Elden Ring: Top 5 most fun builds to play with

Elden Ring spans a massive map populated by over 100 different bosses. Each offers a challenge and beating them can be difficult if you are unprepared, so many lean into the strongest builds—but some just want to play what’s the most fun.

Here’s five builds to add a fun flavour to your journey, depending on your playstyle.

Top five fun builds in Elden Ring

Elden Ring builds revolve around picking primary stats and complimentary secondary stats. Each stat represents a certain playstyle with different weapons to bring the best out of the build. These five stats can be used as cornerstones for fun builds:

• Strength: This stat uses heavy weapons with high damage, but slow attacks.
• Dexterity: This stat mostly uses lighter weapons with fast attacks, including ranged weapons.
• Intelligence: This stat channels sorceries through staves and wands.
• Faith: This stat channels incantations through seals.
• Arcane: This stat is a wild card, allowing you to proc various status effects.

Depending on the way you play, you can pick a build based on any primary stat. Each build showcased below is great at PvE content with some good at PvP as well. None of these builds are objectively better than the other, and Elden Ring is quite generous with the respecs, allowing you to try them all out in a single run.

Strength build

If you like swinging heavy weapons and watching your enemies turn into a pile of Runes in a couple of hits, the Strength build is for you. This build involves picking up double Greatsword-class heavy weapons, imbuing them with elements, and going ham on enemies.

This build starts at a fairly low level; the required equipment is available as early as level 50. Picking up the Claymore and Lordsworn’s Greatsword heavy weapons helps you power-stance through most enemy attacks with little to no effort.

The Claymore’s Lion Claw skill lets you catapult toward the enemy, launching a powerful attack that staggers smaller foes and you can use the Quickstep Ash of War, imbued on your Lordsworn’s Greatsword, to maneuver easily. You can get the Claymore in Castle Morne while the Lordsworn’s Greatsword is found traveling in a carriage in the Gatefront Ruins near Stormveil Castle.

With such heavy defenses through power-stancing, including Radagon’s Soreseal to your build adds more power with almost no downsides. The Great Jar’s Arsenal is almost essential to this build because of the weight of the heavy weapons since you will want to be at least able to medium-roll.

Dexterity build

If faster attacks and flashy combos are more your speed, then Dexterity is for you. Unlike the heavy attacks of their Strength counterparts, Dexterity weapons hit lighter, but faster. Dexterity weapons also delve into ranged combat if you like bows and crossbows.

The Dexterity build of choice will need you to get up there in levels. This is due to the Hand of Malenia Katana which is the centerpiece of this build. To get this weapon, you will need to defeat Malenia and transmute her Remembrance of the Rot Goddess through Enia. The main skill, Waterfowl Dance, imitates Malenia’s signature attack, making short work of multiple enemies. This attack works as a great boss-killer too.

You will need choice Talismans to truly power up this build. Millicent’s Prosthesis and the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia grant bonus damage with successive attacks, with the former also boosting Dexterity. With so many rapid attacks, the Godskin Swaddling Cloth lets you heal while the Shard of Alexander increases the power of your Waterfowl Dance.

Intelligence build

The first of two caster builds, the Intelligence build revolves around blasting a variety of sorceries at your enemies. If you like playing as a spellsword, you can use Sorceries to buff your melee weapons instead. However, for the sake of this build, we will be going pure caster with max Intelligence.

The pure caster Intelligence build uses a few Gravity spells for damage and control and the now infamous Comet Azur for sustained damage. Collapsing Stars is the spell of choice for clearing out groups of weaker enemies to farm Runes while Meteorite of Astel is used for stronger enemies. Rock Sling is great if you want to stagger powerful enemies, like bosses, with physical damage.

To empower these spells, two weapons are needed. The Azur Glintstone Staff boosts your Comet Azur by reducing its cast time for more FP usage. For your other spells, the Meteorite Staff is the perfect choice because of its S-scaling and damage boost to all your Gravity spells.

The Talismans for this build increase your Sorceries’ damage further. Graven-Mass Talisman provides a flat boost to Sorceries while Marika’s Soreseal increases Intelligence and Mind, but then increases damage taken. Carian Filigreed Crest reduces those FP costs and Godfrey Icon powers up all chargeable skills, improving their damage.

Faith build

The second of two caster builds, the Faith build uses Incantations through a Sacred Seal. They consist of Lightning spells, Holy spells, and Dragon Communion Incantations of various elements. This Faith build, however, uses Madness for maximum chaos and fun.

With so many options to choose from for a Faith build, we decided to go with the often-forgotten Madness build. This build makes full use of Madness-based Incantations cast through the Frenzied Flame Seal. Equip Vyke’s War Spear on your other hand to proc the Madness status effect through your physical attacks too.

The spells for this build include all five Frenzied Flame Incantations. Frenzied Burst and Howl of Shabriri apply Madness procs rapidly while The Flame of Frenzy is great for inflicting Madness on groups. Inescapable Frenzy is a great PvP skill that works well on smaller enemies too, while Unendurable Frenzy is the most powerful spell in your arsenal.

There are no Madness-specific Talismans for this build. Similar to the Intelligence build, the duo Talismans of Carian Filigreed Crest and Godfrey Icon will help you sustain FP costs and improve damage respectively. Old Lord’s Talisman sustains Madness and Flock’s Canvas Talisman grants a massive boost to Incantations.

Arcane build

The Arcane build is our wildcard build that uses any weapon type. This build lets you proc different status effects to whittle enemies while you deal high damage. This Arcane build works well in both PvE for boss-killing and PvP against other players.

The Arcane build of choice is the famous Rivers of Blood build. With enough points invested into Arcane, you’ll be able to proc Blood Loss every time you use the Corpse Piler skill. This move is great for clearing groups of enemies while Flame, Grant Me Strength channeled through the Arcane-scaling Dragon Communion Seal works best for bosses.

Invest points into Mind and, if you are having FP problems, use a Carian Filigreed Crest for the early levels. Eventually, make the switch to Millicent’s Prosthesis and add the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia for more damage. Shard of Alexander boosts your Corpse Piler’s damage even further and Lord of Blood’s Exultation skyrockets this build.

Maintain a safe distance and spam Corpse Piler to turn enemies into a pile of corpses. If you’re having trouble with bosses like Malenia, this build will make your job a lot easier.