Elden Ring Cragblade Build Guide – Tower Knight

Elden Ring Hammer Cragblade Build – Equipment

In this build, we focus on utilizing a Hammer, specifically the Morningstar, for its exceptional capabilities. Let’s delve into the reasoning behind this choice. Hammers boast 36 Stance damage both on their charged heavy attack and their Block Counters. Why is this Stance damage figure crucial, you might ask? Let me enlighten you.

A lot of bosses in Elden Ring have 80 Stance. That means if you do 80 Stance damage to them in a short period of time, they’re going to Stance Break, and that’s going to allow you to go in for a critical attack or hit them a couple times, or a combination of both, getting in some free damage. And also, when their Stance broken, they’re not hitting you, which is very important when you’re fighting tough bosses.

Some bosses have more than 80 Stance. Some have 110 Stance. Some have 120 Stance. Some have 105 Stance. It varies a little bit from boss to boss, but a lot of bosses have exactly 80 Stance, and to my knowledge, none of them have less than this in the game, which means that you want to try and be able to do at least 40 Stance damage if you’re going for a Stance Break build with whatever you’re doing in order to try and Stance Break the vast majority of bosses in two hits with whatever causes that much Stance damage, or three hits on the harder bosses that have more Stance.

You might be thinking that’s great, but 36 multiplied by two is 72 Stance damage. That’s not 80. This is where Cragblade comes in. Cragblade is going to increase the amount of Stance damage that your weapon does, besides adding extra damage to the weapon, so that when you do your charged heavy attack with your Hammer or you do a Block Counter with your Hammer, you’re going to do 40 Stance damage, allowing you to Stance Break most bosses in two hits.

It should be pointed out that it’s very important that the Block Counter also does 40 Stance damage because this allows you to do a charged R2 or a charged heavy attack, block, and then do a Block Counter and Stance Break an enemy that quickly. If you have a weapon that has high Stance damage on the charged heavy but also doesn’t have it on the Block Counter, then when you go to Block Counter, you’re not going to Stance Break them, and you’ll still have to strike them another time. Hammers don’t have this problem, and because they’re such light weapons, they’re easier to build around.

Suppose you have a very heavy weapon, like a great hammer or a colossal hammer, and you’re trying to use a great shield to do Block Counters. In that case, you’re going to have a lot of weight on your character, and it’s very hard to build that early on in the game.

By having a weapon that is very light, like the Morning Star, that only weighs 5, you’re able to use that great shield and still not have to worry as much about your equipment weight.

The general strategy then is that you’re going to buff with Cragblade as you move around the landscape to boost your damage. You don’t really need to worry too much about Stance damage on the landscape because you’ll have enough with Block Counters and charged heavy attacks to do just fine without that buff, but the extra damage will be nice for you.

Cragblade buffs physical damage, so we’ve gone with the heavy infusion here in order to make sure all of our damage on the Morning Star is heavy. And so when you go into a boss fight, particularly, you’re going to make sure you want to buff with Cragblade so that you get to that 40 mark, and then you’re going to go do a charged heavy attack very quickly, as quick as you can, and then use a Block Counter to Stance Break them. And if you can’t Block Counter them because they’re a big enemy or whatever, then you’re going to try and just use charged heavy attacks to knock them down, and then maybe attack them a few times before getting a critical hit.

The reason that I chose the Morning Star for this build is because it has a native bleed buildup on hit. Now you don’t have to choose the Morning Star, you can do this with any Hammer in the game. The principles of it are fundamentally the same, so that doesn’t matter, but the reason I chose it is for that bleed buildup. This bleed buildup does not trigger on regular enemies on the landscape hardly ever.

However, particularly if you’re playing this build from the very beginning of the game when you don’t have a fully upgraded weapon, bleed is going to play more of a role because you’re going to have to hit enemies more times before they die, particularly bosses, which means that you’re more likely to trigger blood loss. And that blood loss can help you get through a boss more quickly, even if you only trigger it one time. It doesn’t change the fundamental way we play this build, but it sort of augments it by giving you periodic hemorrhage triggers on some bosses. And that’s just good to have.

The two things you want going into the Elden Ring DLC are status effects and Stance damage, and this build has both. So if you’re playing this build from the very beginning of the game, you’re going to want to get a hammer quickly. There are a lot of early-game hammers. Morning Star can be gotten in Weeping Peninsula, so you can go get that right away. The next thing you’re going to want to get is a great shield.

I’m using the Manor Towershield for this build, which is kind of the namesake of the build. You can get this in Stormveil Castle, which isn’t too far. You don’t actually have to defeat any bosses besides Morgott to get this shield. So once you’ve defeated him, you can just run through the castle and go pick it up without having to fight anything else if you don’t want to.

What I really like about this great shield, it has very good guard boost for how early you can get it into the game, which allows you to do Block Counters very effectively because great shields have extra hardness compared to medium shields, which means a lot of enemies rebuff off their attacks, giving you a better opening for Block Counters, just making them more easy for you to do.

It does weigh a considerable amount, however, at 16 and it needs 30 Strength, which is one of the reasons that I think hammers are really good in this game, is that they weigh so little on average, it allows you to use a great shield with them and still get those Block Counters and that Stance damage that you would get from a much heavier weapon and still be able to use a great shield easily.

The Ash of War: Cragblade is found in Caelid, it’s a ways into Caelid. It’s actually close to Redmane Castle, but you don’t actually have to fight anything to go get it. There’s a Teardrop Scarab over there that you just need to kill doesn’t even attack you, so you just run up to it, when you find it, kill it, get this Ash of War, and then you have it. It’s just a long ride really to go get it, so it doesn’t take you very long to put this build together.

The Knight set is located in Roundtable Hold, you can buy it there once you have the runes. So the fundamentals of this build can come together very, very quickly.

Elden Ring Hammer Cragblade Build – Talismans

The Talismans that I’m using for this build, most of them can be found quite early on. I have the Green Turtle Talisman for stamina recovery, that way you can block and attack without having to worry too much about your stamina, otherwise you might have stamina issues.

We have the Axe Talisman here, that further increases your charged heavy attack damage, we do a lot of those in this game, so that’s a good damage increase there. We have the Curved Sword Talisman, which increases your block counter damage. All of these talismans can be found very, very early on in the game. And what’s great too is if you defeat Morgott and go in and get that Manor Towershield, when you defeat him, you’re going to gain another Talisman slot.

So you’ll have two Talisman slots when you put this build together, and from the very beginning of the game, which will be good. So the Greatshield Talisman is in my last slot, and this further increases the guard boost of your shield, making it so that you lose less stamina when you block. And we really don’t have to have this for this build, it just kind of makes it so that really whenever you block, you don’t have any trouble with stamina.

You won’t really anyway with this shield, but this just puts it even further into that category where you can block and attack and block and counter, and you never really run out of stamina with this build, which is quite nice. If you want, you could replace this with something like Ritual Sword Talisman to further increase your damage, since you don’t tend to get hit very often with this build because you are blocking and block countering so much.

But sometimes you do trade in boss fights because you have to play aggressively to get stance breaks, so I find that during boss fights, something like this is better, or maybe even the Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman to further increase your protection.

Elden Ring Hammer Cragblade Build – Recommended Attributes Distribution

When it comes to attributes for this build, we have 50 Vigor, 25 Mind, 30 Endurance, we’re all the way up at 80 Strength, we have 12 Dexterity, and basically you don’t need any Intelligence, Faith, or Arcane for this build.

Maybe at some point in Journey 2 or Journey 3, you might add some. But the idea here is that you have enough health that you can trade hits and be aggressive in boss fights. You will take some damage in boss fights just because of the nature of this build, so you need enough health to survive that. Mind is not super important for this build, you can get away with less Mind than 25, and you could probably drop this down to 20.

I typically set it at this when I’m testing builds. But the reason for that is all that you’re doing is buffing with Cragblade, which isn’t super expensive, and frankly, you don’t need it all the time. You probably only need it for the harder enemies, so you don’t really tend to go through a lot of FP flasks with this build, and you can skew your flasks more heavily to the HP side of things generally.

Endurance is up at 30 because you want a lot of Stamina in order to be able to block, attack, and block counter. You also need to wear at least a 51 poise armor set, which the Knight set is, in order to be able to medium roll and not fat roll around all over the place. You are also carrying a great shield, so that adds a lot of weight to this build.

So Endurance is good here because of the Stamina it provides you, and the equip weight. You need both of those things for this build. I have Strength all the way up at 80 here to increase the amount of damage we do with our melee attacks. We’re not two-handing here, we are one-handing, so 80 can benefit you.

Dexterity is at 12 because of my class. I don’t think the Morningstar needs that much dexterity, you could actually have lower. Your dexterity will probably depend on what class you begin with, and also what hammer you decide to use, because some of them can use more or less dexterity.

However, it doesn’t override Exalted Flesh or Flame, Grant Me Strength, so those are both good to have. For the Flask of Wondrous Physick, you can go a couple of ways. You can use the one that increases your charged attack damage, that’s great, you’re going to be using that strategy on bosses, so that’s definitely a plus.

You can go for extra stamina or stamina recovery, and you can also go for extra poise damage if you want to try and like break bosses that have more than 80 Stance faster. And then when it comes to great runes for this build, I think Radahn’s is easily the best choice here, just because it gives you stamina, FP, and HP.

You don’t really need FP for this build, but stamina and HP are both really good to have for this build. Godrick’s is not bad, but you really only need 4 stats for this build, so it’s probably wasted compared to something like Radahn’s. And then lastly, again, you can use any hammer you want for this build.

I just like the Morning Star for the occasional hemorrhage trigger on bosses, particularly if you’re playing this game or playing this build from the very beginning of the game. That will happen more regularly, but you don’t have to use that hammer, you can use any one that you prefer.

So that wraps up our Tower Knight build, I hope you guys enjoyed this one. This is a very simple, straightforward build that’s extremely effective. I know that we made the Noble Swordsman build recently that has fantastic Stance Breaks, and that also is a build I would highly recommend for Shadow of The Erdtree. But this build has a lot more protection than that build, because you can just walk up to stuff, Block Counter easily with a great shield, and I like it.

Stay tuned for more Elden Ring content as we continue the hype train toward Shadow of The Erdtree. We are going to have more build guides, we’re going to finish up our weapon guides, working on some Ash of War guides. We also have some ranking lists coming, I believe. As always, let us know if you have questions or other tips in the comments below. We have a ton more builds coming for Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree so stay tuned for those. If you need help finding the spells, items, or equipment in this build, and securing some personal objectives, make sure to check the Elden Ring Map.