In this Elden Ring guide, we are going to show you the best bow build, this is a New Game Plus build that focuses exclusively on the use of a bow to take down enemies.
Elden Ring Best NG+ Black Bow Build Guide
In Elden Ring, people have been struggling to figure out how to use the bow to take down monsters, bosses, and enemies, and in this guide, we want to show you how it's perfectly viable to play using a bow in New Game Plus by going over the evolution of the bloody Bowman build. This black bow build has similar stats and uses similar equipment to the bloody bowman build, but it's sort of taking the next steps in the process in order to make it viable into NG plus, and by doing so like increasing the faith in order to use Golden VoW and Flame Grant Me Strength to further boost our attack power, and there are a number of things we've done here. You probably wouldn't have the attribute points for in a new game or maybe very close to the end of the game, but once you get an NG+, these things are almost a must in order to be competitive. So now let's dive into the setup of the powerful bow build in Elden Ring!
Weapon
Main Hand: Black Bow
How To Make This Build Work? Let's talk about the weapon, we're using we're using the blackbow here this is the same weapon we used in the bloody Bowman build. It is a really good bow and has very good damage. It operates like a short bow even though it's a long bow meaning you can jump and shoot roll, and shoot jump and shoot, and then shoot when you land. So it act the way a short bow does is very important for this build because it's a very mobile build and getting those shots off quickly as opposed to standing still pressing R1 are basically how you have to play a boat build in this game.
Barrage is absolutely fantastic at cranking out damage as well particularly from any distance well, not super long range but from medium to the short range you can crank out, even Point Blank this thing can crank out a lot of damage.
One of the problems with bow builds in Elden Ring is that bows in general have terrible scaling meaning that they are much better earlier on in the game when scaling doesn't play a big role, the upgrade of the weapon plays a more important factor earlier on in the game and scaling tends to come into effect later in the game. So when scaling comes into effect with bows in the later half of the game and you're not getting very much damage out of it, you start to struggle to kill enemies and we basically resolved that issue by taking Golden Vow and Flame Grant Me Strength, these two spells are going to increase your physical damage to the point where you're actually doing enough damage to kill stuff reliably, it's still going to take you a couple of arrows here and there. And it's not like you're going to One-Shot everything but it will make it so that you can reliably kill enemies.
Left Hand: Erdtree Seal or Frenzied Flame Seal
For your sacred seal, ideally, you'd use one that weighs zero such as the Erdtree Seal, in order to get the most from the Blue Dancer Charm here because that is going to lower your equip weight, and as your equip weight goes down you gain more and more attack power from that Talisman. If you don't have enough Faith here for the Erdtree Seal, the ideal one would be like the Frenzied Flame Seal or any seal that weighs zero.
Armor
Head: Black Knife Hood
Chest: Marais Robe
What you want to use for armor is something extremely lightweight because the Blue Dancer Charm has sort of soft cap break points at 8,16, 24, and then once you hit 30 you get no effect. That doesn't mean the damage difference from 8 to 8.1 is different you don't go from like 80 to 40 damage if you hit 8.1, it's sort of like a sliding scale, the more you get closer to 30 the less damage you deal. So it doesn't have to be exactly on the nose on these things but our advice is don't go much heavier than 16. If you go too much past 16, we don't feel like there's many benefits in using the Blue Dancer Charm, so you should either aim for about 16 weight or aim for about 8 weight in order to get 8 weight you basically can use the black bow, a Talisman that or a sacred seal that weighs nothing, and then your Talisman. So you'd wear no armor and you'd hit right around that 8 points, or you could throw on some one piece of armor that weighs like one or something to get some armor if you just want to wear something so you're covered, but you want to be close to that 8 breakpoint. Just keep in mind that it's sort of a sliding scale from zero all the way up to 30 and the closer you are to zero the more damage you're going to deal.
Talismans
Blue Dancer Charm - Combine the Golden Vow and Flame Grant Me Strength with the Blue Dancer Charm to get even more attack power
Old Lord's Talisman - To increase the duration of your spells: Golden Vow and Flame Grant Me Strength. The reason for that is that it can take longer with bows to kill things and you want you don't have to rebuff constantly in combat, Flame Grant Me Strength is not exactly the fastest cast nor is Golden Vow, so this talisman gives you time in your boss fights a little extended time to fight things. You'll probably have to rebuff with Flame Grant Me Strength once in a boss fight that's not usually too difficult to do but if it's something you've got to do regularly and then rebuffs with Golden Vow then rebuff with it, you're taking too long. So the Old Lord's Talisman will make these more effective, you don't have a ton of FP with this build either because of the way the stat spread is, so this will sort of alleviate some of that by making these Buffs last longer.
Arrow's Sting Talisman - To further increase the attack power of our Arrows by 10%
Shard of Alexander - To increase the ability barrage by 15%.
Ritual Sword Talisman - You can swap out Shard of Alexander depending on what you're doing, like you could put in Ritual Sword Talisman if you just want overall more damage for everything including regular attacks, but keep in mind you'll have to keep your health at 100 which can be kind of difficult to do with a bow build it sometimes.
Spear Talisman - Or you can put on the Spear Talisman if you find that better that's going to increase your damage if you hit enemies with arrows when and they're like in their forward attack animation, which tends to happen a lot with this build because you tend to have to bait enemies into attacking you, sometimes particularly ones that have a shield, so you can get good damage out of that as well.
Incantations
Golden VoW - To give you more defenses
Flame, Grant Me Strength - To boost your attack power with Old Lord's Talisman, and this should last roughly around 40 seconds, which isn't going to last the whole length of a lot of difficult fights but it should be like three-quarters of the length or maybe half, so you'll probably have to rebuff with this once but Golden Vow should get you all the way through the fight.
Blackbow Attributes
Vigor: 50
Mind: 18
Endurance: 25
Strength: 45
Dexterity: 45
Intelligence: 16
Faith: 25
Arcane: 9
50 Vigor is there to keep you alive because you're wearing almost no armor, you're going to need to take this up to 60 at some point throughout NG Plus or you're going to get one shot by certain bosses, so make sure you get that up to 60 when you can.
18 Mind is actually a little lower, so you're going to want to increase this probably up to 25. Golden VoW takes up a lot of FP and you need to keep that up constantly with this build in order to keep your damage high, so managing that is really where your FP cost is coming from you probably won't use Flame Grant Me Strength all the time and Barrage uses almost no FP, so you probably want to get this up to 25, 30 would be better but you can take it up to 25 and then you know do other stats and come back to 30 later if you're fine
25 Endurance is probably right on the edge of what we want for this build. If you're using Barrage, you are just tearing through stamina getting up to 30 would probably be better
Strength and Dexterity are your two damage-dealing stats here and we have them at 45 here mostly to give you more points for other stuff, you can take these up to 50 if you want, but really you're not getting too much more damage out of these this build, at this point probably the last thing you want to do is increase strength and dexterity when you've got everything else where you want it because it's such a minimal amount of damage that it increases per point that you're going to get more benefit out of like mind or endurance. So the last thing you want to do you probably get lined up to 25 bigger up to 60 endurance up to like 30 or 35 and then you just crank dexterity and strength as far out as you want to go in order to keep increasing your damage.
We don't need to take Faith any higher than 25 here because we're using Golden VoW and Flame Grant Me Strength that's all we want it for, so there's really no reason to increase Faith, so all you really need to do is get those things to where this set and you're good to go.
Flask of Wonders Physick
Greenburst Crystal Tear - Increases your stamina recovery
Greenspill Crystal Tear - Increases your stamina
In boss fights, you're usually using barrage a lot getting that extra stamina can help alleviate and allow you to use barrage continuously, and getting that stamina recovery will make your stamina come back faster, so this works really well adding dexterity or strength to get damage
Great Runes
Radahn's Great Rune
Additionally, if you're looking at what runes were used for this build, Radahn's Great Rune is not a bad choice, you really don't need too many more attribute points but once you get to those breakpoints that we mentioned, so it's not going to benefit you a ton but Radahn's Great Rune gives you more FP, more stamina and more Health.
Blackbow Build Gameplay Tips
Couple of tips before we wrap up this guide:
Use Regular Arrows, Not Need Use Bleed Arrows
If you saw the bloody Bowman build, you should know that the focus of that build was using things like bleeding arrows in order to help set Hemorrhage on enemies that had large Health pools, so you're plinking away at them with the arrows but you're really getting these big chunks ripped off when they would. When you trigger Hemorrhage and that was the way to sort of offset the low damage of the bow. But with this build, you can use a lot of regular arrows in the boss fighting because you don't really need bleed arrows for this build, and there are scenarios where that'll make things easier, but they are still effective.
Get the Bonus from Golden Vow & Flame, Grant Me Strength Skill
The bonus with Golden Vow and Flame, Grant Me Strength really increases the damage of this build with Blue Dancer Charm to the point that just hitting repeatedly you'll eventually kill targets, now you obviously have to have a lot of arrows in order to play a bow build. Probably the most frustrating part of playing a bow build is managing your arrows so that's still a thing in this build, but because you can use trash arrows so often it's going to make it a lot easier to manage because you can just go buy them in bulk and you'll have plenty of Elden Ring runes in New Game Plus in order to do that right away.
Buy Different Arrow Types from Vendors
There are a couple of good things to do before you go to NG plus if you're going to play bow build and that goes buy as many of all the different Arrow types as you can like you can buy magic arrows, bully arrows, and fire arrows, etc. and that way they'll hold you over until you reach those vendors again a new game plus. There are enemies in the game that are just weak to certain damage types like fire and pierce damage, this will allow you to use some of those arrows as you make your way through the game and to those vendors and they generally deal more damage than the regular arrows. Don't use them all the time, but definitely use them when you need them.
Defeat Bell Bearing Hunter for Bones (Arrow Craft Materials)
Another couple of things you should do before you go to New Game Plus is make sure that you've defeated the Bell Bearing Hunter at least once turned in his Bell in Roundtable hold and bought a bunch of thin bones, this will prevent you from having to go farm animals for bones you can just stock up on them, that way you can craft whatever arrows you need during an NG+ without having to farm animals.
Buy Bloodroses (Arrow Craft Materials)
Then also you can buy Bloodroses from the Imprisoned Merchant, you can just stock up on these so you don't have to farm these either. So if you want to make blood arrows you have the bones and you have the blood roses. Buy these items from the vendor will give you the tools that you need when you get to New Game Plus that you can go straight into NG+ and just start completing the content and not have to like farm arrows right away as you did at the beginning of the game if you were playing a bow build.
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