Elden Ring Nightreign Best Weapon Tier List

Which is the best weapon for each Nightfrarer/character, and how do the scalings and stats work on weapons in Elden Ring Nightreign? Read our Elden Ring Nightreign Best Weapon Tier List, you will find out the answer!

Elden Ring Nightreign Best Weapons Guide

With Nightreign now out for a couple of days, players have been diving in further and deeper into the game. While some people are still looking for their first win on the first Nightlord, others have multiple Night Lords down. Aside from just people having more experience with this style of game, or of course, skill differences, there's also a ton of RNG in the game on what you actually get. But one of the most important factors to success is an understanding of the character that you choose to play and the weapons that you choose to wield. Because some parts of the weapons are simple, and some parts are very much not obvious unless you dive into stuff like the visual codecs in the round table hold. And even then, there's some funkiness going on on top of that.  

So today we're going to go over the concept of what the best weapons can be in the game. We'll talk more specifically about the best sort of options for each character and what to look for on the different nightfares. And then we'll also be talking about how to maximize your chances of finding these higher-tier weapons and making them stronger while on a run.

Elden Ring Nightreign Best Weapon Tier List

First of all, we would like to rank the best weapons available in the Elden Ring Nightreign early game now, after the 1.01.1 patch:

1. Axe of Godfrey (S-Tier)

Type: Colossal Weapon

Best For: Raider

The big one is, of course, the legendary colossal weapon, the Axe of Godfrey, which is sort of insane in Night Reign, honestly. The passive effect of this gives you a buff when you do a charged heavy attack. This buff is just a 20% attack power increase to your character as a whole for around 15 seconds afterwards, including the damage to the charge attack itself. The weapon skill is both damage and a roar, and the roar applies a self-attack buff and changes the strong attack animations. But, funnily enough, for Raider specifically, the animations after the roar are actually weaker than his normal charge strong attack animations because of his preferred unique move set.

2. Marais Executioner's Blade (S-Tier)

Type: Greatsword

Best For: Wilder

A really solid option is the Marais Executioner’s Blade, especially as this has B strength scaling, C dexterity scaling, and also B arcane scaling, which is an incredible match with Wilder’s stats. Not only does the weapon skill do good damage, but it also has a relatively low FP cost.

3. Rivers of Blood (S-Tier)

Type: Katana

Best For: Executor, Ironeye

Rivers of Blood is even better than it is on the Iron Eye because of Executors having Katana as his preferred weapon type. It has great scaling and bleed buildup application, which is strong, and a really solid weapon skill. It’s one of the best dex/arcane weapons in the game.

4. Glintstone Kris (A-Tier)

Type: Dagger

Best For: Duchess

These are Glintstone Kris, which is actually quite exceptional for the Duchess, specifically being a dex and int scaling dagger, which is her preferred weapon type, and having a relatively strong weapon skill on top of that, too.

5. Mohgwyn’s Sacred Spear (A-Tier)

Type: Great Spear

Best For: Guardian

Mohgwyn’s Sacred Spear has decent scaling as well as having bleed status buildup, which you can apply from behind your shield. So, that makes it awesome for Guardian.

6. Eleonora’s Poleblade (A-Tier)

Type: Twinblade

Best For: Executor, Ironeye

Especially Eleonora’s Poleblade, which has great scaling and bleed buildup application, but also just has really solid weapon skills available, too.

7. Dark Moon Greatsword (A-Tier)

Type: Greatsword (Magic)

Best For: Wilder

Some other great options are Dark Moon Greatsword, if you find it, especially as this applies a magic damage negation debuff, which can boost the damage of your teammates as well.

8. Antspur Rapier (B-Tier)

Type: Thrusting Sword

Best For: Ironeye, Executor

Even something like the Antspur Rapier for rot buildup on a dex-scaling weapon is awesome, too. It’s a great synergy pick for arcane/dex builds like Iron Eye or Executor.

9. Blasphemous Blade (B-Tier)

Type: Greatsword

Best For: Wilder

Blasphemous Blade is a classically very strong weapon that matches Wilder's scaling and is a solid option across many situations.

10. Serpent-Hunter (B-Tier)

Type: Great Spear

Best For: Guardian

Serpent Hunter is great for Guardian for just massive physical damage. It fits well into his preferred tank playstyle and works with spear-based movesets.

11. Bloody Helice (B-Tier)

Type: Heavy Thrusting Sword

Best For: Executor, Ironeye

Bloody Helice is also quite good generally, but the skill isn't fantastic on it. Still, it’s a solid dex/arcane weapon, especially for Executor or Iron Eye.

12. Bastard Stars (C-Tier)

Type: Flail

Best For: Duchess

Bastard Stars is a very solid flail if you are into that too, especially as the passive it has in this game makes it create extra explosive pops on hit sometimes, which actually adds up quite a lot of damage once it adds up.

13. Coded Sword (C-Tier)

Type: Faith-Based Melee

Best For: Revenant, Recluse

You're just hoping to luck out and find specific things like the Coded Sword, which is an S faith scaling shortsword, a rare but good melee option for spellcasters like Revenant or Recluse.

14. Cipher Pata (C-Tier)

Type: Faith-Based Melee

Best For: Revenant, Recluse

The Cipher Pata, which is another S-scaling extended range fist weapon, just has generally higher attack power than your starting weapon option and fits both Revenant and Recluse well.

15. Ornamental Straight Swords (C-Tier)

Type: Straight Sword

Best For: Wilder

Ornamental Straight Swords are really really strong for Wilder, in my opinion, because when you activate the skill and then get the super strong charged heavy attack as well, that can do nearly 1.200 damage at level 10 in a single use with nothing else boosting it. Not even things like charged attack boosters, and that is sort of nuts compared to what a lot of the damage is in Night Rain.

16. Starting Fist Weapon (Revenant) (C-Tier)

Type: Varies per character

Best For: All

Specifically, these are her own starting weapon, which is a fist weapon with S faith scaling and extended range compared to most fist weapons. It's really actually quite a solid weapon, especially if you build some upgrades onto starting weapon as part of your relic setup for the character.

How Weapon Scaling & Stats Work in Elden Ring Nightreign?

As you see, damage numbers and scalings are a lot more streamlined in this game compared to the previous From Software titles. If you do pick up multiple weapons in the same category and one has a higher damage number, in almost all cases, it's just the direct upgrade. It's not like the attack rating stats in Elden Ring, where the higher number doesn't necessarily mean more damage. In this game, it pretty much does mean more damage.

Now, despite how simple that sounds, there still is a benefit to understanding how the weapons do work because you do want to know what you're typically looking out for for not only for you, but your teammates, too. And also, some weapons out there don't really scale off what you think.

Now, similar to Elden Ring, the concept of weapons having letter scalings and just having your stats determine the damage is still there, but in fusions work differently, and every weapon does have different damage and scalings compared to Elden Ring. Like the dark moon greats sword, for instance, that has a B scaling in intelligence and a D scaling in strength when it comes to elder rin,g but in nightreign it gets a C scaling in intelligence and a B scaling in strength.

Now, if you do want to know all the scalings of the weapons, you can just check that out in the sparring grounds, and you can just check the character scalings in the visual codeex.

But just to summarize the whole scaling situation, all physical damaging weapons inside their own category get the exact same scalings, and all weapon types are balanced around this. There are some outliers, but I can talk about those later as well.

So, for instance, if something gets an S scaling in dexterity, it would get an A scaling in strength and vice versa. If something gets an A scaling in one stat, it's going to get a D scaling in the other. If one gets a B scaling, then the other one's going to end up getting a C scaling.

Now, two weapon types don't follow this trend and actually get a B scaling in both dexterity and strength, and that's the straight swords and the curved great swords. So, these are pretty much good to use for no matter what character.

Best Weapons by Stat Scaling

With the above scaling explained, here we suggest the general weapon options based on stat scaling:

• Strength Builds: Great hammers, great axes, colossal weapons.

• Dexterity Builds: Daggers, katanas, bows, curved swords, whips, claws.

• Quality (Str + Dex): Greatswords, halberds, great spears, fists.

• Faith/Int Builds: Use staves for sorceries (Int) and seals for incantations (Faith). Melee weapons rarely scale well here.

• Arcane Builds: Look for weapons with status buildup (bleed, rot, poison, frost), which scale with arcane.

How to Get the Best Weapons in Elden Ring Nightreign?

To wrap up the guide, we want to talk about how to actually get all of the best weapons on a more consistent basis. Obviously, at the end of the day, this game is heavily based on RNG. And if you get bad rolls, bad randomness, then you will have a tough time. Simple as that. But if you have the knowledge about where good weapons come from or even how to make a weapon better yourself in the middle of a run, then you can put yourself into a position to have a higher chance of just better results in general.

1. Leveling Up

That said, generally speaking, higher quality loot has a higher chance of showing up the higher level that you are personally. So, the first thing is to level up. Aside from that, higher-quality rewards come from more difficult bosses. And generally, you want to avoid those right at the start of a run. What I mean is that power is a sort of snowball effect in Night Reign. The faster you can be strong enough to kill a difficult boss, the quicker you will get the power from that hard boss. And the faster that you can do that encounter, the more of these harder bosses you can kill in a single run, which gives you the highest chances at the best stuff dropping.

2. Using the Map to Plan Your Route

The specific bosses that you want to really make sure that you pick on and pick up are all the bosses that are marked by skulls once you walk past them on the map, when you have a look here. And these also get marked on the second day. These tend to be quite big boys, but then also, of course, most every location on the map does have a boss inside of it, too.

A big part of this is knowing what type of weapons you're hunting for. But the map actually has a fair amount of details that can help you plan what you want to do. Generally speaking, all enemies in the game, the way that they work, will drop items that are somewhat relevant to them. If you kill a big fire monk-based boss, you're probably going to get a big fiery weapon as a reward as well. If you know the Night Lord is weak to fire, you want to look for a fire weapon as a result. And to do so, you can just look for the fire element symbol in areas on the map.

For example, on this first one, the Night Lord is weak to holy. So, if we look at our map here, you'll see that this camp here gives you holy damaged items. As well, it has a chance of dropping bows.

If you look at the details screen, if you're playing Iron Eye and want a bow, that means camps that have the bow symbol are probably places you want to visit. Similarly, for the places with the seal and staff symbols for when you're playing Recklus or Revenants or I guess if you just want to have spells as utility in general. So this is how you use the map to plan your route based on what things are when you load in.

3. Merchants and Weapon Loot

The other main things that you can do are to check in with merchants. You can also see the merchant symbol when looking at map details to know if there are merchants around different points of interest, and generally, where they are.

But merchants often have a few weapons within their stock, including some purple rarity options to choose from. This one right here that I'm using as an example has a purple rarity weapon that I'm going to be recommending highly for one of the characters. So, that's just an example of the fact that merchants can have very good things as well.

4. Upgrading Weapons with Smithing Stones

The last thing that I want to talk about in this section is how to make weapons better that otherwise might not be that great. And the main method of this is smithing stones. This is how you make your starting weapon stay competitive into the later sections of an expedition. And it's how you can make even the most common of weapons actually have really solid stats by the end.

A regular smithing stone, smithing stone one, can be found just generally through the world. Enemies can drop them, and they can be purchased from pretty much any merchant. This can be used to make a white quality weapon turn into a blue quality weapon.

Smitting stone 2 are specifically attached to the mine locations on your map which have the minehaft symbol. There are a couple of these generally. And if you go in here and go all the way to the bottom, you will find a troll enemy. Defeat the troll. And one of the options you'll be offered is a smithing stone 2. This is used to upgrade a blue rarity weapon into a purple rarity weapon.

So if you have a really solid blue weapon, this should be a high priority thing for you to do within your run.

Then the final stage of that is if you have the crater shifting earth event active, the big volcano in the center of the map, you can delve in through that. And then at the very end of the area is an anvil that you can use to upgrade one weapon to legendary quality, which is the highest quality you can get.

Generally speaking, Shifting Earth events are really high value regardless of which one it is, as they have lots of bosses and general enemies in a relatively densely packed area. This applies to all of the events like this in general, but the crater specifically is the one that can let you upgrade a weapon to legendary.