ELDEN RING: Build: Dark Moon Greatsword, Spellblade (PVE, Newbie Friendly)

Helpful?

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Why play this build?
This build is great for new players who want to explore the game with a lot of options. While your main focus is buffing the projectile of the Dark Moon Greatsword’s Moonlight Greatsword skill, you can utilize spells to solve other problems. Swap some trinkets and gear and now you’re just as strong as any pure spellcaster build. You get all of the fun of wielding a huge ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ melee weapon with all the benefits of the wide toolkit of sorceries. With some additional dexterity investment you can widen your toolkit with the special skills of the Wing of Astel and Moonveil.

Build Weakness
• Low Vigor, weak defensively
• Partially covered by Morgott’s Great Rune, Opaline Hardtear, Dragoncrest Talisman.

You don’t need the DLC to play this build, but it does add some fun toys to play with.

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Map Genie, Elden Ring[mapgenie.io]
The guide will mention locations but will not necessarily provide instructions on how to get there. If you need help, try using a game map.

Questions, Comments, Suggestions
Have I made a mistake? Let me know in the comments, no big deal. Do you think you’d make changes to the build to suit your preferences? That’s really awesome and I encourage you to do so because experimenting is a huge part of this game. Just remember the goal here to build each other up, not tear each other down.

Roughly these stats. See the Stats section for more info. Personally, I don’t find the Wing of Astel or Moonveil particularly fun, as useful as they can be in certain situations. I just stick to 12 Dex.

lvl 150

Bosses – Dark Moon Greatsword, Generic Strategy
• Take Consumables/Physick
• Power up the Dark Moon Greatsword’s Moonlight Greatsword ability.
• Cast Ranni’s Dark Moon on boss to lower their magic resistance and build up a little Frostbite.
• Moonlight Greatsword projectile boss to death, re-upping buffs/debuffs when necessary.

Everywhere else
• Whatever you want. You have a huge toolkit.

I’d like to talk about each stat a little bit and then at the end of this section I’ll give a little analysis of allocation order.

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Vigor: 40+
Vigor is always great. As you play, you should level it AT LEAST enough to cover your flask refill ability (detailed below in its own section), but ideally high enough so you’re not getting one-shot. One of the weaknesses of this build is that it sacrifices a lot of Vigor to make the other stats work, but I highly recommend you don’t go below 40 in your final build. Pull points out of mind at that point. You can supplement your HP with Morgott’s Great Rune.

• Vigor Ramp/Diminishing Soft Cap: 40
• Vigor Low-Value Soft Cap: 60

Mind: 38-40
Flask +12 can recover all your FP at 38 Mind. Really not worth going too far past this, especially with the new DLC talisman the Blessed Blue Dew Talisman. 39 or 40 Mind may give you an extra cast of those larger-FP spells that would otherwise be some wasted leftover FP. If you need to allocate attributes somewhere, and you can’t pull more points out of Endurance or Vigor, pull out of Mind.

• Mind Ramp Soft Cap: 41
• Mind Diminishing Soft Cap: 50

Endurance
Your endurance should only be just high enough to allow medium rolling while wearing your fashion set and using your heaviest combo of talismans/weapons. Feel free to pull out of endurance and put it right into Vigor if you wear lighter armor.

• Endurance First Diminishing Soft Cap: 25
• Endurance Second Diminishing Soft Cap: 60

Strength: 16
Minimum 16 strength needed for the Dark Moon Greatsword. This also allows you to use the Brass Shield as well, which is a very strong medium shield if you have the endurance to support its high weight.

Dexterity: 12-18
Minimum 12 Dex needed for the Dark Moon Greatsword. You’ll need 17 Dex for the Wing of Astel, and 18 Dex for Moonveil. You don’t need any more points in Dex than your weapon’s minimum requirement because the Wing of Astel and Moonveil are more about their Ash of War skill than their dex scaling.

Dexterity technically helps with spell casting speed up to a cap of 70 Dex, but the difference isn’t significant enough to dedicate so many points. Radagon Icon Talisman adds 30 virtual dex, and the Azur Glintstone Staff adds 40 virtual dex at the cost of 20% more FP per spellcast.

Intelligence: 80
This is your big stat. Adds to your weapon and spell damage. You need 72 to cast every spell in the game (includes DLC). You can potentially save 8-10 points by using Intelligence-knot Crystal Tear as part of your Flask of Wondrous Physick, if that trade is worth it to you.

• First Diminishing Soft Cap: 50
• Second Diminishing Soft Cap: 80

Faith
Not used in this build.

Arcane
Not used in this build.

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Allocation Order
The early game is obviously the most difficult time. You need a lot of Vigor and Mind to keep up with your flask upgrades, and you want a lot of Intelligence to get more spells and make them worthwhile. You’ll also need to find time to squeeze in some strength just to wield something decent while you’re working toward the good weapons. You are going to struggle and be behind for a bit and that’s okay!

I’d prioritize Vigor and Mind to keep up with your flasks (numbers detailed in the Flask of Tears section), and try to pump Vigor up beyond that if you’re struggling. You can get by without Endurance because Armor isn’t that important. Intelligence is tricky in the early game. If you don’t prioritize mind, you don’t have the FP to cast a lot. If you want to cheese a bit with Night Maiden’s Mist, which has no scaling component, then your intelligence doesn’t come into play. As soon as your Vigor is 30+ and you’re getting started with the mid game, you’ll be in a good position to start pumping Intelligence.

Why stop leveling at 150?
First of all, there’s no way to lower your level. Many builds stop at 125 or 150 because you start hitting soft caps in your primary stats and it sets limits on what you can do. This is a good thing, because leveling indefinitely makes you overpowered for PVE content and makes everyone kind of same-y in PVP. Because there’s a meta agreement on 125-150, you’ll also have access to the most players for co-op or pvp.

Your flask upgrades give you more charges and refill more of your HP/FP overall. Keeping your Vigor and Mind high enough to accommodate the full power of a flask refill will allow you to push your character through longer stretches of dungeons that are chipping away at these resources.

Despite the low amount of Vigor needed for a full HP flask refill, you should prioritize getting Vigor to 40 to protect against getting effectively one-shot.

The build’s weakness is its lack of Vigor, so the ideal Great Rune is Morgott’s Great Rune which gives you a 25% bonus to max HP.

To use a Great Rune, you need to kill the associated boss and then visit the Great Rune’s specific Divine Tower to “activate” it. Equip it at a site of grace (it has it’s own option in the grace) and then actually activate the rune by using a Rune Arc.

• Recommended

• The Other Great Runes

Dark Moon Greatsword
• Bread and Butter, and the focus of the build
• Deals Physical & Magic Damage
• The skill is what we’re buffing, but it’s an excellent general purpose melee weapon as well.
• Acquired as part of Ranni’s Questline (see walkthrough below).
• Can be acquired before accessing Atlus Plateau.

Skill: Moonlight Greatsword
• Lasts 60 seconds, costs 32 FP
• Adds 65 magic damage and 15 frostbite buildup to weapon.
• Heavy attacks shoot a magical projectile that deals 84/105 Frostbite buildup, 15/24 stance damage, and deals magic damage (no FP cost)
• Can be charged.
• Damage from the melee swing can be combined with the projectile from the skill for heavy physical/magic and stance damage.
• The projectile does the same amount of damage whether it’s one-hand or two-hand.

Sword of Astel
• Primarily used for it’s skill, Nebula.
• Requires 17 Dex

Skill: Nebula
• Particularly effective against bosses with wide hitboxes.

Moonveil
• Mostly just used for its skill. Honestly kind of a boring weapon, but your taste may vary.
• Requires 18 Dex

Skill: Transient Moonlight
• Short projectile
• Pierces through enemies
• Bleeds
• Like the Dark Moon Greatsword, can combine melee swing with projectile.

Spellblade Set
You want to get the most out of the Moonlight Greatsword projectile? Each piece of this set gives a 2% damage bonus to sorcery skills for an 8% bonus total. It doesn’t affect your casted sorceries at all though, so don’t get confused by the description. It comes from Rogier at the end of his mini-questline.

Mushroom Set
• Huge bonuses to your immunity.
• It’s good for specific situations.
• Can be found in Seethewater Cave (Mt. Gelmir, but accessible from Atlus Peninsula)

Black Knife Armor
• The chestpiece totally silences your movement sounds.
• Found in the Consecrated Snowfield.

Not too interested in specific sets and want to play dress up to look cool instead? Same. Wear whatever you want for fashion, it’s fine.

It’s hard to get around it. The Brass Shield is the best general purpose medium shield outside it’s hefty 7 weight. It’s frustratingly good against everything but lightning, and it’s not even that bad at that. Importantly, it also has the best Guard Boost of any medium shield, which means it’s going to cost you less stamina to block attacks. You’re also allowed to change out its Ashes of War, which allows it to use the Ash of War: Carian Retaliation for parries that have the longest possible parry window.

BUT let’s just say you’re playing with very tight weight/endurance limits. I like the Eclipse Crest Heater Shield for it’s even Elemental blocking, 3.5 weight, and pleasing looks. Any of the Heater shields (except the Heater Shield) are going to offer slightly different Elemental resistances and can all have their Ash of War changed, so just go for whatever matches your outfit.

Medium Shields – Organized by Guard Boost

Parrying
• Medium shields get 3 frames of a parry window
• Small Shields get 5 parry frames and recover 2 frames faster
• The Buckler gets 5 parry frames, same as all small shields, but recovers 2 frames faster than them.
• If you put Ash of War: Carian Retaliation on your Medium shield, it gets the largest parry window possible, 1 extra frame better than Small Shields / Buckler, and recovers 1 frame faster. It only costs FP if you use it to parry a spell, otherwise it’s just straight better against normal attacks.
• The Ash of War: Golden Parry used to have the longest parry window at the cost of FP, but they changed it to instead affect a wider area at the cost of FP, otherwise it’s the same as parrying with a medium shield. It is not recommended.

This is how FromSoft decided to balance parrying and it’s stupid. Sorry about that. There’s only one choice. Put the Ash of War: Carian Retaliation on your shield of choice if you want to parry.

*For the purpose of this section, “main-hand” refers to the staff that’s actively casting the spell, as opposed to “off-hand” which we’ll define as another held staff just there to provide bonuses.

A staff applies its sorcery scaling only if the staff itself is actively casting a spell. There is no benefit to upgrading a staff that you are only using for off-hand boosts/bonuses.

Meteorite Staff (early game)
• Best for the early game.
• You cannot upgrade it with smithing stones, so trade it out for another staff as soon as you have the smithing stones to get an upgraded staff with superior sorcery scaling.

Academy Glintstone Staff (mid game)
• Best general purpose staff between Intelligence 41 to 68.
• Requires (roughly) +14 upgrade to be an upgrade over the Meteorite Staff.

Carian Regal Scepter (late game)
• Best general purpose staff from Intelligence 69 and above.
• +10% damage when casting Ranni’s Dark Moon, Rennala’s Full Moon, or Rellana’s Twin Moons.

Azur’s Glintstone Staff
• Adds 40 virtual dex to spellcasting. Applies whether main-hand or off-hand.
• Spells cost 20% more FP.
• 3% lower scaling than the Carian Regal Scepter.
• More of a PVP thing, the casting speed isn’t that noticeable.

Lusat’s Glintstone Staff
• 10% higher scaling than the Carian Regal Scepter
• Spells cost 50% more FP.
• The higher scaling only applies if being cast in your main-hand. This staff will always apply it’s 50% increased FP costs whether it’s your main-hand or off-hand.

Staff of Loss
• +30% damage when using Night Shard and Night Comet. (main-hand or off-hand)
• When casting those two spells, this staff has higher scaling than any other staff.

Staff Damage Boost to Specific Sorceries
• Some staves apply a boost to specific sorceries. This doesn’t line up with the category a sorcery claims to be in. For instance, Ambush Shard is a “Night Sorcery” but it is not affected by the 30% boost from the Staff of Loss.

Staff Scaling Chart
• Numbers organized by sorcery scaling at 80 int. Assumes this build’s generic lvl 150 stats for the other stats that affect sorcery scaling.
• Solid line represents the sorcery scaling of a single staff casting a spell.
• Dotted line represents using a single staff with it’s boost to specific sorceries (such as Staff of Loss casting Night Comet or Night Shard)
• Green backgrounds on the chart represent boosted staffs. For the most part, I ignored them because they didn’t affect spells I care about.
• Meteorite Staff is better than it seems at low levels of INT because you are very unlikely to have a the max upgraded staffs at that point.

Here’s a handy calculator for staffs by Jerp.[jerp.tv]

When to upgrade the Meteorite Staff
At 40 INT, this is what level a staff needs to be upgraded to to have higher scaling than the Meteorite staff. It doesn’t change that much at other levels of INT.

• Demi-Human Queen’s Staff +14
• Academy Glintstone Staff +14
• Astrologer’s Staff +15
• Carian Glintblade Staff +15
• Carian Glintstone Staff +16
• Digger’s Staff +19
• Staff of Loss +21

• Core Build, Moonlight Greatsword

The Magic Scorpion Charm and the Shard of Alexander are missable!
• Do not give Ranni the Fingerblade until you’ve completed just enough of Seluvis’ quest to get the Magic Scorpion Charm.
• Do not kill Alexander (you can safely smack him out of his holes though)

Godfrey Icon does not affect the Sword of Astel’s Nebula skill at all because it cannot be charged. The talisman still helps spells, but you probably should change it out anyway.

The Blessed Blue Dew Talisman has a fast enough FP regen to be useful in the late game. You can get it immediately upon entering the DLC. I use it instead of the Dragoncrest Shield Talisman in the open world or while dungeon crawling.

Besides these, you should have all the situational talismans. The Drake Talismans for all the elemental negations. The resistance horn talismans for encounters with troublesome status effects. Gold/Silver Scarab for farming.

There’s so many little tools you can make use of, but these are the ones I’d like newer players to be familiar with.

Lantern
• Light that doesn’t cost a hand or spell slot.
• Pick it up from Merchant on the west side of Weeping Peninsula or the south side of Liurnia of the Lakes for 1,800 runes.

Bow
• Sometimes it’s helpful to poke enemies or environmental objects.
• Stats/req don’t matter.
• I like the Harp Bow for it’s light weight and musical note.

Ash of War: Quickstep
• Helpful for crossing sludge and other things that slow you down.
• Apply it to a light weapon. A lot of dagger-type weapons come with it.

Sacrificial Axe
• A weapon you can use as a stat stick.
• 4 FP restored per enemy killed.
• Keep holstered in off-hand.
• Good for helping someone through a zone in co-op.
• Acquired from the Deathbird that spawns north of Castle Morne in Weeping Peninsula (night only)

Glintstone Whetblade
• Provide Magic/Cold affinity to weapons before you have your Dark Moon Greatsword.
• Not all weapons can be given affinities.
• Found in Raya Lucaria in the rooftop jumping area.

Sentry’s Torch
• Reveals invisible enemies.
• Functional even when holstered (even though it appears snuffed)
• Available from a Merchant in the Leyndell Capital Outskirts for 7,000 runes.

Rainbow Stones
• Glowing stones you can place as markers for your session. (33 limit)
• If you throw them off a cliff, they explode if it’s a long fall that will kill you.
• Crafted from Ruin Fragments, which you can farm in various places.
• Ruin Fragments can be purchased infinitely after acquiring a Smithing-Stone Miner’s Bell Bearing [4] in the Crumbling Farum Azula.

Fighting a boss? Another player? An annoying enemy? Just pop your Physick Flask. Yeah, it can only be used once per grace visit, but it lasts for 3 whole minutes. It’s fiiiiine. Experiment and play around with it.

• Recommended Crystal Tears

• Other Options

If you wanted to, you could swap some trinkets and become a pure spellcaster and then we can talk forever about every spell in the game and the value of every possible loadout, and that would be a lot. If you’d like some in-depth analysis of sorceries, you should find a guide talking about pure spellcasters. I’m just going to talk about some basic walking-around sorceries that I find go along well with this build.

The Dark Moon Greatswords Moonlight Greatsword projectile is single target with a range that’s on the shorter side of medium. These are some sorceries that complement that.

Ranni’s Dark Moon
• Staff Boost: Carian Regal Scepter (10%)
• Chargable?: No
• Location: Liurnia of the Lakes, Chelona’s Rise, accessible as part of Ranni’s Questline.

Open boss fights with it. It has a bit of a wind-up where you’re vulnerable, then flies off, causes slight AoE explosion for a small chunk of damage, add some frostbite, and, most importantly, add a debuff that lowers magic resistance by 20% for 1 minute. It also dispels any spells that come into contact with it. You only need to recast it to re-apply debuff, otherwise swing away with your Moonlight Greatsword projectiles.

Rellana’s Twin Moons
• Staff Boost: Carian Regal Scepter (10%)
• Chargable?: No
• Location: DLC, Remembrance from Rellana in Castle Ensis

Vulnerable while casting, but satisfyingly strong AoE with stance damage and a knockdown on the final hit.

Gravitational Missile
• Chargable?: Yes! Benefits from Godfrey Icon (+15% dmg)
• Location: DLC, dropped by a overworld miniboss at the crater in the Hinterlands.

Kind of neat in PVE because NPCs don’t avoid it and pulls them in while dealing good damage. Where it really shines is PVP where you can deny a wide area for a fair amount of time. If you want to be clever, you can try and hide that you’re casting other gravity based sorceries like Collapsing Stars while standing in the middle of it.

Cannon of Haima
• Staff Boost: None
• Chargable?: Yes! Benefits from Godfrey Icon (+15% dmg)
• Location: Liurnia of the Lakes, Converted Fringe Tower

I initially slept on this spell, but learned to love its utility. AoE, strong knockdown, and you can do some tricky arcs in the air.

Loretta’s Greatbow
• Staff Boost: None
• Chargable?: Yes! Benefits from Godfrey Icon (+15% dmg)
• Location: Liurnia of the Lakes, Caria Manor, Royal Knight Loretta

Excellent spell I use all the time in the open world, delving in dungeons, and in PVP. It’s the sniper spell. I’m not including Loretta’s Mastery in this list (the similar sorcery that fires four arrows) because it’s pretty FP heavy and hard to get the full effect out of because the arrows hit terrain too easily. But feel free to keep it on hand for when you want to nuke something in the distance.

Night Comet
• Staff Boost: Staff of Loss (+30%)
• Chargable?: Yes! Benefits from Godfrey Icon (+15% dmg)
• Location: Bought from Gowry in Caelid after progressing through the Caelid portion of Millicent’s questline.

It’s a projectile, but NPCs won’t actively dodge it. Simple, useful.

Night Maiden’s Mist
• Staff Boost: None
• Chargable?: Yes, for a bigger AoE, but it doesn’t benefit from Godfrey Icon.
• Location: Bought from Gowry in Caelid after progressing through the Caelid portion of Millicent’s questline.

Early game cheese spell. It does aggro enemies, but you can kite them, or otherwise hide from them while they take 1500+ damage from the AoE. It can damage you, but will not damage allied players in co-op. In PVP it is EXCELLENT for surprise covering ladders, as well as area denial. It does not benefit from any scaling or items at all so it isn’t all that useful in the late game.

You can buy this sorcery after completing a little bit of Millicent’s questline. If you want this cheese spell, you probably aren’t too against cheesing, and it can be acquired very early in a playthrough by cheesing the Commander O’Neil portion of Millicent’s quest by kiting him through the scarlet geysers outside his arena.

Class
I’ll make this simple and then give too much information on why. Astrologer if you’re not interested in adding Sword of Astel and/or Moonveil to your tookit. Prisoner if you are interested in those weapons. Personally, I have more fun with the Dark Moon Greatsword and started with Astrologer anyway.

It depends on how much dex you want in the endgame, and I suppose what spells you want immediately. It’s a 1 point difference between those two classes, so just follow your heart. The spells shouldn’t really come into play because it is not hard to go grab the spells that the other class starts with.

You can also sacrifice attribute points in your final lvl 150 build to start with a different class.

Dark Moon Greatsword, Basic (planning for 12 Dex)
• Astrologer: Most attribute points available.
• Alternates for -1 Attribute: Prisoner, Vagabond, Warrior

+ Sword of Astel / Moonveil (planning for 17+ Dex)
• Prisoner: Most attribute points available.
• Alternates for -1 Attribute: Astrologer, Vagabond, Samurai

Keepsake
Whatever you like. Nothing is particularly necessary as you can acquire it all in other ways. So grab whatever makes the early game easier for you.
• Golden Seed: Immediately get 1 extra flask use.
• Stonesword Key: One less Stonesword key to find.
• Cracked Pot is good for those who know how to manage pots.
• Fanged Imps is fine, whatever.

Need a map? I recommend Map Genie[mapgenie.io].

Build-Specific Rewards
• Dark Moon Greatsword
• Magic Scorpion Talisman (Missable!)
• Sorcery: Ranni’s Dark Moon (incidental, accessible only by progressing this questline)

Because the Magic Scorpion Charm can be missable as a result of progressing Ranni’s questline too far, this will also be a walkthrough for Seluvis’ questline.

Limgrave
• Optional: Meet Renna at the Church of Elleh (at night) after acquiring Torrent.

Liurnia of the Lake
• Progress through Caria Manor to access this the Three Sisters region. On the way you’ll fight Loretta and receive a very useful sorcery. (pictured)
• Find Ranni in Ranni’s Rise. She won’t be available if the Radahn Festival is currently active.
• Ranni will have you speak to the three people in her service. Go downstairs and fully exhaust all of their dialogue before returning to Ranni.

Siofra River
• Siofra is accessible from an elevator in the Mistwood region of Limgrave. It’s an obvious building on the map right next to the minor erdtree.
• Find Blaidd who will suggest you talk with Seluvis. (pictured)
• This step will start the Radahn Festival in Redmane Castle in Caelid.

– – – – – Seluvis Questline

Liurnia of the Lakes
• Speak with Seluvis in his tower. He’ll suggest you talk with Sellen.
• Seluvis will have a task for you. He’ll give you Seluvis’ potion with instructions to give it to Nepheli Loux. You don’t have to do that though.

Various Options
• Give potion to Gideon Ofnir: Fastest, no reward option. He’s in Roundtable Hold.
• Give potion to Nepheli Loux: Dire implications for Nepheli. Makes her spirit ash available (mutually exclusive with Dung Eater’s spirit ash)
• Give potion to Dung Eater: Lot of work and requires a lengthy excursion to Leyndell Royal Capital and its Catacombs. Makes his spirit ash available (mutually exclusive with Nepheli Loux’s spirit ash)

Liurnia of the Lakes
• Locate Seluvis’ hidden chambers. Interact with his special message there and bring down the illusory wall. (pictured)
• Return to Seluvis in his tower. Buy a puppet spirit ash, then buy a second puppet. This will cost starlight shards which you can find next to Stone Astrolabes throughout the world.
• Seluvis will send you to gather the Amber Starlight Shard.

Atlus Plateau
• Collect the Amber Starlight Shard.

Liurnia of the Lakes
• Bring the Amber Starlight Shard to Seluvis in his tower. You’ll be rewarded with the Magic Scorpion Charm! Hooray!
• Seluvis will give you the Amber Draught to administer to Ranni. DO NOT DO THIS. I mean, you can if you want. It’ll fail, piss Ranni off, and then you’ll need to go absolve your sins with Celestial Dew. It’s a whole thing with no benefit.

– – – – –

Limgrave (probably optional)
• Speak with Sellen. She has her own questline you may be interested in following, but for Ranni’s quest she’ll direct you to slay Radahn.
• Cross-Quest: Complete Alexander’s questline to the point before you fight Radahn.

Caelid
• Defeat Starscourge Radahn. You can access him from Redmane Castle in Caelid once the Radahn Festival is active, which should be active already from interacting with Blaidd in Siofra River. It can also become active by you entering Atlus Plateau.

Limgrave
• Enter the crater into Nokron.

Nokron, Eternal City
• Progress through this lengthy zone and acquire the Fingerslayer Blade

If you give the Fingerslayer Blade to Ranni, Seluvis will become inaccessible and you won’t be able to acquire the Magic Scorpion Charm! It is a core talisman of your build, so don’t ♥♥♥♥ this up. If you haven’t completed the Seluvis portion above, you need to do so now.

Liurnia of the Lakes
• Give Ranni the Fingerslayer Blade. She’ll leave.
• Iji can tell you where Ranni has gone. (probably optional)
• Go to the now accessible Renna’s Rise. You’ll find the Snow Witch Set and a Ranni doll.
• Take the portal.

Ainsel River
• Rest at the site of grace and talk with the Ranni doll multiple times until she gives you a new task.
• Seek out and slay the Baleful Shadow for a Discarded Palace Key.
• You should be near the Lake of Rot. Go find a site of grace so you can get back here.

Raya Lucaria
• If you haven’t completed Raya Lucaria, you will need to do so.
• Loot the chest in the final boss room to get the Dark Moon Ring.

Lake of Rot
• Go to the end of the Lake of Rot. You’ll find a coffin in the Grand Cloister. Take it.

Special Location
• Defeat Astel, Naturalborn of the Void
• Exiting this arena (out the other side) will bring you to the Moonlight Altar, a special sub-region of the Liurnia of the Lakes.

Moonlight Altar
• Go to the Cathedral of Manus Celes. I recommend you collect the 11 Starlight shards around here.
• Go down the hole.
• Interact with the doll. You will receive the Dark Moon Greatsword!

• Go check out Chelona’s Rise in the SW of this region. There’s turtle search that will reward you with the sorcery Ranni’s Dark Moon which is also part of your build. You cannot teleport around to collect them all. You HAVE to physically run/ride to each turtle. (puzzle answer pictured)

Need a map? I recommend Map Genie[mapgenie.io].

Build-Specific Rewards
• Shard of Alexander (MISSABLE!)

This quest will fail you kill Alexander before the end of his questline.

Limgrave
• Find Alexander in Northern Stormhill and rescue him from his predicament.

Caelid
• Optional: Chat with Alexander at the Gael Tunnel
• Start the Radahn Festival. Either enter Atlus Plateau for the first time or progress through Ranni’s questline to the point you discuss Radahn with Blaidd in the Siofra River.
• Defeat Starscourge Radahn, summon Alexander during the fight.
• Reload area, talk with Alexander in the Radahn arena.

Siofra River
• Buy the Nomadic Warrior’s Cookbook [17] from the Abandoned Merchant.

Liurnia of the Lakes
• Find Alexander south of Carian Study Hall and rescue him from his predicament. This will require an Oil Pot, which you can craft after buying the Nomadic Warrior’s Cookbook [17].

Mt. Gelmir
• Find Alexander in the lava field on Mt. Gelmir.

Bonus help you to Azur.

Mountaintops of the Giants
• Defeat the Fire Giant to access the Crumbling Farum Azula. You can optionally summon Alexander.

Crumbling Farum Azula
• Find Alexander and complete his quest.
• You will recieve the Shard of Alexander.