The Duchess is one of the sharpest classes in Elden Ring Nightreign. The undercover priestess loves to dip in and out of combat, overwhelming foes with fast attacks and status ailments.
Once you unlock the Duchess, pick her if you like to stay nimble and quickly dominate foes with excessively high damage per second. While her damage potential is one of the highest, Duchess has some apparent weaknesses that can diminish her viability.
If you’re an aspiring Duchess main who wants to get the best out of the character in your future expeditions, this Elden Ring Nightreign guide will show you how to play as the Duchess, with a focus on recommendations for her best relics, best teammates, and best weapons, alongside other miscellaneous tips.
How to make a great Duchess build in Elden Ring Nightreign
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As a dextrous character, you’ll want to craft your Duchess build around daggers, katanas, and curved great swords. All in all, anything that has a fast move set and is able to apply bleed is beneficial to a Duchess build. Bleed just overall synergizes with Duchess’s Restage ability, so when in doubt, prioritize looking for weapons and relics that allow for bleed application.
Since Duchess scales with intelligence and faith as well, she does well with most of the game’s ranged weapon options. We recommend a good bow or staff in your equipment loadout.
Best relics for Duchess in Elden Ring Nightreign
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Duchess scales primarily off of Arcane, Faith, and Dexterity, so the best relics for her are those that provide boosts to those specific stats. You can unlock these relics by just playing the game, but the best relics come from completing runs and defeating Nightlords. Another great way to gain access to high-quality relics is by completing the remembrance objectives found in the journal.
Some of the Duchess’ best options are relics with the following effects:
- [Duchess] Dagger chain attack reprises event upon nearby enemies
- [Duchess] Improved character skill attack power
- [Duchess] Defeating enemies while Art is active ups attack power
- [Duchess] Become difficult to spot and silence footsteps after landing critical from behind
- Boosts attack power of added affinity attacks
- Improved stance breaking when wielding two armaments
- Any relic that increases Dexterity, Intelligence, or Endurance
- Character skill cooldown reduction
- Starting armament inflicts are good relics as well if you can match the status ailment with a Nightlord weakness
Best teammates for Duchess in Elden Ring Nightreign
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Duchess excels when she’s able to deal damage unimpeded. She fits neatly into team comps that create enough space for her to do as she pleases. As the game evolves, new strategies may emerge, but at launch, the following classes are great fits as teammates for the Duchess and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
- Guardian — Guardian’s ultimate art provides a useful damage negation buff to teammates in its radius, helping Duchess with her survivability.
- Raider — Debatably Nightreign’s tankiest character, he can easily handle enemy aggro, allowing for Duchess to set up good uses of her Restage ability.
- Wylder — Wylder’s character skill allows him to grapple enemies to him. In the early stages of an expedition, Duchess is at her weakest. A good Wylder can help mitigate enemy aggro by yanking them away from her.
- Duchess — Having multiple Duchess players is not as good as the other picks; however, there is an unusual synergy with her Restage character skill. Since it applies to allies’ damage as well as her own, multiple Duchess players can rapidly apply status ailments like Bleed and demolish bosses.
Best weapons for Duchess in Elden Ring Nightreign
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Hands down, the best weapon for Duchess is a dagger, as Duchess prefers to build up status ailments as quickly as possible. To that end, it’s best to equip her with weapons that have fast move sets.
That said, even though she’s a dextrous character, she also has good intelligence scaling. Staves are extremely underrated on Duchess. Since there’s no equipment load or stat requirements outside of levels, there is simply no reason not to have at least one good staff member with you at all times. Below are some of the best weapons for Duchess:
- Crystal Knife
- Reduvia
- Wakizashi
- Moonveil
- Rivers of Blood
- Meteoric Ore Blade
- Horned Bow
- Carian Regal Scepter
Best talismans for Duchess in Elden Ring Nightreign
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It isn’t often you’ll run into a talisman during an expedition, but if you get lucky, they can completely dial up the effectiveness of any character. Be on the lookout for scarabs, a returning enemy from Elden Ring, who tend to drop them.
The best talismans for the Duchess are the following:
- Millicent’s Prosthesis — Boosts attack power with successive attacks.
- Twinblade Talisman — Boosts the power of chain attack finishers.
- Lord of Blood’s Exultation — Boosts attack power when blood loss is in the vicinity.
Depending on your playstyle, you might even prefer to use talismans that increase spell casting power, such as Graven-School Talisman or Radagon Icon. While it may not be her best option, it is still viable, and being able to adapt on the fly is the best skill you could have in Elden Ring Nightreign.
For more Elden Ring Nightreign guides, here’s a list of all classes, the best class to pick first, how to unlock the Revenant, and the best early Recluse build.
