spiders that you spawn gain soul for you every time they take damage when you have grubsong equipped. that means that if you really want to, you can wall climb and stay on the walls with either mantis claw or crystal dash for the first waves of enemies and let your spiderlings attack and kill the enemies down below while you gain soul from that. and then use that soul to cast spells on the harder enemies when they come.

also there’s a hot spring just to the right of the bench down below the starting point for the trials that you can use to get soul. can’t remember if it’s behind a broken wall or not, but i think it might be.

phew. that was long. sorry!