Good Blood Veils early to mid game?

[JLHartsock]

Not super expeirnced with blood veils so could take some suggestions.

[EchoSON]

Rather than focus on bloodveils - focus on things you'd prefer to play with

If your Claymore has Strength Scaling A , you want more strength to get the most out of it - which will limit your bloodveil selection.

Blocking can be extremely strong with a good claymore, so you don't 'need' quick mobility.
But quick Mobility is ofc nice , and much easier to achieve if you use a Gun as your weapon.

Venous Claw is the most 'op' early veil, very high dark scaling , very low weight , strong veil attack. It's not the absolute best for everything, but it's hard to do better early on.

Pick whichever veil you think looks the best - and suits your build style, OR build your playstyle around being able to wear a certain veil, tis up to you

[K13Cove]

Night Claw is great and available near the start. Give it a whirl.

[M200Chan]

Pretty much these two comments above me, but if you're hiding your veil and therefore want something that plays to your strengths, go for Night Claw (which I think is a Silver Claw reskin, so that also works) or Venous Claw - the former for a fighter (it has high Light scaling that helps with buffs) and the latter for a caster (dark basically equals damage).

[Xengre]

Veils matter less than weapons and codes/gifts. Blood Veils are mainly important for casters or tanks, but their damage only factors drain attacks (backstab, drain charge, etc. and aside from backstab its usually not worth messing with and even for backstab if its someone you want to backstab they can usually be chain backstabbed anyways like the larger enemies).

Veils influence dark/light gift values along with your code's scaling and of course level. Weapon influences weapon dmg (veil does nothing for this).

What can be useful is how you transform your veils such as making it lighter or making it elemental aligned to be resistant to an element like totally immune to fire and ice dmg, etc.

What matters most is weapon + buffs. Its a core tactic recommended to stack several buffs. Even stacking 3-5 buffs isn't unusual (note elemental "offensive" aren't usually that good though unlike Souls games, but many of the other offensive and defensive including elemental defensive are really good). You can usually get by with 1-2 buffs for trash mobs but for bosses it can be the difference of say 200-300 dmg and 10,000 dmg per hit or even 1-shotting bosses with the right buffs.

For magic casting, however, weapons offer no benefit as this is exclusively veil + code + buff + level scaling.

Usually defense doesn't matter a ton unless you are aiming to be really tanky like immune to an entire element like fire (ex the particular duo boss to make it easy to ignore one, or the fire map where all but one mob do fire dmg including even their basic physical attacks and you can ignore the lava, etc.). There is a build that makes you take 0 dmg from pretty much everything in the game but its annoying to upkeep and requires DLC White Mia gift and her brother's code (forget if its the one where they live or die).