You can beat Elden Ring with any weapon in the game, but without a doubt, wielding Moonveil will make all your battles significantly easier.
Moonveil is a katana that scales with Dexterity and Intelligence. It requires 12 Strength, 18 Dexterity, and 23 Intelligence to use, but right out of the gate, the sword’s a winner. As a base, it deals 73 physical damage and 87 magic damage, and it has one of the best weapon skills in the game. Moonveil uses a modified version of the basic katana unsheathing attack that spits out a wave of magical energy. It has tremendous range and damage, so you can dice through bosses while staying back at a safe distance.
Let’s get it!
The search for Moonveil
To get Moonveil, you’ll first have to traverse through the Gael Tunnel and take down the Magma Wyrm.
Start at the Rotview Balcony Site of Grace in the western part of Caelid. From there you’ll travel southwest and jump off two small cliffs before you reach the entrance to the tunnel. After killing two soldiers guarding the entrance, you’ll notice that there’s no elevator to take you down into the tunnel. Instead, you’ll have to carefully jump down a series of ledges to reach the bottom of a pit before snagging the Gael Tunnel Site of Grace.
The tunnel itself is a fairly standard Elden Ring dungeon. There are some soldiers, miners, and land octopuses that you’ll need to deal with. As you make your way through the tunnel you’ll be able to loot a handful of smithing stones, and if you kill the giant land octopus hiding in the back of a hallway off the main room, you’ll get the Cross-Naginata – another useful katana-style weapon – for your troubles. There are a handful of different hallways to loot, but for the most part, the Gael Tunnel is a short adventure. At the very end of it, you’ll unlock a door leading to another Site of Grace and an alternate entrance that opens up in Limgrave. You’ll also find a set of double doors that stand between you and the Magma Wyrm.
Prepare to die
The Magma Wyrm isn’t the hardest boss in the game, but there’s a good chance that you’ll be fighting it fairly early into your playthrough, which ups the challenge level significantly. The Wyrm primarily uses three different attacks. It’ll stand on its back legs and spew a ball of magma at you, or it’ll puke out a steady stream of lava while running forward to hit you with a slam attack. It can also turn around and spew magma back toward its tail if you spend too much time attacking it from behind.
The key to beating the Magma Wyrm is to stay on the move. Its charge attack is devastating and can easily kill you in a single hit. The magma it spews will also stay on the ground and deal damage over time whenever you’re standing in it. I tried to strafe in a semi-circle around the Wyrm’s back. I’d hack away at one side of its tail, then dodge over to the other side when it turned around to shoot some lava at me. Whenever it was prepped for a charge, I dropped my attacks and just ran around the room to stay out of its reach. Slow and steady wins the race here, and even though this fight can be a bit frustrating in the early game, getting Moonveil as a reward more than makes up for it.
