‘Elden Ring’ Player Reveals Insane PvE Faith Build That Melts Every Boss

Elden Ring is a game of endless possibilities.

You can customize your play-style and build to your heart’s content, focusing on different stats, weapons and items to create a hulking knight with a massive stone shield or a nimble sorcerer with an arsenal of devastating spells. Or combine the two concepts and roll with a spellcasting tank. That’s the beauty of the game. You can play it however you want.

I’ve written about Elden Ring player Matt ‘Your Average Gamer’ Farnkopf previously, when he created a build that was able to one-shot both final bosses in the game—Radagon and the Elden Beast—on the hardest difficulty (NG+7) through a combination of Faith magic, various buffs and status effects, and no small amount of experimentation and trial-and-error.

Now Farnkopf has made a guide to help players build their own ‘One-Shot’ build after the game’s 1.06 patch, which made a few significant changes to the game’s items and enemies.

As you can see in the below video, using this build Farnkopf was able to take down every main/mandatory boss in the game in one shot:

If you’d like to try your hand at this build yourself—or some variation of this build—a separate video walks you through that process:

A third video walks you through the location of each and every item you’ll need for this build (it’s a long one).

Here’s a list of everything you’ll need to replicate this crazy one-shot build:

• Gravel Stone Seal or Golden Order Seal
• Jellyfish Shield
• Mushroom crown
• Fetid Pots
• Boluses
• Blood sword for health damage
• Godfrey Icon
• Lightning Charm
• Kindred of Rot’s Exultation
• Red Branch Feather Talisman
• Ancient Prayer book (for the incant)
• Black Dumpling
• Lightning Tear

Farnkopf tells me that the Gravel Stone Seal is a good option through about Journey 5. “Once you can over level though (past the meta) the Golden Order Seal beats the Gravel Stone Seal once it hits an 80 in Faith and INT,” he says. “It scales with an A in both.” The Gravel Stone Seal’s 15% Lightning boost is better early on, but that’s still not as good as the A scaling when you have 80/80 in both Faith and Int. “Overall Golden Order is the way to go for PvE builds,” he says.

Here are this build’s stats at Level 150 on Journey 3 (NG+3):

As you can see, most everything here is fairly low including Vigor, which dictates how much health your character has. The only stat that’s been significantly raised is Faith, since virtually all the damage in this one-shot build comes from utilizing incantations and Faith-based items.

In order to properly carry out the one-shot kills on bosses, a specific buffing order is required—which involves swapping out helms, using items, casting incantations and inflicting poison on yourself (and then curing it so you don’t die) all of which concocts just the right amount of buffs to ultimately smack down bosses with just one powerful shot of the Ancient Dragons’ Lightning Strike incantation.

Here’s the buffing order according to Farnkopf:

1. Use madness helm to proc

2. Switch to mushroom crown

3. Make sure health is low enough for boost

4. Drink tear

5. Cast Golden Vow

6. Use Jellyfish shield

7. Howl of Shabriri

8. Poison procs

9. Cure poison

As I noted in my last piece, this degree of tinkering with items and buffs is well outside my personal play-style when it comes to Elden Ring, but I do enjoy seeing this level of care and detail go into a player’s build. It’s almost like a science experiment. Or perhaps a mad alchemist’s concoction. Either way, it’s an impressive feat.

You can watch more of Your Average Gamer’s not-so-average Elden Ring content on his YouTube channel.