Elden Ring Beginner Moonveil Katana Class Guide: How To Build A Moonveil Samurai

In this guide, we are going to show you a moonveil samurai build in Elden Ring. This is a samurai build that uses the moonveil, katana is a great effect and if you've been wondering what to do with your samurai when you reach level 50, then this build is for you. 

Elden Ring Beginner Moonveil Katana Class Guide: How To Build A Moonveil Samurai 

How To Make Moonveil Samurai Build Work

The things you're going to need are moonveil which isn't too hard to get. You're going to have to run over into caleb in order to get that, there's a boss there, a magma worm you need to defeat in order to pick it up. It's not too hard of a fight might take you a few times, you could always summon there. Once you have moonveil, the other things that you're going to want are meteorite staff, you can just run in and pick this up off a corpse. You might want to respec at Rennala after you've defeated her into this if you're playing a deck samurai and this is something you want to do. Besides those two things, the talismans that you're going to want for this build are Radagon Icon, assassins cerulean dagger and carrion filigreed crest. All of these three talismans radagon icon is probably the flex meaning that you can put something else there like the turtle, talisman or you can put Erdtree’s Favor. The reason to use this one is for carrying greatsword, if you do not have this and it also makes your glenstone pebble fire a bit faster as well as your loretta's great bow. So it's just good all around in a lot of situations and it's not bad to have, but if you want to replace one that's the one to replace. 

The Assassin's cereal and dagger gives you 15 fp back every time you do a critical strike, this is any backstab or off a perry, you're not really going to be doing parries with this build or when you stagger an enemy and you critical strike them, you get 15 fp back. This is very important for this build because we're using carrion filigree crest which reduces the skill cost of your transient moonlight by 25%, which means that you're going to use this ability for 15 fp instead of 20 and cerulean assassins dagger gives you 15 back. When you use the r2 attack of transient moonlight, you stagger enemies generally when one attack. 

Most regular enemies will stagger one attack, so if you stagger them and then you critically strike them, you get all the fp back that you used to cast it meaning you can literally use this on every regular enemy in the game without ever consuming any fp. Even though you won't get all of it back when facing harder enemies when you stagger them and get a critical strike you'll get some back, allowing you to perform this many times during boss fights or hard encounters without having to chug a pot, and this is really good because you want to play aggressively and that way you don't have to back away to use a pot and then continue your assault.

Moonveil Samurai Attributes

- Vigor: 25

- Mind: 17

- Endurance: 13

- Strength: 12

- Dexterity: 18

- Intelligence: 28

- Faith: 8

- Arcane: 8

For the stats of this build, if you've been playing a samurai build thus far and you want to change into a moon veil samurai, you're going to probably have to respec at Rennala in order to get some intelligence, because you start out with a very low amount. However, if you played like a prisoner, you're probably in good shape because you've probably been increasing intelligence all the way and you just need to increase your dexterity a little bit to meet the minimum requirements for the moonvale katana. But essentially, your stat spread should look something like 25 vigor is very good for melee, 17 mind gives you 90 fp, that's 6 strikes with transient moonlight, before you run out assuming you don't get any criticals which is a good whole number since that's exactly 6. Dexterity is 18 which is the minimum from moonveil and intelligence is at 28, this not only buffs your spells, so that's gonna make your spells more effective, this meets the minimum requirements for moonvale plus a little bit and it also meets the minimum requirements for the spells that we use carrying Greatsword and Loretta's Greatbow are like 24 and 26 intelligence. So you need to have a little bit more than moonveil in order to use those. 

The intelligence doesn't really help your damage too much with moonveil at this point in the game because the scaling is only c scaling with intelligence, but as you upgrade moonvale more, you're going to get more and more out of that intelligence and it's only going to increase your damage from there.

Moonveil Samurai Gameplay

Holding l2, you can do the regular r1 slash that you would with unsheath that has a bit longer range and shoots out of blade, but it's really the r2 that we're going to focus on here and you've reduced the cost of this from 20 fp to 15. And you're gonna use this liberally, this is going to be your go-to on just about anything, if you can sneak up on something and get a backstab or sneak up on something and start out with like a thrust attack or a charge r2 and then use this or just use this outright, you could kill most enemies before they can even get up off the tarmac. So you're gonna spam this ability like go up to hard bosses like even ones that are huge, just start spamming this, hit it, roll, that thing will be staggered, you'll get a critical strike and just keep repeating this. You don't even have to learn the mechanics of some boss fights because it's that strong. Since you're using intelligence for this build, it makes sense to have a staff and to cast spells, so you might as well take advantage of it. 

Glintstone Pebble is one of the spells we use liberally, it is great for scenarios where you can't get to enemies or maybe there's a pack of them and you want to thin them out before approaching them or maybe something's flying. There's a lot of scenarios where this works well horseback, so it's just good to have and it costs very little fp. 

Carrying Greatsword is fantastic for aoe scenarios, although you'll probably tend to thin things out with glintstone pebble before going in with your transient moonlight ability and just regaining fd that way it's more efficient, but nevertheless carrying great sword is there and it's very good from horseback as well. 

The last spell is Loretta's Greatbow, this is excellent for very long range. Sometimes, you just need some range because the scenario is going to be very difficult without some and this is very good.

Moonveil Samurai Build Tips

You can still use a bow with this build if you want especially if you're upgrading moonvale with somber smithing stones, that frees up the regular smithing stones to upgrade your staff if you're using meteorite staff. Although you'll probably want to change to like academy glenstone staff later or carrying glindstone staff if you want to have more damage with carrying greatsword. The thing about bows in this game is that they don't scale very well in general off your stats, you're not really losing out a lot of damage by removing points from dexterity and putting them into intelligence, at least at this point in the game. But what you want to be on the lookout for is better arrows, you're going to need to find or craft better arrows because the 25 damage arrows you begin the game with is just not going to be enough as you can go further into the game. So you're going to want to craft either the 55 damage arrows or buy ones like fire arrows in order to deal with the regular damage plus 95 fire damage. That can also save you fp which you can then use for a moon veil instead of on spells like Glintsone pebble.