Elden Ring Hand of Malenia Build Guide – Waterfowl Warrior

Elden Ring Hand of Malenia Build Guide – Equipment

Let’s dive into the weapon for this build: the Hand of Malenia, a Katana known for its impressive physical damage and exceptional scaling with Dexterity. To optimize its potential, this build focuses on reaching 80 Dexterity, as the weapon’s effectiveness begins to taper off beyond that point. However, as you progress further into NG+, you might consider pushing this stat up to 99 to keep boosting your damage output.

What’s unique about this Katana compared to others is that bleed buildup isn’t a significant focus for this build, mainly because you don’t have many ways to increase the rate of bleed accumulation. The Waterfowl Dance ability, despite its rapid sequence of hits, surprisingly doesn’t cause much bleed buildup, which is unexpected given how frequently it connects with enemies. So while you’d expect frequent bleeding due to the attack’s rapid succession, it doesn’t happen as often. Consequently, bleed isn’t a major component of this build, though you might still trigger it occasionally.

For regular enemies, you can rely on the Katana‘s running R2 attack and standard strikes. But for tougher foes and bosses, the Waterfowl Dance is your go-to move. A great advantage of this ability is that you can chain it by pressing L2 multiple times—you can do it up to three times in a row.

While performing this move, you gain some poise, allowing you to avoid being staggered depending on the point in the animation and the Strength of the incoming hit. Additionally, this build emphasizes high poise to further reduce the risk of interruption during the combo, making it a powerful tool for tearing through bosses and challenging enemies.

One of the downsides of the Waterfowl Dance is that it consumes a ton of stamina. If you perform the full sequence by pressing L2 three times, you’ll likely deplete most, if not all, of your stamina bar. This makes it challenging to immediately follow up with another combo of three L2 presses, as you might not have enough stamina left for the full sequence.

This is why managing your stamina is crucial when using this skill effectively. It’s also why this build prioritizes high Endurance, not only to increase your stamina pool but also to support equipment that provides high poise. Having that extra stamina reserve is key to making the most of this weapon.

Regarding the armor, I went with the Cleanrot set primarily for its aesthetics. It gives you that Cleanrot Knight vibe while wielding this weapon, which looks pretty cool. The poise is decent, sitting at around 48, but it’s just shy of the breakpoint for builds that require high poise due to lengthy attack animations. Ideally, you’d want to aim for about 56 poise to maintain stability during intense moves.

To compensate, I equipped the Bull-Goat’s Talisman, which provides enough poise to withstand a couple of hits while executing Waterfowl Dance without breaking your flow. However, this setup isn’t entirely optimal. Looking at my equip load, there’s room to carry heavier armor, which typically offers both better protection and higher poise. If you’re willing to use the extra load capacity, you could switch to heavier armor for increased resilience.

If you want to play this build 100% optimized and not go the cosplay route that I did, what you would do instead is wear heavier armor and then swap out the Bull-Goat’s Talisman for something like Great-Jar’s Arsenal, or you could swap it out for something like the Green Turtle Talisman to get more stamina recovery to help out with your Waterfowl Dance uses. This will give you more protection and more poise as well.

Elden Ring Hand of Malenia Build Guide – Talismans and Gameplay

Besides that talisman, the other talismans that I use are Shard of Alexander, Rotten Winged Sword Insignia, and Millicent’s Prosthesis.

These two talismans, Millicent’s Prosthesis and Rotten Winged Sword Insignia, increase your damage as you hit rapidly. Waterfowl Dance hits over and over rapidly, so this builds up your attack power, which is then going to increase the damage of your Waterfowl Dance and your regular attacks. You can’t get both of these talismans in one playthrough unless you have someone drop you one.

So it’s likely that you’ll use Winged Sword Insignia and Millicent’s Prosthesis unless you can get someone to drop you Rotten Winged Sword Insignia. If you have it, use Rotten Winged Sword Insignia over Winged Sword Insignia.

Shard of Alexander increases your Waterfowl Dance damage by about 15%, which is great because you’re going to use this on all the toughest bosses.

If you prefer a more optimized build, you might consider using heavier armor instead, allowing you to replace the Bull-Goat’s Talisman with something like the Green Turtle Talisman for faster stamina recovery, the Great-Jar’s Arsenal for extra equip load, or the Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman for increased defense. This approach gives you flexibility in terms of both poise and protection.

The general playstyle for this Hand of Malenia Build is straightforward. For regular enemies, you can use running R2 attacks with the Katana, and when facing groups or tougher foes, switch to the Waterfowl Dance, which has a significant area of effect. This move is particularly effective against pesky birds or clusters of enemies.

If you’ve used other Katanas in the game, you’ll be familiar with the basic attacks, so stick with those for standard encounters. Reserve the Waterfowl Dance for more challenging situations, pressing L2 a bit earlier to account for its brief windup time, ensuring it connects as enemies approach.

One of the great things about this build is that it doesn’t rely on external buffs. The power-ups come from actually hitting enemies, so you don’t need to use Golden Vow or any other buffs that require regular reapplication. If you’re not a fan of constantly refreshing your buffs, this build is ideal. It’s straightforward and allows you to focus on combat without the hassle of maintaining active buffs.

Elden Ring Hand of Malenia Build Guide – Recommended Attributes Distribution

Moving on to the stats for this build, I have 50 Vigor, 25 Mind, 36 Endurance, 11 Strength, 80 Dexterity, 16 Intelligence, 7 Faith, and 9 Arcane. 

I started as an Astrologer for this build. That’s why I have 16 Intelligence. You don’t need any Intelligence, Faith, or Arcane for this build. So if you’re playing a different class, your stat distribution will be a bit better as those points in Intelligence could be in Strength or Dexterity or Endurance or Vigor or Mind.

For this Hand of Malenia Build, I have set Vigor to 50. This is sufficient for my playstyle, although it’s cutting it close at times. Depending on your aggression level and personal preferences, you might consider increasing it to around 60 during your playthrough to give yourself more of a safety margin. As I progress deeper into NG+, I’ll likely bump it up to 60 for some extra health cushion.

For Mind, 25 is sufficient for this build. The constraint on Waterfowl Dance isn’t your FP but your stamina. Even with ample FP, your stamina won’t support frequent spamming of this move. Thus, you don’t need more than 20-25 Mind. If you wish, you can lower it to 20 and invest those extra points in Vigor, Endurance, or Dexterity for increased damage output.

Regarding Endurance, you can’t really have enough for this build. High Endurance is crucial, especially if you’re aiming for heavier armor with high poise while maintaining a medium roll. If you want to be fully optimized and still retain mobility, you’ll need a good deal of Endurance. This also helps with stamina for Waterfowl Dance, making 50 a good target. You can redistribute a few points from Mind into Endurance to accommodate heavier armor or continue to increase Endurance as you level up to improve your protection and poise.

When it comes to Strength, the Hand of Malenia does scale a little bit with it, albeit poorly. You only need 11 Strength to two-hand this weapon, which is what we’re doing. I didn’t put any more points here to give us more points for things like Vigor, Endurance, and Mind.

Theoretically, once you max out Dexterity at 99, you could probably start putting points into Strength. If you have your optimal Endurance, Vigor, and Mind spread, then you would want to start increasing Strength to keep increasing your damage, although it’s only going to be by a little bit. But realistically, that’s probably not until NG++ or the very tail end of NG+, depending on how much of NG+ you do.

Lastly, when it comes to Dexterity, 80 here. It starts to fall off significantly after 80 Dexterity, so you’re really going to hang out here for a while until you get the other things sorted, like your armor and poise, and then continue to increase your damage with Dexterity. Then you’ll continue to increase your damage with Strength after that. Again, this is probably the latter half of NG+, probably into NG++, that you’ll start increasing Dexterity up to 99.

Elden Ring Katana Hand of Malenia Build Guide – Final Tips

A couple of tips about this Hand of Malenia Build before we wrap up. First, you can use something in your offhand like the Sacrificial Axe. Although I’m not doing it here, that will give you FP back when you kill something. Since Waterfowl Dance kills enemies rather easily, this can save you some FP. You really don’t have FP issues with this build, so it’s not something you need to worry about much.

You could also put something like the Blasphemous Blade in your offhand to gain health back when you kill enemies. It’s not a bad option, because you do tend to trade damage if you don’t Mind having the weight of the Blasphemous Blade in this build. But that really depends on how much Endurance you have, what armor you’re using, and how much poise you have.

When setting up your Flask of Wondrous Physick, definitely include the Greenburst Crystal Tear for increased stamina recovery. Stamina is the biggest limiting factor for Waterfowl Dance, and you want to be able to use it repeatedly in boss fights. Faster stamina recovery lets you pull off the full combo without interruption, which is critical for maintaining your damage output. It’s frustrating to start Waterfowl Dance, try to use it again, and find you only have enough stamina for one L2 press instead of all three. To avoid that, ensure you have the Greenburst Crystal Tear.

Additionally, include a tear that boosts your damage with successive attacks. This effect complements Waterfowl Dance‘s multiple hits, giving you a noticeable increase in attack power and making this skill even more potent. With these two tears in your flask, you’ll be better equipped for boss fights and high-stamina combat scenarios.

That wraps up our Waterfowl Warrior build. I hope you enjoyed this NG+ build, we’ll have more NG+ builds coming out. 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.