Elden Ring 1.07 Frost Lightning Build Guide: Weapon, Stats, Spells, Incanations & Gameplay Tips

In this Elden Ring Frost Lightning Guide, we break down the difficulties of mixing Frost and Lighting, and make it the perfect antithesis of blood flame!

Difficulties of Mixing Frost and Lightning in One Build

Frozen Lightning Build, what do you think of when we say this? Probably one of these three things: Dragonscale Blade, Frozen Light Spear, and Dragon Halberd, as there are only three weapons or spells that apply Frost while doing lightning damage in Elden Ring. But if you think a bit harder outside of these three specifics, you'll realize just how difficult it is to combine lightning with frost to make a coherent build without just utilizing one of the two dragon-scale weapons and calling it a day.

1. Dragonscale Blade & Dragon Halberd

Let's first take a look at these two dragon weapons. The 1.07 buff on their weapon arts is quite significant, they now receive 160 lightning damage plus 80 Frost status damage for 45 seconds when they use their respective weapon arts. Building a build for either of these is not that difficult. 

Stats Required for Ice Lightning Build with One-Handed Weapon

If you consider them an ice lightning build, these are their one-handed optimized stats for their respective weapons. 

Stats Required for Ice Lightning Build with Two-Handed Weapon

As they are unique weapons that scale off strength and dexterity that is all you need to do to get the highest AR on the respective weapons, and if you're going to two-hand them, these are their optimized stats.

2. Problem: Buff Does Not Scale and Invest In Str/Dex

Their weapon Buffs do not scale to strengthen dexterity, so you don't need to invest into anything else to make them work. Nothing fancy, but what if we wanted to combine it with the frozen lightning spear, now that's much more difficult as you need at least 34 points into Faith to get the Frozen Lighting Spear incantation. There are also no great options to easily get a decent amount of incantation scaling while investing into strength or dexterity. 

While the dragon scale blade leans more towards a dexterity scaling weapon so you don't waste the dexterity investment, as it gives the incantation cast speed. You will still have a relatively low incantation scaling.

Hybrid builds are always that hungry too and holding one single Katana really isn't the best weapon option when the weapon Arts is locked into the ice lightning sword. A move that won't really land in PvP and isn't all that great in PVE outside above.

How about the other sources of frost and lightning? Let's take a look:

Lightning Infusion / Ashes = Dex

Lightning Incantations = Faith

Cold Infusion = Str/Dex/Int

Cold Ashes = Dex/Int

Sorcery = Int

Lightning infusion and Ash's scale to dexterity, but the lightning incantations scale to faith, cold infusion depends on the weapon but it will scale to shrink dexterity and intelligence, cold bullet arts scale to dexterity and intelligence, sorceries that apply Frost scale to intelligence. 

Now that's quite a big pickle, isn't it? If we want to use lightening incantations, we need Faith investments anything that applies for us other than the three innately ice lightning items requires intelligence investment, it is impossible to run a lightning weapon art on a cold infusion weapon, nor can you run a code weapon art on a lightning infusion weapon. So what do we do?

How To Make A Frost Lightning Build in Elden Ring?

Then how could we break down the stats issue and combine the Frost with Lightning in one build? Here we give you some solutions:

Weapon

Build 1 - Golden Order Seal (Frozen Lighting Spear) + Dark Moon Greatsword

What if we just embraced both Intelligence and Faith for incantations with a Golden Order Seal, so that we can run the frozen lightning spear? After all, this is one of the best hybrid scaling catalysts because cold infusion often gets its AR from strength and dexterity, we can use a unique weapon that has good intelligence Investments and frost buildup instead, and that is why we are going to run the Dark Moon Greatsword - hitting 50 intelligence would hit the soft cap, tapping into the magic, scaling curve really hard, while also providing Golden Order Seal with the 45 intelligent soft cap. 

Build 2 - Adula's Moonblade + Gelmir Glintstone Staff

As a bonus or alternative, you can also run Adula's Moonblade with the Gelmir Glintstone Staff, which is our best option around our given level of stat investment. By investing in intelligence and faith, we are able to run the lightning incantations. Aside from the buff ones, you can take your pick but we suggest having at least frozen lightning spear for the theme and a lightning spear for the quick punish. 

Character Stats

This will be our stat distribution:

Level 150

Vigor: 58

Mind: 21

Endurance: 18

Strength: 16

Dexterity: 13

Intelligence: 50

Faith: 46

Arcane: 7

We are running 46 Faith because we chose to use Fortissax's Lightning Spear for one of our incantations which requires 46 Faith. Both our catalysts are on our offhand as we do want to apply Dark Moon Greatswords weapon arts above. You can forego the Gelmir Glintstone Staff if you don't want to run Adula's Moonblade or any other Frost sorceries.

It is an interesting mix in the toolkit, but having to deal with sorceries and incantations on the same scroll wheel while having to change catalysts on a single hand is allowed to handle.

Main Armor

Snow Witch's Hat

The Snow Witch's hat buffs Frost sorceries by 10%, 81 points breakpoints is enough. The only bad parts about the snow witch hat is the Darkmoon Greatsword clips through it.

Spells & Incantations

As mentioned before we're hitting 50 intelligence for the Dark Moon Greatsword, these are the spells and incantations we are running:

Spells: Adula's Moonblade

Incantations: Lightning Spear, Frozen Lightning Spear, Fortissax's Lightning Spear

Once again mixing sorceries with incantations requires a lot of practice and patience, so if you don't want to run the dealers we drop it.

Gameplay Tips

This build leans on the slow side of things, your fastest incantation is sliding Spear and you're using a great sword as a main weapon, it definitely has a tougher time against opponents good at dodging. 

That's all of our Ice Lightning Build guide. Frost lightning is the perfect antithesis of blood flame, the white-blue lightning effect looked so elegant, it should have been a hard faith/int build and the weapons should have followed. So really hope we get more frost lightning spells or weapons in DLC.