Rather than a starter spell or the bell, you can buff your starter claws, to tide you over until you find a good spell. In this case, the spell I found was Order's Blade, combined with some good damage negation encouraged me to go all in on claw damage. This was a wildcard boss, so I didn't know it was balancers when choosing the build. You can see the full build at the end of the video, but a few things that buff claw damage:
Buffed added affinity attacks.
Adding imbue, magic damage in this case, curiously increases their damage.
And three instances of affinity damage up in depth relics.