Welcome to our weekly series that features a community submittedDark Souls 3build.Dark Souls 3 build craftingis one of the most enjoyable parts of the game and a big reason for its longevity. Who better to turn to when in need of a new idea than your fellow players? To have your build featured on the blog, you may submit your best setups on ourforum threadand every week we will select one at random to be featured here. Feel free to discuss and debate the build’s strengths and weaknesses but as always be constructive with your fellow Dark Souls players. This week’s build, “Ice, Wind & Fire” comes from community member announakis and is aDex/Sorceryfocused build.
Dark Souls 3 Build of the Week: Ice, Wind & Fire
Disclaimer:This build is not meant to be crazy efficient (although it can be). It the result of many iterations that made it drift from its original purpose and was eventually totally driven by fashion.
Faith… I have never really played a Faith Build in any of theSoulsgames. Why? Because I do not likehealingsince I mostly duel, I do not like buffingweaponssince I switch weapons often in a fight… But I wanted my share ofUnfaltering Prayerabuse onLightning Arrowand decorate my swords with beautifulDarkmoon purple hues. So I decided to try a hybrid Faith/Dex.
Only to slowly realize, as I powerleveledmy character, that I was basically just doing a flaccidDexterityBuild with a few points in Faith to castSpells, which would not really have any consequence. At this point, I was about to dump thecharacteras many others before it…but instead, I thought I would make aCrystal Chimeuser with an 18/18 FaithIntelligenceto use only utility spells likeTears of Denialand Frost together with a frost weapon. Then I remembered that after tryingFriede’s Great Scythe, I was really not impressed, but tried it again…just to love it suddenly. But I hated using Tears of Denial because I felt like I was stealing my win if I ever triggered it and finished standing…
So from a Faith/Dex hybrid, I ended up with this Dex/Sorcery hybrid focusing on Friede’s Scythe. Also, mylinkto the MugenMonkey page for this build.
Stats & Vitals
*Starting Class is Knight, because luck is the only useless stat in this build.
**The version in the video is lower because I got tired of PvE once I had what I wanted.
Weapons, Armor, Rings & Spells
*Sharp or Simple depending on level of Intelligence.
**So that you look real silvery / blueish shinny! Like a walking icicle! Otherwise theDancer’s Leggingsmake your legs ridiculously skinny and ugly.
The idea of the build is pretty straight forward: having good physicaldamagewhile pressuring withFrostbite. Every weapon used has specific non-overlapping moveset that should allow dealing with most situations. You can also usefireas an alternative damage source (for PvE mostly), particularly through the Immolation Tinder’sweapon art.
You will use mostly Friede’s Great Scythe in the right hand to damage and the Immolation Tinder in the left to castSnap Freeze. But using the Storm Curved Sword for shorter reach and faster close quarter combat while retaining the Immolation Tinder for complementary longer reach is totally viable too.
The Manikin Claws are here to remind spammy players that they should think orDead Angleyou before spamming R1s. And a great choice againstUltras: two-handed R1s on the Immolation Tinder should have enough of hyperarmor for you topoisethrough one-handed R1 ofStraight SwordsandSpears, but not 2-Handed!
Then you must rely ofElfriede’s StanceR1 and R2 to poise through this. you may poise through a one-handed R1 of an Ultra GS (most likely though, you will eat up the follow-up R1 and lose the trade anyways) but two-handed Ultras will crush you like butter as they should. That is with 17.78 poise of course. You can poise through one-handed R1 of an Ultra GS for days but only once versus a two-handed R1…so be careful with your trades.
Now let’s take a look at strategies with each weapon:
Friede’s Great Scythe
One-handed Moveset
TypicalReapersone-handed moveset is a mix of terrible and great: terrible because locked-on normal R1 tend to simply miss the target even at point-blank, but great because running R1 is a large sweep with lots of reach and a fairly short recovery time. The one-handed R2 is similar and is great against people trying to roll around you like little monkeys.
Two-handed Moveset
Also a mix of love and hate: the two-handed R1s come in a series of three large sweeps that look phenomenal but suffer from wonky hitboxes, making them very unreliable on poor latency matches: the hitbox seem to linger much less than what it seems and people can roll through it forever without ever being hit. They are good roll catchers in theory but in practice, for the aforementioned reasons, they are not.
The two-handed R2 is…meh. You can however follow with a special R2 after an R1, creating a large sweep followed by another stronger one slightly delayed that usually gets people, especially crazy rollers because of the delay. But head on R2, apart from getting thedaggerquickstepspammers is not great. The running R2 is actually pretty good, despite looking like having a very small hitbox, it does connect very reliably.
In the end, the two-handed moveset fits greatly the need for large sweeps with PvE in mind, but not so much in PvP somehow. The other Reapers like theCorvianhave a far superior two-handed movest IMO for PvP. Well,Farron Greatswordwould be totally OP if the hitbox was what it looks like to be honest so yeah…BALANCE I guess.
Blocking looks awesome but beware, it has only 20 stability so use it only to run buffer on your attacks, but not to actually block except very small weapons.
Weapon Art
The Weapon Art is what makes this weapon truly superior to the rest of the class. Elfriede’s Stance. Wow. The trick is to play mind games with your opponent: all players are probably aware of the stance’s deadly L1 combo etc…so when they see you adopt the stance they either:
So you must be smart and keep them on there toes by assuming more or less randomly the stance, so they lower their guard and eat up the big combo when you feel like you’re able to punish.
Storm Curved Sword
Curved swordsare fantastic PvP weapons because they are extremely fast and usually haveunparryablespins to win weapon arts. This one does not make exception. But before you say anything, I know that thePontiff Knight Curved Swordwould have been a much better choice for the build, but I do not like the look nor theFalchion moveset. Plus with this one, I get an additional useless element to the build, i.e. the wind ^_^.
Similar to aShoteland aScimitarrather than a Falchion, the one-handed R1 is very similar to its 2-handed counterpart. The R2 is fancy but I am not a specialist with it and cannot really speak for any outstanding feature on this move. And the running R1 is also similar in both one and two-handedstances.
The fancy part comes from the Weapon Art. The first spin is rather slow and requires an R1 before it to combo but it can also be used to alternate between parryable and unparryable swings if your opponent seems susceptible to pull off a parry. But, I prefer to use it as a bait to initiate a surprise reverse running R1…It works wonders!
Immolation Tinder
The fire in the build. It is there to cast Snap Freeze mainly, but also happens to be a decent damage dealer scaling OK on dexterity and pretty great on Intelligence. And of course, it belongs to these weapons which cap their damage on very high level builds (40Str, 40 Dex, 60 Intl), but does well enough already.
In the left hand, this weapon can be used to threaten, with a rather long reach, to punish evasive rolls away from you as well as other things. I love using it to castFarron Flashswordbecause it has an insanely long reach. You can see how powerful it can be on a high levelmage, but on this build, with low intelligence and nosorcery ringequipped, the damage is very poor. Still, it is very fast, has insane reach and can throw the opponent off with weird tempo and chip damage.
Two-handing the weapon has value because the running R1s are very good (like allHalberds) with very short recovery time. And really good at chasing players by chaining reverse backstep with R1. The R1 has also some decent hyperarmor allowing you to poise through a few attacks as already described earlier.
Manikin Claws
I usually like theClawbetter than the Manikin Claws because I used to find quickstep wonky especially on those (but has always been great on daggers though) and because of the superb combo you can do with Onislayer WA. But since I stopped playing the game for about 6 months, I am not sure when this happened and things have changed quite dramatically. Now, you can recover from an L1 with a quickstep really fast, making this weapon a blast for a hit and run tactic because the running L1 is a beast, the rolling R1 is amazing and the quickstep make them impossible to punish you afterwards.
Also, the parrying window comes much faster than the Claw orCaestus, just like theDemon’s Fistsand theCrow Talons.
ALTERNATIVES
Of course, there are other ways to keep the same weapons with different stats or include different weapons without betraying the spirit of the build:
If you made it till there, you deserve a medal!
Thoughts on this Dark Souls 3 build? Get the discussion going in the comments. Have a Dark Souls 3 build that you think is grossly incandescent? Show us what you’ve got by submitting itin this thread!
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