The best Elden Ring staff for your sorcerer

So you're a wizard. Or an aspiring wizard, anyway (a Harry Pot-boy?), pumping points into intelligence and looking for glintstone spells to use to blast Elden Ring's toughest bosses from afar. If you picked one of Elden Ring's magic classes, you should've started the game with a perfectly adequate staff for the early hours. But once you get deeper into Elden Ring, you're going to want to track down something more powerful to start pumping all your smithing stones into. A better staff. The best staff, fit for a sorcerer supreme. But is there really a single best staff in Elden Ring? 

It's probably going to take a few months for the number crunchers in the Souls community to offer a definitive answer, but right now there are some clear frontrunners. Elden Ring has something like 70 sorcery spells, which represent a serious variety of attacks, assists, and defensive buffs. Different staves pair better with different styles of magic, so each staff below is the best staff in Elden Ring for a particular playstyle.

For more suggestions on how to equip your sorcerer, check out our Elden Ring builds guide.

The best early game Elden Ring staff: Meteorite Staff

Requirements: 16 strength????, 18 intelligence????
Passive bonus: Boosts gravity sorceries
Location: Street of Sages Ruin, Caelid 

If you start as a sorcerer class like the Astrologer or Prisoner, you can do just fine with your starter staff. Both offer modest intelligence scaling at first, but upgrading them a single time with smithing stones will bump you from C to B scaling, giving your spells a bit more damage. At +8 the Astrologer's staff hits A scaling, and at +9 the Prisoner's staff hits A scaling. Alternatively, you can forget about scrounging for smithing stones and grab a better early game staff, the Meteorite staff, as long as you're brave enough to venture into Caelid to get it.

The Meteorite Staff is a great early game staff because it starts with S intelligence scaling and requires only 18 int to wield. It's not upgradeable, which means its damage will fall off later in the game, but it's a blessing for the early game, giving you high damage output from the start and letting you save up all your smithing stones to upgrade later staves.

How to find the Meteorite staff:  

1. From Limgrave, venture east to explore the red, apocalyptic part of the Lands Between called Caelid. Most enemies here will be too strong to fight until much later in the game, so do your best to avoid them. Follow the road from Limgrave through Caelid, first picking up the Shack of the Rotting site of grace just south of the road, then continuing along it to find the Caelem Ruins site of grace, Smoldering Wall site of grace and eventually, in central Caelid, the Astray from Caelid Highway North site of grace.
2. From Astray from Caelid Highway north travel straight east and you'll shortly arrive at the swamp at the heart of Caelid. In the northwestern part of the swamp you'll find the Street of Sages ruins.
3. Look in the windows of the ruins until you spot a corpse hanging from one with an item on it. Grab the item to obtain the Meteorite Staff.

The best all-around Elden Ring staff: Carian Regal Scepter

Requirements: 8 strength????, 10 dexterity????‍♂️, 60 intelligence????
Passive bonus: Boosts full moon sorceries
Location: Obtained from the Remembrance of the Full Moon Queen 

If you want to be the best sorcerer you can be, you're going to need to dump a ton of levels into intelligence: 60, specifically, to use this staff. The Carian Regal Scepter is a reward for defeating Rennala, one of Elden Ring's five major bosses. It can be upgraded to +10 with Somber Smithing Stones, and once you get your hands on it you'll want to upgrade it to at least +5 to increase its intelligence scaling to S tier.

This royal scepter offers a passive damage boost to full moon sorceries, but there are only a couple of these in the game, so you likely aren't wielding it for that bonus. You're using it for the excellent damage scaling on intelligence without the tradeoffs of some other staves. If you want to go full nuclear, there's one more choice below.

How to find the Carian Regal Scepter:

1. Defeat Rennala, the Full Moon Queen at the Academy of Raya Lucaria. Beating this boss will give you the Remembrance of the Full Moon Queen item.
2. Trade in the Remembrance at the Roundtable Hold to obtain the Carian Regal Scepter.

The best Elden Ring staff for max damage: Lusat's Glintstone Staff

Requirements: 10 strength????, 52 intelligence????
Passive bonus: N/A
Location: Sellia, Town of Sorcery in Caelid

Despite the slightly lower intelligence requirement than the Carian Regal Scepter, don't let this staff fool you: it's a late-game weapon. Lusat's Glintstone Staff seems to offer higher damage scaling than any other staff in the game, and hits S tier scaling on intelligence at just +3. Upgrade it to +10 with Somber Smithing Stones to really pump out the damage. But there's a catch: Lusat's Glintstone Staff also makes spells consume more FP to balance out its higher damage output.

That's why this is a weapon you likely won't want to use early in the game: you're going to need to pump points into your Mind stat to upgrade your FP pool, in addition to hitting that 52 intelligence requirement. Of course, you could also go light on healing flasks and go heavy on Flasks of Cerulean Tears to keep your FP supply topped up, so long as you don't get hit.

The item description on Lusat's Glintstone Staff is confusing and makes it sound like the staff should offer some sort of passive damage boost to spells, but it really just offers higher damage scaling than any other staff when fully maxed out at +10. Again, the trade-off is spells costing significantly more FP. It's best used to deal burst damage to bosses, especially combined with a special item like a Cerulean Hidden Crystal Tear in your Flask of Wondrous Physic, which lets you cast spells for 10 seconds without consuming any FP. With enough int, sometimes 10 seconds is all you need.

How to find Lusat's Glintstone Staff:

1. Journey to Selia, Town of Sorcery in eastern Caelid. This area is tied into Millicent's quest in Elden Ring, which you can start by talking to the NPC at Gowry's Shack just south of the town.
2. You'll learn from Gowry that you need to light the fires at the top of the towers in Selia to open its magically sealed doors.
3. Once done, you can fight the area boss, the Nox Priest and Nox Swordstress duo.
4. Defeat them and open the chest in the small room at the rear of the boss chamber to find Lusat's Glintstone Staff in a chest.