Wretched Again, Now With Night Sword!

 When you first play a game like Dark Souls or Bloodborne or what have you, the "Wretched," or "Waste of Skin" etc. seems like an odd choice. Go in with crap stats in everything? And with no equipment (ok, to be fair, in Bloodborne everyone starts with basically no equipment... and I don't think you can respec, so this argument might not apply there).

But I've found that with Elden Ring, a game that is somehow vaster than any previous FromSoft Souls-like, and yet which I feel I have a better mastery of than any previous entry, my instinct for new characters is to go Wretched.

For one thing, Elden Ring is more generous than previous games in letting you re-spec. I believe there are 15 or possibly more Larval Tears, which you use as a currency with Renalla (once you've beaten her) to reassign your attributes.

The reason this benefits the Wretched is that when you do this, you cannot assign points lower than your starting statistics. If you were going to go with an Astrologer but decided that you now think you'd prefer an Arcane, Rivers of Blood build, you're going to be holding onto a lot of worthless Intelligence.

Starting a Wretched character is a little rough - I don't recommend it for a first playthrough. It takes a good while to get a decent set of armor, and you'll need to grind a little early on to get the stats to equip even a simple longsword or the like.

So I've now done that a second time.

My first Wretched eventually wound up using Blasphemous Blade and Gargoyle Greatsword with a jump-attack-focused dual-wield greatsword approach, buffing with incantations.

This one, I first wanted to try out a Twinblade - which are a little few and far between (you basically can find one generic twinblade and then don't get another until like Altus Plateau). I put Bloody Slash on it to take advantage of the fast attack rate, but I found myself growing a little unenthused about that (especially after my Int-based Samurai, who dual-wields Moonveil and a Cold Uchigatana, both of which, being katanas, have bleed build-up) and so I decided to go for a theme - I think this character will go for the Age of the Duskborn ending, and so I figured I'd make a death-sorcery character.

I'm using Sword of Night and Flame, which I hadn't really tried before, and I do have Rancor and Ancient Death Rancor (though not the Intelligence to cast the latter yet) and I'm slowly working my way through. It'll be a while before I can get the Prince of Death's Staff, which scales with both Intelligence and Faith. The intention here is to level Intelligence to 34 so I can cast Ancient Death Rancor, then focus on getting Faith to 24 so that I can unequip the Two Finger's Heirloom and still meet the attribute requirements for everything.

Luckily, being a Wretched, if I find I'm not so into this build, I can try a different one with relative ease (though I'll need to get more Larval Tears! I don't think you really get a good reserve of them until Nokstella.)

As someone who always gets a bit of anxiety about this kind of thing, I kind of wish that Larval Tears were something you could get an unlimited number of, even if it required farming a bit.

I'll put that up there with making it so that you can't miss quests or rewards if you do things in a slightly off sequence (I've missed the Magic Scorpion Charm on two characters who could have really used it because I didn't get Seluvis' quest done before giving Ranni the Fingerslayer Blade. And on my Samurai, I think I must have screwed up something with Nepheli Loux, because she's still in Roundtable Hold, talking about the Storm King Ashes I gave her, and I could have sworn she'd move on to Stormveil after you go to Farum Azula.)

Anyway, I rushed ahead in Liurnia in order to respec, so I'm now cleaning the place up. I've got I think almost everything out of Raya Lucaria (except getting trapped by the Abductor Virgin at the bottom to take me to the prison under Volcano Manor). Right now I'm just hungry for levels to get everything up and running.