Best Bloodfiend’s Arm build in Shadow of the Erdtree

✓ at a glance

• Weapons – Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm with Lion’s Howl Ash of War and the Giant’s Seal
• Stats – Strength and Arcane.
• Incantations – Flame, Grant me Strength
• Talismans – Lord of Blood’s Exultation, Axe Talisman, Two-Headed Turtle Talisman, Blade of Mercy.
• Armour – White Mask
• Mixed Physick – Stonebarb Cracked Tear and Spiked Cracked Tear

The Bloodfiend’s Arm can become a powerhouse if you take it down the Blood route. The weapon doesn’t have bleed, but this will let its Arcane scaling work for it. With the Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm, you’ll have a stance-breaking, critical hit scoring, and charge-attack spamming weapon that will completely melt enemy HP thanks to constant bleed triggers. Let’s look at the build:

Stats and attributes

In terms of your stats, you need at least 28 Str, 11 Dex, and 16 Arc to wield the Bloodfiend’s Arm. From this, you should realise that you want to basically pump your main stat points into Str and Arc to get the most out of this weapon. You also want to take it down the Blood route, making it the Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm to benefit greatly from the arcane scaling to increase your bleed damage. Here’s a table of the stats you want:

Attribute	Level
Vigor	62
Mind	26
Endurance	40
Strength	60
Dexterity	13
Intelligence	9
Faith	15
Arcane	70

To make use of the Arcane scaling and make the weapon worth it, you need to take it down the Bleed path to let that B Scaling shine. Bleed will cause extra damage based on your Strength and Arcane, making this a fantastic Strength/Bleed weapon. This will also give the weapon innate blood loss buildup with every hit. It starts at 133, but at +25, it becomes 217. If you want, you can put Faith to 15 to use the Giant’s Seal and cast Flame, Grant me strength, but this is optional. If you’re leaving Faith alone, put the points into more Endurance or Vigor, if you find you need either of those.

Weapons

• Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm

With Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm in hand, you’ve got yourself one powerful weapon. This is only obtained from the DLC, so you’ll need to get past Mohg and enter the Land of Shadow to track it down. Again, if you want, you can use the Giant’s Seal and upgrade it to +25 in order to use Flame, Grant me Strength. You can use any other seal that you have access to, but if you get 15 Faith, you might as well use this one.

Arguably, you don’t need to worry about getting the Giant’s Seal to +25. Since you’re not investing more in Faith (unless you want to for weapon enchanting), you’ll realistically only benefit from casting Flame, Grant me Strength and then you’ll be holding the Bloodfiend’s Arm in two hands.

Ash of War

As a regular weapon, the Bloodfiend’s Arm can be infused with most Ashes of War. We’ve opted for the Lion’s Claw Ash of War for the powerful flipping attack. Importantly, this Ash of War also allows you to make the Bloodfiend’s Arm a Bleed weapon. The Lion’s Claw is simple and effective, and it will help you stagger enemies even more than with your normal attack patterns.

• Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm – Lion’s Claw.
• Giant’s Seal – No skill.

You can put whatever Ash of War you prefer on this weapon. The only thing you must ensure is that it also allows you to make it a bleed weapon because that is where this build will shine.

Incantations

With your Giant’s Seal, you want to pretty much only use Flame, Grant me Strength. If you happen to invest more points into Faith, feel free to grab something like Lightning Armament or any other spell that enchants your weapon. For the sake of this build, we’re going to 15 Faith and stopping there. We think the points are better spent elsewhere, in this case.

Talismans

With an emphasis on Bleed, you’ll want to have the Lord of Blood’s Exultation as a mainstay Talisman. Outside of this, there is a lot of freedom depending on how you want to go about fleshing out the rest of this build. We have two suggestions for you, so take your pick from these two, or use them to make your own.

Bleed and DPS Talismans

Talisman	Effect
Lord of Blood’s Exultation	Blood loss in the vicinity increases attack power.
Axe Talisman	Enhances charge attacks.
Two-Headed Turtle Talisman	Greatly raises stamina recovery speed.
Blade of Mercy	Raises attack power after each critical hit.

The principle behind this build is to double down on how many times you will stagger the enemy with your charged attacks, thereby opening them up for a critical hit. With each critical, the Blade of Mercy will further power you up, making it fantastic for boss fights and chain-staggering foes.

Bleed, defensive, and heavy Talismans

Talisman	Effect
Lord of Blood’s Exultation	Blood loss in the vicinity increases attack power.
Axe Talisman	Enhances charge attacks.
Two-Headed Turtle Talisman	Greatly raises stamina recovery speed.
Verdigris Discus	Raises defence with higher equipment load.

The idea behind this build is to make your character an immovable object, donning the heaviest armour you can in order to tank through most attacks in the game. The beauty of this setup is you don’t sacrifice much damage – you will be heavy rolling, however – and the trade-off is you have a ton of defence and damage negation thanks to the Verdigris Discus Talisman.

✓ Which one?

It depends on what you want out of this build, but the former will let you be more mobile while the latter will make you more tanky.

Armor and gear

When you use a monster’s arm as a weapon, you can be hard-pressed to look cool. As we all know, fashion is the most important thing in any Souls game, so it’s crucial you look the part. This is simply a suggestion that offers a nice range of style. Feel free to mix and match to your heart’s content, we don’t think it makes a huge difference at this point.

• White Mask
• Black Knight Armor
• Rellana’s Gloves
• Greaves of Solitude

Make sure you keep the White Mask since this will further enhance your attack power when triggering blood loss, and this will be a frequent occurrence. If you’ve opted for the heavy build, then simply equip the Verdigris Armor alongside keeping Varre’s Mask to get the best of both worlds.

Mixed Physick and Great Rune

The real MVPs for this build go into the Mixed Physick, and these are the Spiked Cracked Tear and Stonebarb Cracked Tear. The former tear will increase the damage your charged attacks do for a brief time while the Stonebarb Tear will increase how much stance damage you do to enemies. With the heavy hits from this weapon added with the physick, you’ll have no problems breaking any guard in the game, leaving them open for a critical hit. If you have the Blade of Mercy, this means more damage inflicted in the long run.

For the Great Rune, we recommend using Godricks Rune. It gives you everything you want to improve this build. While it is arguably unnecessary to use, it doesn’t hurt if you remember to pop a Rune Arc when you need to.

General combat tips

As always, buff up before a fight:

• Cast Flame, Grant me Strength first
• Chug your Physick.
• Two-hand your weapon.
• Win.

Now you’re buffed up, switch over to two-hand your Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm and start smashing. You’ll want to abuse the distance covered by the Lion’s Claw weapon skill and the increased damage from charged skills you’ll have while the Physick is active. Spam your charged attacks to deal huge stance damage and barely give the enemies time to react. As an added bonus, the charged hit of the Bloodfiend’s Arm does another instance of splash damage, spraying blood in an AoE when it hits the floor.

So long as you can keep breaking your foe’s stance, you can keep hitting them with critical hits. In turn, this boosts your attack further through triggering blood loss and the passive benefit from the Blade of Mercy increases your damage each time you get a critical. GG, have fun.