Every hunter has their favorite trick weapons.
To a certain extent, hunters' combat styles were all the same. Gehrman, the first mercenary employed by Byrgenwerth to poke around inside the old Pthumerian ruins (having a man with a sharp blade and a shotgun with you when you first explored a laybrinthine tomb complex left by an ancient superhuman civilization being just sound archaeological practice), then later by the college and the Healing Church to deal with the side effects of their experiments, had employed a style involving light clothing and fast movement. The fact that he had survived where others had ended up as wall paint encouraged others to follow his example. Even if a hunter's weapon was a massive block of stone mounted on the end of a sheathed sword, high mobility was still key.
Even so, there was still plenty of room for variation, due to the creative (not to say weird) combinations people came up with. Gehrman himself used a giant scythe, as if to announce to the world "I am so badass that I can use a farming tool in battle and do better with it than people using real weapons." Eileen the Crow wielded the Blade of Mercy, a couple of knives that could magnetically combine into a shortsword, which should have been a clue that the Hunter of Hunters was not primarily interested in hunting giant beasts whose teeth were larger than her weapon. Djura liked the Stake Driver, which used charges of gunpowder to give its spike a little extra impact power, the kind of complicated weapon suitable for a mind that could tease a moral quandary out of whether it was appropriate to defend oneself from a furry monster trying to carve one up into bloody gobbets for nom noms.
Balyn, for his part, used the saw cleaver because it was the first thing the Messengers had offered him and he really wasn't about having second thoughts. Or first thoughts, as certain dolls might say if you were the sort of person who believed that dolls could talk. Though he did sometimes also use a rifle spear, because he was also the kind of person who thought tying a shotgun onto a spear made perfect sense, even if he did have issues with why everything called a "rifle" in Yharnam was a smoothbore weapon firing a cluster of spread pellets.
Maybe it was a dialect thing.
But yes, when push came to shove, Balyn was a fairly basic fellow. He wasn't really interested in fancy flourishes that made him look good in battle. The beasts didn't impress, anyway, and he had no idea what eldritch entities considered "cool" and "awesome." It was hard to play to an audience where you couldn't even see three or four of the dimensions they perceived. And simplicity had its charms.
"...Is there a reason you are telling me all of this, good hunter?" the Doll asked him, tilting her head to one side as if to try to comprehend what she was looking at from a new perspective in the vain hope a different angle would make it make sense.
It was an expression that he got a lot.
"Well, I was just thinking about my last trip to the Hunter's Nightmare. That place is pretty weird, all these fellows caught up in an eternal hunt, with a bunch of beasts to be hunted, and then there's crows and those giant blood-sucking bug things attracted by the violence...I think maybe those last ones are there to emphasize how ugly and brutal the hunts are? Not that it really needs all that much reminding."
"You have seemed thoroughly aware of the savagery of boom hammers, of beastcutters, of beasthunter saifs, of hunting dogs—"
"Yeah, exactly," he cut off her depressing litany. Had she really been keeping track of all of the ugly deaths that he'd come back complaining about? And did he really want to know the answer to that question?
Probably not, he decided. Blissful ignorance wasn't called blissful for nothing!
"Anyway," he hurried on, "my point is, most of what I've found there is pretty on-theme for the Nightmare's purpose. But this last visit I found something totally different, the kind of thing that reminds me that it really is a nightmare realm created by a Great One's curse."
"Oh? And what is that?" she asked tentatively. It was as if curiosity was driving her to ask, even animated dolls being driven by the insatiable need to know like the scholars of Byrgenwerth, but she'd had too many experiences before where that curiosity had just gotten her into trouble.
It did not occur to Balyn to ask the Doll how she had had negative experiences asking for further details in the past; ignorance, bliss, etc.
"I chased a couple of guys up to the Grand Cathedral...well, a Grand Cathedral, I think there were two of them in there, maybe? Anyway, they opened the door, and this giant came out. An absolutely huge monstrosity, a dozen feet tall or more, with a cloak and hood...only, instead of a face, there was nothing there other than a starry void." He gave a shiver, recalling that moment when he'd stared up at his foe, then suddenly felt as if he was gazing into the eternal cosmos, the abyssal gulf that lay between the stars. "I have to admit, I froze then, looking into that endless expanse, like there was some horrific insight about the truth of the universe that was teasing around the edge of my brain."
He shook his head, clearing it of the wisps of memory that seemed to gather around his thoughts.
"Then, did it strike you down with some arcane attack?"
"Huh? No, he belted me with a giant axe. All but split me in two like I was a rotten log. You have to respect an eldritch monstrosity that understands the value of sticking to the basics."
"Perhaps, good hunter, this is a lesson I should take to heart," she said with the firm voice of decision.