At Strength 54, a Fire Great Épée outhits a Heavy one by 82 attack rating. Two-hand it, line it up against 56 boss phases, and Heavy comes out ahead in 33 of them. Let’s find out where that number lies to you.
It all started with one simple question. You slot Ash of War: Flaming Strike onto a Strength Great Épée, and the game hands you the Fire affinity along with it. Do you keep it, or do you switch the blade to Heavy and let the skill ride on top? I ran the numbers for 56 boss phases and twelve Strength weapons to find out.
The attack rating screen gives you a clear answer. The bosses give you a different one.
The Build Behind the Numbers
Your starting class barely matters for this comparison. The question came up while I was putting together a shield-and-poke build on a Heavy Knight, with the Great Épée as one of the poking sticks on the shortlist. I’m sharing that setup anyway, so you can see exactly what the numbers are based on.
We’re starting as a Heavy Knight. The class begins at level 10 with 15 Strength, so the Great Épée’s Strength requirement is already covered on day one. Dexterity is the catch. The sword wants 16, and you start at 11. That’s five levels you have to spend before anything else, and two-handing won’t help you here, since the 1.5x bonus only applies to Strength.
Armor-wise, you keep the Steel Armor and Steel Greaves from the starting kit. Together they give you 54 poise. Add the Great Épée at 6.5, and your total load comes to 36.3. With the class’s starting 17 Endurance, your max equip load is 59.3, which puts you at about 61 percent. Medium roll kicks in below 70 percent, so you’re already there without spending a single level on Endurance. Just keep in mind that a shield or a backup weapon eats up that margin fast.
The Great Épée itself sits in a chest in Limgrave. Head due east from the Agheel Lake South Site of Grace, and you’ll find it in a small camp guarded by two Kaiden Sellswords.
We compare the two affinities at two points of a playthrough. Strength is what drives the results. Vigor was leveled to keep the build more realistic and doesn’t affect your damage.
| Checkpoint | Rune Level | VIG | STR | DEX | END | Weapon |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caelid, Flaming Strike in hand | 46 | 30 | 30 | 16 | 17 | +15 |
| Late game | 80 | 40 | 54 | 16 | 17 | +25 |
Caelid is the first point where this question comes up at all, because that’s where you pick up Flaming Strike. Strength 54 isn’t a random pick either. Two-hand the sword and the game treats it as 81, which lands right past the point where Strength scaling flattens out. More on that in a moment.
What Flaming Strike Adds
As I just said, you’ll find the Ash of War in Caelid. A Teardrop Scarab carries it in the graveyard on the cliffs south of Redmane Castle, which you reach by jumping a gap next to the Impassable Greatbridge.
The skill comes in two parts. First, you sweep a wide fan of flame out in front of you. Press the heavy attack button right after, and your character lunges forward with a sweeping strike that sets the blade on fire.
The fire coating works no matter which affinity the sword has. A Heavy Great Épée with Flaming Strike still gets to burn. You don’t have to give up fire damage to switch, you only stop getting it on every swing by default.
The skill itself doesn’t change the verdict. In my in-game test at 54 Strength with a +15 Great Épée, the flame burst hit about 5 percent harder on Heavy. The follow-up strike hit harder on Fire, though, and the full combo came out roughly 7 percent ahead. My test dummy was a carriage troll, which is weak to fire, so against a neutral target that lead shrinks a bit, but the direction stays the same.
Fire also costs you something. A Fire-infused Great Épée can’t take greases or other weapon buffs. The Heavy version can. If you like to put a grease on top of your physical damage, Fire shuts that door. Just don’t expect to stack both. A grease replaces the Flaming Strike coating, so it’s one buff or the other.
At +25, the two affinities split the damage like this:
| Affinity | Physical | Fire | Strength Scaling | Dexterity Scaling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heavy | 279 | – | A | – |
| Fire | 202 | 202 | C | E |
Heavy throws everything into one physical number with top-tier Strength scaling. Fire splits the base damage in half and gives each half weaker scaling, though Strength still boosts both.
Fire vs. Heavy on Paper
On the stat screen, Fire wins every matchup. These are the attack ratings at both checkpoints, one-handed and two-handed:
| Checkpoint | Grip | Fire (Physical + Fire) | Heavy | Fire’s Lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caelid (STR 30, +15) | One-handed | 207 + 214 = 421 | 337 | +84 |
| Caelid (STR 30, +15) | Two-handed | 227 + 235 = 462 | 379 | +83 |
| Late game (STR 54, +25) | One-handed | 315 + 324 = 639 | 557 | +82 |
| Late game (STR 54, +25) | Two-handed | 345 + 343 = 688 | 633 | +55 |
In three of those four rows, Fire is roughly 80 points ahead, however you hold the sword. Then the late-game two-handed row breaks the pattern, and Fire’s lead drops to 55.
If you stopped reading here, you’d keep the Fire affinity and move on. Plenty of players do exactly that, because a bigger number on the stat screen feels like a done deal.
Why Two-Handing Shrinks the Gap
Two-handing a weapon multiplies your Strength by 1.5 for damage purposes. At 30 Strength, that’s 45, still in the stretch where both affinities keep growing at a similar pace. At 54, it’s 81, and that’s where the two affinities start to separate.
The two affinities scale very differently. Heavy has an A in Strength on a single damage type, so every extra point of effective Strength keeps pushing that one big number up. Fire’s split halves only get a C and an E, and the fire half in particular runs out of steam. Push Strength from 54 to 80 one-handed, and Fire’s fire damage only grows from 324 to 343.
So the harder you lean into Strength, and the more you two-hand, the closer Heavy creeps. At 80 Strength two-handed, Fire’s lead is down to 35 points.
A 55-point lead at our late-game checkpoint still sounds comfortable. But that’s attack rating, not the damage that actually reaches a boss’s health bar. That’s the split-damage trap we covered in Weapon Affinities in Elden Ring – All Secrets Unleashed. Every boss resists each damage type separately. Against a boss that shrugs off fire, half of your Fire sword’s attack rating runs straight into that resistance.
Boss by Boss
To see what actually reaches the health bar, I took every boss phase from our Boss Weakness Finder, 56 in total, and applied each one’s pierce and fire negation to both affinities. Pierce, because the Great Épée’s light attacks are thrusts. The table counts how often each affinity comes out on top:
| Checkpoint | Grip | Heavy Wins | Tie | Fire Wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caelid (STR 30, +15) | One-handed | 6 | 3 | 47 |
| Caelid (STR 30, +15) | Two-handed | 9 | 0 | 47 |
| Late game (STR 54, +25) | One-handed | 19 | 8 | 29 |
| Late game (STR 54, +25) | Two-handed | 33 | 0 | 23 |
In Caelid, Fire is the clear pick. It wins against 47 of 56 phases, whether you hold the sword in one hand or two. By the late game, the picture flips. Two-handed at 54 Strength, Heavy takes 33 of them.
The bosses fall into four groups.
Heavy wins, every time. Bosses with 50 percent fire negation or more: Magma Wyrm Makar, Rykard, both Mohgs and the Fire Giant. Heavy beats Fire against them at both checkpoints, and against the 80 percent crowd the gap is brutal. The Godskins join this group from Caelid onward too, though only by a few points at first.
Heavy wins once you’re strong. Bosses with 40 percent fire negation, like Placidusax, Fortissax, both Lorettas, Astel and the Elden Beast. In Caelid, Fire still edges them out. At 54 Strength, Heavy takes over.
Coin flip. Several Shadow of the Erdtree bosses (Messmer, Midra, Metyr and Promised Consort Radahn) pair 40 percent fire negation with 20 percent pierce negation. One-handed at 54 Strength, that cancels Fire’s lead almost exactly. Two-handed, Heavy edges ahead.
Fire wins, every time. Bosses with no fire resistance or an outright fire weakness: Margit, Morgott, Malenia, Radagon, and in the DLC Commander Gaius, Romina, Jori and the Scadutree Avatar. The Avatar takes 40 percent extra fire damage, which makes it the best Fire matchup in the game.
A few examples of late-game damage after negation, two-handed:
| Boss | Fire Negation | Fire | Heavy | Better Pick |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mohg, Lord of Blood | 80% | 379 | 570 | Heavy |
| Fire Giant | 50% | 516 | 633 | Heavy |
| Messmer the Impaler (DLC) | 40% | 482 | 506 | Heavy |
| Commander Niall | 20% | 619 | 633 | Heavy |
| Malenia, Blade of Miquella | 0% | 654 | 570 | Fire |
| Scadutree Avatar (DLC) | -40% | 756 | 506 | Fire |
DLC numbers are shown without the Scadutree Blessing. It boosts both affinities alike, so the better pick doesn’t change.
Notice Commander Niall in there. He resists only 20 percent of fire damage, yet at our late-game checkpoint Heavy still edges him out.
These numbers only account for negation, and that flatters Fire. Bosses also have flat defense, which hits each damage type on its own, so split damage loses a bit more than these tables show, and the real picture leans even further toward Heavy.
So Which One Should You Run?
Keep Fire while you’re working through Caelid and the mid-game. At 30 Strength, it wins against almost everything, and the only bosses that punish it are the ones famous for loving fire anyway.
Once you push Strength toward 54 and start two-handing, switch to Heavy. It wins more late-game fights than it loses. It also takes greases, which gives you an alternative to the Flaming Strike coating when a boss resists fire.
To make that switch at all, you need the Iron Whetblade. It unlocks Heavy, along with Keen and Quality, and you’ll find it in Stormveil Castle. Since you’re heading through there anyway, there’s no excuse to leave it behind.
The nice part is that you don’t have to commit forever. Changing an affinity costs you nothing but a quick stop at a Site of Grace, so you can swap to Fire for a Scadutree Avatar or a Malenia attempt and go back to Heavy afterward.
If you’re not sure which group your next boss belongs to, look it up in the Boss Weakness Finder before you pick.
Rule of thumb: Check the boss’s fire negation before the fight. Under 40 percent, keep Fire. At 50 percent or more, switch to Heavy. At exactly 40 percent, your Strength decides. Early in the game it’s a wash, but once you’re two-handing at high Strength, Heavy wins. The exception is a boss that also shrugs off physical damage, since that hurts Heavy more than Fire.
This isn’t a Great Épée quirk, either. I ran the same comparison for eleven other weapons a Strength build might pick up, from the Claymore and Zweihander to the Greataxe, Great Stars and Lance. Every one of them followed the same pattern. At 40 percent fire negation and 54 Strength two-handed, Heavy came out ahead by 71 to 116 attack rating. Against 80 percent fire bosses, the margin grew to between 199 and 293.
So enjoy that bigger Fire number while you’re carving your way through the mid game. Just don’t get too attached to it, because somewhere around Mohg, your sword is going to want to be Heavy.
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