In Elden Ring, Hammer isn’t a popular weapon other than the fact that it deals strike damage for some PVE enemies, but honestly, it works plenty fine in PVE and even has its niche good points. While they’re not great at PVP, we also don't think they're entirely unusable in PVP. In this guide, we go over the different versions of Hammers and tell you which are the best Hammer Weapons to use in Elden Ring!
Elden Ring Hammer Weapon Range and Moveset
Let’s get started with the ranges of the hammers. One weapon we do want to highlight though is the Scepter of the All Knowing. Poor Gideon really got shafted here. This weapon’s hitbox is actually shorter than the weapon model itself, which is very rare.
Next, we should take a look at the different movesets of the hammers. The motion value, or damage %, of hammers, are quite similar, but there are small differences in the movesets. This is the normal light attack chain of hammers and this is the light attack chain of the club and stone club.
Elden Ring Hammer Weapon Tier List
With the movesets out of the way, let's take a look at the Attack Rating or AR of the weapons starting with the unique weapons and ranking them from the best to worst.
1. Nox Flowing Hammer
The Nox Flowing Hammer has surprisingly good AR with strength investment. But the main reason you would run this hammer would be its unique weapon art, Flowing Form. This unique weapon art greatly extends the range of the Nox Flowing Hammer, which is much needed being the shortest hammer. It makes this hammer one of the hammers with better area coverage.
2. Ringed Finger
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the longest hammer, the Ringed Finger. Its unique weapon art, Claw Flick, actually deals with quite decent poise damage in addition to damage. This skill isn’t fast and has an obvious startup, so it’s mostly a meme in PVP, but it can perform quite decently in PVE. However, it does have quite the long recovery frames too. Not super strong, but not completely weak either.
3. Scepter of the All Knowing
The Scepter with the shafted range. Thankfully, its unique weapon art, Knowledge Above All, has quite the long range. Here, it has the debuff decreases the magic and sacred resistance of everything (including you and your allies) by 10% for 30 seconds. It costs 35FP which is quite a bit, and the buff isn’t exactly powerful anyway. Plus, if your enemy deals either magic or sacred damage, it is also a detriment to you. The debuff is usable, but is it really worth it 4.5 weight and 35 FP per cast for an overall meh buff that might also work negatively? Remember it also takes time to cast, and you can do another buff or attack with that same time frame you use to cast this weapon art too.
Let’s say you could’ve cast another weapon art that deals 1500 damage like the moonveil or a wing of astel. This would mean that you would need to do 15k damage on the enemy to break even for the time used to debuff your enemy. The debuff also doesn’t deal any poise damage. It’s definitely possible to make use of this debuff on enemies with higher HP, but overall, unless you have enough burst damage, it’s not that great. Its AR is also quite low for its investment especially when it’s a split damage weapon. Not a weapon for the most part, but not entirely unusable.
4. Envoy's Horn
Envoy’s Horn is a Hammer you don’t really swing around. This weapon does indeed have quite the low AR. Even with 80 faith investment the bubbles
don’t do that much damage. Although, it does have ok tracking which can be quite hilarious for invasions when your opponent has no idea how to react. The sound this thing makes is also incredibly annoying, so even if you don’t defeat your enemies, at least you can made sure their ears suffered.
5. Marika's Hammer
Marika’s Hammer is not a faith weapon. It’s actually a quality weapon with a faith requirement. Despite having a D rating in dexterity and a C rating in faith, you actually get more AR from your dexterity than you do faith after hitting 20 faith. But what does that matter, Chrightt? Doesn’t the weapon art scale to faith? Well, yes and no. Marika’s Hammer is actually one of the easier weapon art to calculate. It simply follows the AR * MV rule for equal
amounts of physical and holy damage. It does not have any bullet art component. Basically, all you have to know right now is we want to do to maximize the weapon’s AR in order to get the most damage from its weapon art. So, despite a huge gold circle appearing, the majority of the damage done on an optimized Marika’s Hammer is mostly physical.
6. Varre's Bouquet
Varre’s Bouquet is one of the worst weapons in the entire game. You can tell the devs designed this weapon not with its practical usage in mind. You can still buff this weapon up with status greases and have the statuses scale to arcane, but you can do that with either of the ripple weapons too with much more AR. It also applies to the other status greases that are not blood, but I just want to say, you can check out my Halberd video for the
numbers on the Ripple Halberd as it is way better for practical usage.
7. Best Regular Hammers
Next, for the regular weapons, we have the Club, Stone Club, Curved Club, Mace, Spiked Club, Morning Star, Warpick which deals pure piercing damage rather than the regular strike damage of hammers, Hammer, and Monk’s Flamemace.
Heavy/Fire Hammers
Let’s start with the Heavy infusion. You can immediately see the Stone Club far outstrips the Club in terms of damage while sharing the same moveset. The warpick also has relatively low AR. For PVE people usually run hammers for the strike damage, and for PVP there are way better piercing weapons.
Fire infusion is basically the split attribute infusion of strength. This infusion tends to be better at lower strength levels and weaker than heavy at higher strength levels like 80. Other than this usual characteristic, nothing too special to point out for the fire infusion.
Best Keen/Lightning (and str vs dex) Hammers
comes the Keen infusion, which most hammers don’t prefer. There are some strength requirements that are not met in order for standardization, but it won’t negatively impact the AR. Just think of any requirements not met as extra cost you must meet, but in both stone club and hammer’s case you would typically just do strength if you want to run them.
And here we want to point out two pairs of weapons:
First, the Club and the Stone Club. Since the stone Club is also longer than the club, it is pretty much the superior version of the club. Let’s take the weight difference between the two weapons and divide that by 0.7 because we definitely want medium roll. That’s 5 weight of extra requirements from endurance we must meet which translates to around 4 or 5 endurance without Erdtree’s Favor or the Jar charms. If we take a look at their AR by subtracting 5 points from stoneclub’s investment to account for the extra weight, it’s very easy to see that the stone club is plainly superior.
The other pair is the curved hammer and the hammer. They share the same basic moveset and the hammer is also longer. Let’s do the same thing we did for the club and the stone club. We see that their weight difference accounts for around 2.14 weight for the medium roll which translates to 2 or 3 endurance points without the equip load charms.
Comparing the stat standardized AR we immediately see the Hammer is just the superior option. Even if we account for the higher strength requirements on both the better hammers, you will still find them more desirable for the other infusions at meta PVP levels or any higher level since you will have access to even more skill points.
For Keen infusion, Monk’s flamemace is pretty much the only hammer that scales better to dexterity.
Lightning infusion is like the dexterity counterpart of fire. For PVP, lightning defense is always the lowest, so this is often more desirable than fire. If you really want to play hammers with dexterity that isn’t Monk’s flamemace, we suggest using lightning infusion over Keen infusion as lightning would give you comparatively more effective damage.
Quality Hammers
This infusion is only useful for PVE at the endgame when you have more than enough points to spare. With 58 points in both strength and dexterity, which means more investment than either 80 strength or 80 dexterity, we are still mostly looking at weaker AR than either the Heavy or Keen infusion counterpart. For meta PVP levels, quality is simply not a good option.
Flame/Sacred/Magic Hammers
Sacred and Flame are two sides of the same coin when fully upgraded to +25. You’re only picking between the elements. You’ll be picking this infusion either because of your weapon art choice or because you want to mainhand a hammer for weapon art while offhanding a seal. Since hammers typically have a relatively low strength and dexterity requirement, this isn’t actually such a bad idea if you like hammers. In fact, it is especially good at the first soft cap mark where faith and intelligence scale weapons better. A quick comparison between Fire which has more stat investment than the Sacred version with 3 less stat point investment, we see that the sacred version actually has higher AR across the board. Furthermore, you gain the ability to off-hand a seal. Pretty much no downsides here. If we compare the sacred versions with the fire version at their 80 point level, we see that the fire gained more AR than the sacred which is to be expected due to the scaling curve. The effect is far less pronounced here.
For the magic infusion, you can basically translate everything we’ve just talked about in the flame and sacred version here, except you would be scaling to intelligence instead of faith. For magic though, it would be because you rarely swing around your weapon because otherwise the Cold infusion would typically serve you better if attacking with your weapon is a main source of damage.
For the cold infusion, there is a bunch of different scalings. The Club and the Stone Club prefer a high strength investment after 20 intelligence. With the same investment level, the Monk’s Flamemace prefers high dexterity investment after 20 intelligence. The warpick prefers an extremely weird distribution of strength, dexterity, and intelligence and still manages to produce a completely garbage AR. As for the rest of the hammers, they all like some strength and intelligence. Exact amounts may vary slightly according to the hammer, but this should give you a general idea.
For poison version, we’re going back to the five weapons for Heavy and Keen. The warpick, once again, scales really weirdly. Honestly, status infusions for hammers aren’t that great compared to other weapons because they don’t really have multi-hits and their attacks aren’t exactly really fast. Other weapons also have longer reach for PVP, making it easier to apply the status through enemy dodges at a longer distance. While the status infusions are still good, it is simply because the status effect themselves are good rather than the hammer offering anything for the status infusions.
Occult Hammers
As for occult hammers without any base status effect that scales to arcane, these are weaker than the Heavy or Keen counterpart. Your two considerations are the spiked club which has pretty decent scaling for occult and low strength requirements, or the Morningstar.
Summary of The Best Hammer Weapons in Elden Ring
Let’s do a quick summary starting with the two-strength-based unique hammers. Honestly, you’re going to be using them primarily because of their weapon art:
The Nox Flowing Hammer suits PVP a bit more while the Ringed Finger does decent damage and stagger damage in PvE.
As for Marika’s Hammer, it isn’t a faith weapon. It is quality weapon chosen for its weapon art.
The Envoy’s Horn doesn’t really deal great damage. This is probably best used for invasions with their oddly decent tracking to annoy inexperienced opponents.
Varre’s Bouquet can be buffed with status greases, but it has an extremely low AR. Either of the Ripple Weapons would be better
with the status greases.
Scepter of the All-Knowing is mainly used for weapon art which is kind of mediocre. It can indeed your overall damage on targets with high HP over the 30 seconds, but generally, not something you would really use for most
targets.
For the two clubs with the unique light attack moveset we’ve shown that the stone club is basically the superior version of the club and has quite high AR. For these Hammers, they all have a unique heavy attack or running/rolling attack.
The Monk’s flamemace is the only hammer that scales better to dexterity. The Spiked Club and Morning Star also have base bleed.
Warpick only deals piercing damage but has poor scaling and really poor AR. We don’t suggest using this because this is one of the worst if not the worst piercing weapons. You lose the hammers advantage of doing strike damage for PVE mobs like the Crystallians.
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