In this Elden Ring Nagakiba Samurai Build Guide, I’m going to be showing you how to play my Blazing Bushido build, or Flammurai build if you will. This is a level 100 Samurai build, and if you’ve been wondering how to play a Samurai not using Moonveil, then read on to find out.
Elden Ring Nagakiba Samurai Build Guide – Blazing Bushido
A Samurai Build that uses the Nagakiba and a Greatbow to take on enemies at range or in close combat.
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Elden Ring Nagakiba Samurai Build Guide – Equipment
First, let’s focus on the weapon I chose for this build, and I chose the Nagakiba here. There are a few reasons for this. First, the weapon has an incredibly long reach. It is the longest katana in the game by far, probably almost double the length of most katanas in the game, which gives you a significant advantage when trying to hit difficult-to-hit bosses, wiry ones, etc. It’s also fantastic because the running R2 attack is sort of a slide-and-poke, and giving you that extra range means that you can stay out of harm’s way by rolling backward immediately afterward and keeping your distance from enemies.
Additionally, I really like the charged R2 attack here, as it’s a thrust instead of an overhead slash, so that’s fantastic. I’ve replaced the default Ash of War on it with Unsheathe. I like the Unsheathe ability, and if you’ve played at all with the regular Uchigatana or Moonveil, then you’ll know that this is strong. So I’ve set the quality affinity on this weapon with the Unsheathe Ash of War, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First, we want to keep the damage type physical to be able to buff this. If we set it to bleed or fire or magic or some other thing like that, we won’t be able to buff the blade, so keeping it physical is ideal.
The reasons I chose Quality over Keen with this build are a couple of reasons. First, the weapon requires about 18 Strength to use anyway, although you can two-hand it for less, but also because we use a Greatbow that scales off both Strength and Dexterity about equally as well, that means it’s going to benefit from both these stats, which is great. Additionally, you gain extra damage. You gain the Strength scaling, or 1.5 times the Strength scaling of your weapon when you two-hand, and we’re going to be two-handing this weapon nearly all the time we’re attacking with it, so you’re going to get a little extra damage from that two-handing when you’re because of Strength, so having some Strength here doesn’t hurt at all either.
You can get the Nagakiba by killing Yura at the beginning of the game or anytime you see him, or by progressing his quest line to a certain degree. You should be able to progress his quest line far enough at this point in the game to get it if you didn’t kill him. You can do the quest line to get it without killing him if you’d rather do it that way.
The next weapon we’re using for this build is the Greatbow as I just mentioned, and we swap the longbow, if you’re familiar with the Samurai build I made earlier, for the Greatbow, and there are a couple of reasons for that. You’re going to meet the requirements for Strength and Dexterity for it already because of the way you’re set up for this build, so it’s a good candidate for a Greatbow. Even if you’re using some other Greatbow that’s not this one, you’re going to meet the requirements because of the quality setup that you have, which is great.
Also, when you use Rain of Arrows with this build, it hits like a freight train, so it’s a very, very good way to deal a lot of damage at range against particularly bigger targets, targets that all the arrows will hit because they kind of scatter around a little bit. And one of the weaknesses of this build is big enemies.
Because they have large hitboxes and dodging is your only defense with this build, trying to pick them off at range before you have to engage them in melee or weaken them from range before you have to engage them in melee is going to help you out tremendously, and this is the way to do it. Also, Great Arrows are quite expensive and you can’t carry nearly as many of them, so getting every ounce of damage out of every arrow is fantastic, and Rain of Arrows only uses one arrow per use.
You can use any other Greatbow for this build if you want, but the reason I picked this one is it has double D scaling. Some of them only have D scaling and E scaling, and also one of them, one of the unique bow ability on it is not replaceable with Rain of Arrows, so I wanted to be able to put Rain of Arrows on this, exactly why we picked this bow. You can get the Rain of Arrows skill in Caelid, you got to go get the painting there in the town of sorcery and then go over to the Erdtree and drop over the cliff and get it, so if you’re wondering where that is, you can check out the wiki or you can follow that.
Additionally, if you’re looking for a place to buy Great Arrows, that’s what I do because I can’t be bothered to farm them at this point in the game, you’re going to find them at the Hermit’s Shack, which is in the Royal Capital area.
The last weapon we want for this build is the Finger Seal. We’re going to use this in order to cast two spells, which are Bloodflame Blade and Flame, Grant Me Strength. The reason we want this spell instead of the Clawmark Seal is because, for some reason on the Clawmark Seal, the Strength does not apply to the incantation scaling to increase the damage of Bloodflame Blade.
If it did, it would outperform Finger Seal, but it doesn’t, so if that ever gets changed, you’ll want to switch to Clawmark Seal, but for the time being, Finger Seal is the best seal that we meet the requirements for and it’s going to improve the damage of Bloodflame Blade. Flame, Grant Me Strength‘s damage doesn’t increase with any sort of scaling or anything like that, so it doesn’t matter what seal you use for that spell, but if you want to get the most out of Bloodflame Blade, then you’re going to want to use the Finger Seal.
As far as armor goes for this build, you can really use any that you want to use. I like the Samurai Armor or some of the different Samurai Armors in the game. You want to make sure whatever you do that you can still medium roll though, so make sure it’s not too heavy. And I have the Mask of Confidence here because it gives me a little bit of Arcane. You need 10 Arcane to use Bloodflame Blade, but if you just put a point or two into Arcane or if you don’t have enough Arcane, you can put a point or two in there, that’s fine. If you want to use something else instead, but if for some reason you don’t have enough Arcane, using this should get you to where you need to be.
Elden Ring Nagakiba Samurai Build Guide – Talismans
The four talismans I use for this build at this point in the game are Ritual Sword Talisman, Blessed Dew Talisman, Arrow’s Sting Talisman, and Carian Filigreed Crest.
The Ritual Sword Talisman is fantastic and it increases your damage by 10% when you’re at full health. This is good for any build that uses bows for instance because you’re trying to pick things off from far away before you ever get hit and you should be at full health most of the time. If you’re playing an archer build and you’re wondering how to increase your damage at this point in the game, go pick up this talisman because that’s going to give you 10% more damage.
Blessed Dew Talisman is there to regenerate health in between encounters to get back up to 100% to further boost your damage by 10%. Sometimes when you’re fighting you take chip damage and it’s too little to use a potion but you want that extra damage increase. So this is there to top you off between encounters and you might want to sub this out for something else in boss fights or something like that.
The Arrow’s Sting Talisman increases your arrow damage by 10%. Again you’re going to be using a bow with this build as well so getting that extra damage with it is fantastic. You have about 30 arrows before you run out so you’re not going to use it like you would an archer build picking everything off with it but you’re going to use it for hard-to-hit targets or targets that are extremely difficult and you’re going to want to use it with Rain of Arrows when you have tough enemies that are bigger too.
Lastly, we have Carian Filigreed Crest. This reduces your skill cost by 25%. Rain of Arrows is 20 FP by default so that’s going to knock it down to 15 and Unsheathe Abilities is 10 for the R1 and 15 for the R2 so that’s going to knock them down by a few points each and that’s going to allow you to conserve FP to use these abilities more. You don’t have a ton of FP with this build at this point in the game because you simply don’t have the stats for it. When you hit 150 you should have a lot more FP and you can probably swap that out for something like the Warrior’s Jar Shard or something that increases your skill damage but at this point having the FP cost reduction is better.
I don’t use the Winged Sword Insignia with this build. This talisman increases your attack power by a percentage every so often after you do a certain amount of hits. It’s like every three hits or so and the reason for that is because you simply cannot attack fast enough with this weapon to make it worth it. You are running in and out of combat because of the speed and I feel like Winged Sword Insignia is much better when you’re dual-wielding weapons that attack quickly than it is with katanas so I don’t recommend using it for this build. Another talisman you could use for this build is the Spear Talisman.
The running R2 attack is actually thrust damage as is the charged R2 attack. Still, you have to hit enemies while they’re in the middle of their attack, and generally speaking with this build you don’t want to be anywhere near an enemy when it’s you know winding through its attack unless you’re finishing it off with a hit. Hence, it’s a bad spot to be in and this should apply to arrows as well if you’re hitting something with an arrow while it’s mid-attack animation because that’s also thrust damage. However, it’s hard to use the bow mid-combat. You want to try and use the bow at the beginning of combat or outside of combat.
Trying to use it inside of combat is rather difficult so this probably isn’t going to happen very often. Another great talisman for this build is Lord of Blood’s Exultation which increases your attack power by 20% for 20 seconds after a target nearby to you has suffered Blood Loss. However, you can’t get it at this point in the game. I don’t want to go into spoilers with the story but I feel like that’s an end game item so I didn’t include it in this build but if you see an endgame version of this build it will include that talisman.
Elden Ring Nagakiba Samurai Build Guide – Spells
So as I mentioned earlier the two spells we use for this build are Bloodflame Blade and Flame, Grant Me Strength. These require 10 Arcane and 12 Faith for Bloodflame Blade and 15 Faith for Flame, Grant Me Strength. Flame, Grant Me Strength doesn’t increase in damage no matter what you do. It’s going to give you 20% more physical damage and 20% more fire damage for 30 seconds.
There’s no way to increase that damage so you don’t have to worry about increasing your Faith it’s one of the reasons we use it for this build because we give ourselves just enough Faith to be able to use this and Bloodflame Blade so we can increase our damage without having a significant investment in Faith.
This also applies to your bow so if you are planning on shooting things with your bow from outside of combat or you know triggering a fight make sure you buff yourself with Flame, Grant Me Strength first, and then use your bow. Bloodflame Blade is a fire buff you can use to enchant your weapon which is again a reason that we don’t make our weapon a damage type. We keep it physical so that we can use this spell and it applies 40% of your incantation scaling to your weapon for 60 seconds so it’s about double the length of Flame, Grant Me Strength which is fantastic but that’s not the only thing that it does.
On top of that it makes it so that your bleed build up continues to build up for a period of time after your attack ends. Normally when you hit an enemy with a weapon that has bleed build up on it they just take as much on their bar you know it fills up as much of their bar as it would and then the second you stop attacking it starts to drain but with this buff on it continues to go up for a position to attack again before it starts draining so it makes it a lot easier to proc Hemorrhage on enemies ripping off huge chunks of their health and what’s really good about this spell is because it adds fire damage to your weapon and you’re using Flame, Grant Me Strength which adds physical damage and fire damage that’s actually buffing the fire damage from this as well.
You can add other spells to this build and over time you may add a little bit more Faith in order to get other buffs like Blessing’s Boon that’ll give you a heal over time which will help keep your health topped off which will then allow you to get that 10% damage increase more often but at this point in the game you just don’t have the points for that.
Elden Ring Nagakiba Samurai Build Guide – Recommended Attributes Distribution
Talking about the stats I have for this build I have 28 Vigor, 20 Mind, 18 Endurance, 40 Strength, 40 Dexterity, 15 Faith, and 12 Arcane.
So the Vigor I wanted to get as much as I could here I’d like to have more than 28 at this point but you’re definitely going to want to increase this throughout the game to at least 40 or 50 probably by level 50.
We have our damage increased pretty high with Strength and Dexterity so from this point forward playing this build you’re probably going to want to increase Vigor and Mind a lot more than you are Strength and Dexterity. That will allow you to use your Bow ability more often and your Unsheathe more often and cast your spells without chugging pots as much and that’ll free you up to have more health flasks which will keep your health topped off as well.
Endurance is just enough to use the armor and weapons that we’re using in mid-roll. If you have different armor pieces or slightly different talismans the exact amount of Endurance you need for this might change by a few points so keep that in Mind that that might vary a little bit for you depending on what armor you’re using.
Strength and Dexterity pretty simply increases Bow damage and increases damage for our Nagakiba so we want those to be as high as we can get away with. I have noticed at this point though that there is a bit of a drop-off in damage compared to about level 30-35 points into Strength and Dexterity so you’ll have to pay attention and see how much damage you’re getting because at some point it’s probably not going to be as worth it as to just crank bigger or something like that.
Faith is at 15 which is exactly enough to use Flame, Grant Me Strength is why we have it there and 12 Arcane is actually too much you only need 10 for the Bloodflame Blade spell but I used a helmet that gave me 3 when I had 9 so I have 12 so you don’t need more than 10 but that’s what it is there.
Just a couple of final tips with this build you can also coat your blade with other things if you use other greases. One of the things that’s great about having a physical damage weapon in this game is being able to be flexible with what you want for instance if you’re playing against something weak to lightning you can use Lightning Grease on your weapon or Dragonwound Grease on it if it’s a dragon so don’t be afraid to use other things as well. Also in the same vein, there are other arrows you can use besides the great arrows that I’m using with this build so you can experiment around with those.
The locations of those are on the wiki I don’t know what they all are off the top of my head but they do various things like magic damage or more damage etc so don’t be afraid to use those as well if the situation calls for them. That pretty much wraps up our Blazing Bushido build, 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.
