Elden Ring Treespear Build – Lightning Lancer Guide

Lightning Lancer Dex Build: Equipment

First off, let’s discuss the weapon that I’ve chosen for this build, and I have chosen the Treespear. This is actually found in Liurnia of the Lakes, not far from Stormveil Castle. You kind of just have to ride past the castle, go up the right-hand side, and double back alongside the castle, and you can find this kind of overhanging the road that’s about to drop off into the abyss.

There are a few reasons I chose this weapon in particular for this build. First, the requirements stat-wise are kind of hefty. It requires 15 strength, 22 dexterity, and 18 Faith, which means you’re going to have to be at a good level in order to meet those requirements. So it’s not something that you would probably be able to meet at level 50 unless you spent all your points in those stats specifically. That doesn’t leave very many points for mind and vigor, so it would be hard to pull off.

Secondly, this weapon scales with dexterity, faith, and strength. Even though it scales best with dexterity at higher levels, you’re going to get the benefit of damage from all three of those stats. And since you need 22 dexterity for this weapon, and you need 34 strength for the great shield, and you need faith for your spells, you’re going to put all those points into damage for this weapon.

Another reason I chose this weapon is that it can be buffed. Despite the fact that it actually does physical and holy damage, it can actually be buffed. And we use Electrify Armament in order to buff this to further increase damage. And the actual weapon ability on it that can’t be replaced, Sacred Order, buffs it with holy damage. So you can either buff it with holy damage with Sacred Order, or you can buff it with Electrify Armament for lightning damage. It’s very unusual for weapons with multiple damage types to be able to be buffed. I think there’s only a handful or a couple handfuls of them in the entire game. So this is fantastic.

Next, the weapon has a tremendous moveset and it has a longer reach than the sword. So when you’re doing your Block Counters, you can actually hit further. And this allows you to hit some enemies that have longer weapons that sort of push you back a little bit when you block. And that’s great. I like the charged R2 on this. It kind of double hits for substantial damage. And I like the running R2 as well. You sort of charge forward and you can stagger enemies before you thrust at them, which is great.

And lastly, one really good thing about Sacred Order besides buffing your holy damage is that it also increases your spell damage. So if you have this buff up and you use Lightning Spear, for instance, it’s going to deal more damage. So that’s absolutely great. You cannot use this at the same time as Electrify Armament and this only lasts 30 seconds compared to the 90 seconds of Electrify Armament. So you don’t use it that often, but it’s great for scenarios where you know you’re going to be chucking a lot of Lightning Spears or you know you’re fighting a bunch of undead.

Moving on to the shield, we’ve upgraded from the Brass Shield to the Golden Greatshield. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the guard boost is 12 points higher, meaning that you’re going to take less stamina damage when you block with it. It has better mitigations overall, besides the physical block. And when you buff with Barricade Shield, you’ll actually reach 100 guard boost, meaning you’ll take zero stamina damage when you block as long as that buff’s up. This is huge because it allows you to attack with all your stamina and not waste any blocking in a lot of cases, as long as you have the FP pool.

Another really great thing about using a spear for this build is that you can hold block and press R1 and block an attack at the same time. So if you don’t know what an enemy is going to do and you’re worried, you can hold your shield up and attack. You do less damage with these attacks, but it protects you at the same time.

Another really good thing about this build is that the 34 points into strength aren’t wasted to just meet the requirement for it. They’re also going into damage on the spear because it scales with strength, and length, and the Clawmark Seal actually scales with strength as well so that it’s going into your spells as well. So not only are you increasing the damage of your weapon to meet the requirements of this, but you’re also increasing the damage of your spells as long as you’re using that seal, which is fantastic.

One thing I do want to point out before I move on to the seal that I’m using for this build, the Clawmark Seal as I just mentioned, is that if you upgrade your shield, after a while you’ll actually improve the guard boost, so you should do that eventually for this shield. But also, if you get the Brass Shield up to, I think it’s plus 18 is the exact number. If you check the wiki, it’s listed there. If you get it up to plus 18, it’ll actually hit 65 guard boost, meaning that if you buff it with Barricade Shield, it’ll actually have 100% as well. That shield is significantly lighter, meaning that your equip load will be a lot lower. The downside being that you’re going to probably take more stamina damage on average compared to the Gold Greatshield when you’ve upgraded it.

So when you’re not using Barricade Shield, you’re a bit more of a liability than when you are, but you should be using it constantly, so that is an option for you as well. The Golden Greatshield has a better block area too. Sometimes attacks will go over the top or under the bottom of your shield, depending on if hitboxes are really exact in this game. So another good reason to have a Greatshield is that it kind of protects your body a little bit more, actually physically inside the game. But you could use the Brass Shield if you upgraded it high enough and still get that 100%, just to give you an idea so that you can do that if you want.

Moving along to the seal that I use for this build, as I mentioned, I use the Clawmark Seal and at plus 16, this is B scaling in both Strength and Faith. So points put into that are going to do very well towards your Incantation scaling. So this is fantastic to use for a build.

So any build that you’re playing a Strength-based Faith build, this is going to be a very good seal for that sort of build. One thing I do want to mention though is that I did a bunch of testing with the Gravel Stone Seal at plus 16 as well. The reason for that is that this has S scaling in Faith at that level, and it also boosts the damage of your Dragon Cult Incantations, which a lot of the spells like Lightning Spear in this build are, and Electrify Armaments, for instance. So what’s really interesting about that is that Electrify Armaments actually performs better with the Gravel Stone Seal. It seems like the Incantation scaling is not applying the Strength value to that. So if you’re wanting to boost your Electrify Armaments more, you’ll actually want to use the Gravel Stone Seal, but Lightning Spear actually outperforms this with the Clawmark Seal at this level. Now it’s going to be a bit tricky here because either one of these seals might be better for you depending on how much Strength you have and how much Faith you have. For instance, if you use the Brass Shield and you only have 15 Strength or whatever the minimum requirement is to use the Spear at 20 Strength, and you have a lot more Faith, the Gravel Stone Seal is going to do a lot better for you.

Or maybe from this point forward, you start cranking Faith more, at some point, Gravel Stone Seal will outperform. So you should probably get both of these and upgrade them and then check how they’re doing periodically as you increase your stats. Really you could go either way. The damage isn’t going to be super noticeable around this part of the game, but it’s good to have both of them and moving forward as you hit 150, it’s likely that the Gravel Stone Seal will probably outperform the Clawmark Seal.

You’ll also have more Dragon Cult Incantations at that point so that’ll probably benefit you a lot more. The armor that I’m using for this build is the Leyndell Knight Set, which is a golden armor from the Knights that are around the Leyndell area. It’s about the same armor as a build I was using before, the Templar build, or slightly more. So it’s more about fashion with this build, I just thought it looked really cool. You can keep using the same armor you had before if you want, but if you want to farm this it’s not too hard to farm. There are three Knights in the Leyndell City at the Outerwall Phantom Tree Site of Grace. If you just go back through the doors that you came through to get there, there are three of these guys sitting on the steps and you can basically sneak attack and pick one off at a time, farm it real fast.

Elden Ring Treespear Build: Talismans

The four talismans that I use for this build are the Spear Talisman, Starscourge Heirloom, Curved Sword Talisman, and the Green Turtle Talisman.

The Spear Talisman actually increases the thrust damage that you deal with a spear while you hit an enemy while they’re mid-animation. So if you hit something that’s like mid-windup that’s trying to attack you, your damage is going to be increased, and this is good for this build because that happens a lot. I used Starscourge Heirloom to get 5 more strength here. You’re very stat-hungry at level 100.

This build is probably going to be stat-hungry the whole way because you need strength, you need dexterity, you need FP, you need equipment weight and stamina, you need health, you need faith. So you’re going to be spreading your points around between like five or six stats, and this will help you meet the requirements of that great shield while freeing up five other stats

You could use Radagon’s Soreseal here, which is very good stat-wise. It gives you 20 stats, vigor, endurance, dexterity, and strength, 20, 5 in each one, which is good, but it also increases the damage you take by about 12 to 13% and it feels like what’s the point of wearing heavy armor if you’re going to take the same amount of damage as you would if you’re taking light armor? So all those points into endurance, kind of wasted, so I didn’t use it here. I feel like if you’re wearing a heavy armor set, the point is to be protected, but you could use this earlier on to meet requirements for things and then swap it out later.

The Curved Sword Talisman is pretty self-explanatory. You’ve been using this all along. It increases your block counter damage. You do lots of block counters with this build, so more damage is good.

And lastly, we have the Green Turtle Talisman. This increases your stamina recovery, even though you’re going to be using Barricade Shield and it’s going to make it so that you’re not taking stamina damage when that buff is up. You do attack a lot and you want your stamina to come back quickly, and there are some cases where you don’t have time to use Barricade Shield and you need to block a big hit and it will take off a lot of stamina. So it’s just really good for this build. 

Other talismans you could use for this build are the Lightning Scorpion Charm, which increases your lightning damage by about 10%, but also makes it so you take about 10% damage. And the Sacred Scorpion Charm, which does the same thing for holy damage. Those are really good ways to buff your damage, but you will lose mitigation by taking them. And again, as I mentioned, what’s the point of wearing the heavy armor if you’re just going to throw it all away on a little bit more damage? So it’s kind of up to you. You could use those to boost damage if you feel like you’re not getting hit. But I personally like the extra protection.

Lightning Lancer Build: Spells

Moving along to the spells, first up is Blessing’s Boon. This spell lasts a very long time. I think it’s 90 seconds and it heals you for about 8 health per second over that time. So it’s a very good HoT and putting it on you before like a tough battle or something will allow you to keep fighting and shrugging off some of those hits without having to go to your heal potion. And it’s really good for this build because you tend to prioritize FP flasks because of all the spells you want to use. This is a good way to allow you to do that because you can always heal yourself with FP if worse comes to worse.

Next up is Electrify Armament. This spell does 0.75 of your incantation scaling on your seal. As I mentioned, there’s a bit of an issue with the Clawmark seal not applying the strength, but any other seal that you use, it’s going to apply 0.75 of your total incantation scaling. So this is going to get more and more powerful throughout the game. What I really like about it is, well, it lasts 90 seconds too. So no short buffs with this build really. So you can buff with this, you can buff with Blessing’s Boon, and you can also buff with Golden Vow. All last 90 seconds. And you can fight for a good long time before they expire.

Talking about Golden Vow, this increases your damage by about 10 to 15% if I’m not mistaken. It also increases your defenses by about 5%. So you’re going to get even tankier when wearing this. One of the reasons I don’t recommend removing or putting on things that reduce your overall damage mitigation. And what’s really great about this is you can cast it from horseback and you can use it at the same time as a Lightning Armament. So you’re going to get double damage there. Well, not double, but you’re going to have two buffs that increase your damage at the same time. And it also buffs your spell damage. So if you’re riding around on horseback, throwing lightning spears at a boss that’s out on the landscape, you can buff with this and your lightning spears are going to deal more damage.

And lastly, we have Lightning Spear. This spell is fantastic. It moves very quickly through the air. It has very good tracking and good range. And you can also charge it up for extra damage. It’s really good for thinning out packs of enemies. It has a little bit of splash if you charge it up. And one really cool thing about this spell you may not know is it actually does increase damage by about 10% in my testing if you’re hitting enemies in the rain or if they’re standing in water. So you definitely want to use lightning when you’re attacking enemies that are in this situation. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, Lightning Spear does better at this point in the game with the Clawmark Seal, but the Electrify Armament does better with the other seals. So it’s kind of up to you which you want to use, and it’s going to depend a little bit on exactly how your stats are.

Lightning Lancer Build: Attribute Recommendations

Looking over the stats I have at level 100, I got 25 points in Vigor, 17 in Mind, 34 in Endurance, 34 in Strength, 22 in Dexterity, and 34 in Faith. Vigor, I wish it was higher, but we don’t have enough points here. Mind, same thing. You use a lot of spells, but you just don’t have the points. If you’re using the Soreseal, then that’ll free up some points you can put into Mind, but you will take more damage. And keep in mind that if you’re using the setup that I suggested for the Talismans and you’re not using something like Erdtree’s Favor, you’ll actually need like one more point in Endurance to not fat roll. So you’ll probably need 35 Endurance instead of 34 here, so just keep that in mind. 34 Strength is the minimum for the shield that we use, so you need 34. You need 22 Dexterity for the spear, so that’s non-negotiable. And 34 Faith I just thought was a good number to match the Strength, but you can actually get away with a little bit less Faith here. Put points in Endurance and Mind if you want.

Stats To Focus On:

• Vigor: Increases health for survivability in close-range encounters.
• Mind: Increases FP pool.
• Faith: Enhances damage output with Lightning Spear or Golden Vow, also increases the potency of incantations.
• Dexterity: For better scaling on the spear

Moving forward from this point, all you need to do is increase your Mind and Vigor so that you’re tankier and that you can cast more spells easily, and keep pumping your Dexterity and Faith. You don’t need any more points in Strength at this point, especially if you switch over your seals, and you’re going to get better scaling off Dexterity on the spear as you upgrade it, so you’re going to get more bang for your buck out of Dexterity than Strength unless you continue to use that Clawmark seal. And obviously increasing Faith is going to increase your damage and allow you to use higher-level spells, which you’ll do at the endgame.

So that was the first of our level 100 builds. Stay tuned for more. I’m not exactly sure which build I’m going to do next. It might be a Samurai build, it might be something else, but we’ll have it out as soon as we 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.