In this Elden Ring Sacred Relic Sword Build Guide, I’m going to be showing you my Sword Saint build. This is a NG+ build that focuses on the use of the Sacred Relic Sword. A lot of people have been asking me to do a build for this weapon. It’s a weapon that is very NG+ friendly since you get it at the end of the game, so you almost have to use it in NG+.
Elden Ring Sacred Relic Sword Build Guide – Sword Saint
A Dexterity/Faith/Strength Build that focuses on using the Sacred Relic Sword and Wave of Gold.
We have over 110 Elden Ring Builds now, for all classes and playstyles. This Build is recommended for New Game +.
Elden Ring Sacred Relic Sword Build Guide – Equipment
So first up, This build uses the Sacred Relic Sword. This is a greatsword that weighs 11, which is one of the heavier greatswords. It does both physical and holy damage, although it does far more physical damage than holy damage. It has 110 critical, meaning that it’s one of two greatswords in the game that has 110. With the Lordsworn’s Greatsword being the other one, it does more when you do a stagger and then a critical strike. It does more damage than other greatswords when you do that. It has D scaling and Strength, B in Dexterity, and C in Faith. What sets this weapon apart from other weapons is, of course, its weapon skill Wave of Gold, which shoots out a golden wave in a cone in front of you over a long distance.
It does 100% holy damage. And this thing can wipe out packs of enemies from very far away, or deal significant damage to bosses or tough enemies from far away. Something great about it as well is that even if it doesn’t kill enemies, it tends to knock them down. So while they’re getting up, you can hit them with another wave, and while they’re getting up from that, you can hit them with another wave, etc. Making this a particularly deadly weapon skill. Something particularly interesting about this weapon is that it has B scaling and Dexterity, and you get more damage out of the weapon if you just put in the minimum requirements for Strength and Faith, and then crank Dexterity up to 80. But, if you split the stats between Dexterity and Faith, going 50-50 with minimum and Strength, you do very slightly less damage with your regular attacks, but your Wave of Gold will deal about 10% more damage. So I find it to be a better trade-off.
Also, putting that many points in Faith will allow you to use spells, if you want to use Golden Vow, Flame, Grant Me Strength, or any other Faith spell buff that is in that 20-50 requirement for Faith, which all incantations are. So that works out well as well. You’re only losing a very small amount of damage to split that way, and you’re boosting the damage of Wave of Gold a lot, and giving yourself some flexibility with incantations. Now the issue with the Sacred Relic Sword is that Wave of Gold, although extremely deadly, is extremely expensive. It costs 42 FP by default to use this. It means for the average person that has a greatsword-type setup with your Mind somewhere in the 20-30 range, you’re going to get 3 or 4 casts of this at most before you need to drink a flask.
That is not a lot. So managing your FP while using this weapon skill is important. That way you can use it as much as you want because if you’re holding back from using the weapon skill of this weapon because you’re trying to manage your FP, you’re losing out on a lot of potential with this weapon. So solving that is what I went for when working with this build. So the first thing I did here was slot Carian Filigreed Crest.
This reduces the FP cost of your weapon skills by 25%. That knocked this down from 42 to 32 because it rounds down, so you don’t quite get exactly 25% in this case. But you get around a 22% reduction here, which helps tremendously because you save a lot of FP. If you’re reducing the FP cost of a weapon skill that’s 12 FP, you save 3. But when it’s 42 and you save 10, that’s huge savings. So that works out very, very nicely here.
The other thing that I wanted to do was slot the Sacrificial Axe in my other hand to give you more FP when you kill enemies. That way when you kill all these enemies with Wave of Gold, you get back tons of FP, and a lot of times it can refund the cost. But in this case, it made more sense to use the Sword of Milos for this build because Sacred Relic Sword is itself a greatsword.
That way you can power stance both great swords, and you can use jump attacks as well. And you still get that FP back when you kill enemies and you get even more with the sword of Milos than you do with the sacrificial axe. In this case, you’re getting back 5 FP per kill compared to the 4 FP per kill that you’d get from Sacrificial Axe. So those two things kind of led me down the road of, well this will allow me to use the weapon skill more often. It also gives you the option to do jump attacks with great swords. It also gives you the option to buff with Golden Vow and other buffs. And it turned out to be this strong build that has a lot of variety and flexibility.
Regarding the armor I’m using for this build, I’m using the Haligtree Knight Set on the top two pieces and just some Haligtree Armor on the bottom. I was trying to farm the whole set but it was taking too long so I just kind of stopped. I love the art style of this set. I think it works well with this weapon. And it doesn’t matter what armor you use for this build. The more protection the better. You still want to be able to medium roll. But because you’re using two great swords, your equip load isn’t going to be so much that you’re going to be able to wear exactly the armor that you want to use for this build.
But as you go further in a NG+ and you increase your Endurance more, you’ll be able to wear heavier armor that gives you more protection and more poise. And that’ll just help you out even more. And as far as the sacred seal that you’re going to use for this build, you can use any. The Erdtree Seal would be good. It weighs nothing for this build. That way you don’t add to your equip weight. I’m using the Clawmark Seal here. But it doesn’t matter which one you use. Using the lightest one possible is great to give yourself more equip weight for armor and your swords, etc. That can free up points in Endurance early on when you’re trying to pump damage and then later you can add Endurance to wear heavier armor.
Elden Ring Sacred Relic Sword Build Guide – Talismans & Spells
The talismans I’m using for this build are Shard of Alexander which further boosts the Wave of Gold damage which is fantastic, and Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman to give me even more protection. It’s probably one of my favorite talismans in the game. It just gives you lots of physical protection which is good. And we’re using the Claw Talisman here as well. This is for jump attacks. Anytime you’re doing a power stance jump attack build, this is a great talisman to use.
o generally the style of play that I use is I default to jump attacks any time there are a large number of enemies on the screen. I use Wave of Gold. Sometimes I’ll even run in and aggro a bunch of enemies back away and then cast Wave of Gold just to make things faster. What I really like about this build, something that I didn’t mention earlier that I’ll mention now, is that because the Sword of Milos is 100% physical damage and the Sacred Relic Sword is 65% physical damage or 60% physical damage, you do a lot of physical damage with this build. Wave of Gold is holy damage.
There are a lot of holy resistant bosses and enemies in the game but it’s no problem with this build because when you find those enemies, for instance, Morgott at the beginning of the game is very holy resistant or Godrick is very holy resistant, you just use the jump attacks. The jump attacks basically bypass that issue because you get 85% physical damage with jump attacks between Sword of Milos and Sacred Relic Sword. So you’re not quite as effective as a build that was 100% physical damage when you’re doing jump attacks.
But it’s still good enough to get you through these fights and then back to using Wave of Gold on enemies that aren’t holy damage resistant.
When it comes to spells for this, the main one I use is Golden Vow, but you could also use Flame, Grant Me Strength as you do a lot of physical damage. You can use Blessing’s Boon or Blessing of the Erdtree to give you heal-over-time. You can use Black Flame’s Protection in order to give you more protection if you don’t want to use Golden Vow. There are a lot of different buffs you can use with this build to help give you more protection, which is fantastic.
Elden Ring Sacred Relic Sword Build Guide – Recommended Attributes Distribution
When it comes to stats for this build, I have 50 Vigor, 23 Mind, 30 Endurance, 15 Strength, 50 Dexterity, 16 Intelligence, 50 Faith, and 9 Arcane.
- 50 Vigor is enough at this point of the game to survive just about anything with protection that we have between Golden Vow, Dragoncrest Greatshield, and the armor we’re wearing. You probably want to take this up to 60 throughout NG+, but it’s fine where it is for the moment.
- 23 Mind is lower than I’d like. You’ll want to increase this throughout NG+ and into NG++ if you make it that far. Having more FP is going to allow you to buff with Golden Vow more easily and use other buffs as well as use Wave of Gold. If you use Wave of Gold on a lot of enemies, it will allow you to restore more FP if you had a larger FP pool to begin with. So that is a good thing to increase. You probably want to take this up to 40 throughout NG+ and into NG++.
- Endurance is at 30. That’s just enough for what we’re using right here. If you’re using the full Haligtree Knight armor set, you’ll probably need a few more points. If you’re using an armor set with more poise, and more protection, you’ll probably need more Endurance. Probably take this to 40 at some point as well. Maybe not until later in NG+ because it’s not a huge priority for the moment.
- Strength is just there to meet the minimum requirements for the weapon, although it does add a little damage. And Dexterity and Faith, as I mentioned before, the case why I split these 50-50, you lose out a little bit on attack power, about 10 to 15 damage, and you gain about 10% damage with Wave of Gold, which is about 300 damage. So this was a trade-off that I was willing to go for and obviously by having more Faith, it opens you up to be able to use other incantations as well, which is good.
- You don’t need any Intelligence or Arcane for this build. I started as an Astrologer, that’s why those are there. If you’re not an Astrologer, your stats spread will be a little bit better at this point in the game. So you’ll have points and other things that’ll help instead of Intelligence and Arcane.
One of the things that I like about this build is that it’s future-proof, meaning that you’ll be able to make it through NG+, increasing your damage in NG++. And that’s because you can take Dexterity up to 80, you can take Faith up to 80, you can take Strength up to 50 on this weapon. That’s probably like, I don’t know, at least NG+ into NG++, maybe even through NG++, in terms of how far you’d have to go before you aren’t getting much out of this weapon.
At the same time, Sword of Milos scales off Strength and Dexterity, so you only have Dexterity pumped out here. So if you went and increased Strength next, you’d get less damage out of the Sacred Relic Sword, but you would get more damage out of Sword of Milos.
So it’s kind of up to you whether you want to increase Dexterity, you’ll still get damage out of Dexterity for Sword of Milos, but you might get better damage out of Strength. So not only is this weapon future-proof, but Sword of Milos has at least another 35 points that can go into Strength to increase its damage, and then it could probably go up to 80 Dexterity and Strength. So you’re future-proof. This build is not only good for NG+, but it’ll be solid in NG++ as well. Probably NG++ plus.
Elden Ring Sacred Relic Sword Build Guide – Final Tips
A couple of final tips. If you’re using the Flask of Wondrous Physick, you want the Holy-Shrouding Cracked Tear. This is going to boost your Wave of Gold damage. Use this in any section where you know you’re going to go through it quickly to the next checkpoint, so you can refresh your flask, and you know there are a lot of enemies, and you can just wipe them out with Wave of Gold, boosting that damage significantly during that phase.
Another good choice for this is Stamina Recovery is the Greenburst Crystal Tear. Wave of Gold uses a lot of stamina to cast, so you need it to come back quickly. A lot of times what happens is if you cast it back-to-back, the entire stamina bar is drained. You’ve gone into the negative stamina, and it has to come back. Just imagine your stamina bar keeps going to the left past where it begins.
It has to come back to the negative amount, and then into the positive amount before you can cast it again. So having good Stamina Recovery helps here, and having that one will help very much. If you don’t want to use that one, you can use Faith. That will increase your damage with Wave of Gold, but I just find getting that stamina back and being able to cast Wave of Gold more frequently is a better use of the tier.
If you’re considering what runes to use for this build, Godrick’s Great Rune is a good case here. You need Vigor, you need Mind, you need Endurance, you need Strength, you need Dexterity, you need Faith. And six of the eight stats, any time in your NG+, you’re going to have a lot of stat usage. So Godrick’s is a good case here. Once you get done with Godrick, you can go get this. And that will help increase your efficacy with this build tremendously.
Stay tuned, we have more NG+ builds coming. Let me know what you would like to see. A lot of the reasons I made this build are because a lot of people were asking for the Sacred Relic Sword. So if you have a weapon you want to see a build for, or a style of play with certain spells, or casting, or a hybrid, let me know in the comments and I will try to accommodate if I can.
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.
