Best Beast Claw build in Shadow of the Erdtree

✓ at a glance

• Weapons – Beast Claw with Raging Beast Ash of War
• Stats – Strength and Arcane.
• Incantations – Flame, Grant me Strength.
• Talismans – Lord of Blood’s Exultation, Rotten Winged Sword Insignia, Two-Headed Turtle Talisman. Erdtree’s Favor +2.
• Armour – Pelt of Ralva.
• Mixed Physick – Thorny Cracked Tear and Viriddian Hidden Tear.

The Beast Claw is a powerful fist weapon added in Elden Ring’s DLC. The best Beast Claw build utiltises its innate bleed build up to trigger frequent blood loss on enemies thanks to its fast, multi-hit combos. You can get the Beast Claw very early on in Shadow of the Erdtree and this weapon can be completely customised with your own Ash of War and enchanted with magic. Here’s the build and what we recommend.

Stats and attributes

To use the Beast Claw, you will need 13 Strength and 11 Dexterity. The Beast Claw comes with innate blood loss buildup, but has no Arcane scaling at all. In case you don’t know already, we want to rectify this glaring error and take the weapon down the Blood path. You can opt to make it inflict Poison instead, but for this guide we’ll focus on bleed. As such, you need to prioritise a lot of points into Arcane for better bleed scaling. Here’s a table outlining the stats you want:

Attribute	Level
Vigor	60
Mind	26
Endurance	40
Strength	55
Dexterity	13
Intelligence	9
Faith	15
Arcane	75

Another route you can take the Beast Claw down is with Frostbite, to give you a double-whamy of Bleed and Frostbite with your attacks. With Blood Beast Claw, you’ll have D scaling in Arcane at +25, but a blood loss buildup of 116. With this build, you can further bolster your attack rating with Incantations, thanks to the 15 Faith letting you use a Seal and Flame, Grant me Strength or Lightning Armament.

Weapons

• Blood Beast Claw +25

The Beast Claw will be your main weapon for this build and it is dropped by Logur, an NPC enemy found in the Gravesite Plain area in Shadow of the Erdtree. If you really want to, you can use a Seal in order to cast Flame, Grant me Strength for some more damage. With the 15 Faith you have, you can also cast Electrify Armament, which will work well with the Blood Beast Claw. However, the Faith investment is optional. Your main source of damage is going to come from multi-hit rapid attacks triggering blood loss on enemies. Here are the stat requirements:

Beast Claw:

• Strength – 13
• Dexterity – 11

If you’re going to use a Seal, you can use the Giant’s Seal with these stats:

• Strength – 4
• Faith – 14

It’s probably not worth your while to level the Giant’s Seal to +25, but you must upgrade the Beast Claw to maximum to get the most out of the damage scaling. You will almost exclusively be using the Beast Claw with both hands, so an off-hand Seal is only necessary for buffingm if you want it.

Ash of War

• Bloodfiend’s Blood Arm – Raging Beast / Savage Claws
• Giant’s Seal – No skill.

Since you can take the Beast Claw down any upgrade route, this means the Ash of War can be changed to whatever you want it to be. The weapon’s default Ash of War, Savage Claws, is more than good enough for this weapon. If you have the Raging Beast Ash of War, you could opt for this one to give you more mobility than its default.

Try them both out and see which you prefer. We’ve gone for Raging Beast because it includes a lunge forward that you can chain into more hits. While we highly recommend using Bleed for this build, you can absolutely use these claws with the Frost or Poison route, which might serve you better in some boss fights where bleed isn’t working out.

Incantations

As with most builds, having just enough to use Flame, Grant me Strength will help you deal more damage and survive more hits. If you go too far into Faith, you might see dimishing returns because you want to invest in Str and Arc more than anything else. If you want, you can go for Intelliegence, which might open up more opportunities for you. For this build, we recommend Flame, Grant me Strength, but this is just a guideline and you can change anything about this build as you see fit.

Talismans

As with any and all bleed builds, you must have the Lord of Blood’s Exultation talisman equipped. Since you’ll be attacking fast and frequently, you also need to ensure you have enough stamina. To this end, you’ll want to take the Two-Headed Turtle Talisman to dramatically increase your stamina recovery, which translates to more frequent attacks and less downtime. Here are all the Talismans we recommend for the best Beast Claw build:

Talisman	Effect
Lord of Blood’s Exultation	Blood loss in the vicinity increases attack power.
Rotten winged Sword Insignia	Greatly raises attack power with successive attacks.
Two-Headed Turtle Talisman	Greatly raises stamina recovery speed.
Erdtree’s Favor +2	Raises maximum HP, stamina and equip load.

For the final slot, we’ve put the Erdtree’s Favor, but you can put in anything else you want. Another good Talisman here would be the Viridian Amber Medallion +3 to help you with more stamina if you need it and don’t want to put more points into Endurance.

Either way, the main idea behind this Talisman setup is to provide you with more damage the more you attack and trigger bleed. The bonus you get from Lord of Blood and Rotten Winged Talismans are huge, letting you tear through enemies if you can get a combo going.

Armor and gear

For your gear, you’ll want to not only look the part, but be able to survive hits. This is the delicate balance we all strike in Souls games and it is one you can choose to ignore entirely. You can go either way with this build’s fashion and armor. If you want to be tanky, go for full heavy armor and try not to get into heavy equip load. Likewise, you can equip lighter armour and have something that looks more on-brand for someone suing beast claws as a weapon. We’ve opted for the following:

• Pelt of Ralva
• Gloried Attire
• Giaus’s Gloves
• Oathseeker Knight Greaves.

Equipping the Beast Claw weapon actually hides whatever hand armour you have on, so you can take something that looks awful and boosts your stats a lot to help you out here.

Mixed Physick and Great Rune

For your Mixed Physick, we’ve chosen the Thorny Cracked Tear to boost your attack power after successive strikes and the Viridian Hidden Tear to temporarily stop your stamina reducing. Feel free to slot in the Greenburst Crystal Tear instead of the Hidden one, to give you more stamina recovery instead.

For your Great Rune, we recommend using Godricks Rune. This rune gives you a boost to all your stats across the board, which translates to more survivability and damage. Likewise, if you feel you need more HP or stamina, go for Radahn’s Great Rune.

With your buffs active, start a fight by using your Ash of War to close the distance. You’ll be on your foe in no time and can open with a charged attack. Keep attacking fast and don’t let up. Thanks to how much you move around with the Beast Claw and the little jumps you do during your attacks, some moves will miss you or you will poise through them. Be sure to heal if you get hurt too bad and never get greedy.

The more you attack, the more damage you’ll start to do thanks to buff from your Lord of Blood and Rotten Winged Sword Talismans, and your Mixed Physick. These will work in tandem to increase your damage and essentially let you power up as you tear through your foes.