Lords of the Fallen best builds for beating the game

Want the best builds in Lords of the Fallen? As a soulslike RPG, it’s only natural for Hexwork’s newest title to be filled with an abundance of weapons, gear and stats to help you shape your character in fun and interesting ways. But sometimes to combat the challenge, it can help to have an outline of the builds that’ll allow you to get the most out of your investment.

Here, we’re going to go over the best builds in Lords of the Fallen that we’ve found so far. Keep in mind that much of this comes from playthroughs we undertook for our Lords of the Fallen review, and as we continue playing more, this list is subject to expansion. If you’re just starting out on a playthrough though, you might be looking for the best class and best starting weapon to begin the game with. We’ve got you covered there too.

The best builds to play in Lords of the Fallen

Here are our top three best builds to play in Lords of the Fallen. As we said, this isn’t an exhaustive list, and we’ll be sure to expand it as time goes on. Our picks are:

• A Heavy Polearm build.
• A multimagic build.
• A sustained agility build.

To keep everything orderly, we’ll outline the suggested level you want to aim for when putting together each build, as well as our personal picks for the best weapons, equipment, consumables, and stat spread in each case. Don’t forget that you can always respec your character to align with one of these builds if you aren’t planning on a brand new playthrough.

The Heavy Polearm build

The heavy polearm build is designed to strike a perfect balance between defence and offence, allowing you to effectively manage groups, single targets, and potential even some PvP if you’re hopping into Lords of the Fallen multiplayer.

Heavy Polearm build setup

Here’s how to setup for the build.

• Recommended minimum level: 50
• Strength: 20
• Agility: 16
• Endurance: 20
• Vitality: 26
• Radiance: 8
• Inferno: 8
• Weapons: Hushed Saint’s Halberd, Throwing Hand, Hallowed Knight Shield
• Equipment: Enhanced Bloody Hatched, Poison Javelin, Briostone, Unripe Berries, Defiance Ring, Mineowner’s Ring, Warrior’s Claw Pendant.
• Armour: Light/ Medium Armor.

Heavy Polearm build explained

Despite the name for this build, it’s not actually centred around making you as heavy as possible, but rather offsetting the weight of your weapon. The Hushed Saint’s Halberd offers fantastic physical damage, especially if you find blacksmith Gerlinde and upgrade it. As an added bonus, it deals poison damage. It’s attack output, combined with its varied moveset and excellent reach allow you to take on opponents from a safer distance, whether single targets or groups. The shield acts as a fallback for when enemies close in, allowing you to block and parry more aggressive foes, which makes up for the slow speed of the Halberd.

Your throwable items give you stronger mid-range support, with the Poison Javelin helping you to proc the effect on enemies if they avoid a melee strike. The Mineowner’s Ring boosts your already strong endurance, allowing you to sustain combat for longer, while a sizeable health pool offer another line of defence. The Defiance Ring then gives just a little extra protection from incoming ranged elemental attacks. The Warrior’s Claw Pendant further improves your damage, and Briostone and Unripe Berries act as a final support option to maintain health and stamina.

All this defence allows you to don lighter armour, maintaining a faster dodge and movement speed. This leaves you with a build which is surprisingly fast, with a great deal of defensive bonuses and exceptional mid-range and close-range damage potential against almost all foes.

The multimagic build

Some would call this build blasphemous, but we couldn’t hear their criticism because they were on fire and/or smited. The idea of this build is to create a massive, versatile magic arsenal that keeps you prepared for any situation.

Multimagic build setup

Here’s how to setup for the build.

• Recommended minimum level: 40
• Strength: 12
• Agility: 8
• Endurance:12
• Vitality: 22
• Radiance: 22
• Inferno: 22
• Weapons: Hallowed Knight Sword, Throwing Hand, Charm of Fortune’s Sight
• Equipment: Ring of Radiant Preeminence, Charred Root ring, Shuja Harmony Hoop pendant, Enhanced Empyrean Grenades, Umbral Burrower, Mannastone Clusters
• Spells: Umbral Agony, Umbral Guardian, Sanctify, Adyr’s Hardiness
• Armour: Light armour.

Multimagic build explained

This build centres around three pieces of equipment. An Umbral Catalyst, The Charred Root ring, and the Ring of Radiant Preeminence. As we explained when covering them in our best rings guide, the former ring allows you to cast inferno sorceries with a non-inferno catalyst, and the latter ring allows the same for radiant sorceries. Wearing both means that you can cast any and all sorceries from a single Umbral Catalyst – we chose the Charm of Fortune’s Sight because it’s accessible to newbie sorcerers and easy to get.

Our chosen spells are a mixture of support and attack options. Sanctity and Hadriness reduce your incoming damage, cure status ailments and help you to heal, further supported by a reasonable investment into Vitality. The Umbral Spells meanwhile give you fantastic ranged choices for attacking enemies, and support well in crowd control as well as single-target damage. The synergy of these spells is boosted by the Shuja Harmony Hoop, which stacks damage modifiers for repeated spell casts, and to an even greater extent if those spells are from different schools of magic.

Lastly, the Hallowed Knight sword boasts a great longevity in performance if invested in wisely, as well as varied moves and good multitarget damage potential. Alongside some solid throwable options, this gives you solid mid and close-range options to fall back on if needed. Lastly, light armor ensures you’ll be able to dodge quickly to disengage from unfavourable terms.

Ultimately, this build should give you the versatility needed to persistently overcome varied obstacles and bosses.

The Sustained Agility build

The idea behind this build is to take the power that a continued onslaught of attacks can have, and boost it to its logical extreme. This is the perfect sort of build for anyone who favours a fast, aggressive playstyle.

Sustained Agility build setup

Here’s how to setup for the build.

• Recommended minimum level: 40
• Strength: 8
• Agility: 20
• Endurance:30
• Vitality: 14
• Radiance: 8
• Inferno: 8
• Weapons: Two Bringer of Stillness swords, Throwing Hand.
• Equipment: Lacerating Knife, Slinger’s Ring, Defaced Ring, Scournful Effigy pendant, Unripe Berries.
• Armour: Light armour.

Sustained Agility build explained

The aim of this build is very simple. Start slashing, never stop. The Bringer of Stillness Swords boast impressive reach, an excellent moveset, strong Agility scaling, and superb speed. You can farm these from Umbral Reapers. The Scournful Effigy pendant boosts their damage further, while the Defaced Ring somewhat offsets the drawback of the pendant. A solid investment in Agility further boosts the weapon damage potential.

As a mid-range backup, Lacerating Knives, damage boosted from the Slinger’s Ring, will stagger most opponents easily, and stack bleed on those hearty enough to push through. Light armour meanwhile keeps mobility high, allowing you to more easily control the pacing of an engagement.

What really brings this build from powerful to deadly is the endurance. With a massive stamina reserve, and even larger reserves and regen thanks to the Unripe Berries, you’ll be able to continuously pump out combos for agonisingly long stretches, stunlocking enemies and cutting down most feebler foes long before they get a chance to retaliate.

That covers all our current picks for the best builds in Lords of the Fallen. We’ll be sure to keep expanding this as we find fun new ways to play. In the meantime, why not check out some of our other guides? Whether you want help with something specific like finding the Pilgrim’s Perch Key or beating Spurned Progeny, or you’re just in search of some general tips and tricks, we can help you out.