Elden Ring Ashes of War Guide: Affinities, Whetblades, and the Ashes Worth Farming

There is a chest in a cellar at Gatefront Ruins, maybe six minutes from where the game starts, and it contains the single most build-relevant item in Elden Ring. Not a weapon. A whetstone. Miss it and you spend forty hours swinging weapons with whatever skill FromSoftware bolted on at the factory.

Ashes of War are the closest thing Elden Ring has to a build editor. There are 91 of them in the base game, thirteen affinities to pair them with, and five Whetblades scattered across the map that gate which of those affinities you're even allowed to pick. The game tells you none of this. So here it is.

What Ashes of War actually do

An Ash of War does two things at once, and people consistently only think about the first.

It replaces the weapon's skill. Your Longsword's default Square Off becomes Lion's Claw, or Bloodhound's Step, or Golden Vow. That's the flashy part.

It also sets the weapon's affinity — the damage type and stat scaling. Every Ash has a "native" affinity it applies by default (Bloody Slash is Blood, Lion's Claw is Heavy, Sacred Blade is Sacred), but if you own the right Whetblade you can override that and keep the skill while choosing a different infusion. This is the part that quietly rebuilds your character.

Three rules that save you a lot of grief:

• Ashes are not consumed. They slot in, and you can pull them back out or move them to another weapon whenever you want, for free, at a Site of Grace. There is no penalty for experimenting.
• Ashes only work on regular Smithing Stone weapons. Anything upgraded with Somber Smithing Stones — most unique and boss weapons — cannot take an Ash of War or change affinity at all. That Moonveil you were planning to slap Bloodhound's Step onto? No.
• Each Ash has a weapon-type whitelist. Kick goes on any melee armament. Piercing Fang needs something that thrusts. Prelate's Charge only fits large and colossal axes and hammers.

You apply them at any Site of Grace once you have the Whetstone Knife, or through Smithing Master Hewg at Roundtable Hold. And if you find an Ash you want two copies of, Hewg will duplicate it in exchange for a Lost Ashes of War — a consumable you'll pick up naturally from map exploration.

Get the Whetstone Knife in the first hour

Gatefront Ruins, Limgrave. It's the ruined camp on the road north of the first Site of Grace, the one crawling with soldiers and a couple of dogs. Ride past them on Torrent, find the stairs down into the cellar, open the chest. Inside: the Whetstone Knife and Ash of War: Storm Stomp.

That's it. No boss, no key, no gate. It should be a mandatory stop on any sensible opening route through Limgrave, and the fact that thousands of players walk past that camp on their way to Stormveil is the reason so many first playthroughs feel stiff.

Storm Stomp itself is a genuinely good early Ash — a Quality-affinity stomp that staggers crowds and costs almost nothing — but the knife is the prize. From that moment, every regular weapon in your inventory is reconfigurable.

The 13 affinities, and the four that matter most

Thirteen affinities exist: Standard, Heavy, Keen, Quality, Magic, Cold, Fire, Flame Art, Lightning, Sacred, Poison, Blood, and Occult. They split into two groups with very different rules.

The basic four: Standard, Heavy, Keen, Quality

Standard (the default), Heavy, Keen, and Quality are the physical infusions, and they are the only four that let you keep using weapon buffs. Grease, Bloodflame Blade, Golden Vow's weapon-buff cousins, sorceries and incantations that coat your blade — all of that is locked out the moment you infuse anything outside these four. That's not a small footnote; a Faith build that buffs its own weapon frequently does more damage on a Standard or Heavy blade than on a Sacred one.

• Heavy boosts Strength scaling, cuts base damage, and removes Dexterity scaling entirely.
• Keen boosts Dexterity scaling and cuts both base damage and Strength scaling.
• Quality splits the difference across Strength and Dexterity, lowering base damage.

Those trade-offs are why understanding how scaling letters convert stats into damage matters more than the affinity name. Heavy on a weapon with poor base Strength scaling is a downgrade, not an upgrade.

The nine that cost you your buffs

Everything else adds a damage type or a status effect and takes something away:

There's a second restriction people trip over constantly: non-basic affinities restrict which skills you can pair them with. Magic and Cold skills only combine with the basic four or with each other. Fire and Flame Art likewise. Lightning and Sacred pair together. Poison, Blood, and Occult form the last cluster. So you cannot take a Sacred-affinity skill and infuse it Cold — the menu simply won't offer it.

Every Whetblade and where it hides

The Whetstone Knife alone only gives you Standard plus each Ash's native affinity. Everything else needs a Whetblade, and each one is a physical item in the world. All five carry over into NG+.

Two of those deserve warnings.

The Red-Hot Whetblade is missable-adjacent. If you reach the Altus Plateau before grabbing it, Redmane Castle transitions to its festival state and the item becomes unavailable until you've killed Starscourge Radahn and exhausted Castellan Jerren's dialogue. If you're running a Fire or Flame Art build, get it before you ride the Grand Lift.

The Black Whetblade is behind Nokron, which means it's behind Radahn as well, since beating him is what opens the starscourge crater into the underground city. Bleed builds do not come fully online until then — which is worth knowing when you're planning which bosses to fight in what order.

The Ashes worth a detour

You will collect dozens of these passively — most Ashes of War drop from Teardrop Scarabs, the little glowing beetles that scuttle away when you approach, and the rest come from chests, merchants, Night's Cavalry drops, and the occasional Remembrance. These are the ones worth going out of your way for.

Damage — Lion's Claw, Flame of the Redmanes, Seppuku

Lion's Claw (Heavy, 20 FP) is a forward somersault slam that fits swords, axes and hammers above dagger size. It's the default answer for any Strength weapon because it does big poise damage, closes distance, and has enough forward momentum to punish a boss's recovery frames. Kill the Elder Lion at Fort Gael in Caelid — it can't leave the fort's dirt floor, so it's safe to whittle down from range.

Flame of the Redmanes (Fire, 14 FP) is a wide frontal burst of flame on any melee armament, and it is the cheapest reliable stagger tool in the game. Two casts break most humanoid enemies' poise outright. Invisible scarab northeast of the Fort Gael North grace, also in Caelid.

Seppuku (Blood) is the bleed build. You stab yourself, take chip damage, and get a large attack-power boost plus massively improved blood loss buildup for the duration. Pair it with a Blood-affinity Nagakiba or a Rivers of Blood-adjacent setup and things melt. Invisible scarab on the north side of the Frozen Lake in the Mountaintops of the Giants — late, but the payoff is real.

Survival — Bloodhound's Step, Endure, Barbaric Roar

Bloodhound's Step (Keen, 5 FP) is the most quietly overpowered thing in this article. Five FP for a dodge that goes further than a normal roll, moves faster, and makes you briefly invisible with generous invincibility frames. It is not subtle and it trivializes several fights. Kill the Night's Cavalry that patrols the eastern bridge in Dragonbarrow at night — bring a horse and a lot of patience.

Endure (Heavy, 9 FP) plants your feet, spikes your poise, and reduces incoming damage while active. It's the trade tool: hold Endure, eat the hit, keep swinging through it with a colossal weapon. Bernahl sells it for 600 runes at the Warmaster's Shack in Stormhill, which makes it the earliest premium Ash in the game.

Barbaric Roar (Heavy) buffs your attack power and converts your heavy attacks into savage combos for the duration. On greataxes and colossal weapons it turns a slow, committal moveset into something that actually finishes an enemy inside one opening. Scarab at Ravine-Veiled Village in northern Liurnia.

Buffs — Golden Vow, Royal Knight's Resolve, Determination

Golden Vow (Sacred, 40 FP) raises attack and defense for you and nearby allies — including your summoned spirit ash. Forty FP is steep, but a pre-boss Golden Vow on a swapped-in cheap weapon is one of the highest-value fifteen seconds in the game. Drops from a mounted Godrick Knight on a hill northeast of the Warmaster's Shack.

Royal Knight's Resolve (Quality) greatly powers up your next attack. Combine it with a slow, enormous weapon and you get one of the most satisfying single hits available. It's on a corpse in Volcano Manor, behind an Imp Statue.

Determination (Quality) is the same idea at a smaller magnitude, and you can have it in your first two hours — the scarab on the stone bridge north of Agheel Lake carries it. Slap it on whatever your starting class handed you and your damage per opening roughly doubles against tough early enemies.

The scaling trap nobody warns you about

Here's the part that separates people who understand Ashes of War from people who just like the animations: skill damage does not all scale the same way.

Some skills scale off your weapon's total attack rating and your stats, meaning the best infusion for the skill is whatever infusion maximizes the weapon. Lion's Claw behaves this way — a Keen-infused, fully upgraded Flamberge in the hands of a Dexterity character will out-damage the same weapon carrying Lion's Claw's default Heavy infusion, because Keen is the better fit for that character's stats.

Other skills are hard-tied to their native affinity's damage type. Ground Slam does less damage under any infusion other than Heavy, even when a different infusion would give the weapon a higher attack rating on paper.

There is no in-game indicator for which is which. The practical rule: if the skill's damage looks physical and comes off your blade, infuse for your stats; if it produces its own effect — flames, frost, a shockwave — respect its native affinity. When in doubt, apply both, hit the same enemy twice, and compare. Ashes cost nothing to swap, which makes this a thirty-second test rather than a theory argument.

Mistakes that cost people hours

• Infusing off the basic four while running a buff-heavy build. Losing access to grease and weapon-buff incantations is a bigger DPS hit than any elemental infusion gives back.
• Forgetting Somber weapons are locked. If you're building around a unique weapon, your Ashes of War collection is irrelevant to it. Plan around the skill it comes with.
• Chasing Bloodhound's Step at level 30. The Dragonbarrow Night's Cavalry will erase you. Come back.
• Not testing. Because Ashes and affinities are free to swap and free to remove, the correct workflow is to carry two copies of your main weapon at similar upgrade levels and A/B them.
• Overlooking pre-equipped Ashes. Some weapons ship with an Ash already slotted — the Nagakiba comes with Piercing Fang despite Unsheathe being its true base skill — which means you can strip it off and put it on something else.

Quick Action Checklist

• Loot the Gatefront Ruins cellar chest first. Whetstone Knife plus Ash of War: Storm Stomp, no boss required.
• Grab the Iron Whetblade inside Stormveil — one Stonesword Key for Heavy, Keen and Quality is the best key spend in the early game.
• Get the Red-Hot Whetblade before the Grand Lift of Dectus if you want Fire or Flame Art, or you'll be waiting on Radahn.
• Stay on the basic four if your build buffs its own weapon. Infuse elemental only if you don't.
• Buy Endure from Bernahl for 600 runes the first time you have the spare currency.
• Test, don't theorize. Ashes are free to apply, free to remove, and free to move — there is no wrong answer you can't undo in ten seconds at a Grace.