In this article, I will give you another build, which is my best Strength and Arcane build in Patch 1.09.1 and it is called Blood Prince.

The Gear

First, let’s start with a more in-depth look at the gear and setup so we can rack anything and everything.

Our weapon of choice is the Blood Iron Greatsword +25 with the Blood Affinity and the Ash of War Seppuku and, in our offhand, we have a Dragon Communion Seal +10. Thanks to patch 1.09, Greatswords have increased speed range, recovery time and guard counter speed. By the way, if you want to level up your weapons quickly, you need to prepare lots of Elden Ring Runes.

You can get the Blood Iron Greatsword to drop from the Misbegotten enemies in Leyndell, Royal Capital on the path to the Grand Lift of Rold. The Black Whetblade for the Blood Affinity is found in Nokron, Eternal City in the Night’s Sacred Ground and Seppuku you get here in the Mountaintops of the Giants, east of the frozen lake on an invisible Scarab. We found in testing that the Blood Iron Greatsword was giving us the highest AR for our stat spread, which we will look at in a moment.

To really get our boosts going, we have the White Mask boosting attack when Bleed is in effect. This is our optimum headpiece. We are wearing the Hoslow’s Armor set for our Fashion Souls again. You can optimize with more YouTube ability pieces if you want.

The White Mask can be found in Mohgwyn Palace in the blood lake area of the map. You’ll get randomly invaded by nameless White Mask characters, which can drop the mask. Hoslow’s Armor set can be obtained by invading Juno Hoslow. This is the final step of the Volcano Manor questline. I should just mention we are actually using Alberich’s Bracers to keep our medium roll speed and our Fashion Souls. These braces can be found in Leyndell Royal Capital in the main hall of the Fortified Manor.

In the Talisman slots, we have some variation depending on the situation. But we start with the Lord of Blood’s Exultation working with the White Mask to increase our attack power when Bleed kicks in. This is dropped by Esgar, Priest of Blood in the Leyndell Catacombs. We have the Dagger Talisman boosting our critical damage. This is found behind the Stonesword Key gate in Volcano Manor.

Then, we have two utilities for now: Erdtree’s Favor +2 boosting our health stamina and equipment load and the Green Turtle Talisman boosting stamina, recovery speed. The Erdtree’s Favor +2 is found in the Leyndell, Ashen Capital after Maliketh. Take the lift from the Forbidden Lands to find a closed off area and find this Talisman to the south on a corpse on a tree route. Just hug the wall to sneak round past the enemies. And the Green Turtle Talisman is found in the Summonwater Village in an underground area behind a Stonesword Fog Gate.

In the Flask of Wondrous Physick, we have the Faith-knot Crystal Tear boosting our Faith by ten. And we have the Stonebarb Cracked Tear boosting our chance to break enemies for critical hits. The Faith-knot Crystal Tear can be found east of the Church of Pilgrimage, just down a cliff surrounded by poisonous flower enemies, and the Stonebarb Cracked Tear is dropped by the Putrid Avatar in Caelid.

As for Incantations, we have Golden Vow, which you can get in Mt Gelmir at the Corpse-Stench Shack, Flame, Grant Me Strength, which you can get in Caelid around the back of Gale Force and then Swarm of Flies, which you can get in Mohgwyn Palace in a small cave in the blood lake.

Also Read: Free Elden Ring Runes & Items Giveaway

Stat Spread

Next, let’s have a look at the stats. I started with the Hero class and we have aim to min-max Strength and Arcane with this build.

We have Vigor at 57 and Mind at 11. This gives us enough base FP to buff with Golden Vow, Seppuku and Flame, Grant Me Strength with one FP bar. Endurance is at 15 and Strength at 54 because we will be two-handing the Blood Iron Greatsword. We get 50 bonus to Strength, which makes our total strength whilst two-handing 81 not 54.

Dexterity is at 10, so we can wield the Blood Iron Greatsword. We didn’t touch Intelligence. Faith is at 15. We use the Faith-knot Crystal Tear to boost our Faith to 25, so we can buff with Golden Vow. And finally, we have Arcane at 64. Our bleed build up. Our Dragon Communion Seal is scaling with Arcane and this is increasing the Bleed build up from Swarm of Flies. So with all this in place, we have a very decent rune level of 150.

Combats

Finally, let’s talk combats.

When it comes to our Blood Prince build, we start by using our flask, then we buff with Golden Vow, Seppuku and Flame, Grant Me Strength. Then, we can restore our FP and cast Swarm of Flies to go at our enemy whilst we two-hand the Greatsword and go in with our fast R1 swings.

Using Seppuku immediately will activate Lord of Blood’s Exultation and the White Mask, so we start fights with boosted attack power, then, we have the bleed procking fast and the chance to break our opponent’s stance and go in for our boosted critical hits. I just can’t believe how fast bleed can proc with this, sometimes in just one or two hits.

If enemies are dying too fast and you aren’t getting a chance for a critical hit, then you can always swap out the Dagger Talisman for the Viridian Amber Medallion Talisman +2 for even more stamina.

What about enemies that are immune to Bleed? Simply try variation, too. Change your Blood Affinity to heavy and put the Lion’s claw Ash of War on the Blood Iron Greatsword. Put in the Shard of Alexander to boost Lion’s Claw. Then, put in the Carian Filigreed Crest to lower skills FP cost and you can keep Dagger Talisman into boost critical attacks.

With this variation, you can spam Lion’s Claw and its awesome hyper armor to break enemy stance. You can get the Shard of Alexander from Iron Fist Alexander when beating him at the end of his questline in Crumbling Farum Azula and you can get the Carian Filigreed Crest from War Counselor Iji after talking to Ranni at Ranni’s Rise for the first time.

Honestly, I just love this build. It looks awesome and feels really well balanced. You can trivialize bosses if needed or just enjoy a well-balanced playthrough.

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