Elden Ring 1.15 (1.10) New Best Weapons & Builds After Buffs & Nerfs

With the patch version 1.10 (1.15 update) released, Let's talk about the new possible best weapons and builds that will dominate in Elden Ring!

Elden Ring 1.15 (1.10) New Best Weapons & Builds with Lastest Buffs & Nerfs

After months and months, we finally got a new patch for Elden ring, it's almost entirely a PVP-focused patch though, attempting to uplift the stagnant PVP scene. The Elden Ring has been facing these past few months. Basically, Poise became really important and strong, and heavy armor sets became overwhelming because of that, faster weapons by comparison were much harder to play. And this patch has reversed all of that really flip things on its head, like now light weapons are dominating because they're actually staggering even the heavy armor users and people are really calling this the Dark Souls 3 PVP patch.

Let's cover what actually happened to Elden Ring with patch 1.10, and figure out which type of weapons and builds will dominate in PvP and PvE:

• Light Fast Weapons & Builds

PVP exclusive Poise damage of all weapons and some spells and incantations have been increased, what this means is that all weapons are dealing more stagger more poised damage, so even if you're facing an opponent with heavy armor like full bull goats, you're still able to stagger him even with really light fast weapons, which is obviously a great change!

• Mixed Builds with Slower Heavier Hitting Weapon & Light Fast Weapon

The second part of that is increased Poise when attacking with some skill spells incantations and some types of weapon attacks that generate Poise, so further specifying that different attacks actually have more poison now along with all weapons having their Poise raised and that's why it's feeling just so impactful. So what this does is it means fast weapons are likely king of PVP right now due to their ability to stagger even the heaviest armor sets, this might kill slow weapon builds in PvP as we knew them we say running a heavy armor a heavy weapon that's meant to ensure the protection of the heavy weapon, but it doesn't kill heavy weapons exactly. What it does do is allow for mixed weapon builds finally in Elden Ring, meaning you can have a slower heavier hitting weapon, and then maybe an offhand that's really fast even if it's doing no damage that can be used to hit and stagger and interrupt the enemy in their attacks making evasion of that hard as well. Because you're mixing up the speed of your attacks, and then punish them post that stagger with maybe the slower heavier weapon.

• Magic Builds for PvP

They've added some sort of damage reduction when performing attacks with some skill spells and incantations, as this is a first reaction we can't tell you individually what those are, but we know a lot of people are currently testing everything to find out exactly what has changed, so we could look forward to that. But basically what that seems to be especially in our experience is that in trade we're basically not dying instantly. In old Elden Ring PVP, you could trade like two maybe three times and the dual was over, now it feels like there are quite a lot more interactions in the PVP meaning there's more time to survive have more interactions, and trades and work out what the enemy is doing. We think this is going to have a profound effect on the PVP specifically because if you're able to trade and survive more it means you can work out what your enemy is actually trying to do and make counter-plays which is so much better.

• Critical Hit Weapons & Parrying Builds

Critical hit angles have been extended and the general balance adjustments say to increase critical hit damage overall, as well as increase poised damage of attacks that occur after missing a critical hit and reducing the recovery time after you miss a critical hit. So that backstab animation where you miss for example that lasts less time and if you actually hit someone awkwardly with it, it does a bit more. So crit damage is higher this means backstabs are more important to PVP parries actually matter. For backstabs, it means we can actually land them instead of them always just walking away from what really should have forced them into a backstab like in Dark Souls 3, the awkward Miss backstab animation is obviously improved in that we're stuck in it less time and it provides a bit more if you do hit them with it somehow.

However, if you do miss a backstab, the animation still leaves you exposed and that leaves you to being backstabbed yourself much like it used to be and now we are actually landing backstabs in PvP which feels so good. 

On the other hand, then parrying, so critical hits also benefit from parrying. Parrying was a major part of the previous Souls games but in Elden Ring specifically PVP you'd never really see it. Every Build made in Dark Souls 3 for PVP had Parrying in mind in some way, but if you tried that in the builds for Elden Ring and it just didn't work. While Parrying is still very hard in high skill even with various hashes that do increase your power frames and certain Shields. It's actually being rewarded now which is really nice to see and so the really skillful Parry-based players are going to be rewarded more as they should be.

Overall, the 1.15 update has really changed the feel of Elden Ring PVP and people are calling it the DS3 patch and the way that it Harkens back to the way DS3 PVP was played at its core. Now it's obviously not a valid fare one-for-one comparison, this is still Elden Ring, but it's also undeniable that it feels more like Dark Souls 3 than it used to. And it is a big change for the matter of PVP and how it's going to be played and how you might even consider making builds. We think it will shift things up in a good way because we have been stagnant for so long, any big change to the core of how it works is only going to be a good thing after such a long wait without any updates.

Specifically with how this works though we are scared that faster light weapons are just going to dominate now, we also think skillful smart players are going to be rewarded more than ever with a mixing up of weapons weapon swapping potentially, and of course the critical hits of backstabbing and more importantly parrying so more people will try to Parry, maybe we'll see more of a meta around parrying again which we've never really seen in Elden Ring.