Elden Ring Strength Builds Guide

This guide presents you with a few good Strength Builds in Elden Ring if strong and tanky melee is your playstyle.

Strength is one of the most favored stats in all of From Software games, due to high damage and poise allowing you to power through attacks and easily kill multiple enemies in a single hit. This guide presents you with a few good Strength Builds in Elden Ring.

Elden Ring Strength Builds

Strength builds are the builds most players will likely go with on their first playthrough of Elden Ring. With large weapons, satisfying damage and enemies unable to stagger you, strength builds will be tons of fun and extremely effective.

If you are a new player, here are a few strength builds use can use in Elden Ring.

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Pure Strength Build

Stats

  • Vigor: 50
  • Mind: 20
  • Endurance: 39
  • Strength: 80
  • Dexterity: 15
  • Intelligence: 9
  • Faith: 8
  • Arcane: 8

For the rest of the build, you should follow this setup.

  • Best Class for Pure Strength Build: Hero
  • Flask Spread: 1 FP, rest HP
  • Best Weapon for Pure Strength Build: Bastard Sword
  • Best Shield for Pure Strength BuildBrass Shield
  • Best Armor for Pure Strength Build: Chainmail armor
  • Best Skills for Pure Strength Build: None

How to play Pure Strength Build

The build is a pure strength build. As you start the game, simply start killing enemies and put in a single point in your Dex to get it up to 15.

From here, your main focus will be Vitality, Endurance and Strength. Both endurance and strength will increase your equipment load, allowing you to wear heavier armor without suffering too much.

You will start with a battle axe, so simply turn around towards Weeping Peninsula. Here, you can buy the Bastard Sword from the Nomadic Merchant for 3000 Runes.

The sword has decent damage, especially for early game and the Stomp skill allowing you to negate damage from enemies and launch an uppercut that will launch most of the smaller enemies in the air and deal massive poise damage to larger enemies.

The shield, Brass Shield is found as a drop from the enemies in the starting area of Limgrave. You can come across this shield very easily. If you don’t like the shield, any other shield with No Skill and 100 physical damage reduction will do just fine.

For the armor, you can simply buy it off the Nomadic Merchant in Church of Elleh.

Now that you have everything you need, you need to go and find a few smithing stones in the game. Keep on killing the enemies again and again as you search eh area for Smithing Stones. Once you are confident enough in your skills, head to Limgrave Mines.

You can find lots of Smithing Stones here. These enemies are still much tougher than you, so it’s recommended that you simply run through them collecting smithing Stones.

Level up your Vigor to 20 and your Endurance to 18. How much you upgrade your Strength depends on how much you can grind for, but we recommend at least 20 Strength.

With this, go and defeat the first boss in Stormveil Castle to get invited to the Round Table. You need to come here to get your sword leveled up. Get your Sword up to +3.

Hack and Slash through your enemies easily with your pure strength build. Your armor and weapon provide you with enough poise to simply get through all the enemies and high Endurance allows you to swing the sword multiple times before having to regain stamina.

The reason for picking a shield with no skill is because this allows you to freely use your Bastard Sword Skill. The skill allows you to easily deal with the stronger enemy knights or break their guards. 100% physical damage negation to allow you to block most of the hits head-on and launch counterattacks without taking damage yourself.

This sword can be made even more dangerous by infusing it with different Ashes of War depending on the situation.

As far as armor is concerned, we will recommend you to go with Chainmail Armor which is a quite dependable armor in Elden Ring.  Don’t get too attached to it as better alternatives will present themselves as you progress further. Make sure to put some points in endurance to increase your carry weight for better armor sets.

For future upgrading, we do not recommend sticking with the Bastard Sword. Instead, we recommend players complete the Castle Morne in Weeping Peninsula.

Here, you can find Leonine Misbegotten boss at the back of the castle. Defeating this boss grants, you the Grafted Blade Greatsword, a legendary weapon with high damage.

The weapon’s skill allows you to temporarily increase all attributes and also provides a major buff to your Poise.

End Game Strength Build

Stats

  • Vigor: 60
  • Mind: 20
  • Endurance: 40
  • Strength: 81
  • Dexterity: 18
  • Intelligence: 9
  • Faith: 9
  • Arcane: 7

For the rest of the build, you should follow this setup.

  • Best Class for End Game Strength Build: Vagabond
  • Flask Spread: 2 FP, rest HP
  • Best Weapon for End Game Strength Build: Grafted Blade Greatsword or Greatsword
  • Best Shield for End Game Strength Build: Dragonclaw Great Shield
  • Best Armor for End Game Strength Build: Radahn Set
  • Best Skills for End Game Strength Build: Ashes of War: War Cry (if you chose Greatsword as your main weapon)
  • Best Talismans for End Game Strength Build: Erdtree’s Favor and Great Jar’s Arsenal

How to play End Game Build

This build focuses not only on the strength but also on the other helpful items you are going to need for the endgame.

As you start the game, continue with your starting gear until you get the Bastard Sword and Grafted Blade Greatsword. With these, start investing purely in strength and endurance until you can wield the sword.

You can opt out of the Grafted Blade Greatsword for the Greatsword, which has a better range than the Grafted Blade Greatsword.

If you chose to do so, make sure you change the skill from stamp to war cry, as this increases your damage and poise allowing you to be more efficient.

Now, with around 40 strength and the required dexterity, get your endurance to 25 and invest everything else in Vigor.

Next, you want the armor of Radahn. You can get this armor by defeating Starscourge Radahn, one of the main bosses of the game in Redmane Castle. After defeating Radahn, go to the witch next to the Two Fingers at the Round table to get the armor.

The shield is the next item for you to get. It is dropped by the Draconic Tree Sentinel, northeast of Lyndell Royal Capital.

You can choose any shield with 100% physical defense and Shield Bash skill, but this shield, when upgraded can deal damage of around 300+ and even deals holy damage allowing you to kill the pesky skeletons that arise in graveyards and even some of the enemies are weaker to holy damage.

The last thing you need are the best talismans to support your heavy gear. For this, use the Erdtree’s Favor Talisman and Great Jar’s Arsenal, both of which increase your equipment load limit.

By the time you get this build together, you will have a literal walking tank. Grafted Blade Greatsword skills will provide you damage reductions and increased attributes as well as increased poise.

The Grafted Greatsword comes with an amazing skill called Oath of Vengeance that will increase all the attributes for around 5 to 30 seconds. During that time you will be able to deal extra damage with your sword.

With this buff, most enemies and bosses will take significant damage and so getting through them shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

The shield bash will allow you to deal with enemies whose combos are so fast that you are mostly unable to dodge the second hit in them.

The shield bash will not only save you from the damage, but also allow you to counterattack. The armor itself has high defense and keeps you from taking too much damage during your onslaught.

Other than that, the talisman-like Great Jar’s Arsenal will help you in increasing stats that will increase your max equip load as well.

This talisman can be combined with the Erdtree Favor for further increasing the equip load and other stats will give you a much-needed boost.

This talisman also increases your stamina which is very important for strength build. With increased stamina, you can attack, dodge and block hits more frequently.

The Ash of War: War Cry that you can equip on your weapons or shield will modify the equipment. This will provide heavy affinity and increased strength of your character.

This amazing skill has a duration of 20 seconds, which is enough time to take out most regular enemies.

Abdullah Shabbir is a senior guides writer at SegmentNext.com. He is fan of God of War and Call of Duty franchises, spends most of the time praising or playing these games. He recently expanded his ...