In this Elden Ring Dual Swords Build guide, I’m going to be showing you my Golden Champion build. This is a level 150 Dexterity build that dual-wields straight swords and also uses a shield while wearing heavy armor that can attack very quickly or Block Counter as needed. If you’ve been looking for a pure melee build, one that only really uses martial weapons to deal damage besides a couple of buffs, then this build is for you.

Elden Ring Dual Swords Build – Golden Champion Guide

A Dexterity-based tank build that can Block-Counter, Dual Wield, and Parry all in one setup.

• Class: Any
• Flask Spread: Mostly HP some FP
• Weapon: Ornamental Straight Sword & any Sacred Seal
• Shield: Banished Knight’s Shield
• Armor: Banished Knight Set
• Talismans: Winged Sword Insignia, Millicent’s Prosthesis, Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman & Spear Talisman
• Primary Stats: Dexterity
• Secondary Stats: Vigor & Endurance
• Skills: Golden Tempering & Golden Parry
• Spells: Golden Vow, Blessing’s Boon and Flame, Grant Me Strength

We have over 110 Elden Ring Builds now, for all classes and playstyles. This build is recommended for Level 150.

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

Golden Champion Build: Equipment

Let’s start off with the weapon I chose for this build, which is the Ornamental Straight Sword. One of the reasons I chose this is because it’s all physical damage.

 Now, having all physical damage is great if you’re going to use one weapon because a lot of enemies can be resistant to a certain type of damage, if you’re using all holy damage or something like that, you can get into situations where you need to swap your weapon out or you’re just going to be really ineffective, and that’s just not the case with this build because we’re doing primarily physical damage. Another thing I really like about this weapon is that it’s actually a paired weapon, so when you go to two-hand it like you would any weapon, you actually pull out the other pair like you would with claws or fists, and then you’re dual wielding two versions of this weapon and you can do the dual-wield moveset with L1 or you can do the regular moveset with R1.

Additionally, if you buff the weapon with its ability, Golden Tempering, you add some holy damage to the weapon, but what’s really great is not only does it buff both weapons, but it changes your R2 and your R2 attacks into something completely different. The R2 then does a dual-wield attack, and the charged R2 does a flurry of blows really rapidly. It has kind of a long charge up, so it’s not always usable, but you get this huge flurry that allows you to attack very quickly, allowing you to boost your damage very quickly with the talismans we use, and what I really like about it as well is that that flurry is then usable even if you’re one-handing the weapon, so you can be sword and boarding it and then go right into that dual-wield flurry without having to pull the weapon out to dual-wield, so you can use it in any circumstance as long as you have this weapon equipped and you’re buffed with Golden Tempering.

And another really cool feature as well with this is that even when you’re buffed, if you pull your shield out with your left hand again, and your weapon’s still buffed, but then you go back to dual-wielding, the left-hand weapon will still remain buffed because this is a paired weapon, and the buff remains on the right hand, so technically the pair is still buffed, so you don’t lose out on that buff on the left hand by swapping back and forth between shield and sword and dual-wielding, and you can swap back and forth at will without losing that buff on the left hand. I also like to use the Frenzied Flame Seal for this build. I don’t even upgrade it because the buffs we’re using don’t get any better with any kind of scaling, and it weighs zero, so it doesn’t add any to your equip weight.

As far as shields go for this build, I’m using the Banished Knight’s Shield, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, it has very low strength requirements, and the weapon, even though it does have strength scaling, has very poor strength scaling when compared to Dexterity, so you want to crank Dexterity to get the most out of the Ornamental Straight Sword, so having low strength means not using the heaviest shield out there, and this is a good choice because it only has 14 strength requirement. It also has a fairly good guard boost, and I’m using the Banished Knight’s Armor, so it sort of matches that style.

When it comes to armor, I’m using the Banished Knight Armor, as I just mentioned, and you can really use any armor you want here.

The idea, though, is to have very high protection and very high poise. One of the things about dual-wielding in this game is that you want to be very aggressive when you do, because you’re using talismans that build up your attack power the more you hit, and you want to be able to swing through some attacks without dying in order to keep building up that damage and keep dealing more and more damage with each swing. I also really happen to like the way this armor looks, and it’s the same armor that we used in the Champion build, it’s just, in this case, we’re using the unaltered chest piece instead of the altered version.

Golden Champion Build: Talismans

When it comes to talismans for this build, we’re using the Winged Sword Insignia, the Dragoncrest Shield Talisman, the Spear Talisman, and Millicent’s Prosthesis.

 So the reason that we’re using the Winged Sword Insignia and Millicent’s Prosthesis in this build is, again, because we’re dual-wielding and you’re going to be attacking rapidly with these attacks, or if you use the Charged Up R2, that thing just does insane amounts of attacks very quickly, which will build up the attack bonuses you gain from these two talismans. You can also use the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia in place of the Winged Sword Insignia if you have that, but the only way to get that is to have someone drop it for you, unless you get an NG+, so that’s why I have the Winged Sword Talisman here. Millicent’s Prosthesis is also a great fit for this build because we need dexterity to boost the damage of the weapon, and it gives you plus five dexterity. The reason that we have the Spear Talisman here is because it does increased damage when you’re thrusting attacks into an enemy that’s attacking you.

This happens a lot with this build, and the Charged R2 attack does a lot of thrusts, as does the L1 attack when you’re dual-wielding. You have several thrusts in there, and this is going to boost your damage when you’re attacking enemies that are attacking you when you’re using these weapons with its thrust attacks. You could replace this with something like the Ritual Sword Talisman if you want, but you are going to take damage with this build, so that’s going to be a lot harder to pull off because it’s going to be harder to maintain full health. And the Dragon Crest Greatshield is there to further increase our physical defense.

Because we’re wearing heavy armor and because we’re using this, we’re able to take lots and lots of damage, as well as using Golden Vow. You have 50% physical protection, and if you use even heavier armor, if you go up in this build like 15-20 levels and you increase your endurance more and you get more equip weight, you can use even better armor and get that up to 60%. Black Flame’s Protection also will give you increased physical resistance, which works really well if you can hit the faith requirement for it.

Golden Champion Build: Spells and Gameplay

The spells that I’m using for this build are Golden Vow, no surprise here, increases our attack damage and our defenses. Beyond getting Dexterity really cranked, there really aren’t a ton of ways to increase our damage. Strength isn’t very much, so getting your Faith up to 25 in order to use this is a much better option, particularly if you’re already maxed out at 80 Dexterity, Flame, Give Me Strength boosts our physical damage. We deal primarily physical damage even though we have a Holy Damage buff. It’s not a Holy Damage with this build, so this works great. And Blessing’s Boon is there to give us health regeneration over time to kind of keep our health capped off. Again, we’re going to be trading damage a lot with this build, so it’s good to get some of that back in between enemies. And you can also, as I mentioned, use Black Flame’s Protection.

This will give you even further physical resistance, making you exceptionally hard to kill, but I think you’ll need a couple more points in faith in order to use that. So generally the way this build works is that I’ll be buffed with Golden Vow when I’m running around, or minimally Golden Tempering, but sometimes I’ll use Golden Vow and Golden Tempering depending on what stretch of the game I’m facing. And I’ll keep my sword and shield out, and I’ll try and Block Counter regular enemies. Normally you can counter or critically strike an enemy off one Block Counter, finishing them off, just getting rid of them if the enemies are spread out. But if they’re sort of grouped up, I’ll tend to dual-wield and try and melt enemies quickly. If you can build up your hits with your dual weapons, then you’ll get more and more damage with each subsequent attack, which is good. And building that up early is a really good strategy to get your damage high so that from one enemy to the next, it gets easier and easier to kill them

 Also, one of the really great things, as I mentioned, is that you can swap back and forth between sword and board and dual wield really easily and not lose that buff on the left-hand weapon. So you really can just go with whatever you want for the moment, swap back and forth as needed, not really worry about it, and just rebuff as usual. Another thing that’s really great about this buff as well is that because it lasts a minute, you can make it so that you have a skill on your shield, and you can just swap to dual wield buff and then swap back to sword and shield when you want to use the shield’s ability.

I like to use Golden Parry for this build, and if you’re trying to learn how to parry if you’re not a very good parry player, this is a great build to learn how to parry because you, it’s kind of a gradient you can parry from a lot longer range with this build, and if you’re someone who’s like me, who isn’t fantastic at parrying, you can kind of learn how to do it and ease yourself into getting better and better at parrying. You could use whatever skill you want, you could use Barricade Shield here if you want, or something else, but I really like Golden Parry. It fits the theme, and it’s a great build in order to learn how to parry, and it gives you so many options. You can Block Counter, you can dual wield, or you can parry, and you can do this all with one build effectively.

Golden Champion Build: Attributes Recommendations

Talking about stats for this build, I have 45 vigor, 20 mind, 32 endurance, 14 strength, 80 dexterity, 9 intelligence, 25 faith, and 9 arcane. We have 45 vigor here because you are going to be trading damage.

I actually wish this was higher, and if you level up this build more, you’re probably going to want to put points into vigor because you will be trading damage even though you have high protection. It really allows you to play aggressively when you’re dual-wielding, which I really like, and if you’re playing more defensively, it’s not as much of an issue, but I really like to play aggressively in some cases, and that’ll just help keep you alive. 20 mind is there just in order to be able to get your buffs off easily, and to just maintain three or four Blue Flasks while the rest are health

Basically, everything we use in this build is a buff except for Golden Parry, which is very inexpensive at 4 FP. If you’re using something like Barricade Shield instead, that’s a lot more expensive. You’ll probably want to increase Mind more, maybe take some points out of vigor, or take a few points out of dexterity in order to be able to use Barricade Shield more easily. 32 endurance is there in order to meet the equip load needed with heavy armor, a sword shield, and seal, and still be able to medium roll.

One of the really great things about this build is that because you are using the Ornamental Straight Sword as a paired weapon, you don’t actually have to slot another straight sword into your offhand, which weighs a certain amount of equip load, so you can actually keep your equip load down considerably by doing this, and by using a seal that weighs nothing, you really save equip load, so you don’t need as much endurance as you would need if you were actually using another straight sword. 14 strength is there in order to just meet the requirements of the shield that we’re using. Again, the Ornamental Straight Sword scales very terribly with points into strength, so it doesn’t increase your damage much. It’s probably better than 81 into dexterity. Dexterity really starts to drop off after 80, and strength would probably be better, so if you want to get some more damage out or use a better shield moving forward, you could start putting points into strength. 80 dexterity is there because that’s what the Ornamental Straight Sword scales best with, and it scales very well up until 80. It does have soft caps where it starts to get less and less, but it still outperforms strength, so if you’re trying to get maximum damage, you’re going to increase dexterity very high before you start putting points into strength.

9 intelligence is there because we don’t need any for this build, and 25 faith is just there to meet the requirements for our incantations. Golden Vow, Blessing’s Boon, Flame, Grant Me Strength, and if you’re going to use Black Flame’s Protection, you need to get this up to 30. Arcane is at 9. We don’t need any for this build. 

One final tip for this build. If you’re going to use the Flask of Wondrous Physick, I recommend using the one that increases the damage with consecutive attacks. It’s the same strategy here. You’re going to be using dual wield a lot during boss fights and being aggressive, particularly ones where you can’t Block Counter because they’re really large, and you can’t really Block Counter their attacks, so that’ll further increase your damage in those scenarios, and then the green burst here as well will increase your stamina recovery. We don’t really have space for the Green Turtle Talisman, which I really like in this build, so that’ll give you a lot more stamina recovery during boss fights, and it’ll also make it so that you can Block Counter a lot better because that uses a lot of stamina and just does blocking in general, so if you’re in fights where you’re going to be blocking and Block Countering a lot, it’s really good for those as well as fights where you’re dual wielding. This is it for the 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.