In this Elden Ring Ruins Greatsword Strength Build guide, I’m going to be showing you my Warrior of Waves build. This build can be used from about the middle of the game onward in and through NG+. The gameplay here is from NG+, and in this build, we’re focusing on the use of the Ruins Greatsword.

Elden Ring Ruins Greatsword Build Guide – Warrior of Waves

The Warrior of Waves (Strength build) is an all-game build that can be used from the middle part of the game, until you beat Elden Ring, and through New Game Plus. This build primarily focuses on the use of the Ruins Greatsword weapon, a colossal sword that has fantastic scaling and devastating power once it is fully upgraded.

• Class: Any
• Flask Spread: Equal Charges
• Weapon: Ruins Greatsword
• Shield: n/a
• Armor: Greathelm, Beast Champion Armor, Beast Champion Gauntlets, Beast Champion Greaves
• Talismans: Taker’s Cameo, Carian Filigreed Crest, Great-Jar’s Arsenal, Shard of Alexander, Ritual Sword Talisman, Ancestral Spirit’s Horn
• Primary Stats: Strength, Vigor, Endurance
• Secondary Stats: Mind, Intelligence, Dexterity
• Skills: Wave of Destruction
• Spells: Flame Grant me Strength
• Crystal Tear: Strength-Knot Crystal Tear, Spiked Cracked Tear, 
• Great Runes: Godrick’s Great Rune or Radahn’s Great Rune

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Elden Ring Ruins Greatsword Build – Equipment & Talismans

Now, this is a weapon people have been asking me to make a build with for a very long time, and it’s an outstanding weapon. The Ruins Greatsword is a colossal sword weighing 23. It’s a very heavy weapon, despite having Greatsword in its name, and it’s a weapon that’s devastating. You get it at Redmane Castle. So it’s not that far into the game, but it’s also not at the very beginning of the game.

Realistically, you’re going to have to be a decent level, like 70+, in order to get this weapon for most players. So that’s why I say you can use it through the majority of a playthrough, but you’re not going to be able to use it all game unless someone drops it for you from the very beginning. And even then, the weapon has tremendous strength requirements. So you’d have to have a decent amount of strength in order to be able to two-hand it.

What I really love about this weapon is that it is a fantastic Strength scaling weapon. It has S and Strength scaling. It has insane attack power when fully upgraded. Most of the damage is physical, with about 15% of it or so being magic, which isn’t too bad in my opinion. That means if you use things like Exalted Flesh or if you used Flame, Grant Me Strength in this build, or if you used Golden Vow in this build, you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Golden Vow would buff the damage either way. But Exalted Flesh and Flame, Grant Me Strength would benefit this build tremendously, even if it’s just 90% of the damage, because it’s a lot of damage. And I would highly recommend that if you take this build into NG+, at some point you take some faith in order to use Flame, Grant Me Strength and Golden Vow. But we are not that far yet into NG+, so it’s not necessary at this point.

Ruins Greatsword, besides its insane damage, has very good guard boost, allowing you to block counter with it very effectively as long as you have decent poise, because enemies do not rebuff off your Greatsword as they do off a Greatshield, because the hardness is not the same. 

You’re not getting as good an opening in terms of getting that block counter off. But you can still get it off as long as you have a good window, or you have decent poise, and you can just poise through the hit. One of the reasons I use Taker’s Cameo on this build is because it allows me to do block counters with this and then just regain the health and keep topping myself off. Now you don’t have to do that, but it’s kind of a nice way to do that, particularly if you’re using Ritual Sword Talisman, which boosts your health at max HP. That way you can get back up to max HP.

Wave of Destruction is an absolutely devastating weapon skill. It’s very expensive at 25 FP, but what it does is it lays down a wave of gravity magic in front of you in a very long distance with a decent width, allowing you to AoE into enemies and farm with it if you need, or hit into a pack of enemies. But what really is good about this is the damage is decent. It’s not the highest damage Ash of War or weapon skill I’ve seen, but it’s decent damage. 

It tends to interrupt enemies and knock them into the air sometimes. If you notice during the Crucible fight, you’ll notice that they sort of flinch when I hit them with this, allowing you to get off another attack or get an opening. Also, it has tremendous range, which means that you can use its medium to long wind up while the enemy is still walking towards you and still hit them while you’re at a safe distance. And because you can reliably interrupt enemies and kill enemies at a safe range with this weapon, it makes you really want to use this weapon skill constantly, particularly for anything that’s difficult.

It just makes going through certain areas and certain bosses of the game a breeze. And all it comes down to with this build, making sure that you have the correct talismans, attributes, and also making sure that you can’t be interrupted with decent poise armor. And also you have a way to manage your FP, right? Like there’s this thing is 25 FP. If you have 100 FP, that’s four casts before you’re chugging a flask, that’s a lot of FP flasks. So one of the ways you can do that is you can mitigate it with Carian Filigreed Crest to reduce the cost, or you can increase your mind to have enough that it doesn’t matter to you.

You’re going to have to manage your FP if you really want to use this weapon because the Ash for War is outstanding and you’re going to want to use it regularly. Now, you don’t have to use the weapon skill all the time. In fact, block counters work very well with this build. Running R2 attacks, and even the weapon itself has a rather unique charged R2 where you hit down and then a little bit of gravity magic comes out of the ground. 

Even if you miss the enemy, they will take some damage from this. And if you do hit the enemy and that gravity magic comes out, then you do even more damage. I don’t really lean into that in this build. You could use the Axe Talisman in one of your talisman slots if you want, but I find that I use Wave of Destruction far more than I use charged R2.

Even still, the charged R2 can be very good if you’re point-blank on a boss and he’s doing an animation where you know you can get it off instead of using Wave of Destruction point-blank because the damage is roughly the same between the two things. 

Armor-wise, I’m using three pieces of the beast champion set and then I have the Greathelm for the look. Love the look of the Beast Champion Set. It is probably my favorite or one of my favorite armors from a style perspective. I love the flowing cape behind it, the silvery look, and the details on the armor. It’s absolutely amazing, but it’s extremely heavy.

It has very good poison protection, but it’s extremely heavy, which is why we have Great-Jar’s Arsenal here. This is not an armor set you’re going to be using if you’re playing this game early on in the game. So you’re going to just get something else. If you’re talking about playing this build from earlier, like from the absolute earliest, you can get the Ruins great sword. Just want to look for something with at least 51 points.

For the talismans, I kind of swap back and forth depending on what I’m doing. I have Shard of Alexander here. If you’re playing earlier in the game, this could be Warrior Jar Shard to boost the damage of Wave of Destruction. A ritual sword talisman to further boost my damage at full health. This one you can swap out or not. If you’re ranging things down regularly with wave of destruction, you don’t tend to get hit that much. But if you lean more into the block counters and stuff like that, you will take chip damage. And you might want to swap this out for something else, like maybe the Curved Sword Talisman to increase your block counter damage.

I also go back and forth between Taker’s Cameo and Ancestral Spirit’s Horn here because these are really good. One’s going to give you health back when you kill enemies. One’s going to give you FP back. FP is really great for helping with FP management. Again, you could use Carian Filigreed Crest too to reduce it. I’m not using either of these here because I have plenty of mine and I have plenty of FP flasks. 

If you’re talking about from the middle of the game where you’re not a level 150 yet, you might want to have either one or both of those in there in order to reduce the cost of this weapon skill. And then obviously, as I mentioned, great jars arsenals in there to alleviate the weight of the armor. If you’re playing earlier on in the game, you might need this as well. The weapon is very heavy and gives you more equip weight. Anything like that is good.

Elden Ring Ruins Greatsword Build – Recommended Attributes Distribution

So attribute-wise for this build, I have 50 Vigor, 30 Mind, 35 Endurance, 80 Strength, 12 Dexterity, 16 Intelligence, 7 Faith and 9 Arcane.

Vigor is obviously there. You need a good health pool. Plus, as you can see, I’m not really dying much. We have a lot of protection, so I don’t really need more than that. But if you feel like you do need it, feel free to get it.

Mind is there to alleviate the expensive cost of Wave of Destruction. You probably don’t have to take it up this high. If you’re playing this build earlier on, you might have to have more FP flasks, and you definitely might need carry and philodendron crest to help you offset that.

Endurance is very high for this build to use a very heavy armor set and the Ruins Greatsword, which is very heavy and still be able to medium roll. You’re just going to need a lot of endurance.

We have Strength at 80 here as this weapon scales phenomenally with strength. It has S scaling when you two hand it, which you should be. At some point, you will take this up to 99 to max it out for the most damage. You can probably stop this around 50 or 55 earlier on in order to prioritize other stats.

You don’t need any Dexterity for this build, and you only need 16 Intelligence to meet the requirement for the weapon. You don’t actually have to meet the requirements for Intelligence if you don’t want to because all that affects is the magic damage portion of this weapon, which is low anyway.

And then if you’re talking like Flask of Wondrous Physick, I have strength in here just to give me more damage when I use it. And also I have the one that increases your charge to R2 attacks. I don’t use them a ton during boss fights, but there are really not a lot of great things here. Magic damage isn’t really going to benefit you much. You can put intelligence, but that’s not going to benefit you much. Stamina recovery is not bad, for instance. And then if you’re talking about which Great Runes are good for this build, Godrick’s is good early on, but later on, I think Radahn’s is actually better because it gives you health, FP, and stamina.

All those things are really good for this build. You don’t really need any more intelligence, and once your strength’s up to 80, you really don’t need that much more anyway. So you’re really talking about only really getting a lot of effectiveness out of maybe three stats with Godrick’s, whereas Radahn’s just gives you stats that are just useful in general.

That wraps up our Warrior of Waves build. I really love this weapon. It’s such a great weapon to play with. It’s one of my favorite large weapons in the game. I can’t believe I haven’t made a build for this sooner.

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.