I’m going to be showing you my Scarlet Spear build, which is a New Game Plus build that focuses on the buildup of deadly poison as well as Scarlet Rot and dealing substantial damage with Spears. 

A lot of people have been asking me for a Scarlet Rot build for a while and this is what I decided to go with after testing and playing around with different Scarlet weapons. Here, I want to make one thing clear that the focus of this build is the style of play that we’re using and the Scarlet Rot effect sort of augments that, but it’s not the shining star of this build. 

As you get further into New Game Plus, Scarlet Rot will play more and more of an impact in the way that you fight bosses. But it’s not going to have a huge impact on the landscape and it’s not going to have a huge impact in the beginning because you’re simply going to kill enemies and bosses too fast.  

But I just want to make it clear that you can play this build in a similar way without Scarlet Rot just by using some of the simple things that I’ll go through in this article.

How To Make This Build Work?

Let’s go ahead and talk about the weapons that we’re using for this build. 

We’re dual wielding Rotten Crystal Spears. We have two of them and the reason this is a New Game Plus build instead of not an earlier game build is simply because you cannot get these until the Haligtree Area by farming the Crystalians enemies there, which is basically the very end of the game. By the way, if you want to kill the enemies more easily, you can first equip yourself by using Elden Ring Runes.

The reason we have two of them here obviously is because you’re going to be able to build up Scarlet Rot faster by hitting twice with both weapons at the same time with L1 presses, and they’re very fast with Spears. But I do want to make it clear that you could potentially use one of these and then use a different Spear that you use something with Rot Grease with and get a similar effect and just use the Rot Grease during boss fights because you don’t really trigger Scarlet Rot on regular enemies all that often.

So, if you wanted to use a different spear that was primarily dexterity scaling, that could be infused like the Cross-Naginata or something like that. You could use that on one hand in your main hand buff it and then use that with a Rotten Crystal Spear during boss fights. But this is a kind of the way I don’t like having to farm for items to craft with them. It can be a kind of pain in the butt to make Rot Grease regularly. So, this will allow us to set Scarlet Rot without dealing with that.

Now, something interesting about the Rotten Crystal Spear is it’s basically the exact same version of the Crystal Spear except for the different Ash of War and obviously Crystal Spear does a little more damage, but it’s only like 30 more damage. So, frankly speaking, unless you’re using Impaling Thrust, which is the Ash of War of Crystal Spear. I really feel like there’s no real reason not to use the Rotten Crystal Spear because the damage difference is so negligible that you might as well have the Scarlet Rot effect there because maybe you’ll trigger it on some tough bosses.

So, beyond these two weapons, we have the Coil Shield here and the reason we have this Coil Shield is that it adds poison and to be more specific deadly poison, which is a kind of like a better version of poison.

But using its weapon skill, Viper Bite will usually set poison on most bosses in one hit and a lot of bosses and two hits if you don’t do it in one. This will trigger your Kindred of Rot’s Exultation and if you’re using the Mushroom Crown, it’ll trigger that as well, like instantly at the beginning of a fight.

So, that’ll increase your damage almost instantly, set deadly poison instantly and get as much possible time for that poison to tick off a boss or a difficult enemy from the very beginning of the fight. And that’s what we use it for. We’ll lead off a lot of fights with this, set the poison booths for our attack power and then start going to town with our dual wield attacks trying to trigger Scarlet Rot on enemies while dealing a lot of damage. 

I cannot say enough good things about the Coil Shield Viper Bite, just it’s absolutely strong like you can set poison so fast and it only weighs 1.5, costs 8 FP, has almost no stat requirements. So, you don’t have to like build for poison like you literally just tackle this thing even if you don’t have it upgraded and you’ve set poison most of the time. It’s fantastic.

Armor

Moving on to armor that I’m using for this build. I actually have the Redmane Knight Set here and there are a few reasons for that. But first and foremost is because the Poise is 51. 51 is the minimum Poise you want for this build because you are going to trade damage and I’ll get into that in just a second.

But the other reasons we’re using that is because it’s kind of scarlet colored, which kind of fits the theme of Scarlet Spear and also because Redmane Knight Sets are kind of synonymous with Scarlet Rot and their interactions and dealing with it over time, etc. 

Now, I do want to note that having an armor set that has higher Poise and higher protection is ideal. So, ideally, you would probably have something more protective than this. We do have a lot more equipment load we can use with this build, so there’s really no reason not to except for style, which is why I’m doing it here. 

But if you’re talking about in maxing, you want as much Poise and as much protection and that’s because when you’re trading blows with Spears. Spears deal thrust damage, which means they’re going to deal counter damage, which is extra damage you deal to enemies that are attacking you. This is not when they wind up, but when they come forward with their attacks. 

And since Spears is a great way of applying this, you want to make sure you’re attacking into them when this is happening, which means you’re often going to trade blows to get that extra damage. Having that protection will make it. So, you take less than having higher Poise will make it, you don’t get interrupted and you can get that counter damage.

Talismans

Moving along for the Talismans for this build.

First, we have the Spear Talisman. Guess what this does. It increases your counter damage. Obviously, we’re going to counter damage with this build, so this is a must for this build because you want to make sure you increase that as much as possible.

Beyond that we have Millicent’s Prosthesis, which gives us five dexterity. This is a dex focused Spear, so that’s good. And this gives us increased damage as we attack repeatedly with our L1 attacks. One L1 press will trigger this Talisman and the same with the Rotten Wing Sword Insignia. If you don’t have Rotten Wing Sword Insignia, then you’re going to want Winged sword Insignia and this will allow you to gain trigger this with each L1 press you’re going to increase the amount of damage you do, so this is going to ramp up your damage very quickly. 

And then, on top of that, we have the Kindred of Rot’s Exultation, which will give us plus 20% attack power when we are poisoned or something near us becomes poison. In this case, once you trigger that with the Coil shield on a boss, you’ll gain this buff or with you trigger Scarlet Rot with Spears, you’ll gain this as well. 

What’s really great about this is that it’s so easy to trigger with a Coil Shield. You’ll get this almost every fight really beginning. But another thing I want to mention is you can use the Mushroom Crown to gain a further 10% attack power. If you want to do that, you put that on your head and then some really tanky armor of the other three pieces. I don’t really like the fashion of that piece, so I didn’t do it here. But if you’re talking about max damage, you’re definitely wearing that headpiece.  

Scarlet Spear Gameplay

The general strategy with this build is to set deadly poison with the Coil Shield on a difficult enemy and if it’s not a difficult enemy, then just running L1 with your Spears and then L1 attack. The L1 attack of Dual Spears is so fast. I think it’s actually faster than the R1 with most weapon types in the game, so it’s so fast it’s completely underrated.

Make sure that you’re just spamming L1 and usually you’ll win because you have high enough Poise and high enough protection. You can just tank through a hit and you’ll just kill enemies as your attack power ramps up higher and higher.

Again, if it’s a difficult enemy, just use the Coil Shield first, get some more attack power, set poison on them and then apply the strategy.

Related: How To Use This Ash of War To Defeat Godfrey For Level 1 Elden Ring Beginners?

Scarlet Spear Attributes

For attributes for this build, I have 60 Vigor, 20 Mind, 36 Endurance, 21 Strength, 80 Dexterity, 16 Intelligence, 7 Faith and 9 Arcane.

You don’t need any Intelligence, Faith or Arcane for this build, although if you’re looking for a way to boost the damage of this build further, but New Game Plus. It might take Faith up to 15 in order to give you Flame, Grant me Strength in order to increase your physical damage. This would help increase your damage even more, so you could do that. But we don’t need any for this build. Those stats are simply because of the starting class.

Beyond that, 60 Vigor is there because you’re going to trade hits. You don’t really need any bigger than this at this point, but you’re going to trade blows with this constantly. You just don’t want to die, so that’s why that’s there.

20 Mind is there to give you some FP. Charge Forth is not a very good weapon skill for this. You do use it sometimes. It can knock enemies off balance. You can roll backward into a Charge Forth, which is really nice. But it’s not the greatest weapon skill and you frankly won’t use it much in this build. If you decided to take a different spear in your main hand and buff it with rot priests and go that route, you might use your weapon skill more depending on what you have there. But just generally, you’re not going to use a lot of FP with this build. You could probably drop this down to 15 or 10 Mind if you want early on in order to gain extra attribute points for everything else.

I have 36 Endurance here because you’ll probably want to wear heavier armor with this. I’m showcasing an armor set that I really like that I think fits the build. But you also need a lot of stamina for this build. L1 presses at the speed. We’re pressing them with Spears just drains your stamina, so having a lot of stamina is very good for this build. We don’t have any Talisman slots to help with stamina because there’s just so many good Talismans for this build, so having high Endurance even if you’re not using like I have your armor set still good for stamina.

When it comes to dexterity, I’m going to get into Strength in a second. But when it comes to dexterity, 80 is pretty much where we’re going to max out. You can take this up to 99 in future playthroughs to further boost your damage. But dexterity is like it scales very well up to dexterity. This is a dexterity focused spear, so you want to take this up to 80 after you meet the strength requirements for the spear to get maximum damage out of it.

At that point, you’re going to want to start pumping Strength to get more damage, so that’s why I have 21 points in Strength. I just started increasing because there’s really nothing else I need to add to this build except more damage at this point. So, taking Strength up to like 50 or something like that before taking Dexterity up to 99 is kind of the next course of action. You really don’t need any attributes and any other points, which means this is a New Game Plus build probably won’t go much further than that, but you’ll see the Scarlet Rot start to be more and more useful as you go through NG plus and further into NG Plus Plus. 

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