The Complete Dark Souls 3 Weapons Guide: all weapon types – bladed, blunt, magical weapons, and more

FromSoftware hinted that in Dark Souls 3 there would be fewer weapons with more nuanced movesets to allow players to really become experts with their characters. Well, that maybe the case, but ‘fewer’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘not very many’. There are a lot of weapons to play around with, each with different advantages, but they do fall into categories that are slightly more easy to define. With that in mind we’ve updated the weapons guide to cover all those categories, rather than breaking down each moveset for each weapon precisely, because that would take far too long for you to read.

Bladed weapons in Dark Souls 3

Bladed weapons are some of the most common you’ll find in Dark Souls 3, particularly in the early areas. They’re great against unarmoured enemies, but weak to armour or tough hide, which turn the blade away quite a bit, so it’s good to keep another option handy. Despite this, blades are versatile weapons, running the gamut from standard issues swords, through to axes, rapiers, and huge bladed great weapons. Most blades scale with strength and dexterity over other stats.

Straight swords

Straight swords, as a term, also encompasses broadswords and longswords, since they all have straight blades. They’re a versatile weapon, particularly useful for cutting down mobs, as they have a wide arc and will swing quickly, but still do a fair amount of damage. Because of their wide sweeps, however, they’re prone to getting stuck on surrounding architecture, which is noted in the item description of a lot of them. This can screw you right over if you think you’re about to stick an enemy before he sticks you, but then your sword clangs on the wall.

Curved swords

These are the weapons you find with curved blades, like scimitars, falcions, and twinblades. They’re generally build for quick damage, and many of the curved blades you can pick up carry bleeding damage on them. With twinblades you sacrifice your left arm shield for the second blade, so you’ll need high stamina to move instead of parrying or blocking if you’re wielding them.

Katanas and rapiers

These swords are razor fast, but have thin blades, so can break faster than other weapons, but are another good weapon for high dex characters. Rapiers in particular thrust to the point, instead of slicing, so you can maintain a bit more range from the enemy. It may not be much, but every little counts.

Daggers

Daggers have high critical hit damage, which means they’re really good for backstabbing, which means they’re best utilised by high dex, high stamina builds that can get around behind enemies and keep moving. They’re a very close range weapon, so you have to stay right up to the enemy or be prepared to move in fast.

Axes

You’ve got two basic types of axes in Dark Souls 3: handaxes and battle axes (with some small deviations). Handaxes are faster than battleaxes, but do less damage, while the battleaxes are heavier and slower. Like straight swords, axes tend to do wide sweeps of damage that can hit more than one enemy at once.

Scythes

Scythes aren’t great in enclosed spaces, since they do big sweeps, but they can also stack incredible amounts of bleeding damage. They’ve got good reach on them, but they also handle differently to most other bladed weapons, so require some practice to get used to to movesets.

Spears, pikes, and halberds

These are technically bladed weapons (they are a stick with a blade on the end), but they have much greater range than other blades, so you can stay further back from whoever you’re spiking. Spears are usually the lightest of these three, with halberds being the heaviest, and, predictably, the slowest, but often have the longest reach. Because you’re able to deal damage from further away it means the (relatively) slow speed of some of the stronger attacks.

Greatswords and greataxes

These are the largest bladed weapons, and when we say large we mean very large indeed. These weapons are incredibly slow, with long lead in times on your attacks, especially heavy attacks, which can sometimes see your character turning their whole body into them. The trade off is that great weapons do a massive amount of damage, so if you know your timings you can cut enemies down quickly.

Blunt weapons in Dark Souls 3

Blunt weapons can do good damage to armoured or otherwise tough-skinned enemies, crushing them under the very armour they thought would protect them. Blunted weapons are also much better at breaking the guard and the poise of enemies (meaning it can get through their blocking and make them stagger) which gives you an opening to attack. They usually scale with strength and endurance.

Hammers

Hammers describes not only actual hammers, but any big, un-edged thing you can use to hit someone with, e.g. maces and the like. Hammers are the slowest basic weapon in the game, but you get a lot of bang for your buck (where ‘bang’ is read as ‘damage to target’ and ‘buck’ is read as ‘effort you have to put into the swing’).

Greathammers

Greathammers are the hammer equivalent of greatswords, but even heavier and slower because hammers are heavier than swords to begin with. They’re not a starter weapon, is what we’re saying. They’re slow, and use lots of stamina to swing, but they crush an enemy good.

Bows in Dark Souls 3

Manual bows fall into three categories, but we can be brief enough about them that they don’t need to be split out. Shortbows are fast firing, and can, for example, be fired immediately on a roll, which is useful in combat. Longbows have a greater range on the shortbow, and can be manually aimed for great sniper-style shots, but have a slower firing speed. Greatbows, of which there are only a couple in the game to be found, are larger, and do more damage, but are very ungainly and take a long time to fire.

You have to have arrows equipped to fire you bow, obviously, but you can equip two different kinds of arrow to switch between as necessary. Most bows scale with dexterity.

Crossbows in Dark Souls 3

A crossbow is generally easier to aim than a hand bow, and they do more damage, but the bolt needs to be readied before you think of firing it, so you can’t really improvise with a crossbow. Crossbows also have a lower range than hand drawn bows.

Just as with arrows, you need to have bolts equipped before you can fire a crossbow, but crossbows tend to scale more with strength than dexterity.

Miscellaneous weapons in Dark Souls 3 – whips, fists, and claws

These are the kind of weapons that would probably require you to be proficient in ‘exotic’ weapons in other kinds of RPGs. They’re incredibly fast, but do comparatively little damage. The trade for this is that they’re more likely to have extra effects on them, like poison or bleeding damage. Whips have a good range, as well as a wide area of effect, whilst fists and claws require you to just go up and punch the bad guy with your actual fists. These weapons scale with dexterity over anything else.

Magical weapons in Dark Souls 3

There are three schools of magic that need different weapons to cast, but magic can be a very useful addition to your build. Magic in Dark Souls 3 is channelled through a magical weapon, usually equipped in your left hand instead of a shield, which can leave you more vulnerable if you’re the kind of player used to tanking, but magic can do a lot of damage, or boost your defense ahead of a big fight, so is worth considering.

Pyromancy flame

A pyromancy flame is the only way you can cast pyromancies, i.e. you can’t get different versions of pyromancy flames. You just get one. Luckily you can reinforce it with titanite shards if you’ve set up Cornyx at Firelink Shrine. He’ll also give you a pyromancy flame if you didn’t already have one. Pyromancies are high damage spells, with some decent area-of-effect ones thrown in, but pyromancy doesn’t include defensive spells like healing and, in many cases, are slower to cast. Pyromancy scales with intelligence and faith.

Talismans and Chimes

Talismans are what you use to cast miracles. Miracles tend to be the more defensive school of magic, buffing and healing rather than having a huge array of spells that deal damage directly, (though there are still some of these) to play with. Miracles combine well if you’re going for a melee spellcaster, and scale with faith.

Staves

Staves cast sorceries, the traditional wizardy type spells, which is appropriate because staves are basically traditional wizard staffs. Sorcery is the most varied school of magic, with different spells that can mask your movement, buff your defense and attack, or just deal damage directly. The earlier sorcery spells deal a bit less damage than pyromancy, but are quicker to cast, so you’re less likely to get interrupted in the middle of a magical attack. Sorcery scales with intelligence.

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