The Blood Calls Me Back to Elden Ring

 Well... it was a good few days. I beat Elden Ring on my Strength/Faith greatsword dual-wielder and figured I would take a good long break before getting back into it.

And then I thought "hm, a bleed build might be fun."

Two hours in, I've put together the starting pieces of the build, inspired as usual by Fextralife's excellent guides. Taking the Warrior class, who starts with dual scimitars, the goal was basically this: get to Fort Haight as soon as possible and grab the Bloody Slash ash of war. With the standard Whetstone Blade you can apply the Blood affinity to one of your scimitars. So you're already able to inflict the bleed condition.

Bleed, if you don't know, works thusly: if you have a weapon with a bleed effect, it will build up a status effect on your target each time you hit it - different targets have different Robustness (I think that's the bleed defense stat) so depending on the foe, this can build faster or slower. When the (invisible) bleed bar builds to full, the target instantly loses a percentage of their total health - 15% plus an amount based on the weapon. This, of course, means that you can potentially get a ton of damage on high-health enemies if you can build up the blood loss effect. Notably, once this goes off, the meter simply resets, and can start building again, unlike, say, Frostbite, which does 10% of their health but can't be reapplied until the secondary effect falls off (which you can also force by doing fire damage to them). Frostbite can be very effective as well, but you'll probably build differently for it.

To get it to work on this build, you want to get that Bloody Slash on both your scimitars, doubling the rate at which you build this status effect. Thus, we need to head to the Weeping Peninsula and purchase a Lost Ash of War from the merchant in the shack near the Walking Mausoleum.

But we also need Hewg to duplicate Bloody Slash, and for that, we need to at least face Margit the Fell Omen so Melina can take us to Roundtable Hold.

Given that I've now beaten him on three characters, I wasn't shocked when I managed to take him down on the first try this time - having at least one Blood Scimitar allowed me to get a couple bleeds off.

With that accomplished, you can put the second Bloody Slash on the off-hand Scimitar, and then things really take off - attacking with L1 you'll hit targets several times in an attack-chain, and with two swords building the effect, the bleed goes off quite frequently. Thanks to the extra, non-percentage damage many lesser enemies will just drop dead almost immediately.

Per Fextralife's guidance, this build then uses the Dragon Communion seal along with Dragon Communion incantations, which does create a bit of an overlap with a previous character. I'll see whether I go that route or find a way to work in other Arcane-style weapons (perhaps poison-inflicting ones?) to deal with bleed-resistant foes. We'll see.