Elden Ring Barbarian Build Guide: Hero Build for Beginners

This Elden Ring Barbarian Build Guide goes through a fun beginner-friendly build that deals incredible damage and can often one or two-shot most enemies. It is a Strength-based build so you’re going to want to set yourself up to have as much Strength as possible to plow your enemies with.

Elden Ring Barbarian Build for Beginners

This Elden Ring Barbarian Colossal Sword-wielding build focuses on dealing as much damage as you can with each big swing and then being able to finish off your enemies with just a few hits due to your incredibly high damage output, enhanced further by the Ash of War: War Cry ability.

• Class: Hero
• Flask Spread: Mostly HP, 1-2 FP
• Weapon: Zweihander, or any Colossal Sword
• Shield: None
• Armor: High-Poise Armor that doesn’t sacrifice Medium Roll
• Primary Stats:  Strength, Endurance, Vigor
• Secondary Stats: Dexterity (only for Colossal Sword requirements)
• Skills: Ash of War: War Cry
• Spells: None

We have over 110 Elden Ring Builds now, for all classes and playstyles. This Barbarian build is recommended for beginner players.

Introduction to the Hero Class

To make this Elden Ring Barbarian Build, you’re either going to choose the Hero or Vagabond Class at the start of the game. Ideally, I think Hero has the better stat spread of the two because it has less Dexterity, which you don’t need very much and it has more Strength which you need a lot of in order to use the Zweihander, or any other Colossal Sword for that matter. So I think Hero’s a better choice but you can do it with either.

Elden Ring Barbarian Build Equipment

So, to put this Elden Ring Barbarian Build together the things you’re going to need are the Zweihander, which can be bought from the Isolated Merchant who can be found at the southwestern part of the Weeping Peninsula. Once you have 3500 Runes, you’re going to want to head down there and pick that up right away. You’ll also need the Whetstone Knife that’s in the Gatefront Ruins right at the beginning of the game, so you can farm some runes there as well and get some better Armor. So, that’s not a bad place to start the game. You’re also going to need the Ash of War: War Cry, which is located at the Warmaster’s Shack. You can buy that from Bernahl there. He sells it for pretty cheap, it’s like 800 Runes or something like that. He’s located in northeast Stormhill, so go get it from him as soon as you have the Zweihander.

Upgrade your Zweihander

You’re going to want to upgrade yours Zweihander as soon as you have it. Again, there are the Smithing Stones you can get from the statue at the top of Stormhill. Have the trolls break them for you to get a bunch of them. And there is also a bunch located in the Limgrave Tunnels. You want to get that Zweihander up to +3 as quick as you can.

Barbarian Build Talismans of Choice

One of the three Talismans that you’ll want for this build are the Green Turtle Talisman, located in eastern Stormhill. This Talisman is very good for stamina recovery. This build has absolute stamina-consumption problems. You use so much stamina with this build that you have to regenerate your stamina quickly or else you’re going to be just standing there doing nothing. So, that Talisman is an absolute must.

Another one is the Axe Talisman which increases the damage you do with Charge Attacks. This build has a huge focus on Charged Attacks – it does them over and over, and this Talisman increases the damage by 10%, which might not seem like a lot, but as your overall damage increases throughout the game, that number is going to increase from like 40 damage at the beginning of the game to like 80, 100, or 200 damage later on. The Axe Talisman can be located in Mistwood Ruins, which is kind of east of Limgrave. You can check the wiki for the exact location.

The last Talisman you may want is the Roar Medallion, which is located in the Limgrave Tunnels from defeating the boss there. This boosts damage after you are buffed with War Cry, so consider getting it if you want another damaging option.

Using the Ash of War: War Cry

When you do slot the Ash of War: War Cry in, make sure you use the heavy version on your weapon, and not the standard. It will increase your damage because of the amount of Strength you have and the scaling of the weapon. At +4 on the Zweihander, you have B-scaling which is pretty good for +4, and you’re going to be cranking Strength up anyway in order to meet the requirements of bigger Colossal Swords and deal more damage. So, make sure you use the heavy version when you’re using it

Barbarian Build Armor

Like most builds, you’re going to want better Armor than you begin the game with, not only for protection because they’re going to be trading blows, but you want high Poise with this build because that will prevent you from being interrupted when you’re doing Charged Attacks. Between the Poise you gain from doing the charge itself and the Poise on your armor, you can actually just go through some really heavy-hitting boss attacks sometimes. So, you want to pay close attention to that Poise stat and try and wear pieces with high Poise if possible. Just make sure that your equip load is in the medium range so that you can medium roll.

Elden Ring Barbarian Build Recommended Attributes

Talking about stat spread, you want to get to the minimum requirements for the Zweihander as quickly as possible. That’s 19 Strength and 11 Dexterity. That means you need to put three points into Strength and two in Dexterity. That should happen fairly quickly. Once you have that done, you’re going to crank Vigor and Endurance up, probably going on a one-to-one ratio or something like that, because you need more health and you need to increase your equip load so you can use heavier Armor with good Poise, without fat-rolling early on in the game.

Your stats are going to look something like 20 Strength, 11 Dexterity, 20 Endurance, 20 Vigor – something like that. From that point forward, you’re going to want to just keep cranking up Strength, Endurance, and Vigor throughout the game unless you need more Dexterity to meet the requirements of maybe some other Colossal Sword that you want to use like the one that drops from the boss in Castle Morne.

Barbarian Build Core Attributes:

• High Strength for maximum damage
• High Endurance for high Stamina and equip-load
• High Vigor for more health to trade blows
• Just enough Dexterity to wield Colossal Sword of choice

Elden Ring Barbarian Build Gameplay

So once you have the build put together, use the Charged Attacks to start out fights. This build works extremely well against tough enemies – if you have trouble with tough enemies, this is a fantastic build for you. Now, Charged Attacks apply to holding R2 until you actually fully swing. When you do an R2 normally with this build, you’re going to do a thrust that’s got pretty long range, it does really good damage, and the Axe Talisman will boost that.

However, what we really want to do is use War Cry with L2 to change your R2 Charged Attack into an actual charging attack, like where you’re running forward and actually charging – two different definitions of ‘charge.’ This ability is really strong – it hits harder than the regular Charged Attack, and it also gives you a certain amount of Poise. This means that you can just plow through enemies or tank through incoming hits when you do this and a lot of times you’ll just pancake enemies in one hit, or if not, you’ll stagger them and you can follow up with an R1 and deal incredible damage and usually wipe them out in two swings.

Unlike the Berserker build that focuses a lot on jump attacks and things like that, this build doesn’t have as much focus on those. It focuses more on the charge aspect, but that doesn’t mean you can’t jump attack or you can’t roll attack. These are still really strong. Generally, the R1 or R2 attacks that Zweihander has are really good and the weapon has a really good move set. You should get used to it because it’s very very strong. It has like a lot of horizontal AOE, so you can cleave through a lot of enemies at once if you know what you’re doing.

Elden Ring Stance Mechanic

One thing you may not know about this game is that each enemy in the game has a Stance meter, not unlike yourself, where if they get hit a certain number of times, they stagger, allowing you to do a Critical Attack. And that’s kind of what you’re going for in this build – you want to try and stagger enemies so that you can get that critical attack, and just like a bleed bar, it’s an invisible bar that fills up as you attack more and more. As you stop attacking, it begins to drain so it’ll take more attacks to stagger them if you wait too long in between attacks. So the idea is you charge in, you pancake them, and you hit two R1 attacks. Ideally, you have enough stamina to get the R1s off, and usually that staggers them. Then you do a critical attack. Follow that up with the charge again and usually that wipes out just about anyone. If it’s a boss it takes at least half or more of their health off, and in some cases will just outright kill them.

Buffing Up with War Cry

War Cry also buffs your damage a little bit, I think it’s about 10%. It’s not a huge amount but between that and the charge you’re going to deal substantial damage, and this lasts about 40 seconds so you’ll need to refresh it. You’re not going to need very many FP flasks – this is not a very FP-hungry build, so you’re going to use maybe one FP flasks and the rest on HP, or maybe two FP flasks with the rest for the rest health if you have a lot of flasks because you only need to replenish them from time to time.

Mounting Up

One last thing I want to mention is that mounted combat with this weapon is a bit strange. First of all, the R1 and L1 attacks hit really close to you, almost like dagger range, so you have to get used to that. It’s not something you’d be expecting after using a claymore or a greatsword that kind of sweeps out a bit. The R2 and L2 attacks, however, do insane damage. Not only that, the second the tip gets on the ground if you ride through any enemy, it does damage to them, and then when the sword comes up it does damage again, a lot of times shooting them up into the air like a geyser. So learn to use those L2 and R2 attacks when you’re mounted. They work a lot better than the R1 and L1, although there is a time and place for those, but you can absolutely just devastate whole packs of enemies with a good R2 or L2 hit.

So that’s it for our barbarian guide! We have a ton more builds coming for Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree so stay tuned for those and, as always, let us know what you think in the comments below. If you need help finding items, and securing some personal objectives, make sure to check the Elden Ring Map.