Elden Ring Rotten Winged Sword Insignia [Location & Builds]

The Elden Ring Rotten Winged Sword Insignia is easily one of the strongest late-game talismans that encourages an aggressive playstyle for your build. As a stronger version of the regular Winged Sword Insignia, this talisman greatly raises your attack power with successive hits. So if you want to take an offensive stance and melt through enemy HP, this item is for you.

Location of The Rotten Winged Sword Insignia

As we’ve mentioned, the insignia is a late-game talisman in Elden Ring. To get it, you’ll first need to complete the entirety of Millicent Questline. And towards the end of this quest, you’ll have to kill off a few NPC invaders to get the talisman.

Millicent is a friendly NPC whom you’ll first encounter in Caelid, one of Elden Ring’s mid-game regions. She has one of the longest but most impactful quest lines in the game, so you might want to buckle up for the long ride. With that said, here’s a rundown to completing her quest:

Meet Millicent For The First Time

The first half of this quest involves meeting Millicent in Caelid and curing the Scarlet Rot afflicting her. To do this, we’ll first need to meet Gowry at his Shack near Sellia, the Town of Sorcery:

• Starting from the Sellia Under-Stair Site of Grace towards the northeast of the Swamp of Aeonia, head southwest alongside the Town’s outer walls.

• • As you go up the hill, take a left at the end of the route next to the tree roots and follow the stone path ahead to reach the Sellia Gateway.
  • Here, you’ll notice a small wooden shack to your left guarded by a Monstrous Dog outside.
  • Kill the dog and make your inside the shack to meet Gowry, a mysterious NPC.

• • Exhaust his dialogue, and head back to the Swamp of Aeonia to fight Commander O’Neil and get the Unalloyed Gold Needle.

• • After killing the boss and obtaining the needle, go back to Gowry in his shack and hand it over to him as well as receive Sellia’s Secret, an info item that’ll give you a clue on how to solve Sellia’s puzzle.

• • Now, teleport to the Sellia Under-Stair Site of Grace again and make your way back to Gowry’s Shack to retrieve the repaired Gold Needle.

• • Next, proceed to Sellia via the entrance near the shack and solve the Town’s puzzle using the aforementioned info item to unlock the sealed door atop the stairs at the far northern edge.
  • Once you’ve completed the puzzle, make your way to the Church of Plague following the straight route and uphill, and you’ll meet Millicent in a sick state.

• • Give her the needle you previously repaired, rest at the Church’s Site of Grace, and talk to her again to receive the Prosthesis-Wearer Heirloom.
  • Finally, talk to Gowry and tell him you temporarily cured Millicent to finish the first part of this quest.

Continue At The Altus Plateau And The Mountaintops

After curing Millicent, you’ll bump into her again at the Erdtree Gazing Hill, located west of the Grand Lift of Dectus in the Altus Plateau. This is a mini-quest where you need to get her Prosthesis from the Shaded Castle.

• From the Erdtree-Gazing Hill Site of Grace, head northeast uphill, and you’ll find Millicent standing near the cliff edge.

• • Exhaust her dialogue, and take a trip west to the Shaded Castle surrounded by a green swamp located north of your current location.

• • Make your way inside the castle, go to the rooftops, and follow them to the main rear gate, where you’ll find the Prosthesis inside the chest in a room guarded by a Cleanrot Knight at the north-western edge of the castle.

• • Return the Prothesis to Millicent at the Gazing Hill, and now your next objective is to kill the Godskin Apostle atop Windmill Village.

• • The quickest and easiest way to reach Windmill Village is by going around the Plateau to the backside of the biome.
  • Once you’re at the foot of the village, follow the stairs uphill, and you’ll find the Godskin Apostle at the very top beside the large windmill.

• • After killing the boss, rest at the Site of Grace, and Millicent will spawn beside you.

• • Now, simply exhaust her dialogue and continue the quest at the Mountaintops of the Giants.
  • After going through the Altus Plateau and the first half of the Mountaintops, you’ll find Millicent yet again near the Ancient Snow Valley Ruins Site of Grace.

Aid Millicent At The Haligtree

The next and final part of this long quest now will continue in Elden Ring’s late-game phase at Elphael, Brace of the Haligtree. This is where you’ll need to aid Millicent by vanquishing her sisters in an invasion.

• After entering the Haligree via the Haligtree Medallion, follow the path straight ahead until you reach Elphael and, ultimately, the Prayer Room.
• Inside the room, you’ll again find Millicent standing next to one of the pillars.

• • Talk to her, and then continue your journey through Elphael until you reach the Drainage Channel Site of Grace.

• • From here, go back to the Haligree roots above the sewers and follow the tree’s branches to your left, leading to the massive open rot swamp.
  • Once you reach the swamp, you’ll have to fight and kill the Ulcerated Tree Spirit resting there.

• • After killing the mini-boss, pick up the legendary Great Ghost Glovewort and jump onto the ledge on the right side of the swamp, where you’ll come across a red and a gold summon sign.

• • Both of these signs have a completely different objective and ending to the quest, as the red sign will summon you to challenge Millicent, while the gold sign will summon you to assist her in fighting off Millicent’s Sisters.
  • By deciding to help Millicent and kill her sisters in that location, you’ll receive the Elden Ring Rotten Winged Sword Insignia talisman, but challenging and killing her instead will give you Millicent’s Prosthesis, another powerful talisman.
  • Since you want the insignia, touch the gold summon sign and kill all 4 sisters to receive the talisman.

Best Rotten Winged Sword Insignia Build

As mentioned, Elden Ring’s Rotten Winged Sword Insignia favors aggression to make quick work of enemies. Therefore, the first thing I needed to focus on for the build was the attributes that’ll support the play style. With that said, the stats to preferably level up to effectively utilize this talisman include:

1. Endurance:
   • Leveling up this stat raises your maximum stamina and equipment load, which is highly beneficial to your build.
   • Having more stamina lets you perform more successive attacks, while more equipment load lets you wear heavier gear.
   • With heavier gear, you have higher poise, which prevents enemies from staggering you mid-attacks.
   • This, in turn, encourages you to keep extending your combo and consistently raising your attack power thanks to the insignia’s ability.
2. Vigor:
   • Vigor is a basic attribute that simply raises your maximum HP.
   • Whilst this feels like a generic and obvious stat to level up, it’s extremely effective when you’re using the insignia.
   • With more HP to tank enemy hits, you can primarily focus on staying combative rather than blocking or dodging for defense.
   • Additionally, you can use HP-reducing items and mechanics like Seppoku to trade off that extra health for even more attack power.
3. Mind:
   • Increasing Mind raises your maximum FP gauge, which is a meter consumed for casting spells and doing Ash of War attacks.
   • Unsurprisingly, this should be the priority stat for Faith and Intelligence builds that regularly use Sorceries and Incantations.
   • Apart from that, Ashes of War are special attacks unique to each weapon that have much better damage output, range, and overall versatility compared to your standard light or heavy attack.
   • However, unlike the previous 2 stats, prioritizing this one is recommended but optional.
   • And if you’re primarily a melee build user that rarely uses Ash of War attacks, then you can spend your runes elsewhere.

Talismans For Insignia

Besides spending runes on leveling up attributes, you should pair up the Winged Sword Insignia with offense-based talismans that’ll encourage you to attack more. These talismans will provide incentives to melt through enemy HP by boosting the player’s stamina, damage output, and overall effectiveness during combat.

Godskin Swaddling Cloth

• The Swaddling Cloth is another talisman focused on successive attacks which continuously restores HP as you continue to do so.
• This ability becomes especially useful against hordes of enemies where you’ll have more targets and, thus, more chances to rejuvenate your health.
• Apart from that, the talisman also acts as a passive defense mechanism as you’re incentivized to attack enemies to stay alive.
• To get the Godskin Swaddling Cloth, you’ll have to kill the main Spirit-Caller snail in the Spiritcaller Cave located near the lake at the Mountaintops of the Giants.

Assassin’s Cerulean Dagger

• If you want to be rewarded with even more ammunition as you’re taking down enemies, this is the talisman for you.
• The Assassin’s Cerulean Dagger restores 15 Focus Points after a successful critical hit.
• With the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia raising your attack power, you’ll have a higher chance of staggering enemies, locking them at their concurrent location.
• This, in turn, will make critical hits occur much more frequently, giving you an additional minor FP boost that you can use to continue your combos.
• So as seen, this is a perfect match for the insignia, and you can get this talisman after killing the Black Knife Assassin found at the end of the Black Knife Catacombs in Liurnia.

Shard Of Alexander

• This talisman considerably raises the attack power of skills by 15%.
• Therefore, it’s an ideal pairing for melee weapons that heavily rely on their Ash of War, like the Corpse Piler on the Rivers of Blood.
• The Shard of Alexander shines when it comes to long combo skill attacks, where each hit gains an attack boost from the shard and continuously gets more lethal with the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia.
• This talisman can be obtained after fully completing Warrior Jar Alexander’s quest line in Crumbling Farum Azula.

Bull-Goat’s Talisman

• The Bull-Goat’s Talisman drastically strengthens your poise meter by reducing poise damage by 25%.
• With this talisman preventing you from getting staggered mid-combos, you can easily stack up your attack power and use it in the following combos to eliminate enemies much more quickly.
• As a necessity for the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia build, you can find this talisman atop the corpse at the deep end of the Dragonbarrow Cave in Caelid’s Dragonbarrow but be wary of the Runebear protecting the location.

Great-Jar’s Arsenal

• This is another talisman focused on improving your overall poise as it raises your maximum equipment load by 19%.
• The Great-Jar’s Arsenal makes it so you can wear much heavier armor to garner as much poise as possible.
• However, getting this talisman can be a challenging task, as it can only be obtained as a reward after killing all three NPCs near the Great Jar in Dragonbarrow.

Armor Set For The Insignia

Now that you’ve made an offensive-oriented talisman combo let’s move on to the ideal armor sets for this build. As mentioned, your build needs a good balance between stamina, mobility, and poise to fully utilize the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia’s potential. Thus, we’ll further improve these stats’ figures with a strong helm.

• Most headgears in Elden Ring possess unique passive abilities, adding another layer of versatility to your build.
• As such, if you’re looking to squeeze out any more defensive or offensive enhancements from your wears, here’s a list of ideal head armor you should consider:

• • Unlike the headpiece, however, the rest of the armor sets in Elden Ring don’t have any passive skills.
  • Their only distinguishing attributes include their weight and design, so they usually don’t have to be extremely specific.
  • So for each armor weight class in Elden Ring, here’s a list of sets that fulfill the Rotten Winged Sword Insignia’s poise and stamina balancing requirement:

Wrapping Up

That wraps up our guide on the location and builds for the Elden Ring Rotten Winged Sword Insignia talisman. As always, the items mentioned here are unique with their individual pros and cons, so it’s better to try all of them or craft an exclusive personal build to find the one most suitable for you. If you’re still unsure about the talisman’s mechanics, check out this Subreddit Post to learn more about it.

Consider reading our Elden Ring Frenzied Burst guide and pair up your Rotten Winged Sword Insignia talisman with a powerful incantation. If you’re instead looking for more interesting talismans in Elden Ring, check out our Radagon Icon location walkthrough. And while you’re at it, boost your build even more by equipping the best Remembrance Weapons in Elden Ring.

Next:

• Elden Ring Lenne’s Rise
• Elden Ring: How To Get To Hermit Village
• How To Respec In Elden Ring
• How To Gesture In Elden Ring