This Ember Knights Relic Tier List 2024 section will teach you the general power level (average of the strength across all weapons) of each relic for Demons. If you want more in-depth information about builds or which relics / builds to look for on each weapon, go to the advanced relic guide. Relics within each tier are generally ordered from strongest to weakest within that tier (considering viability and strength across the majority of weapons).
Ember Knights Relic Tier List
Anything above the weak or very niche tier are relics you generally want to take in a run, and anything below that line are relics that are either very niche, way too weak, not viable, temporary relics that you take when you run out of rerolls, or items that you will eventually replace with other items.
Anything below the weak or very niche tier are relics that are almost unusable and should generally be ignored.
The best builds in the game are currently frost, burn, and crit in no particular order. These builds are pretty much the only builds you can run in True Demons, and eliminate a large majority of the relics from being viable.
The poison tier and skill dmg tier exist because these two builds and their respective relics are completely unusable. They exist in their own tier separate from the never take tier, because if poison or skill dmg suddenly became viable then these relics would become great. Most of these relics are viable or meta in non-Demons runs.
This section would be way too long if we explained why every single relic was in the tier it was, but we explain the meta builds much more in-depth in the advanced relic / build guide. Maybe someday we will go through and address each relic, but not for right now.
Advanced Relic / Build Guide
General build packages
The following table outlines the various relic “packages” within the game. These packages serve to give you an idea of what relics you should use if you are leaning into that package during a run. Weapons frequently will use multiple packages at the same time, such as using the crit package and frost package together in order to utilize frost needle + rejuv + volt claw.
The table also outlines some of the strongest users of the various packages. However, just because a weapon isn’t listed as a strong user of that package doesn’t mean it isn’t good to take items from that package. For example, almost every weapon in the game will have to utilize the crit package for healing, since rejuv is by far the strongest survivability relic in the game.