Obliterating your enemies with devastating Umbral magic is one of the most satisfying ways to enjoy your time in Lords of the Fallen. Combining this with the ability to maintain a steady flow of Life Leech ensures you are a highly resilient scourge of destruction.

In this guide, I will break down what is in my opinion one of the best melee caster builds that has a specialism in life leeching at both range and in close quarters combat to keep ourselves sustained.

I will go over the stats, weapons, armor, rings, pendants and rune choices that make this build an undying blood sucking Umbral menace that’s difficult to contend with.

Stats & Starting Class

In the early game, the main stats to focus on in this build are Inferno and Radiance for damage scaling and vitality for survivability.

As the build focuses on dual-wielding Bloodlust, we only require 13 points in Agility to ensure we can use them. The rest can then go into our main stats.

Initially, you’ll require around 20 points in Endurance to have ample Stamina to utilize in the early to mid game. My advice here would be to get Inferno to around 70 and Radiance to around 50 and then fill the rest in any order of your choosing. You’ll gain damage from statting into Radiance and Inferno and more HP from Vitality.

The Orian Preacher and the Orian Preacher Hammer are, as usual, your best choice of starting class and weapon due to the 18 points of radiant damage the class starts with and the fact it has an absolutely powerful weapon in the early to mid game.

Main Weapon & Runes

For the primary weapon, I am dual wielding Bloodlust short swords. This choice is underpinned by two reasons.

First of all, when delivering a final hit via a malee attack or spell, these swords have a life leeching effect. Wielding two also stack this effect.

Secondly, the rune slots allow us to use a total of 4 Tumul runes to further enhance our vampiric life leeching effect when we kill enemies. This weapon also comes with 60 Bleed and 60 Burn in the status effects department.

Combining this with Bleed Salts further emphasizes this effect and also allows us to further lean into the Undying Umbral Vampire kind of look. This can be acquired from the chest in the area where you fight Crimson Rector Percival and you’ll need to complete two playthroughs or find a willing friend to drop you a second one to complete this build.

For those of you with only one Bloodlust, this build still works, or be it with a slightly diminished return on the Life Leech. You could try another weapon to dual wield or go with a shield and some Tumul or Nartun runes for either Mana or HP Regeneration.

The three rune slots in this weapon are integral to the functionality of the build. 2 Tumul runes are non-negotiable to further improve our life leeching capabilities. When duel wielding two Bloodlust with two Tumul runes, we leech around 90 HP per kill.

The final rune slot is an Agility slot and you’ll have a number of choices here. You could go with:

• Vixys for increased bleed buildup
• Dimexus, which increases physical damage whilst dual wielding
• Ornx for increased Grievous Strikes damage
• Nhelaq for those choosing to Lords of the Fallen Vigor farm

I opt to go for Vixys to maximize how quickly bleed builds up to stay with the theme of blood and vampires, but all these options are completely viable catalyst folks.

Catalyst

In terms of catalyst, the best in slot choice here for this build is the Lost Berescu’s Catalyst at +10.

This provides us with exceptional spell power that is just shy of 800 and it also has A tier Radiance and Inferno scaling with 5 spell slots, a simply superb choice here. This is acquired in the Revelation Depths via an Umbral Belly.

In terms of rings and pendants, our pendant of choice is the Pendant of Atroph. This pendant allows us to continue to spam cast Umbral spells even when we’ve depleted our Mana. This makes it very easy to spam enemies down with a barrage of Umbral devastation.

The ring choices are also very straightforward. A Barrage Root and a Puissance Root provide us with increased damage to our sorceries, with the Barrage Root removing 1 spell slot as a penalty, which leaves us with 4 instead of 5. This is completely worthable and not a problem the off of this build.

You can also double down on either ring, with Barrage Root being the most desirable for those who want the highest DPS increase possible and at the cost of two spell slots being removed.

Spells

Speaking of spamming Umbral spells, our main source of range damage comes from Latimer’s Javelin.

This can be acquired from the Remembrance of the Hushed Saint. This thing hits like an absolute truck and offers both single target and AOE damage output.

I’ve seen this thing hit numbers of around 1.8k per throw and I’m not even maxed out on damage stats. But from what I’ve read and seen, apparently this can hit up to around 2.5k if you have both your Radiance and your Inferno stats maxed out.

This is in combination with the Pendant of Atrophy and it makes it absolutely insane for anyone favoring the caster approach. It also works well in combination with melee attacks as a way to chip the mob’s health and posture down before they even reach you.

The second spell is Diminishing Missile, which sends a homing projectile of Umbral magic that debuffs an enemy by reducing their attack damage and their defenses. This is another highly viable and useful choice here.

Our third choice of spell is Umbral Agony. This fires a slow-moving orb of Umbral energy that deals large chunks of damage to foes and takes huge chunks of stagger bars off. You can cast this at your enemy’s feet or at walls nearby to ensure that it explodes, dealing solid AOE damage to multiple enemies. It’s excellent for breaking stagger bars if you’re the sort of player that likes to look to run in and finish enemies off with Grievous Strikes for those extra style points.

Our fourth slot is flexible. I go with either Barrage of Echoes for extremely tasty first damage or Painful Echo, which sends a bolt of Umbral energy that bounces and chains between enemies. This is down to your personal preference, and I tend to swap between these two spells to keep things fresh.

Armour

I know a lot of you like to know how we complete the character looks, so in this case, I’m using:

• Grace of Adyr Mask
• Crimson Rector Armour
• Crimson Rector Leggings
• Lord Gauntlet

All of these are colored with the cell sword tint.

Mechanics

The mechanics of this build are very simple.

Buff up with Bleed Salts, favorably position yourself, cast your of Diminishing Missile and begin spamming whichever skills you see fit.

Latimer’s Javelin has excellent range and damage. The projectile also moves pretty quickly too, which makes this my most favorite choice. You can situationally use the other spells and I usually throw a cast or two of Barrage of Echoes at my feet as enemies approach, with what is left of the HP and stagger bar then being melted. I then either dispatch them with the well-timed attack or administer a vampiric life leeching Grievous Strike.

The build can be played as a full caster or a combination of melee and caster, in both styles allow us to gain 90 HP per kill, which makes us very difficult to kill in return.