Best Curved Sword Builds in Elden Ring

Curved swords face a lot of stellar competition in Elden Ring, particularly since many of their best options are just drops from regular enemies. That said, curved swords feature fairly unique attack patterns that set them apart from other weapons. Many of their best builds capitalize on this to great effect. Let’s take a look!

Bandit’s Curved Sword Bleed

This build utilizes two dual-wielded Bandit’s Curved Swords with blood affinity to rack up tremendous bleed damage. Bandit’s Curved Swords are a great choice because they have considerably higher base damage than most curved swords, but still offer phenomenal scaling with dexterity

You’ll want to level arcane up to 40 or 50 as your main damage stat. This actually allows the Bandit’s Curved Sword to deal more damage with a bleed setup than the Scavenger’s Curved Sword, which starts with bleed damage even without adding blood affinity. After that, add dexterity once you’re happy with your defensive stats and bleed buildup.

Since some bosses are immune to bleed, you might want to swap to occult affinity to deal with them.

Beastman’s Curved Sword Bleed

Are you noticing a pattern here? Bleed is incredibly powerful in Elden Ring and curved swords are a terrific weapon for bleed damage. This is because their dual-wielded jumping and running attacks deal a whopping four hits at once, allowing them to trigger bleed almost instantly.

The Beastman’s Curved Sword is interesting in that it mainly scales with strength, unlike the vast majority of curved swords. This allows you to run a strength-focused bleed build that performs almost exactly as well as the dex-focused builds that you’d typically see.

Along with your defensive stats, level arcane and strength with a focus on the former for more bleed damage and more points in the latter for raw attack damage. If you’re fighting a bleed-immune boss, you can swap to a heavy affinity and scale your damage entirely with strength.

Bandit’s Curved Sword Quality

If you’re averse to practically cheesing bosses with bleed or simply want a build that never struggles with bleed-immune bosses, you can slap a quality affinity on dual-wielded Bandit’s Curved Swords and deal pretty impressive damage with strength and dexterity.

While this won’t deal the absurd damage that you’d get with bleed, it’s a fair bit more powerful against bleed-immune bosses and maintains the fast-paced gameplay that you’ll get with any curved sword build.

Many curved swords work fairly well with a quality affinity setup, but the Bandit’s Curved Sword stands out by still reaching B/B strength/dexterity scaling and having a bit more base damage on top of that.

So What Are the Best Curved Sword Builds?

Realistically, most physical curved swords can work fairly well with raw damage builds or especially bleed builds so long as you’re paying attention to what stats they scale best with. Curved swords are also best when dual-wielded, as they have fast, hard-hitting attacks when used this way.

That said, the Bandit’s Curved Sword stands out for dexterity-oriented builds and the Beastman’s Curved Sword has the best strength scaling of any curved sword. Both also work terrifically in bleed setups with more points in arcane, reaching about 115 bleed buildup at high arcane investment.

We hope that helps give you ideas about how to build a character with curved swords!