Most Powerful Elden Ring Arcane Weapon Tier List - Ranking Highest Damage Bleed Weapons

Arcane weapons in Elden Ring are ridiculously strong, bleed as the status is strong and the other statuses aren't bad either and arcane scaling weapons are the only ones in the game that can actually raise the amount of status on your weapon and make those statuses even more potent as a result. But which arcane weapons are the best and which are the worst? What about the all-important middle? Today, we are going to be ranking this weapon category in the form of the arcane weapon tier list in Elden Ring. This list will go over every arcane weapon in the game as there aren't that many of them.

Elden Ring Arcane Weapon Tier List - Highest Damage Bleed Weapons Ranked 

S+ Tier Weapons

• Rivers of Blood

Rivers of blood is broken all the way up the chain, the damage of the melee swings is super high the move set is that of a katana which are already quite strong. You can power stance this quite easily with another katana and dual wield weapons with high bleed application on every swing and if that wasn't enough for you, the weapon skill itself is just one of the silliest most powerful things in the game. Each individual hit of the weapon skill is enough to ruin your opponents, but it's up to 6 times applying ridiculous amounts of damage and blood buildup and past that it is actually a spammable weapon skill too. If your enemy is using this, your only hope is to dodge it perfectly until they run out of mana. If you are using this, you will feel more powerful than moog himself. 

S Tier Weapons

• Mohgwyn’s Scared Spear

This is a great spear meaning that has quite long range especially notably the sprint attack is nasty good, it scales quite well with stats and gets one of the larger ars on an arcane weapon in the game, making its general melee swings quite potent as well. But if you know this weapon, you know that the melee swings are just the cherry on top of the absolutely insane skill that the weapon has blood boon ritual. If you catch an enemy with it properly in pvp, you will destroy them in one shot. And in pve, you will kill the vast majority of bosses by pressing the button once as well able to deal nearly 20000 damage in a single go to the right enemy.

A Tier Weapons 

• Marais Executioner’s Sword

The b range and moveset of the melee swings themselves are simply better than the other weapon and the ash of war remains largely unchanged. It can be hard to hit in pvp for obvious reasons as it has a decent wind up in a relatively small hitbox. But in the context of pve, it absolutely shreds any enemy that you could come across making a lot of the game quite easy as a result of just holding this thing in your hand.

• Bloody Helice

This weapon has the heavy thrusting sword moveset, it’s just a massive rapier, it takes thrusting attacks with forward momentum and then gives them an even larger range to connect with and then combined with the weapon skill itself makes this an impeccable dueling weapon. The skill gives a lot of mobility to the weapon, it's super fast and can be used as an evade or even as a repositioning tool to get the drop on your opponent with follow-up attacks to follow. Overall, while it isn't the highest damaging arcane weapon by any means, it has an incredibly strong move set for general use without even costing fp and the skill that you have along with it makes you really hard to pin down and trap both in pve and in pvp.

B Tier Weapons

• Mogott’s Cursed Sword

This thing is a curved great sword giving it great range and a nice move set, fast hitting sweeping, strikes for the melee part but also a pretty decent weapon skill on it too, giving you a decent gap closer with a delayed explosive pop of damage coming after it and even a follow-up attack to keep the pressure on afterwards. This weapon doesn't really have any particular negatives or weaknesses to it, but at the same time, there is nothing here to make it stupidly powerful. 

• Ripple Crescent Halberd

This naturally arcane scaling weapon hits the highest natural ar of any of them on the melee swings. In particular, when you go full in on the arcane stat, on top of which it can have weapon buffs applied to it allowing it to take advantage of some serious status application and not just blood but the whole host of statuses can be used through this weapon itself even sleep if you so choose, the only real thing holding it back is that it is forced onto the spinning slash weapon skill which while not terrible is definitely quite middling. Overall, this weapon doesn't quite break the game but it allows for a relatively unique playstyle of choose your own blight and go. 

• Regalia of Eochaid

This weapon itself is good, it's got the straight sword moveset, it may not have insane range or reach the tippity top of ar but it performs quite admirably. And more than that, it has the iacade's dancing blade ash of war shared with only one other weapon in the game. The ash of war can hit for up to 15000 on the right enemy being about the strongest way to use arcane in the game that doesn't involve bleed. So the only reason this weapon is in the b tier is because the other weapon with this weapon skill is simply better for the purposes of melee combat in general while achieving the exact same heights with the skill itself.

• Eleonora’s Poleblade

It is an exceptionally fun weapon that can be a bit hard to use at least in pvp. In pve, this thing shreds things pretty well, the moveset is interesting and unique from the other twin blades but limits the range of it in a weird way, making it a deceptively short on its attacks compared to what you might expect from a weapon of that size. The weapon skill is relatively potent supplying bleeds with decent speed, but it also flings you quite far forward, so you need to know your distance quite well before you fire off with it. 

C Tier

• Serpent Bow

It is mostly just an average bow with a unique ability to apply poison with any arrow fired from it. As it gives you 15 poison on any arrow just as a default passive of the bow itself. This makes it good as a budget option for a poison build if you don't have poison arrows and still want to make it work, but it is unbelievably outclassed by something like the pulley crossbow being able to fire three bolts in a row if you just want to apply statuses quickly. This weapon is usable, it's just beaten out at its own purpose in quite a significant way.

• Reduvia

This is the blood flinging dagger and the reason this gets up to c is the weapon skill itself, blood blade firing a projectile forwards that applies bleed and does a good amount of damage. The projectile isn't the hardest thing to dodge for a player but if you hit, it does good damage from far away and it has bleed build up which makes it an effective range tool for that purpose. But at the end of the day, it's still a dagger which means the second your enemy is in melee range you have to be an inch from their face or you'll lose the fight. Having the ranged option on a dagger does help quite a bit but it would be just stronger on another weapon type. So as much as this one does work, it simply doesn't work as well as the others.

D Tier

• Clinging Bone

It is a fist weapon which makes it a bit rough to play around in the first place, though it does have the longest range of any fist weapon in the game which is nice relative to the others at least. The weapon skill lifesteal fist is essentially a cheat goat on a player if you can hit it, as it obliterates tarnished enemies but has very low range and a bit of a wind up to it too. As well, this can be used on other fist weapons, it isn't actually unique to this weapon but you can't change it on this weapon, it's just stuck that way. The scaling on the weapon itself isn't great there are simply better fist weapons and you can apply the dash of four to other fist weapons, so there's other better ways to use it and the ash of war has basically no effect on 95% of the bosses in the game anyways. So this weapon does have some uses, it is extremely niche and a little bit outdone by other fist weapons built the same way.

• Ripple Blade

This weapon is the only default arcane scaling x in the game and as it tends to be, that means it is a fair bit weaker than just a good axe set to a cult affinity. It doesn't get a unique weapon skill, just having wild strikes. The main advantage of this over an occult affinity x is that you can still apply weapon buffs and thus have interchangeable statuses that are buffed up by your arcane stat to put simply though this weapon has other options that just do the same thing better, with a better moveset, longer range and a higher ar at the end of it. 

E Tier 

• Varre’s Bouquet

This weapon isn't completely irredeemable but it has a particularly short range. The base hammer moveset isn't great compared to even something like a warhammer and as a hammer, it gets a rapier's ash of war in blood tax which applies bleed with repeated thrust but even that suffers from a lot of the ranged issues. If you are using it purely to apply bleeds, there are just way better ashes of war for that purpose. This weapon simply falls behind the other arcane weapons in about every way, it has no specific niche that makes it impressive other than having bleed by default, arcane scaling and being able to have blood flame applied to it but even then it's just slower at bleed application than the other weapons.