Spells

Spells in Dark Souls III are items that unleash various magical effects when cast. They can be bought, sold, and found throughout the world, much like other, regular items. Spells can be:

Attuning Spells

All spells need to be attuned (i.e. equipped) at a Bonfire, before they can be used in combat. Attuning a spell requires free Attunement Slots, which can be unlocked by raising the Attunement attribute when leveling up.

Casting Spells

Casting a spell requires an appropriate Spell Tool, as well as sufficient Focus Points, Intelligence and Faith.

Casting and Movement

Certain spells can be cast whilst moving. These are:

[*] Unique animation while walking including sprinting and rolling attacks.

Casting Speed

Casting Speed in Cinders starts from 1 Dexterity and caps at 99. Some equipment may help boost this, these are:

Common Spell Scaling and Damage Affinity

Some spells like Darkmoon Blade are unnafected by the damage affinity of spell tools, but they are affected by the main stat from the spell school.

These are the general rules of spell scaling for buffs affected by spell buff:

Each spell tool has a damage type affinity, this affinity gives 20% of the total scaling by default to the respective damage type (this bonus is hidden and not shown in the stat menu). After reaching 60 points in Intelligence, Faith or Luck, the difference between each damage type from spell tools is decreased until it reaches the same amounts of damage at max stats (99).

Example:

  • When casting Great Combustion with a Chaos Flame and an Abyssal Flame with 50 Intelligence and 50 Faith, the Chaos Flame will inflict more damage than the Abyssal Flame because of its damage affinity, giving it bonus damage when casting Fire Pyromancies. But when casting it with 99 Intelligence and 99 Faith both flames will do the same amount of damage with Great Combustion.

Refer to the Spell Tools list for their spell buff and damage affinity.

Using battle art abilities like Steady Chant, Chant from the Depths and Awakening will benefit spells casted from another catalyst. e.g. Crystallization from the Sage's Crystal Staff and then casting spells with a Crystal Chime will increase the damage of Crystal Soul Spear.

Spell buff

Spell Buff is a multiplier applied to your spell's base value. The easiest way to see this in the healing miracles, where the base value is unaffected by other variables.

Consider the miracle Heal Aid. It has a base value of 200. Let's say you are using a Talisman with a Spell Buff of 150.

To apply your Spell Buff, divide the value by 100 and then multiply the base value of Heal Aid with your result.

$FinalValue = (SpellBuff / 100) \cdot Base Value$

For our example, this would be (150 / 100) * 200, resulting in 300 HP healed.

Cinders uses a combination of Spell Buff and a set of internal damage corrections to determine the damage of the spells casted. This means Spell Buff is less important than the damage type affinity each spell tool has.

Ascended Spells

Most Spells are considered 'Ascended' when they are casted with a Max Ascended Spell Tool. This grants them additional effects or attributes over the base version.

Spell Hold

As of 1.69, most spells can be put on hold while pressing the cast button similar to how it happens when casting Great Heal.

The player can also run while holding a spell, and it's compatible with the Dashmaster's String.

Information here is accurate for version 1.78.

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page revision: 74, last edited: 20 Jun 2020 22:02
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