This is a quick beginner's overview of weapon classes & starting jobs, with the intention of providing inspiration on how to build your characters.
Don't feel like these choices are set in stone -- more options will reveal themselves to you as you play, which will help motivate further character & build development. There is also a respec system unlocked fairly early in your journey. Discovery & growth are a big part of these games! Embrace it!
Now, let's get started!
Builds in ELDEN RING do not follow a standard class growth system ( eg. unlocking pre-determined skills & other milestones ). Instead, they're motivated by player wants & creativity, where a desire to use certain items, weapons, or armor pieces will determine how you develop your character. I find the flexibility afforded here is akin to building a character for a TTRPG, which may be a helpful frame of mind to be in when starting on your own.
Below is a list of arguably the most important part of your kit: weapons. You'll find a large variety within each category ( and can even customize them to further suit your build's vision ) so don't necessarily focus on what classes or stats they may traditionally lend themselves to -- instead, think about what options look exciting to use. Do they inspire a certain aspect for your character? Does the size & speed suit your play style? Does it look cool? Etc ...
They come in 3 flavors: small shields, medium shields, and great shields. Small shields tend to be used for specialty cases or parrying, while great shields are the best at blocking damage. Medium provide a compromise between the two & can be happily used over the entire game.
Daggers are good for critical hits, while great & colossal swords are well suited for breaking enemy poise or dealing with crowds, thanks to their heft & size. The range in length for straight swords makes them a decent, well-rounded pick for most.
They come in 2 flavors: standard thrusting swords and heavy thrusting swords, which vary in speed & range.
They come in 2 flavors: curved swords and curved greatswords. As usual, the greatsword variety offers more range & stopping power.
They come in 2 flavors: axes and greataxes.
They come in 2 flavors: hammers and great hammers. Their great form lacks the range of greatswords & other large types of weapons, but is unmatched in its ability to poise break.
There are 3 flavors: spears, great spears, and halberds. Halberds are a hybrid type & can be swung in an arc like many other weapons, while maintaining the spear's pierce attacks & defensive capabilities.
There are 3 flavors: bows, light bows, and great bows. Light bows grant the best mobility, allowing one to quickly fire arrows out of backsteps, rolls, and jumps, while great bows allow firing only from standing position in exchange for heavy firepower. Standard bows are a middle ground between the two, which can be fired from the air but not out of dodges.
They come in 2 flavors: crossbows and ballistas. Ballistas are the heavy option & cannot be fired mid-air.
Unlike many of the other weapon types, colossal weapons almost universally require their wielders to have high a STR stat.
Most reapers also come with built-in bleed effects, but their slow speed makes it difficult to successfully proc Blood Loss.
This is one of the few weapons where, if wielded in the main hand, you cannot perform a critical hit on a poise-broken enemy. It cannot be parried, however, much like the flail.
There are 10 different schools of Sorcery, with 1 additional school added in the DLC. Sorcercies by and large deal magic damage ( with a few exceptions ) for its offensive library of spells; there also exists a small array of defensive options, such as magic shields or sources of light. Most spells are mid to far range, but some close offensive options exist as well, meaning spellcasters can be well equipped for nearly any situation.
There are 11 different schools of Incantations, with 3 additional schools added in the DLC.
You will find various other equipment to help sculpt your build besides weapons, although they are less of a commitment as they do not require upgrades ( don't worry about this for now ). To keep this guide simple, I'll only briefly touch on what these are, as you'll learn more as you play.
Armor is the obvious one. It comes in 4 pieces ( Head, Arm, Chest, Leg ) and can be mixed & matched 'til your heart's content. Equip load is the primary concern regarding armor, as it compounds with your weapon(s)'s weight & can affect your movement speed in detrimental ways -- if you'd prefer a more responsive dodge, for example, remember to always keep your Equip Load on the lighter side. I tend to wear armor that prioritizes fashion 99% of the time, with a few choice encounters forcing me to actually strategize fits; you will find a comperable balance that works for you & your character with time.
Talismans and Crystal Tears are two different equips that functionally allow you to refine your build at will. Talismans you wear on your person, while Crystal Tears you can mix & sip in a special potion. They provide buffs covering all aspects of gameplay -- from increasing specific defenses, to raising stats, to tactfully blowing yourself up, to negating damage entirely -- and are an utterly invaluable tool in your arsenal. You can eventually wear a max of 4 Talismans & mix 2 Crystal Tears at a time.
Consumables are what they say on the tin, but now have the benefit of being craftable. Gathered materials can be mixed together to form useful things like poison cure or bundles of arrows while out on the field, which can be a godsend if you're trapped somewhere & urgently need [ Thing ]. There's a fun variety of things you can craft in this game, but you need to find the proper cookbooks before you can make stuff.
Damage a weapon does multiplies by a factor, according to your stats. Typically this damage "scaling" pairs with what stats are required to wield a weapon, compounding the damage further & encouraging certain types of weapons to be used with a certain stat spread.
But fret not. You can alter the specifics using Ashes of War and Whetstones to fully customize your play style! For example, rapiers both naturally scale well with DEX & require DEX to wield -- using the Whetstone system, you can change that scaling to STR, INT, functionally any stat you like, but you will still need the original required stats to properly wield it.
In some cases this means it's not really worth it to change a weapon's scaling, and there are some weapons that you cannot change period, but in general it's an incredible system for diversifying builds & playing exactly the way you wanna play!
Here is a breakdown of our stat spread, if you're curious:
Remember your class progression is not set in stone, also, so if you change your mind later, you aren't stuck playing a class you find unappealing. However, when you go to respec, your stats will default to whatever your starting class' stats were -- in other words, your minimum stats are set in stone.
A knight exiled from their homeland to wander. A solid, armor-clad origin.
Main Stats: Vigor, Str, Dex
A dual-blade wielding warrior from a nomadic tribe. An origin of exceptional technique.
Main Stats: Dex, Mind
A stalwart Hero, at home with a battleaxe, descended from a badlands chieftain.
Main Stats: Vigor, Endurance
A dangerous bandit who strikes for weak points. Excels at ranged combat with bows.
Main Stats: Arcane, Dex, Mind
A scholar who reads fate in the stars. Heir to the school of glintstone sorcery.
Main Stats: Int, Mind, Dex
A seer ostracized for inauspicious prophecies. Well versed in healing incantations.
Main Stats: Faith, Mind, Str
A capable fighter from the distant land of reeds. Handy with Katana and Longbows.
Main Stats: Dex, Endurance
A prisoner bound in an iron mask. Studied in glintstone sorcery, having lived among the elite prior to sentencing.
Main Stats: Int, Dex, Mind
A church spy adept at covert operations. Equally adept with a sword as they are with incantations.
Main Stats: Faith, Mind, Dex
As poor, purposeless and naked as the day they were born. A nice club is all they have.
Main Stats: All EqualBelow is a sampling of the backgrounds you can pick for your Tarnished in the character creator. These have no bearing on stats or ability, so consider these as guiding or complimentary flavor for who your character is.
The most common face among the Tarnished. After all, they were all warriors once.
A face found among the hardy people of the unforgiving north. Some say they're descended from giants.
The features of those known as Nightfolk. Few in number, they were said to bleed silver long ago.
For RP purposes, you don't have to be a Tarnished ... but the game will of course consider you one for plot progression. In the final section of this guide, I'll show you some ways you can envision your character as something besides a Tarnished!
This marks the end of the guide, as well. Thank you for reading, I hope it's proven useful!! Mwah!
I was immediately won over by the charm of swinging a huge anchor around. With pretty basic stat requirements ( mostly just Str ) the build was pretty simple to execute ... so to make it more interesting, I started thinking about what sorts of motivations a character would have to use an old anchor to defend themselves. After looking through the default backgrounds, I decided on the concept of an anxious Tarnished whose family tended to one of the historical vessels their ancestors allegedly sailed off in when they were banished from the Lands Between; when grace eventually found her, she fled in the vessel impulsively, eventually washing on shore to these cursed lands anyway.
I gave her offhand a hearty greatshield, as well as a spear -- she can't fight, so she's using tools she knows how to use outside of combat ( like fishing spears ) to keep herself safe. This further motivated the build to be defensive & bulky over something high damaging. Wasn't my most favorite to play, but still decent!
I HAD to make a build around this iconic weapon. In this game, its description mentions it was given out by Carian princesses to their betrothed ... and since we learn the Carians basically all died in the Cuckoo Rebellion, I thought it would be interesting to make a knight who failed to protect their princess during that time.
Some other bits I used to inform their character was that there were many inert warrior jars in the area of the game where the Carians used to be -- so I figured this person may have spent their time sculpting the jars before they got engaged & formally trained as a knight. I also decided because of that, after the rebellion, they eventually settle in Jarburg -- a place of hiding for living warrior jars who fear being hunted -- to live humbly & channel their failures into protecting its inhabitants.
The build itself is quite simple. I basically only leveled Int & used various staves & swords I whetstone'd to scale with Int, until I got the DMGS. Lots & lots of fun ... but squishy!
When I saw you could throw this weapon around Magneto-style, I was like oh man, I gotta try that out. It has quite a strange array of stat requirements, though -- Str, Int, and Arc all needed to be decently leveled before you could properly wield this thing. To my surprise, this build & character fell into place rather quickly after deciding I would start with the Prisoner class.
For her background, I picked the Numen -- an ancient race decended from Queen Marika the Eternal, who resided in the royal capitol Leyendell. Knowing that this character was royalty and a prisoner, then, I had to think up how she got where she was. I decided her family was falsely accused of treason during the Demigod War for using Sorceries in the heavily religious capitol; after busting out of jail, she swore to kill the demigods herself, despite not being called by grace ( and thus granted power to kill gods ). Arcane lends itself well to blood magic & hunting other Tarnished, so her character ended up descending into a person so overcome by the grief of losing her family & life, that she lost herself & turned into an indescriminate killing machine.
Gravity sorceries are heavy hitting & involve lobbing chunks of rock around, which felt perfect for her fighting style. I didn't end up incorporating blood magic as much as I'd like, but she was still an incredibly fun & dastardly character to run! Another squishy one though, only because I had to allocate so many points to other stats to keep her damage high enough -- in reality, I'd like to imagine her being quite a sturdy lady.
These are one of the starting gifts you can pick at character creation. I was really delighted by them ( and in particular, how this item description implied these two imps were fond friends ) so I wanted to come up with a character who meaningfully used them.
Since you can pick up imp heads as drops, and since imps hang out in the ancient catacombs, I came up with the idea of this character being a living statue -- a burial guardian of sorts, rather than an imp proper, since I couldn't play through the game with a body type other than human. I immediately thought of Deathroot as the cause of his sudden resurrection, like it tangled his long-resting soul into one of these random crumbling statues guarding his tomb. Then I thought about the various demigods associated with undeath ( Godwyn, and then Miquella ) and decided that, during his travels, this character was purged of undeath by the demigod Miquella's innovative healing magic. He then swore himself to Miquella to repay the favor, serving as a guardian & knight of Miquella's domain, the Haligtree, until ... all those, ahem, particular events transpired ...
The build was split mostly 50/50 between Faith and Str, and with plenty of gear options available to me, I didn't have to whetstone many weapons to fit my build. I initially stuck with ancient weapons found from other stone entities like the Golems or Gargoyles, but found more story-relevant items as I got deeper into the game.
I absolutely loved this playthrough, and I ended up absolutely loving this character & his story as well. I diiiiid end up kind of forgetting about the imps ... but they served a critical building block for getting to where I did with him, so ... thank you anyway, impies!!
