In this Elden Ring Grave Scythe Build Guide, I’m going to be showing you my Grim Reaper build, which is a NG+ build that focuses on the use of a scythe and some incantations.

Elden Ring Grave Scythe Build Guide – Grim Reaper

A Strength/Arcane build that uses a Reaper and the Stormcaller Ash of War to shred enemies in seconds.

• Class: Any
• Flask Spread: Mostly HP
• Weapon: Grave Scythe & Dragon Communion Seal
• Shield: None
• Armor: White Mask and and the heaviest Armor that still allows you to medium roll
• Talismans: Rotten Winged Sword Insignia (or Winged Sword Insignia), Millicent’s Prosthesis, Lord of Blood’s Exultation and Shard of Alexander
• Primary Stats: Arcane & Strength
• Secondary Stats: Vigor
• Skills: Stormcaller
• Spells: Bloodflame Blade, Poison Armament, Golden Vow, Flame, Grant Me Strength, Poison Mist and Swarm of Flies

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Elden Ring Grave Scythe Build Guide – Equipment

The reason I chose the Grave Scythe here is not only for the visuals, I like the way this weapon looks, but it also has fantastic damage and it outperforms the scythe of the two Reapers that can be infused. So it’s a good choice here, particularly since we’re going to go with heavy scaling and it has phenomenal heavy scaling.

So essentially what I’ve done here is I’ve set the Grave Scythe to heavy and I put the Stormcaller Ash of War on it. Stormcaller was buffed in patch 1.07. its motion speed increased, its attack power increased, its poise damage increased, and the skill size of it has been increased as well.

So the whole skill has been pretty much buffed from top to bottom, and it absolutely shreds in this build. Originally, when I started playing around with Stormcaller, I realized that you hit so rapidly with the weapon so many times that having some sort of status effect on your weapon was the way to go here.

And since the Grave Scythe or scythes in general, have blood loss buildup on them natively, it seemed like a good pairing. And then when you combine it with something like Bloodflame Blade or Poison Blade, you also get additional blood buildup or poison buildup as well. So it’s just a really nice combination.

Because we’re sort of focusing on status effect buildups, we’re using the Dragon Communion Seal here, because giving us Arcane to scale with our seal instead of Faith is going to increase the effectiveness of the status effect buildup with these spells, with Bloodflame Blade, with Swarm of Flies, with Poison Mist, etc.

So it’s more effective than casting it in terms of the status effects than if you were casting it with a Faith seal. This also allows you to cast other spells rather effectively.

We have 277 incantation scaling with 45 Arcane. That’s pretty good in my opinion. You can get more if you increase Arcane higher, and you probably will as you progress through NG++, if you take this build that far. But that’s not a bad incantation scaling for casting spells. It’s not amazing, but it’s not terrible either. So you could add other incantations besides the ones that I’m using for this build.

The armor that I’ve chosen for this build is the Royal Remains set. This is sort of more for cosplay than anything, sort of making that Reaper sort of look to it. You can use whatever you want here. This is not a must by any means, but I sort of like the aesthetic.

This armor set also gives you HP regeneration if your health drops very low, which is kind of cool. It doesn’t happen very much with this build. You’re usually absolutely decimating things. But it’s just a kind of cool effect on it. If you were probably min-maxing though, you would probably use the White Mask here to get more attack power with Blood Loss buildup.

So that’s if you’re going for true min-maxing, that’s probably what I’d put. And probably some sort of armor that gives you enough, like 51 poise combined with a White Mask is probably how you would min-max it if that’s what you were going for.

Elden Ring Grave Scythe Build Guide – Talismans

When we’re taking a look at the talismans we use for this build, we’ve got Shard of Alexander, which increases the damage of Stormcaller. We use this all the time, so that’s great.

We’ve got Rotten Winged Sword Insignia and Millicent’s Prosthesis here in order to give us more damage as we hit repeatedly because Stormcaller hits so many times in a row, particularly if you’re surrounded by enemies, this is going to build up real fast.

And when you combine this with Lord of Blood’s Exultation and you trigger that bleeding effect like on a boss, your attack power just skyrockets. Fully buffed with Golden Vow, Flame, Grant Me Strength, and these three talismans, I’ve had over 2300 attack power at one point with this build, which is just insane. It’s just crazy. And that’s without the White Mask. So you could probably get 2500 attack power fully buffed with this.

If you don’t have the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia, you can just use Winged Sword Insignia instead. That’s not a bad replacement.

Elden Ring Grave Scythe Build Guide – Spells & Gameplay

When it comes to the spells we use for this build, we’ve got Golden Vow, which we actually don’t meet the requirements for at this point of the game, but I’ll explain how we use it in a minute.

We’ve got Flame, Grant me Strength to further boost your physical damage. You do almost exclusively physical damage. You do a little fire damage when you’re buffed with Bloodflame Blade, but not much because our faith is not very high.

I’ve thrown in Bestial Vitality here just as a way to give you some healing over time. You have a lot of health and it doesn’t give you a ton of healing, but it’s not a bad way to sort of just like top up your health periodically. You’re going to have a lot of FP with this build. So it’s not a bad thing to have there. You don’t have to have it, but I just find it useful now and then.

We also have Bloodflame Blade and Poison Armament. One of these will give you fire damage, Bloodflame Blade and further bleed build up adding to your weapon and will also give you the Bloodflame sort of ability, meaning like if you hit enemies with it, their bleeding build-up will like continue to go up a little bit in between attacks, which will prevent it from going down, which is really nice.

Combined with the native blood build-up of the Grave Scythe, this works well on bosses. And then we have Poison Armament here as well. There’s no reason not to have this one. If you’re fighting bosses that are immune to bleeding, like the Crucible Knight, for instance, or other bosses, it’s a good alternative. You can swap out the Lord of Blood’s Exultation for Kindred of Rot’s Exultation to basically give you the same attack power. Still, you just won’t be triggering Hemorrhage, which will reduce your damage overall against that enemy, but it’s better than them being immune to bleed. So it’s a good way to put Poison on them, which will give you a little bit of extra damage boost you wouldn’t get anyway.

And in addition to that, I’ve got Swarm of Flies and Poison Mist here as well. Swarm of Flies you can cast at the beginning of the fight to help you get that blood build up a lot faster after your buff with Bloodflame Blade, which is great. I only use it usually just like the first cast. And Poison Mist, same thing. You throw this out like right away at the beginning of the boss fight, hopefully, lure the boss into it, and then attack with your Poison Armament weapon and hopefully trigger that Poison right away on him. So it’s just a nice little addition. You don’t use it all the time, usually at the beginning of boss fights for those two spells.

I don’t use any other incantations for this build. I focus heavily on the use of the Grave Scythe for most of my damage. Regular attacks are still usually one shot. Most enemies will two shot them in a lot of cases. But you can add other spells to this build.

As I mentioned, you have decent incantation scaling, and if you prioritize Arcane going forward, you’d have even better incantation scaling, making your spells even more deadly.

So the general strategy with this build is basically I just buff with Bloodflame Blade as I’m running around on the landscape. I don’t buff with Golden Vow or Flame, Grant me Strength typically. And I’ll just R1 attack or running R1, jumping R1. Most enemies, except the difficult enemies, I will use Stormcaller. Or if there’s like a big pack of enemies, I’ll use Stormcaller. I’m trying to lure them all together and just mow them down with that real fast.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty straightforward build. You’re just relying on Stormcaller for the difficult hits. We’re using your regular attacks for pretty much everything else.

Elden Ring Grave Scythe Build Guide – Recommended Attributes Distribution

When it comes to attributes for this build, I have 50 Vigor, 30 Mind, 25 Endurance, 50 Strength, 18 Dexterity, 16 Intelligence, 15 Faith and 45 Arcane.

So talking about Vigor first, you have 50 here, which is pretty good. You have 30 resistances or so, which isn’t terrible with this build. And when you’re buffed with Golden Vow, it’s a little bit better. You probably want to take this up to 60 at some point, unless you’re wearing heavier armor and you’re not doing the cosplay. You might have better protection. But otherwise, you probably want to take this up a bit.

When it comes to Mind, we have 30 here because we do use a lot of spells. We use a lot of buffs and we use Stormcaller quite often. So you’re going to go through FP. You probably don’t need any more than this. A lot of the buffs that you apply are right before boss fights. Otherwise, you’re mostly just using Poison Armament or Bloodflame Blade and maybe Flame, Grant Me Strength occasionally. But if you find yourself using Golden Vow more often, like if you’re popping your Flask of Wondrous Physick, then you’ll want to increase this. But generally speaking, 30 is plenty.

When it comes to Endurance, we have 25 here, and this is to allow us to medium roll with everything that we’re using. It’s actually a bit high. You could probably reduce this to about 20 and a half right on the line between medium rolling and heavy rolling if you want. But if you’re using another armor set, like one that has more poise or is heavier and gives you more protection instead of going for the cosplay route, you probably least need 25 Endurance or maybe 30. So 25 is fine. You do use a lot of stamina with this build anyway. So I don’t recommend changing that.

I’ve got 50 Strength here because we do have a heavy scythe. Eventually, you’ll want to take this up to 80 to further boost your physical damage. This thing scales really well with Strength and does already a good amount of damage where we’re at at 50 Strength. So I didn’t see the need to push it higher. But there are some points in here you could take out and add to Strength to get even more damage if you want.

When it comes to Dexterity, you only need 13 Dexterity for this build. I have 18 on accident here. I’m using Millicent’s Prosthesis, which added five on top of this when I was playing around. I forgot to readjust my stats afterward. So you can actually pull out five points here and put them in Strength or put them in Arcane, making this a bit more effective in general.

You don’t need any Intelligence for this build. Started as an Astrologer, so disregard that. You don’t need any whatsoever for this build.

We have 15 Faith here in order to meet the requirement for Flame, Grant Me Strength. This is a spell you can use out on the landscape when you’re fighting difficult enemies or when you’re you’re obviously want to use this when you’re about to take on a boss. But what 15 Faith allows you to do is use the Cracked Tear that provides you Faith in your Flask of Wondrous Physick, and then you’ll meet the requirements for Golden Vow. And usually I only use Golden Vow during boss fights with this build. So it’ll allow you to use it in boss fights or in between checkpoints if you pop your flask, but otherwise you won’t be able to use it.

Moving forward at some point in this build, you’d probably be better off taking Faith up to 25 so you can use it anytime you want. But it’s not really needed at this point.

And lastly, we have 45 Arcane, which, as you know, is the soft cap for the Dragon Communion seal and is a good point to get decent damage out of incantations if you add any to this, but also helps to improve the status effect build up of Bloodflame Blade, Poison Armament, Swarm of Flies, Poison Mist. So that’s really what we’re using it for here.

At some point, you’ll want to take this higher to get better incantation scaling, and a better status effect build-up, probably after Strength in my opinion.

Elden Ring Grave Scythe Build Guide – Final Tips

Just a couple of final tips. If you’re using the Flask of Wondrous Physick, again, you’re going to use the one that gives Faith here in order to use Golden Vow. And the other one, I like to use the Thorny Cracked here for increased damage when you are doing consecutive attacks, which is kind of the theme of this build. So that is how one of the ways we get up to that 2300 attack power when we’re fully buffed with this build.

And when it comes to Great Runes for this build, Godrick’s is the obvious choice here. You need Vigor, you need Mind, you need Endurance, you need Strength, you need some Dexterity, you need some Faith, and you need Arcane. That’s like seven of the eight stats that will help be able to alleviate some of your stat pressure and just make you more effective all around.

So that wraps up my Grim Reaper build. It is a ton of fun to play and it’s absolutely devastating. 1.07 has opened up so many more builds that were not possible. Previously, I probably would have used like Spinning Slash with this build. And because that only hits three times in a row before you have to restart the sort of Spinning Slash animation, it just wouldn’t be as effective as Stormcaller is, and Stormcaller is just so much fun to play with.

I have had some of the fastest boss kills I’ve had with this build. So I hope you really enjoy it. 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.