10 Best Great Hammers In Elden Ring

If you're looking to swing and smash with some oversized weapons, these great hammers in Elden Ring are the ones for you.

Elden Ring's Great Hammers received some significant buffs since launch, with increases in speed, range, recovery time. The general consensus from the community is that these changes made what was previously viewed as a relatively underwhelming weapon class far more satisfying to use - which is great, because few things bring more joy than bashing your way through the Lands Between with a particularly hefty stick.

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If you avoided Great Hammers in the past, now is the perfect time to give these heavy-hitting weapons a try. And this list is here to tell you which of them is right the right choice.

The Great Club is the longest of the Great Hammers you can give unique Ashes of War to. You are going to sacrifice a significant amount of damage when compared to other options when using it, but that extra range can come in handy.

This weapon also has the advantage of being obtainable at the very start of the game. You don’t even need to fight a single enemy to get it (assuming you skip the tutorial). The Great Club is sitting on the cliffs south of the Forlorn Hound Evergaol, guarded by a few Demi-Humans.

The Curved Great Club is the best in class on certain Affinities - notably Magic, Flame, and Sacred. As a result, if you want a Greathammer for an Intelligence or Faith build, it’s going to be your best option. And who doesn't want to bonk people with magic?

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Many of the Second-Generation Albinaurics carry this weapon around Liurnia of the Lakes, and can be farmed relatively easily. These Albinaurics are quite common, especially in the Temple Quarter.

The Rotten Battle Hammer is tied for the shortest Great Hammer, and has underwhelming damage, but it makes this list thanks to one specific property: it is one of an extremely limited number of weapons that can cause Scarlet Rot. Normally, you want Status-causing weapons to be fast, but that’s slightly less relevant with Scarlet Rot, since you can only trigger it once before you need to wait for it to wear off.

Unfortunately, like most Scarlet Rot weapons, the Rotten Battle Hammer can’t be acquired until you reach the later stages of the game. It’s located in the Consecrated Snowfield, where it is a guaranteed drop from the Rotten Duelist you can find west of the Consecrated Snowfield Site of Grace.

The Great Mace is a solid all-around weapon. You can give it a variety of Ashes of War, and among the Great Hammers sharing that property, it can compete in both damage and length. It's not the best in either category, being shorter than the Great Club and weaker than the Brick Hammer, but you might find the blend the Great Mace provides feels better than the more extreme alternatives.

The weapon can be aqcuired in the middle stages of the game in the area leading up to the Grand Lift of Dectus. It's in a chest tucked amidst the trebuchets that try to shoot you down on your way to the lift.

If you gravitated towards Great Hammers out of a simple desire to inflict blunt-force trauma, the Brick Hammer is the weapon for you. It's a brick on a stick, and it acts like one. It has the highest damage in class on many different Affinities, most notably Heavy, earning S scaling. That said, it is among the shortest Great Hammers, which you might find causes you problems against more mobile enemies.

However, even if you don't want to use it for your entire playthrough, the Brick Hammer can be found quite early in the game in Stormveil Castle by traversing the rafters near where Gatekeeper Gostoc attempts to trap and kill you. This makes it a solid option for Strength builds in Elden Ring's initial stages.

The most spectacular aspect of the Cranial Vessel Candlestand is its Weapon Skill, Surge of Faith. When used, you thrust the weapon into the air, launching fireballs in a wide area around you. This ability won't be particularly effective against small enemies, since where the fireballs land is relatively random, but if your enemy is large (especially if you can get underneath them), Surge of Faith will deal massive damage.

And unlike some weapons with impressive Weapon Skills, the Cranial Vessel Candlestand has good scaling with Strength and Faith, so it will also deal decent damage if you just swing it at your enemies. You won't be able to acquire this weapon until quite late in the game, though; it’s locked behind an Imp Statue seal in the Giant-Conquering Hero’s Grave, in the Mountaintops of the Giants.

Despite literally having the word ‘axe’ in its name, and using the Greataxe moveset, the Pickaxe is, in fact, a Great Hammer. And it's unique in another key way as well: unlike every other weapon in its class, and most heavy weapons in general, it deals Pierce damage. That might sound like a small difference, but it can actually matter quite a bit. Pierce weapons deal Counter Damage if you strike as your opponent is attacking - and when using the Spear Talisman, that damage is increased by 15 percent, allowing for some devastating hits if you catch your enemy during their attack animation.

Giving this property to a weapon that is already a heavy hitter makes the Pickaxe a real threat in the right circumstances. It can be farmed from the Miners you can find in the many mines dotting the Lands Between, the earliest of them being the Limgrave Tunnels.

Of all the weapons on this list, the Beastclaw Greathammer might be the one that has benefited the most from patch changes. Its weapon skill, Regal Beastclaw, has gotten a significant damage boost, and the changes to the Great Hammer class overall gave the Beastclaw Greathammer a true combo in PvP (it’s the uncharged one-handed heavy into a light attack).

Related: Elden Ring: Best Weapon Buffs

You’ll have to really put in the work to get this weapon, though; it’s the reward for giving Gurranq seven Deathroot at the Bestial Sanctum. However, the changes that have been made to the Beastclaw Greathammer mean it may actually be worth going through the trouble.

Given its… unusual appearance, you wouldn’t expect the Envoy’s Long Horn to be a powerhouse, but that’s exactly what it is. While it gets decent damage when swinging it around, like any musical instrument, the Longhorn is at its best when you play it. The Weapon Skill, Bubble Shower, ranks among the best in the game for PvE. It creates a wide spread of small bubbles in a sort of continuous shotgun effect. That makes it somewhat tricky to use against smaller enemies, but it will shred large bosses - especially when wearing the Envoy's Crown, which increases its damage by 15 percent.

To give you some context as to how powerful this can be, Bubble Shower will rapidly reduce even the Elden Beast to zero health, and that boss is 80 percent resistant to Holy damage. If you want that kind of damage on your side, the Envoy's Longhorn is dropped by the Large Oracle Envoys you encounter in Leyndell, Royal Capital and Miquella’s Haligtree.

As the only Great Hammer with innate Bleed buildup, the Great Stars was a shoo-in to make this list. However, that's not the weapon's only feature. It also heals you every time you hit an enemy. The healing numbers aren't massive on a per-hit basis, but they add up quickly, especially when using an Ash of War that allows you to attack faster than you would normally be able to with a Great Hammer.

Additionally, while you used to only be able to get one Great Stars in a single run of the game, later patches allowed you to get two before going into New Game Plus. The original is being towed in a carriage near the Road of Iniquity Site of Grace in the Altus Plateau, while the new one is nearby, dropping after killing Magnus the Beast Claw, who you can encounter in the Writheblood Ruins during White Mask Varré’s questline.

Next: Elden Ring: Best Curved Greatswords

Lucas is a freelance writer who has been playing video games since he was introduced to I Spy and Math Blaster as a kid and never looked back. These days, he plays more RPGs than educational games, though.