In this Elden Ring Black Knife Build Guide, I’m going to be showing you my Black Knife Assassin build. This is a level 150 Dexterity Faith build that focuses on the use of daggers.

Elden Ring Black Knife Build Guide: Black Knife Assassin

A Dexterity/Faith Build that uses dual Daggers to rapidly strike enemies and Bosses for high damage the further into combo chains you go.

• Class: Any
• Flask Spread: Mostly HP some FP
• Weapon: Erdsteel Dagger x2, Black Knife & any Sacred Seal
• Shield: None
• Armor: Black Knife Hood, Black Knife Armor, Fire Prelate Gauntlets & Fire Prelate Greaves
• Talismans: Winged Sword Insignia, Millicent’s Prosthesis, Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman & Shard of Alexander
• Primary Stats: Dexterity & Faith
• Secondary Stats: Vigor 
• Skills: Blade of Death, Bloodhound’s Step & Parry
• Spells: Golden Vow, Blessing of the Erdtree and Flame, Grant Me Strength

We have over 110 Elden Ring Builds now, for all classes and playstyles. This build is recommended for Level 150.

Beginner Builds	Level 50 Builds	Level 100 Builds	Level 150 Builds	Level 150-200 Builds	All Game Builds
Paladin	Templar	Lightning Lancer Thundering Swordspear	Crusader Lightning Dragoon Golden Champion Black Knife Assassin Moonlight Crusader Flame Dancer	Black Blade Golden Sword Sage Godslayer Sword Saint Drake Knight Frost Paladin	Perfect Paladin Coldstorm Cleric Warrior of Waves Tower Knight

Elden Ring Black Knife Build: Equipment

So first up, let’s focus on daggers in general. I’ve been asked to do a daggers build for several weeks, and one of the reasons I’ve really been resisting it is that in playing around with daggers, I really do not like the moveset of daggers. If you’re not doing a bleed build, which is really what you should be doing if you’re using daggers because it makes the most sense. Once they hit rapidly, you can build up bleed rapidly, and it’s probably the most effective way. It can be quite challenging to play a dagger build, and I don’t really recommend it unless you are a pretty seasoned player at this game, because it can be rather difficult to do. One of the major issues with daggers is their hitboxes are very small, and a lot of times, even when you’re right up against an enemy, you’ll just miss. The hitboxes are so precise in this game that if you swing and it goes through, like, the gap between an arm and a leg of an enemy, you won’t deal any damage, and because you lock onto the torso of most enemies, sometimes just because of the general shape of them, you’ll swing and you’ll miss, and it can be really frustrating. 

Nonetheless, I did make a dagger build that doesn’t use bleeding, because a lot of people are like, oh, not another bleed build, and I wanted to show that you can actually play a dagger build without using bleed, even though I do recommend playing a bleed build if you are using daggers if you are struggling to play with one effectively. The three daggers that I used for this build are two Erdsteel Daggers and the Black Knife. So the reason we have three daggers for this build is, firstly, they don’t weigh very much. They only add a couple of weight to your build, which means you don’t really need more than a couple extra points of endurance in order to use them, and this allows you to swap daggers on the fly, which can have different weapon skills on them.

The way I have it set up is I have an Erdsteel Dagger in my right hand, and I have the Black Knife and another Erdsteel Dagger in my left hand. What this allows me to do is something like Bloodhound’s Step or Quick Step on my right hand, allowing me to use L2 and Bloodhound’s Step or Quick Step normally, and then if I hit Triangle and L1, I can use the Black Knife ability, which is a good ranged attack, and then if I’m dual wielding normally and I’m using Bloodhound’s Step, but I find that an enemy is not responding well to Bloodhound’s Step or I can’t stagger them with a lot of hits, I’ll swap Black Knife to the second Erdsteel Dagger, and this has usually parry on it, and then I can parry attacks and do critical attacks and then swap back to Black Knife as needed. Additionally, Black Knife has physical and holy damage, so sometimes enemies resist holy damage, and this allows you to swap to a second Erdsteel Dagger that you can put fire on. So you can put on the Erdsteel Daggers, you can go with Flame Art or you can go with Sacred, swapping back and forth between these types is needed, kind of like the way we do with the Herald build in order to still scale with Faith, but also to change the damage type as enemies are resistant to specific types. So you’ll usually have Sacred out and you’ll be fighting with Black Knife and Erdsteel Sacred, and then if you get to an area of the game where you need fire, you can put Flame Art on the Erdsteel Dagger, and again on the other Erdsteel Dagger, and then you’ll have two fire weapons.

One really fantastic thing about the Erdsteel Dagger is its physical damage actually scales with Faith as well. So if you leave it by default and you have the default scaling and you increase Faith, you’ll only have physical damage on the weapon, but you’ll notice it goes up as you increase Faith, and then when you put Flame Art or Sacred on it, it not only increases the physical damage with Faith points, it also increases the Fire or Holy damage as well, which is fantastic. Besides these three daggers, I also have the Frenzied Flame seal in my right hand as my backup. I don’t even have it upgraded. I like this seal. You can use a different seal. It’s not super important which one you use. I don’t even have it upgraded. It weighs nothing, and I only use it in order to cast very minimal incantation buffs, like Golden Vow and stuff like that in order to buff myself before swapping back to my dual daggers.

Now, when it comes to armor for this build, I really love the Black Knife Armor. I love the way it looks. It fits the theme. The chest piece muffles your sound when you walk, so it’s easier to sneak up on enemies and get backstabbed, which is all great for a dagger build, but what I don’t like about it is the poise on this set is not high enough to sustain a hit while you’re doing your dual-wield combo without getting staggered. One of the things about using dual daggers or any dual weapons, really, that have a fast attack speed is that you are going to try and pull off as long a combo as possible, and that means you’re usually going to take a hit and try and power through it, which means you need to have between 51 to 56 poise usually. In contrast, this armor set doesn’t have that much, so what I did here is I went ahead and swapped out a couple of pieces.

I actually have the Fire Prelate Greaves and Gauntlets, and they look very similar to the Black Knife’s. They don’t look exactly the same, but if you saw the character from a distance, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell, and what this does is not only gives us more protection, but it gets that poise up so that when you’re doing your hit combo, when you’re doing your dual-wield combo. You get hit, you can keep on going with that combo because getting the attack power up by repeated hits with this build is going to further boost your damage, so you don’t want to stop swinging, and a lot of times, you’re going to trade damage, or you’re going to be hyper-aggressive. You might get hit, and you’re risking getting hit, and you don’t want to be interrupted when that happens if you can help it.

ER Black Knife Assassin: Talismans

When it comes to talismans for this build, we have the Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman, Winged Sword Insignia, Millicent’s Prosthesis, and Shard of Alexander.

The Dragoncrest Greatshield is really good for this build because, as I mentioned, it’s a hyper-aggressive build, particularly on bosses where you are going to trade damage, you’re not worried about trading damage, and between the heavy armor that you’re wearing and this, you usually, at Golden Vow, you usually have somewhere close to 50% protection in terms of physical resistance. That’s really good, and that’s going to help keep you alive while you’re swinging away with your combos. Winged Sword Insignia and Millicent’s Prosthesis have a similar effect in that they increase your attack power with subsequent hits, and because you attack very rapidly with this build, the more hits you do, the more damage you’re going to deal. 

So the idea here is that you want to keep swinging as much as possible so that each subsequent hit does more and more damage, and you get five or six hits in, and you’re really starting to hit like a truck. The downside to that is that you have to play aggressively, and if you need to back up because of a big swing or you have to dodge out of the way or there’s some AOE or something, you need to get back into melee range and start swinging again as quickly as you can, or you’re going to lose that buff and start over from scratch. And lastly, for this build, I have the Shard of Alexander. This is here to boost the Black Knife weapon ability as well as any other abilities you want to put on here that deal damage. Black Knife is really situational because it deals holy damage. There are a lot of enemies in the game that resist holy damage, but it can be seriously, seriously crucial in fights where you just can’t get close to the boss or enemy, it’s too risky, or it’s just not effective, you can’t pull off a long combo chain. It can really get you out of a jam in situations where playing with dual daggers is just really hard to do and getting that ranged attack that deals incredible damage, especially if you can walk onto the head of an enemy or a weak spot, does really good damage. This is one that you can swap out if you want because you don’t use Blade of Death all the time. However, when you do use it, you want it to hit as hard as possible and you’re not set up 100% perfectly to get the most damage out of the Black Knife itself if you’re trying to get a good balance between the Erdsteel Daggers and Black Knife and you’re not using Blade of Death all the time. So that will boost it up a bit more and make it useful.

Black Knife Build: Spells & Gameplay

When it comes to spells for this build, I simply have Golden Vow, Blessing of the Erdtree and Flame, Grant Me Strength. Golden Vow increases our damage and resistance, self-explanatory, Blessing of the Erdtree heals us over time. As previously stated, it’s an aggressive build, you’re going to take damage, and this will help keep you topped off. Flame, Grant Me Strength is good to increase your physical damage, and when you are doing the fire version of the setup, sort of double dip, getting that extra fire damage and extra physical damage, which is great.

So the way this build works is that I’ll usually buff with Golden Vow as I run around the landscape in order to boost my defenses and damage and I’ll have the Black Knife Dagger in my left hand and an Erdsteel Sacred Dagger in my right running around. And if enemies in the area are resistant to holy damage, I’ll swap to dual Erdsteel Daggers with the fire affinity on them. And then I’ll swap back when I don’t need that anymore. But I’ll generally use Bloodhound’s Step or Quick Step to dodge as necessary, trying to get into that L1 combo on enemies as quickly as possible. Most enemies can be staggered if you get into them and attack repeatedly. Some of the top ones can’t. And that’s where you’ll swap your dagger on your left hand to the Erdsteel Dagger with parry on it and you’ll try and parry them if you can in order to interrupt them and get that critical strike. You can also play somewhat stealthily with this build, although I don’t because it’s an aggressive build. The fact that your chest piece muffles your footsteps a bit makes it a bit easier to sneak up on enemies if you’re careful and get backstabs, which can be very effective.

Black Knife Assassin Guide: Attribute Distribution

When it comes to stats for this build, I have 50 Vigor, 25 Mind, 24 Endurance, 12 Strength, 50 Dexterity, 9 Intelligence, 55 Faith, and 9 Arcane.

The Vigor is there because you’re going to be trading damage with this build. You do have very good protection, but you want to be able to live and you want to be able to not worry about trading damage. I trade damage with this build all the time. It’s not the end of the world if you get hit with this build. You shouldn’t be worried about getting hit, you should be worried about dealing damage. That’s the hardest thing to do with this build. And having 50 Vigor allows you to trade damage and not die.

25 Mind is there to give you just enough FP in order to buff with all the buffs that you have regularly, and also gives you a little bit of FP to play around with Bloodhound’s Step and Quick Step, Parry. These don’t really cost much FP, so you don’t really need a lot of FP for this build.

24 Endurance meets the minimum requirement to use this armor setup and all four of these items and the Talismans. It’s just enough to be able to mid-roll with it, and you definitely want to be able to mid-roll. So if you go with heavier armor and you go with some other armor, you might have to increase this, but you want to set it to be exactly what you need in order to medium-roll.

12 Strength is there because we don’t really need Strength for this build, and 50 Dexterity is there because it not only boosts the damage of the Erdsteel Daggers, although not very much, it’s very good for the Black Knife. The Black Knife has B-scaling and Dexterity, so it takes a bit more advantage of it. And you get a good balance of damage between the Erdsteel Daggers and Black Knife setup this way between the 55 Faith and 50 Dexterity, whereas if you went heavier to the Faith side, Black Knife would fall off, and if you went heavier to the Dexterity side, Erdsteel would fall off. So it’s kind of a sweet spot between the two. Because we do those stats that way, we don’t really have enough Faith to be a caster or a very effective caster.

You probably want 70 or so Faith or more at this point in the game in order to be an effective incantation caster. And you could crank up Faith 15 points and take some points out of like Mind or take some points out of Dexterity and do that and go a little bit heavy that way if you want to mix in some incantations with your melee. 9 Intelligence and 9 Arcane are simply there because we don’t need them for this build.

Black Knife Assassin: Final Tips

Some final tips before I wrap up this guide, if you are using the Flask of Wondrous Physick, there are several tiers that work well. So you might need to switch these around depending on what’s going on. But using the one that increases your damage the more you attack is very good pretty much for any boss scenario. I also like the Stamina one that increases your Stamina regeneration. You choose your Stamina when you do a Willed Attack and you’re going to do that a lot with just spamming them. So having that Stamina regeneration is really good. We don’t have the Green Turtle Talisman so that really helps out.

Another one is either the Holy or Flame-Shrouding tier to increase your Holy damage or your Fire damage depending on which setup you’re using. That can help as well. So you want to use some combination of those three, pick two of them, and use them depending on what you’re doing. Again, I want to mention that Daggers is a very difficult play style, particularly if you’re not using Bleeding because the hitboxes of Daggers are pretty small and they can sometimes miss enemies because of the way you lock onto them, even when you’re up close onto them. You might want to consider if you’re fighting bigger enemies not locking onto them to get the most out of Daggers because sometimes you just can’t hit them if you’re locked on.

That’s it for our Black Knife Assassin 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.