Elden Ring Dexterity & Intelligence Build Guide – Magus

In this Elden Ring Spellblade Guide, I’ll be showing you my Magus build. This is an evolution of the Spellblade, the next step in the way that you play this build.

Elden Ring Dexterity & Intelligence Build Guide – Magus

A melee-mage Build that uses Scholar’s Armament and Glintstone Phalanx to deal Critical Damage to enemies.

We have over 110 Elden Ring Builds now, for all classes and playstyles. This build is recommended for level 50.

Elden Ring Dexterity & Intelligence Build – Equipment

The staff you want for this Dexterity & Intelligence build is the Meteorite Staff. You can use the Academy Glintstone Staff once you meet the requirement of 28 Intelligence. However, you’ll have to invest in upgrades for it to surpass Meteorite Staff, so I recommend using Meteorite Staff at this point in the game. You can obtain the Academy Glintstone Staff in Raya Lucaria, and its exact location is located in the wiki page.

The next thing you want for this Dexterity & Intelligence build is a Rapier. The reason you want a Rapier specifically, and not Rogier’s Rapier or an Estoc, is that the Rapier has 130 Critical. This means that anytime you do a critical attack, you’re going to deal more damage than you would if you used Rogier’s Rapier or an Estoc because those have a lower Critical rating. Anytime you stagger an enemy, then stab or backstab them, you’re going to do far more damage with a Rapier, specifically for this build. You can purchase one in Roundtable Hold for 1,000 Runes.

If you want upgrade materials, Raya Lucaria Crystal Tunnel east of Liurnia of the Lakes, that has a bell that you can turn into the Twin Maiden Husks, which will allow you to buy Smithing Stone (1) and (2) from her in exchange for Runes. You can farm Runes, then just buy Smithing Stones, which is fast. You can also farm Smithing Stones (3) from the enemies outside of the southern entrance of Raya Lucaria.

When it comes to helmets, I like using Queen’s Crescent Crown to increase my Intelligence. There are a fair number of helmets that increase your Intelligence, which you can use. Getting that extra damage on your sorceries is always good. As for armor, it doesn’t really matter what armor you’re using as long as you can use the heaviest while still being able to medium roll. The Spellblade’s Gloves which you’ll get from Rogier increases Glintstone Sorcery damage, so you’re going to want to be on the lookout for those when you can get them.

Elden Ring Dexterity & Intelligence Build – Talismans

As for talismans, there are three you want to use this this build. These are: Radagon Icon, Assassin’s Cerulean Dagger, and Graven-School Talisman.

Radagon Icon allows you to cast spells faster. This means that when you’re buffing your weapons, using Carian Greatsword, and Glintstone Pebble, it’ll all be faster. This is optional out of the three, but I find it speeds up Carian Greatsword a lot, which will help us get it off in situations where you usually will get interrupted. You can swap this one out for something else, but the other two are staples in this build.

Assassin’s Cerulean Dagger is really good for this build because you do a lot of backstabs, parries, staggers, which allows you to regain 15 FP per critical attack. You want to always aim to do critical attacks and backstabs to replenish your FP.

Graven-School Talisman upgrades your sorcery damage. This is good for Carian Greatsword. In general, it’s good for buffing your weapon with Scholar’s Armaments, so this talisman will increase the damage of that and all of your spells.

Elden Ring Dexterity & Intelligence Build – Spells and Gameplay

The spells that you want to use for this Dexterity & Intelligence build are: Carian Greatsword, Scholar’s Armaments, and Glintstone Pebble. Loretta’s Greatbow is good to add for some extra range if you need it. If you’re playing as a Magus, you probably want to get into melee range. Nevertheless, there are scenarios where range is useful and you may find yourself using Loretta’s Greatbow.

Carian Greatsword gives you a solution to large groups of enemies at once, or when you’re on horseback. The weakness of this build without Carian Greatsword is that it can’t deal with multiple enemies effectively. The build shines very well in one-on-one scenarios like boss fights but struggles with multiple enemies. You absolutely want to make sure you use this when surrounded by multiple enemies.

Scholar’s Armaments is used to buff your right-hand weapon, which lasts for 90 seconds. It adds a substantial amount of damage to your right-hand attacks, more than double the damage. It scales off of your staff upgrades, and it scales off of Intelligence. The higher these stats are, the more it’s going to boost it. However, Scholar’s Armaments cannot buff weapons that have two damage types. For example, Moonveil deals both physical and magic damage, so it cannot be buffed with this spell.

The Ash of War we’ll be using on the Rapier is Glintblade Phalanx. I mentioned above that Scholar’s Armaments won’t work on a Magic-scaling Ash of War, but you can actually put Glintblade Phalanx on your Rapier and still maintain physical damage. We get to use Keen scaling because we’re going to increase Dexterity for this build, which means that you can still buff it with Scholar’s Armaments.

We’re using the skill version of Glintblade Phalanx, not its spell version. The spell itself costs double the FP of the skill, and the damage difference is insignificantly small. Also, the more you upgrade it, the more it’s going to do, so it may catch up and outperform the spell at some point depending on how it scales all the way up. The skill also staggers enemies, while the spell doesn’t, which is one of the primary reasons we use a Rapier. You will constantly stagger enemies with the skill, which then leaves them open for you to do a critical strike, then regain the cost of the spell back with Assassin’s Cerulean Dagger, which allows you to spam the skill.

Another thing with Glintblade Phalanx is that after you cast it with L2, if you press R2, you will do a lunging thrust, which is really good when casting this ability up-close on an enemy. You can interrupt enemies with this if you don’t have a lot of breathing room, as it’ll stagger them. The stagger bar will completely fill up depending on the enemy. If you wait too long, then the stagger bar will deplete, which will then need another cast of it. You want to be able to predict the staggers so that you’re not rolling away when it happens. You’ll get used to it, so that you can maximize the window wherein you can deal critical strikes to enemies.

Elden Ring Dexterity & Intelligence Build – Attributes

The attributes we have for this build are: 20 Vigor, 20 Mind, 14 Endurance, 12 Strength, 18 Dexterity, 33 Inteligence, 6 Faith, and 9 Arcane.

For this build, it’s a little bit different than the Enchanted Knight as you don’t really need Endurance at all. Your Endurance isn’t really much of a factor with this build, as your armor doesn’t need to be heavy. You’re not planning on getting hit, and you want to spend most of your points in Dexterity and Intelligence and get away with as little Vigor as you can. Once you get Vigor to 20, you should have around 30 Intelligence and 20 Dexterity. As you get both your Intelligence and Dexterity up, you can also increase Vigor a little bit. That way, you have maximum damage on your Rapier, especially when you deal those critical hits.

That’s it for our Magus Build Guide! 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 items, and securing some personal objectives, make sure to check the Elden Ring Map. Happy building!