Elden Ring Sword of Night and Flame Build Guide – The Sword Sage

Sword Sage Centerpiece: Introduction to Sword of Night and Flame

The Sword of Night and Flame is a Straight Sword that uses 12 Dexterity and Strength and 24 Intelligence and Faith. It’s kind of a weird weapon because most Spells either use Intelligence or they use Faith. They don’t typically use both. However, in this build, we’re actually going to use a couple of spells that use both.

So the first thing you’re obviously going to want to do for this build is get the Sword of Night and Flame. This is located in Caria Manor. It’s kind of hidden on the bottom floor – you have to first go up top along the ramparts and then drop down to an area to be able to pick this up. It’s not very hard to get at all, and it upgrades with Somber Stones which is fantastic.

This Straight Sword does physical damage, magic damage, and fire damage. The magic damage scales with your Intelligence, the fire damage scales with your Faith, and the physical damage scales with your Strength and Dexterity. The scaling for its magic and fire damage improves as you upgrade the weapon, pretty much the whole way, so you’re probably going to want to focus on their relevant Attributes rather than Strength or Dexterity if you want to make a build with this weapon in general.

What’s really amazing about this weapon is the set of weapon arts that are on it. They are just absolutely fantastic. If you hold L2 you enter the Night-and-Flame Stance. From there, if you hit R1 you’ll cast Comet Azur, which is a spell that does absolutely devastating magic damage. If you hit R2 instead after getting into the stance, you do this sort of AOE sweep with your sword that does a bunch of fire damage. So with one sword, you get magic and fire damage with two different button presses on this weapon. So depending on which type of damage the enemy that you’re facing is vulnerable to, you can often one-shot or two-shot most enemies with these abilities and their FP costs are only around 19 or 23 FP.

Other Recommended Weapons for Sword Sage Build in Elden Ring

The other Weapon that you’re going to want for this build is the Meteorite Staff. It is a fantastic staff that’s going to allow you to cast the Sorceries we want to use for this build and any other Sorceries you might want. It’s not yet the ideal staff for this build, but it’s the best you can do right now at level 50.

A critical part of this build later on when you get to I’d say about level 70 or so in the game, is that you’re going to want to switch to the Prince of Death’s Staff. I didn’t think it would be fair to make it the main weapon for this build because you’re probably not going to have it at level 50. However, it’s not going to be too much longer until you get it. What will be really great about the Prince of Death’s Staff is that it scales with both Faith and Intelligence, both of which you’re going to be pumping up because of the Sword of Night and Flame scales with both of them too, and they also both increase the damage of the Spells we’ll be using for this build. It’s kind of a triple whammy, and you’re just going to see this build jump significantly in performance once you acquire that staff.

Sword Sage Secondary Offhand Weapon: Dagger

Another weapon we want for this build is a Dagger. Well, you actually don’t have to strictly use a Dagger – any really light weapon will do since the idea is to keep the weight low. You’re going to put Ash of War: Determination on whichever weapon you choose. Determination supposedly increases the damage of your next physical attack for the next 10 seconds. However, you can actually boost the damage of your Incantations and Sorceries by using Determination and just casting spells for the duration of the skill without using physical attacks, which is fantastic. It doesn’t really help too much with the spells we use for this build because their damage isn’t very good at this point in the game, but it will if you use other spells so keep that in mind.

Elden Ring Sword Sage Best Talismans and Armor

Armor-wise, I’m using the Queen’s Crescent Crown in order to get 3 more points in Intelligence with no negatives. There are other helmets you can get that increase your Intelligence more than this but give you a side effect, like lower HP or lower Stamina, which I don’t really recommend. However, at this point in the game, we need to reach at least 34 Intelligence, so if you want to use one of them I wouldn’t blame you. You’ll just probably want to swap it out as you get higher levels and you don’t need that Intelligence boost as much anymore.

As for the Chest Armor, you just want to use the best you can and still medium roll. You’re not going to have a ton of choices for Armor at this point in the game in terms of very good armor, because you just don’t have the equip load as all the points are going into Faith and Intelligence. However, as you progress this build further into the game and you have more Endurance and things like that, you’re going to be able to equip better armor.

Sword Sage Talismans of Choice:

• Radagon Icon
• Marika’s Scarseal
• Carian Filigreed Crest

The three Talismans we want to use for this build at this point are Marika’s Scarseal, Radagon Icon, and Carian Filigreed Crest. Marika’s Scarseal is pretty much a must at this point in order to meet the requirements we need for the spells that we want to use along with the weapons. You’ll probably swap this out later, but it’s going to give you a boost to Faith, Intelligence, Arcane, and Mind. We need three of those four Attributes, so it’s really good for this build. Increasing the damage you’re taking isn’t so good, however, and you don’t have nearly as much Vigor as you would probably want at this point in the game, so eventually you want to swap that out.

Radagon Icon increases the cast speed of your spells. It’s just a very good Talisman to have all around. Lastly, Carian Filigreed Crest reduces the FP cost of your weapon skills by 25%. You’re going to use them a lot with this build because the Sword of Night and Flame is just fantastic. This 25% reduction is just going to allow you to use its skills a lot more before you need to chuck a pot, and allows you to use them constantly throughout your playthrough and just absolutely eliminate any obstacle in your way in a matter of seconds

The Warrior Jar Shard can be a good alternative for this build at this point, but the weapon skills don’t really need a damage boost, especially if you can cast them more anyway. However, if you want to you can quickly kill Iron-Fist Alexander for it, or you can wait to do his questline to get a better version in the Shard of Alexander.

Elden Ring Sword Sage Build Gameplay

Best Sword Sage Spells:

• Rancorcall
• Ancient Death Rancor

The two Spells that we use for this build are Rancorcall and Ancient Death Rancor. As mentioned previously, they aren’t going to be at peak performance at this point without that Prince of Death’s Staff, because that’s really going to boost their damage, but they still do significant damage. You’re also going to notice that Ancient Death Rancor specifically does incredible stagger damage. Rancorcall also does good stagger damage for the time that you get it, but with Ancient Death Rancor you can just stagger enemies outright. You can also charge it by holding down R1 to deal increased damage. What it also allows you to do is it allows you to get breathing room to use your weapon skills or just to run and attack enemies as they’re constantly getting staggered by the skulls that you’re sending flying at them.

It’s also important to note that these spells do not build up blight, unlike some of the spells that your enemies use that look very similar. Again, you really have this spell as a ranged option and as something to stagger enemies with to ultimately give you an opening to use your weapon skills. For example, you can go on horseback and you can stagger them while riding around, hop off, and then smack them in the face with a critical attack or something. Again, the damage at this point isn’t going to be as high as it should be so remember that you can buff them with Determination before spamming them. Once you get that Prince of Death’s Staff, they’re really going to do a lot more damage.

As aforementioned, this build really plays a lot similar to the Spellblade build. You’re going to go around mostly just attacking regular things or using your spells to pick off enemies at range. Rancorcall for instance does about double the damage of Glintstone Pebble, and it costs about double, so it’s roughly the same amount of damage as two Glintstone Pebbles. You’re obviously going to want to use your weapon skills a lot. You’re going use that R1 with your stance probably far more than the R2 to take out groups of enemies. You can even line them up and take out multiple enemies at once with it, or you can get into AOE situations where you hit R2 and just take out a whole cluster of enemies in one fell swoop.

Elden Ring Sword Sage Recommended Attribute Spread

Talking about Attributes for this build, at this point we have 20 Vigor, 21 Mind, 12 Strength and Dexterity, 34 Intelligence, and 24 Faith. We don’t really need Arcane at all for this build. Keep in mind that these stats are what you’d have if Marika’s Scarseal is equipped, so without it you’ll have three less in Mind, Intelligence and Faith. This really makes Marika’s Scarseal really good here, particularly this early on.

Core Sword Sage Attributes at Level 50:

• 20 Vigor for survivability
• 21 Mind for better FP
• 12 Strength and Dexterity for Sword of Night and Flame requirements
• At least 24 Faith for Sword of Night and Flame requirements and more damage with Prince of Death’s Staff
• 34 Intelligence for Sword of Night and Flame requirements and maximum damage

You have to hit a couple of breakpoints that are really important for this build. At least 24 in both Intelligence and Faith is a must to use the Sword of Night and Flame, so you have to have that along with the 12 in Strength and Dexterity. You also need to get 34 Intelligence in order to use the Ancient Death Rancor spell, which again has both Faith and Intelligence requirements like a lot of, if not all of, the death spells. As you advance this build throughout the game you’re going get benefit out of increasing Intelligence and Faith and you’ll probably continue to increase them, leaning more on the Intelligence side, which is why these spells work really well for this build. At this point in the game, you’re only using Meteorite Staff which is only getting scaling from your Intelligence stat. You can only imagine once you get the Prince of Death’s Staff later on, which has scaling on it from both Intelligence and Faith, you’ll have both stats applying to your sorcery scaling. It’s going to be absolutely phenomenal.

Vigor at 20 is pretty much the minimum that I recommend for any build at this level. Having just 21 points in Mind isn’t really enough – you need way more because you’re going to spam abilities, but you just can’t meet these requirements at level 50. As you get higher level, however, it’s going to ease up the pressure on these stats in order to meet these thresholds for spells, and you’re going to get more and more Mind and more and more Vigor.

Elden Ring Sword Sage Advanced Mastery Tips

Sword Sage Spell Flexibility

Keep in mind that with 34 Intelligence and 24 Faith, you can add other spells to this build, because you are using a Staff. You can use things like Glintstone Pebble, or even Loretta’s Greatbow. They’re going to do really well at this point in the game with that much Intelligence, which is about what you would have on a mage build anyway; maybe a little bit less but you’re going to be a little bit squishier because your stat spread is all over the place compared to a mage build at this point. However as I’ve said, as you go on in the game that will be less and less the case.

Sword Sage Co-op Gameplay

The spells in this build – Rancor Call and Ancient Death Rancor – work really well in co-op situations where you can just continuously stagger a boss as long as you have FP. This’ll just get better and better as you get a higher FP pool because you’re not really worried about the damage of these spells, even though you will increase it later on, because if you could just keep spamming these spells into bosses, they will never be able to do anything in most cases, while your teammates will just be able to just pound them into the ground and then get a critical attack. And then, you can just repeat this process.

If you’re playing in a PVP situation where the invader is targeting the host, you can start firing these into his back. It works really well because these things chase really far and it’ll make that invader have to really keep dodging out of the way while he’s trying to focus on the host, which is difficult to do.

Lastly, unlike some of the other Souls-like games, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of Seal or Staff that allows you to cast both Incantations and Sorceries. This is mainly why I lean towards the staff for this build – it allows you to use these death spells which you know otherwise you wouldn’t be able to use most of the time because most sorcerers are not investing in just Faith, so they seem to fit really well with this weapon.

And that’s going to wrap up our level 50 Sword Sage 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 the spells, items, or equipment in this build, and securing some personal objectives, make sure to check the Elden Ring Map.