Elden Ring Best Whip Build Guide - Weapons, Talismans, Attributes, Spells for 150 Level Flame Dancer Build

In this Elden Ring guide, we break down a meta flame dancer build - this is a level 150 strength faith build that uses a great shield and a whip to achieve great damage!

Best Weapons for the 150 Level Flame Dancer Whip Build

Giant's Red Braid

There are a few reasons to choose this whip:

1. It has very good strength scaling, not all whips in Elden Ring have good strength scaling. Admittedly you can change the Ash of War on four of six of them to have some strength scaling. However this whip has a very good attack rating and it scales very well with strength and faith, and a little bit of dexterity giving it a very good overall attack rating. It also scales well with strength and allows you to use a great shield easily because you'll meet the strength requirements for that great shield just by boosting the damage of this weapon itself, which is not true very much of other whips - if you went with other whips and their strength infusions you would have lower damage than you probably would with keen or some other infusion in order to be able to use that great shield, but that's not the case with this weapon.

2. There is a bit of synergy between strength and faith because of the claw mark seal that exists, which increases your incantation scaling when you put points into strength and faith, that allows you to use strength-based weapons but still have decent damage with incantations. You're not going to have as much of if you went like pure faith or if you went arcane with dragon communion seal, but you're still able to cast these spells giving you ranged options, when you're going for like innately type build which is fantastic.

3.  The Giant's Red Braid has a fantastic Ash of War and Flame Dance. Flame dance hits in a really large AOE allowing you to just AOE down tons of enemies and because whips have like sort of a flinching mechanic built into them when you hit most enemies, they tend to flinch and this allows you typically to hit them over and over and kind of stun lock them. The weapons themselves have terrible stagger damage meaning that you're not going to knock them down and be able to get a critical strike. But when you hit them they flinch and when you use this flame dance basically everything around you is repeatedly flinching, so they can't get to you. 

We have a lot of poise for this build in order to be able to pull off this move set without getting interrupted, but odds are if you can get that first hit off anyway, you won't be interrupted because you'll just keep flinching everything around you, allowing you to wipe them out or just chain spam this if you can.

Golden Great Shield 

Additionally, we're using the golden great shield, it doesn't really matter particularly which great shield you use as long as it has decent guard boost so that you don't consume a lot of stamina when blocking. Anytime you're doing a block counter based build, you want to try and use a great shield if possible, it's easier to do because enemies typically rebuff off your great shield, it interrupts their combos a lot of time and gives you a bigger opening to get that counter off after you block, that you know medium shields just don't give you. You can still make a block counter with medium shields but it's going to be harder to time those attacks, and if you are using like a longer wind-up weapon like a colossal weapon or something like that, it will be even harder to do without using a great shield. So you definitely want to have a great shield if you can when doing a block counter build and this allows us to block counter very effectively and one really good thing about whips as well, they have a very long block counter range so you almost always connect on that block counter no matter whether the enemy pushed you back a bit or not.

Best Ash of War for The Whips Build

One of the downsides of whips in Elden Ring is that they don't have a very good variety of ashes of war, so if you're using one of the whips that can be infused with the ash of war, there aren't too many good ones to pick from. There are some decent ones like flames of the red main and thunderbolt, but besides those, there are really not a lot of other good options besides maybe royal knights resolve and determination.

Best Armors for The 150 Level Flame Dancer Whips Build

The armor you want to use for this build isn't super important, but having armor with high poise will allow you to get block counters off more effectively to hit enemies with charged R2S and regular R1 without being interrupted. And most importantly, use flame dance without getting interrupted. Again enemies tend to flinch when they get hit with this, so if you can get it off that like first hit, you tend to be good but sometimes because the flame dance of the weapon has a long wind up, you get hit right in the middle of that. But this will allow you to prevent being flinched if you have high poised armor and that way you'll continue to do the whip attacks hopefully from that point continuing to make the enemy flinch over and over, and then you're fine.

Best Talismans for The Level 150 Flame Dancer Whip Build

As far as talismans, you can use them for the spells, there is really a lot you can use because there are just so many different ways you can play. Here are the best ones we recommend using for this build: 

• Fire Scorpion Charm - Increase your fire damage, this is not only with your weapon but also with flame dance and also with the spells we're using primarily flame spells with this build to take advantage of fire scorpion, but also to take advantage of things like flame grenade strength that boosts fire damage and also the flame shrouding crack tear, that boost fire damage as well. So you want to focus on fire damage if possible if this build is very fire oriented.

• Ritual Sword Talisman - Boosts your attacks when you're at full health and your spells and your weapon skills at full house. It's very good we use all three of these things with this build, it's a very good talisman for this build and you just have to make sure that you top up your health you can either do that through an incantation that gives you health over time or you can prioritize health flask and just talk yourself off when you get it every now and then. 

• Shard of Alexander - Boost your damage with flame dance, because the each hit doesn't do that much damage, you just want to increase it as much as you can 

• Great-Jar's Arsenal - Make sure that we can get up to medium rolling with our equip weight if you can play this build if you want with heavy rolling.

• Wing Sword Insignia or Rotten Winged Sword Insignia or Millicent's Prosthesis -  Maybe if you want to go heavy and you want to swap out Great-Jar's Arsenal with Wing Sword Insignia or Rotten Winged Sword Insignia or Millicent's Prosthesis that gives you more damage as you hit repeatedly. This happens a lot when you're using flame dance because it hits five times so it's going to stack that buff when you use that. It just really depends on how often you're using flame dance.

• Curved Sword Talisman - Another good option is the Curved Sword Talisman which increases your block counter damage. If you find yourself in a stretch where you're doing a lot of block counters, make sure to put that on and maybe take off Fire Scorpion Charm for this one if you're not casting as many spells. 

Again that's one of the great things about this build there are so many talismans that you can use, it's very flexible depending on how you want to play this build, whether you're leaning more into the spells, or more in the block counters, or more into flame dance.

Best Attributes Setting for Level 150 Flame Dancer Whip Build 

Vigor: 46 - Give you enough health to sustain hits and keep on going. You have decent armor with this build even with fire scorpion charm, and also you're boosting your defenses with golden file quite regularly, so you don't need as much HP probably as some other builds, because you just won't die in the same amount of hits

Mind: 25 - We need lots of FP with this build, since we have buffs, spells, an expensive weapon skill. Honestly if you're taking this build forward, we would highly recommend increasing mind, so you can do these things more easily, but we don't think you would ever put less than this where you're going to struggle and have to use blue flasks quite regularly.

Endurance: 28 - We're using a great shield, we have a weapon, a seal equipped and Great-Jar's Arsenal, this will give you enough weight load in order to medium roll and still have this heavy armor equipped with these things.

Strength: 50 - To hit the sweet spot for your whip, this is kind of where it really shines right in here you get decreasing performance from this point forward with this

Dexterity: 12 - however you can still get damage out of it and you can increase dexterity in NG plus and onward making it, so this weapon is a very good ng plus weapon or even NG plus for that matter.

Intelligence: 9 

Faith: 50 - What's really great is it has fantastic strength scaling which is a little bit better than its faith and also this allows you to use the claw mark seal rather effectively because it is boosted by both of these rather effectively

Arcane: 9

We don't need any intelligence or arcane for this build, and dexterity is just there to meet the requirements for the whip, but again you can increase this in NG plus and beyond to further increase the damage of this weapon. The ash of war of Giant's Red Braid is actually physical and fire damage which means that points in strength dexterity and faith all increase flame dances damage, so even when you go into NG plus and you're getting into dexterity, and you're getting like one point of damage per attribute point you put in there, you're still going to be boosting flame dance's damage as well which is great. 

Best Spells for The Level 150 Flame Dancer Whip Build

• Black Flame - This is really good for any fire based build and it gives you a nice single target ranged option. One of the great things about this build is flame dance is your aoe, you have block counter single target but then with black flame you have like a single target ranged attack that's going to hold you in good stead when you need to range something down or you just can't get close to something, etc.

• Black Flame Ritual - It's really good when you're fighting against aggressive enemies or big enemies, putting it under them will deal a ton of damage and it puts that black flame status effect on that sap some of their max HP

• Flame Fall Upon Them - It's also very situational sort of like a shotgun of fireballs and works best against big targets where you can hit them with all of the fireballs from very close distance. This is primarily a melee build so you're going to be able to get close distance no problem, particularly with your great shield since you can hold it up as you move in. But if you can't hit the enemy with all these fires, you're going to be fireballs and better off using black flames.

• Stone of Gurranq - This is a good physical damage range option, sometimes enemies resist fire damage, this gives you a nice physical ranged option to work around that, and it's also boosted by the claw mark seal which is an extra benefit.

Best Flask of Wondrous Physick for The Level 150 Flame Dancer Whip Build

Flame Shrouding Tear - it increases your fire damage, so that's your fire spells which you're leaning into flame dance and your regular attacks,

Greenburst Crystal Tear - It increases your stamina recovery, you use a lot of stamina with this build block counters whips themselves consume a lot of stamina and you're going to be casting a lot of spells and dodge rolling as well, so that's a good one to take with it.