In this guide, we dive into the Red Lightning Build in Elden Ring 1.08 patch, which focuses on the use of Dragon Cold incantations and their lightning aspect, you can also play this build in your first playthrough but it'll take you a while to gather all the needed items for this, so you won't be able to play the majority of the game with this.

Elden Ring 1.08 Best Faith Build - Red Lightning One-Shot NG+ Build Guide

Now let's dive into how to build a red lightning faith build at 150+ level that focuses on raining down lightning strikes on your enemies:

Weapons

• Right Hand: Erdtree Seal

• Left Hand: Gravel Stone Seal

The Gravel Stone Seal buffs your Dragon Cold incantations as long as you're holding it, but its scaling is not as good as the Erdtree Seal, so by holding it in the left hand and casting spells in our right hand, we're going to get far better incantation scaling with the Erdtree Seal but still get extra damage from the Gravel Stone Seal. Now if you make it an NG+ build and you make it far enough that you can get a second Gravel Stone seal, we would recommend swapping the Erdtree Seal out for that upgrading that one. Casting with that one in your right hand and then holding the other Gravel Stone Seal on your other hand, will actually provide you more damage than if you're using the Erdtree Seal, so this is not a bad way to go.

If you are playing on your first playthrough and you're putting this build together as you go that you don't want to use the Erdtree Seal until you have over about 60 Faith or so, so if you pick up the Erdtree Seal and you also have the Gravel Stone Seal and you're not sure which to use, if you don't have at least 60 Faith or so you're going to be using the Gravel Stone Seal.

Spells & Gameplay

Golden VoW - this is a spell that increases your damage and reduces the damage you take. We use this situationally mostly for boss fights, and don't use this really while you are out on the landscape because our damage is good enough the way it is. But if you need a little extra damage, you can use this and buff yourself. 

• Lightning Strike - Get this spell as you play through naturally lightning strike is found in the Weeping Peninsula, so it's very early in the game and this is your bread and butter spell with this build, this is going to be the spell that you kill a lot of the vast majority of the enemies with. Why it's so deadly is that it has very good damage and it hits in a line sort of a zigzag line in front of you in a modest line, so it can hit multiple enemies at the same time. But what's really good about it is that once you get that first cast off if you hit R1 again, you can cast it again rapidly. Keep pressing R1, this allows you to just shell out a lot of damage really quickly and allows you to like burst down a very difficult enemy or boss fast. What's more, you can use it on Horseback, and not only that but it will go in the direction of the lock on target no matter which direction you're facing, which is extremely useful if you have an aggressive enemy coming at you.

• Lightning Spear - It's a staple of any lightning build and a lot of incantation builds in general just because it's very effective you can charge it for extra damage, and this is really good for just picking off single targets or finishing off a Target that needs to be hit quickly. This is your fast casting spell, lightning strike takes a second for that first cast and then you can chain it quickly, that first cast is very slow, so Lightning Spear is your alternative when you need to get a fast cast off to finish something off that's about to die or you just don't have the spacing or time to use lightning strike. And something that's really interesting about this spell as well is that it's actually only one FP less than lightning strike, so it's not going to save you that much more FP to use this spell, so really you want to use this spell when you just can't use lightning strike.

• Lansseax's Glavie - This is the red lightning spell that sort of makes you rise up into a slash animation hitting for decent damage if you hit with a slash,  but then it sort of fans out in an AOE behind it hitting enemies for Less damage. So we really use this spell in two situations, first is when there's like a large number of enemies in front of us, this is a good way to AOE them all down; or if you have like a fast-moving target that you just can't seem to hit with a lightning strike or with a lightning spear, this is a good way to just hit them because it's just not going to miss very easily and it deals decent damage.

• Frozen Lightning Spear - This sort of slams a blue Lightning down in front of you that does like a lightning in a small cone in front of you, that also does frostbite build up. We find this spell good to apply the frostbite status effect, it's a good way to do that with this build. There are some enemies that are just going to be resistant to lightning and this is a good way to help debuff them so that your lightning spells actually do more damage. It's also not a bad one-off spell you can absolutely kill enemies and bosses with it if it's set up correctly, but you have a lot of other options as well. But if you're playing a new game and you're building this as you go, this is going to be used a lot more in this build in your first playthrough than probably will be a New Game Plus when you have stronger spells.

• Ancient Dragons' Lightning Strike - This is another red lightning spell that summons lightning where you're standing that then sort of goes outward from you in like directional patterns, that then strike repeatedly as they move outward. And if you charge it up, then it'll go even further than it would originally. But this spell is useful in two situations where you're surrounded by enemies and it really works well against big enemies if you can get under a dragon with it for instance or you can get up next to a big enemy and cast this, you usually hit with multiple columns of lightning which deal incredible damage. It can be cast from horseback, so you can like round up a bunch of enemies on the landscape cast it, and just wipe a bunch of them out.

Armor

When it comes to armor for this build, it's not super important what you wear. There are helmets that will give you Faith but not a huge amount of it you can wear that if you want a min-max that's probably not a bad idea, but if you want to mentally wear an armor set that gives you 51 Poise this will make it so that if you get hit by a regular attack while you're casting a spell it doesn't interrupt your cast animation which makes it easier to play this build.

Talismans

• Flock's Canvas Talisman - Increases the damage of incantations in general.

• Lightning Scorpion Charm - Increases all of your lightning damage but makes you take more damage all of our spells are lightning, so it benefits all of them but you will take some increased damage from that.

• Ritual Sword Talisman - Increases our damage by 10%, this includes any damage we do while we're at full HP, so you're going to try and stay at full HP as often as possible 

• Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman - Further boost our defenses, particularly because we're weakened a little bit from that lightning scorpion charm.

A couple of things we want to note here though that you can do to help this build or to change this build up a little bit if you want to make some tweaks is. For instance, if you want a melee weapon to use with this build, Coded Sword is not a bad choice because it scales only with faith, you have very high Faith with this build, and it's also a different damage type and holy damage even though holy damage isn't the greatest damage in the game. It can still be good against a boss that might be resistant against lightning in some cases and it gives you a decent melee option if you don't want to range attack everything. 

Incantations

Heal / Great Heal - It will give you a way to spend FP to top yourself up so that you get the bonus from Ritual Sword Talisman, otherwise, if you have to chug a pot like every time, you take one little hit, you're going to go through your HP fonts really fast. Also if you're using a Heal over time, you have to wait for that heal over time to get you back up to full health in order for you to get that extra damage, you don't want to stand there and wait around before you go attack enemies, so having a direct heal from like an incantation would be a better choice because it'll get you back up to full health instantly.

Attribute Points

• Vigor: 55

• Mind: 44

• Endurance: 20

• Strength: 8

• Dexterity: 12

• Intelligence: 16

• Arcane: 9

You absolutely don't need any strength dexterity or intelligence for this build whatever your starting classes are going to dictate what the stat spread is for these, but you really only need fate so don't pay any attention to those. You also don't need Arcane for this build but you can add Arcane if you want to add in more incantations that have Arcane requirements Like Blood Spells or Dragon spells.

55  Vigor here is a good amount for a new game plus, it's probably more than we normally have, you could actually take a couple of points out here and put them into mind if you want to get more FP, but you will want to take this up to 60 eventually you do take increased damage because of the lightning scorpion charm. Even though we do gain some from the Dragoncrest Greatshield Talisman, you still want to make sure you have enough Health to survive a hit which is why we have high finger 44 mind is there because you literally don't have a main attack with this build unless you slot something like a coded sword to save yourself from FP. You need to use 20 endurance in order to be able to medium roll and give you some stamina, a lot of times when you're chaining lightning strike you're going to run out of stamina before you run out of FP. We come to 80 Faith here in order to take max advantage of the Erdtree Seal.

Flask of Wonders Physick

Lightning-Shrounding Cracked Tear - Increases lightning damage, all your spells are lightning so that's really nice, it'll help you in any boss fight or any stretch where you need the extra damage. And the one that increases your stamina regeneration will help that way if you fling a lot of spells your stamina will replenish quickly or if you need to fling some spells and Dodge roll, and fling some spells your stamina will come back quickly.

Great Runes

• Godrick's Great Rune

• Radahn's Great Rune

You can either use Godrick's Great Rune early on until you have Radahn's Great Rune, this will give you more Vigor, more mind. more endurance, more faith. Then when you get Radahn's Great Rune, you're going to gain FP you're going to gain stamina and HP, all which are really important for this build particularly. You really don't need to do anything else with this build stat wise so getting that extra FP stamina and HP from somewhere else is a good benefit to this build.

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