In this Elden Ring Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword Build Guide, I’m going to show you my Drake Knight build, which is a NG+ build that focuses on the use of the Magma Wyrm’s Scale Sword and its weapon ability, Magma Guillotine.

Elden Ring Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword Build Guide – Drake Knight

A Strength/Faith Build that focuses on the use of the Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword and its weapon skill Magma Guillotine.

• Class: Any
• Flask Spread: Mostly HP, some FP
• Weapon: Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword & Clawmark Seal
• Shield: None
• Armor: Any Armor that allows you to medium roll
• Talismans: Fire Scorpion Charm, Shard of Alexander, Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman & Carian Filigreed Crest
• Primary Stats: Strength & Faith
• Secondary Stats: Vigor
• Skills: Magma Guillotine
• Spells: Golden Vow, & Flame, Grant Me Strength

We have over 110 builds for Elden Ring. This build is recommended for NG+

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 Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword Build Guide – Drake Knight: Equipment & Spells

The reason I decided to make this a NG+ build instead of a regular game build is because it’s very stat-hungry. The weapon itself requires 24 Strength, 15 Dexterity, and 18 Faith. It’s rather heavy, weighing 15. You need FP, costs 20 FP to default to use this weapon ability, plus 10 for the follow-up attack, which means you’re going to need points in Mind. You’re gonna need points in Vigor. So you need a hefty stat spread. You could probably make this build around 100 plus, maybe 120, and barely get it together. But I think it’ll just play better in NG+ with having everything put together from the start, including things like Shard of Alexander and the Drake Knight set, which are found at the very end of the game.

So first of all, let’s focus on Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword. This is a Curved Greatsword weighing 15, which is heavy for a curved Greatsword. It’s the second heaviest of all of them. You can find it not too far into the game in the Ruin-Strewn Precipice, which is near the Altus Plateau area. Not very hard to get to or very far into the game. So you can get this weapon rather early on, but it’s probably going to take you a while before you can at least have some decent stats to use with it. Some of the things I like about this weapon are first, the attack rating on it is pretty high. I am not exaggerating here. It’s about 900 or so unbuffed with this build. And then when you’re fully buffed, it’s about 1350.

That is a staggering attack rating for a weapon that weighs 15. That’s higher than a lot of Colossal Weapons. That’s higher than a lot of Colossal Swords. So you’re getting a lot of damage here for relatively good weight. Also, the attack speed on this weapon, particularly when you’re two-handed, is fast. It attacks much faster than you would think. So it allows you to get off attacks while enemies are winding up and you’re getting that damage on them while they’re trying to hit you, increasing your damage by even more. It’s just really solid. A couple of other things about this weapon, the R2 and Charged R2 attacks have hyper armor on them, meaning that you can usually withstand a regular attack and still get it off.

Even with light armor or medium armor, equip load or not a lot of poise. I’m not using an armor set here that has a lot of poise and I can still get these off on regular enemies and that’s great. You can get off of charged R2s very easily with this build. And if you used an armor that had higher poise, this would be even easier to do. The reason I didn’t pick an armor with higher poise for this build is because, frankly, I don’t use R2 that much. It’s quite usable. It’s just I don’t find that I need it. R1 takes care of most regular enemies and Magma Guillotine takes care of the rest.

Another thing to note is that the jump attack animation with R2 does a similar type of animation to the R2 attack where you grab the sword in two hands and plunge it into the ground. I don’t like this because it shortens the reach of the sword considerably. The R2 has the same problem, which makes it less useful than it would be if it still had that good reach of the weapon. So Magma Guillotine is an ability that where you sort of crouch down, jump up into the air, and land and hit the enemy if you hit them for damage and then put Magma all over the ground that then hits them and you can do a follow up for another attack. And it uses a lot of stamina. It’s not super FP expensive and it’s devastating.

This ability does both fire and physical damage and it scales with all three stats, strength, dexterity, and faith. With Strength and Dexterity increasing its physical damage and faith increasing its fire damage. One of the things that makes this attack particularly deadly besides the damage it does, which is nuts, is the fact that it does have some hyper armor to it. Meaning that if you can get into the air, then you’re unstoppable with this attack pretty much. You’re going to land it through almost every attack a boss can do.

Not everyone. I don’t want to say everyone, but you can land it through so many attacks that the strategy is to just go into a fight, hit L2, hit L2, and then hit L2 and it’s pretty much over at that point. If you buff, there isn’t any real craziness involved because it just poises through their attacks, hits them, and then you kind of back up if you can get the second attack off and then you just leap in again and it’s over pretty quickly.

Another thing that I like too is that when you use this ability, you duck down before you leap. So a lot of times, if you’re fighting tough bosses that have horizontal sweeps, you’ll duck under these attacks and then leap into the air, which is great. Particularly if you’re using them right next to them or something. I think out of all the NG+ builds I’ve made, and there are some powerful ones, Pyromancer particularly, the last build I did was fast at killing bosses. This might be even faster than that. Bosses were going down in 10 to 20 seconds in most cases, it’s fantastic.

And the last thing I like about this weapon too is because the weapon skill scales off all three stats and you have decent scaling and Strength and Faith and okay scaling and dexterity, you’re going to be able to keep increasing the damage of this weapon through NG+ and into NG++. So it’s definitely a future-proof weapon. It’s going to keep getting more and more damage through NG+ and NG++. So you’re never going to plateau for a while in terms of damage. So it’s going to be able to do those very effectively. Besides this weapon, I also have the Clawmark Seal because this is a Strength-Faith build.

The sweet spot for that is 45, which we’re rather close to. So you can use spells with this build. I primarily use it for Golden Vow and Flame, Grant Me Strength. I haven’t even upgraded it here because I’m just using it for those buffs. I don’t find it necessary to use spells, but if you wanted to, you could use them okay with this setup. As you progress further and further into NG+ and NG++, incantations are just going to get less effective with this Clawmark Seal because it’s not the best seal to begin with in terms of spell-casting damage. So you’re going to find that it’s going to get harder to cast spells. I don’t recommend it, but you can if you want.

Beyond that, I am using the Drake Knight Armor set, which is the namesake of this build. And what I like about this armor, besides its appearance, is that it looks like a dragon or a drake. It has wings on the back and you’re using the Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword, which looks like a dragon’s jaw. So it has this Dragon Drake theme to this build. I didn’t call it a Dragon Knight. We have that build already. So we went with Drake Knight for the name of the armor.

You can use whatever armor you want for this build. Arguably the Raptor’s Black Feathers would allow you to get more jump attack damage. You do some jump attacks with this build, although it’s not the focus. But higher protection and better armor is going to give you more protection. So you could use heavier armor as long as you can medium roll.

Elden Ring Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword Build Guide – Drake Knight: Talismans

When it comes to the talismans, I have Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman for more protection. This is again one of my favorite ones. I use this in so many builds. Shard of Alexander to further boost Magma Guillotine’s damage. Carian Filigreed Crest is there to reduce the cost of it. You can probably get rid of this at some point in NG+, because as you put more points into Mind, you’re going to gain enough that you FP that you don’t need to use this anymore. This is one you’ll probably be able to get rid of eventually at some point in NG+. But for now, we’re using it to help ease our FP costs.

We also are using Golden Vow, which is very expensive. So you don’t have as much FP as you want normally, because you’re buffing with that constantly. And we also have the Fire Scorpion Charm to increase our fire damage. The weapon attacks from this do mostly physical damage, as does the weapon skill Magma Guillotine. But we want as much damage as possible. And you’re going to take a little bit more damage from using this.

But we have the Dragoncrest Greatshield, which helps offset that a little bit. So obviously, you’re going to use Golden Vow and Flame, Grant Me Strength when you’re in boss fights. But primarily, you’re just going to use Golden Vow, which will just increase your damage with attacks and your weapon skill and also give you some more defense, which is good. So you’re going to want to keep that up pretty much all the time that you’re fighting. 

Elden Ring Magma Wyrm’s Scalesword Build Guide – Drake Knight: Recommended Attributes Distribution

When it comes to the attributes for this build, I have 50 Vigor, 30 Mind, 22 Endurance, 55 Strength, 15 Dexterity, 16 Intelligence, 40 Faith, and 9 Arcane.

You don’t need any Intelligence or Arcane for this build. So disregard those. I started as an Astrologer. You’re probably tired of hearing this. This is the same save file. So just disregard those. You don’t need any of those. If you’re going with any other class, like Confessor or anything else, you’re going to be in better shape.

50 Vigor is enough for this part of the game. You have the Dragoncrest Greatshield, decent armor, as well as Golden Vow. So your protection is pretty good. And I would increase this to 60 as you progress through NG+. 
Mind is at 30 here for you to use Golden Vow constantly and still get off Magma Guillotine and its follow-up attack often, as often as you want them.

If you have less than this, then you’re going to struggle with taking pots. You’re going to have to pot more often than you want. You can get away with 25 if you want to put points somewhere else and just pot more often. That’s up to you. But I would recommend as you go through NG+, increasing this to 35 or 40. That would allow you to dump the Carian Filigree Crest and slot something else there, like Ritual Sword Talisman or any other talisman that you like, like Green Turtle Talisman.

22 Endurance is there to give you enough equip load to medium roll. But you’re going to want to take this up higher because Magma Guillotine is a stamina-hungry weapon skill. And to get Magma Guillotine in a follow-up attack and Magma Guillotine in a follow-up attack, which is usually enough to kill most bosses or difficult enemies, you’re going to need more stamina than we have now. 

So it’s the stamina you want from this more than the Endurance, but you can upgrade your armor as you get more Endurance and keep that medium equip load if you want. But I would probably take this up to 30 somewhere in NG+, to be able to pull off back-to-back Magma Guillotines with their follow-up attacks. 55 is the first soft cap for the damage for this weapon. It starts to drop off a bit here after 55, which is why we broke there. At this point, I’m focusing on increasing Faith up to about 50 or so to get more damage, particularly fire damage as well.

And then from that point onward, you’re probably going to increase Dexterity or so to 50. And then you’ll take Strength and then Faith up to 80 each. So you have a long way to go in terms of damage attributes here. You got 25 more in Strength, 35 more in Dexterity, and 40 more in Faith. That’s at least NG++, probably the end of NG++ before you start to reach the full potential of this weapon.

Just a couple of tips before I wrap up this build guide. If you’re using the Flask of Wondrous Physick, you want the Flame-shrouding Cracked Tear. This will increase your fire damage with your attacks and your weapon skill. Again, you don’t do 100% fire damage. You do about 30 to 40%. So you’re not going to get total efficacy out of this, but it’s still a great way to increase your damage. Alternatively, you could add something like Faith there or Strength to further increase your damage if you want. But I find fire is about the same damage-wise, so I use that. And besides that, you can use the Greenburst Crystal Tear to give you Stamina Recovery. 

Again, the Magma Guillotine is very stamina-hungry, so getting your stamina back quickly so you can keep using it is essential. And when it comes to great runes, Godrick’s is the rune of choice here. You need Vigor and Mind, Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, and Faith. Six of the eight attributes. So getting an extra five in each of those is absolutely fantastic. That’s it for the Drake Knight build. 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.