Every weapon and spell in Elden Ring belongs to one of eight damage types. There are four physical damage types and four elemental damage types in the game. Physical damage types branch out to Strike, Slash, Standard, and Pierce while Elemental gets split between Magic, Fire, Holy, and Lightning.
In this guide, we’ll explore and rank all eight damage types in Elden Ring. Physical damage always ranks higher than elemental damage. However, different types of physical damage may be hard to rank in themselves because each targets a certain type of enemy within the game.
8) Holy Damage
Despite having rather fancy animations, Holy Damage is one of the worst damage types in Elden Ring. This is because the number of enemies resistant to Holy damage is far more than those weak against it.
Hence, even with the best Holy weapons in Elden Ring, you will have a hard time outweighing its cons. Holy damage is only effective against undead enemies, Albinaurics, and Crabs, all of which are fairly weak.
All in all, Holy Damage must not be built around. It is mostly based on the Faith stat, one of the game’s least used. This damage will mostly be used against undead enemies suffering greatly from it.
7) Slash Damage
Next on our list is Slash Damage. This type of damage is mainly dealt by sharp edges with slashing/sweeping attacks, like Katanas, Curved Swords, or Scythes. Like Holy Damage, Slash is one of the worst attacks in the game.
While these weapons do deal Slash damage, most of them also deal pierce damage along with it, which doesn’t make them as bad as they should be. Slash-type damage is most effective against light or unarmored enemies. Enemies wearing heavier armor or rocky/brittle monsters are mostly resistant to this damage.
While most of the smaller enemies wear light or no armor at all, some of the toughest bosses in the game wear heavier armor. This makes Slash damage highly effective against normal enemies but useless against tougher enemies,
6) Standard Damage
Any damage that doesn’t fall into any other type is classified as the Standard damage type, which is a weapon’s base/default damage type.
All of Elden Ring’s weapons can deal Standard-type damage. However, some weapons especially deal with Standard damage like most Swords or Axes.
Although Standard-type damage isn’t nearly as effective as Strike damage against heavily armored enemies, it is still very effective against most enemies, including light to medium-armored enemies or rocky/brittle monsters.
Standard Damage is fairly easy to manage and can be effectively used against almost all enemies. The only enemies resistant to standard damage in Elden Ring are the ones with scales on them.
5) Lightning Damage
Lightning Damage takes the fifth spot on our list. While it is highly effective and can potentially deal massive bouts of damage, other damage types are simply better.
The best Lightning weapons offer fast-paced attacks that use jolts of electricity to electrocute enemies. However, only a few spells and weapons deal lightning damage, mostly around the faith stat. Examples of some of them include The Dragon King’s Cragblade or the Lightning Grease.
The Lightning Elemental damage is effective against most of the enemies in Elden Ring. These include light, medium, or heavily armored enemies, dragons, or those wearing metal armor, etc. You can even increase the amount of lightning damage dealt if the enemy is wet. However, this sort of damage is ineffective against rock-type enemies, Ancient Dragons, and even Tibia Miners.
4) Pierce Damage
Pierce damage is mostly dealt with pointy weapons that mainly use thrusting attacks. Some of these weapons include Lances, Spears, and a few Swords. While the former two damage types were weak to scaly enemies, the best Pierce weapons can be highly effective against scaled enemies.
Apart from that, this type of damage can also be effectively used against most other light to medium-armored enemies, but heavily armored enemies will be more resistant to it,
A special property of pierce damage is its counter-thrust property. This property is mainly useful against other players. It deals an increased amount of damage if other players are struck while they are executing an attack themselves. This property can be further improved by using the Spear Talisman and damage multipliers.
3) Fire Damage
The Fire Elemental damage is also one of the best there is, but while being effective in most cases, they are difficult to use and have a higher learning curve owing to their parabolic motion with spells (most of which are Fire-based).
Some weapons and spells that deal Fire damage are the Rivers of Blood Katana, the Vyke’s War Spear, the Blasphemous Blade, Black Flame, and Burn O’Flame. While you can find a variety of different armaments that are proficient with fire damage, they are mostly only useful against unarmored or fleshy enemies.
[FYI: Weapons with innate elemental damage types are especially effective in PvP scenarios, This is because buffing allows you to lay down massive bouts of damage in addition to the base damage.]Unfortunately, most enemies in Elden Ring are resistant to Fire damage, including heavily armored enemies, draconic creatures, and especially fire-oriented monsters. Fire damage also nullifies the Frostbite status ailment and even deals lesser damage to wet enemies, making it a rather bad damage type to use in Elden Ring.
2) Strike Damage
The Strike Damage is by far the best physical damage type in Elden Ring and takes the second spot on our list. Most heavy and blunt weapons in the game can use this type of physical damage, like maces, hammers, flails, etc. This type of damage doesn’t cut up the enemy but crushes them with brute force owing to the weapon’s high weight.
This type of damage is the best because it is effective against almost all types of enemies in Elden Ring except Miners or those with scales, like dragons. You can even use this damage effectively against heavily armored enemies like Crystallians. Though it isn’t quite as effective against scaled enemies like Dragons.
1) Magic Damage
The single best damage type in Elden Ring is Magic. It is extremely powerful, serving effectively in most situations. You can even buff up Magic to deal over double the damage using an Intelligence build.
In Elden Ring, you can do magic damage with most weapons, spells, and incantations. Unlike the other damage types in the Game, this gives you a lot more freedom to build your mage.
Always remember that enemies that inflict magic damage are mostly always resistant to magic damage as well. Magic, however, proves to be quite effective against armored enemies and miners.
