A guide explaining what is the Flask of Wondrous Physick in Elden Ring, how to get it, how to mix Crystal Tears in it and where to find and obtain all Crystal Tears in the game!
If you are looking for information about Elden Ring’s HP and FP Flasks, you can check out the dedicated guide. It contains full explanation on what they are, how to upgrade them and a full list of all Golden Seed and Sacred Tear Locations!
What is the Flask of Wondrous Physick
The Flask of Wondrous Physic is a unique item in Elden Ring. It’s very similar to the Crimson and Cerulean Flask of Tears where you take a drink and gain an effect and it refills each time you rest at a Lost Grace.
Unlike the regular Flasks of Tears, you only ever get a single drink per Lost Grace. It never refills out in the open world upon defeating a group of enemies. More importantly, you actually get to pick 2 effects that are applied when you take a drink.
This item can bestow pretty powerful effects, so it’s worth going out of your way to get it as soon as possible.
Where to find Flask of Wondrous Physick
The Flask of Wondrous Physick can be found at the Third Church of Marika in the eastern outskirts of Limgrave.
It is located in that stone basin on the ground. You can also find a Sacred Tear at the feet of the Statue of Marika. Sacred Tears are used to upgrade your HP and FP Flasks.
How to get to the Third Church of Marika
The Third Church of Marika is accessible from the moment you first set foot in Limgrave after the initial tutorial area.
It’s helpful to know how to use the map in Elden Ring. Navigating around without the help of your map is a lot slower and unintuitive.
From The First Step, make your way past the Tree Sentinel and Church of Elleh and head toward the forest.
Avoid the Tree Sentinel and make your way past the Church of Elleh, but stop in if you haven’t yet.
Stay on the dirt path. You’ll come across a few enemies.
When you exit the forest, you’ll be overlooking Gatefront Ruins and the Stormgate. You can fight them if you want, but in order to reach the Flask of Wondrous Physick at the Third Church of Marika, you’ll want to go to the right and get on the stone path that passes through Gatefront Ruins heading East.
If you follow this guide on a brand new character, resting at the third Grace checkpoint will trigger a cinematic that will allow you to get your mount Torrent.
Eventually, you’ll come across a bridge. There will be a horseman enemy to fight. If it’s nighttime, it might be a miniboss instead.
After you cross the bridge, there will be a subtle fork in the road where the stone path continues and a dirt path emerges.
Take the dirt path. For the remainder of your journey to the Third Church of Marika, you’ll be on this dirt path.
Eventually, you’ll arrive at a fork in the dirt path, keep going straight.
You can see a sort of underpass in the distance created by some toppled ruins. Underneath are a bunch of demi-humans, you can fight them or go around it. After the demi-human underpass, there is one final obstacle.
You can fight this giant, run past him, or go around. Once you’ve made it past the giant, you’ve arrived at the Third Church of Marika!
The Flask of Wondrous Physick (and a Sacred Tear) are inside the church!
How to customize the Flask of Wondrous Physick
You can customize the Flask of Wondrous Physic by sitting down at any Lost Grace and selecting the option Mix Wondrous Physick.
From there, you’ll see an interface that contains all the Crystal Tears you’ve collected so far and you just select which Crystal Tear you want in each slot, just like how you’d equip sorceries or incantations.
What are Crystal Tears
An individual Crystal Tear grants a single effect when you drink from the Flask of Wondrous Physick.
These effects vary significantly, from providing HP or FP regeneration very similar to your Crimson and Cerulean Flasks of Tears. Others have effects that can boost your stats or increase the attack power of a specific type of damage. Some do strange things like make you explode, dealing damage to you and everyone around you.
How to get Crystal Tears in Elden Ring
As the item description for the Flask of Wondrous Physick mentions, you can customize the effects bestowed by the flask by combining Crystal Tears you’ve found at the base of Minor Erdtrees (the giant golden trees) in the Lands Between.
Minor Erdtrees sometimes have a boss to fight at their base called Erdtree Avatars or occasionally other enemies.
Not all minor Erdtrees have an Avatar to fight, sometimes there’s just a stone basin with the Crystal Tears inside.
Some Crystal Tears can be found in other locations, but you will always find them near Minor Erdtrees. At the end of this guide, you’ll find a list of all Crystal Tear locations and their effects.
Crystal Tear Types of Effects and Build Tips
Over the course of the game, you’ll acquire a lot of different Crystal Tears. All of the buffs either last a pretty long time or are fairly instantaneous.
The buffs can sometimes last the full duration of a boss fight and are definitely long enough to last the full duration of large enemy encounters, so you don’t have to worry too much about some seeming more situational
I don’t think you should really need to compare DPS or HPS (damage or heals per second) for a given Crystal Tear. Which two you use will be based more heavily on other factors.
Since there are so many, it can be difficult to pick between them. The first step is to reduce the number of choices by throwing out options you can’t make use of. For example, if your build doesn’t have any fire attacks, you’re not going to benefit from the Flame-Shrouding Cracked Tear which boosts the damage of fire attacks.
You can further eliminate choices by deciding if you want your mixture to provide offense, defense, or a combination of both. Depending on which approach you want to take, you only have to consider Crystal Tears that provide buffs for that specific emphasis.
Offensive Crystal Tears
These types of tears will focus on boosting your scaling stats (Strength, Faith, etc.) or a specific type of damage.
I’d also place the Crystal Tears that affect FP in this category since FP tends to be more useful offensively than defensively. Offensive Crystal Tears have the following name schemes:
- [Stat]-knot – Boost a specific stat
- [Damage Type]-Shrouding Cracked – Boost a specific damage type
- Cerulean – Regenerates FP
- Cracked – Boosts attack type (usually)
Offensive Crystal Tears tend to be extremely build-reliant, similar to Talismans. A lot of the time, you will only be able to make proper use of a small subset of the offensive ones you have access to, though the ones you can benefit from will provide you with a substantial damage boost.
Try to pick offensive Crystal Tears that that encompass the types of damage you deal most often. For example, as an Astrologer, I’m mostly casting spells and my damage scales with Intelligence, so I would benefit the most from Magic-Shrouding Cracked and Intelligence-knot Crystal Tears. On the other side of things, if you only have 1 charge attack that you don’t use too often, you probably won’t get too much use out of something like the Spiked Cracked Tear.
You might want to use an offensive Crystal Tear build if you don’t want to mess around with changing them all the time or are happy with your existing defensive capabilities. If you haven’t found Crystal Tears that work for your build, you should use a defensive or versatile build in the meantime.
Defensive Crystal Tears
These types of tears will focus primarily on mitigating damage or regenerating HP.
Defensive Crystal Tears have the following name schemes:
- Crimson – Regenerates HP
- Opal – Blocks incoming damage
- Hardtear – Mitigates damage
- Cerulean – Regenerates FP (build-dependent)
I included Cerulean here because FP can be used defensively depending on your build. For example, you might be using a defensive skill, Ash of War, or Spirit Ash that consumes FP. If you have a Faith build, you might be using some incantations that heal you as well.
I want to point out that incantations that heal over time do not appear to stack with other effects that heal over time, so you might want to take a closer look at healing interactions when mixing in Crimson Tears or choose a defensive tear that doesn’t heal you.
Defensive Crystal Tears tend to be more situational than offensive ones. For example, the Dragonkin Soldier doesn’t have much health while he does a lot of damage per hit, so the Opaline Bubbletear is incredible against him because it will mitigate more damage than you’d heal from a lot of Crimson Tears. Meanwhile, the Opaline Bubbletear isn’t too great against regular enemies and especially encounters with a lot of enemies where individual attacks won’t necessarily deal too much damage.
Defensive Crystal Tear builds might be better if you’re happy with your damage output or are going for a more glass cannon build where you can more easily get one-shot by attacks. Keep in mind that you’ll need to tweak defensive Crystal Tear build more often if you want to always get the most from your Flask of Wondrous Physick.
Versatile Crystal Tears
Truly versatile tears that can work for both offense and defense are more rare. The only category that really fits the bill is the Green Crystal Tears which improve your Stamina in some way. Stamina functions both offensively and defensively because is governs how long you can attack for as well as how much you can dodge or block.
You can also create a versatile concoction by just pairing what you think is the strongest offensive Crystal Tear for your build with the strongest defensive Crystal Tear you have access to.
Versatile builds offer flexibility at the cost of specialization, you simply won’t get as much of a damage or survivability increase as you’d get with a pure offensive or defensive build.
It’s also worth considering with versatile builds that you may have to choose between 2 strong offensive options, but it’s pretty easy to test to figure out which one is better. All you have to do is equip one at a time, activate it, then go do several hits against an enemy with a lot of HP and see which one deals more damage per hit.
All Crystal Tear Locations in Elden Ring
Below you will find the full list of all locations where you can find and get Crystal Tears for your Flask of Wondrous Physick. Each location is shown with a detailed text description and images of a map and items overview.
Limgrave
Crimson Crystal Tear 1
Located at the Third Church of Marika near the border between Caelid and Limgrave. You’ll pick this one up when you get the Flask of Wondrous Physick.
Strength-knot Crystal Tear
Located in a bowl beneath the bridge leading from Stormveil Castle to the Divine Tower of Limgrave.
Faith-knot Crystal Tear
Located in a bowl along the northern edge of the Weeping Peninsula near the Church of Pilgrimage.
Greenspill Crystal Tear
Found at the base of the Minor Erdtree near the Mistwood Forest and entrance to Siofra River Well Entrance.
Spiked Cracked Tear
Found at the base of the Minor Erdtree near the Mistwood Forest and entrance to Siofra River Well Entrance.
Opaline Bubbletear
Dropped by defeating an Erdtree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree at the center of the Weeping Peninsula.
Crimsonburst Crystal Tear
Dropped by defeating an Erdtree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree at the center of the Weeping Peninsula.
Liurnia
Dexterity-knot Crystal Tear
Found in a bowl in the lake area in between the Boilprawn Shack and Village of the Albinaurics.
Intelligence-knot Crystal Tear
Found in a bowl in the lower area past Iji but before the Carian Manor.
Cerulean Crystal Tear 1
Found by defeating the Erdtree Avatar that guards the Minor Erdree on the west bank of the lake.
Ruptured Crystal Tear 1
Found by defeating the Erdtree Avatar that guards the Minor Erdree on the west bank of the lake.
Magic-Shrouding Crystal Tear
Dropped by the Erdree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtreee in eastern Liurnia, north of the Church of Vows.
Lightning-Shrouding Cracked Tear
Dropped by the Erdree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtreee in eastern Liurnia, north of the Church of Vows.
Holy-Shrouding Crystal Tear
Dropped by the Erdree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtreee in eastern Liurnia, north of the Church of Vows.
Caelid
Windy Crystal Tear
Located in a stone basin in southern Caelid near the entrance to Redmane Castle and Cathedral of Dragon Communion.
Opaline Hardtear
Dropped by the Putrid Avatar located at the base of the Minor Erdtree in northeast Caelid.
Stonebarb Cracked Tear
Dropped by the Putrid Avatar located at the base of the Minor Erdtree in northeast Caelid.
Flame-shrouding Cracked Tear
Dropped by the Erdtree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree in northwest Caelid near the Rotview Balcony and Smouldering Church.
Greenburst Crystal Tear
Dropped by the Erdtree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree in northwest Caelid near the Rotview Balcony and Smouldering Church.
Atlus Plateau
Purifying Crystal Tear
Dropped by defeating the invader named Bloody Finger Eleonora at the Second Church of Marika. You may need to progress through the quest of Bloody Finger Hunter Yura in order for the invasion to trigger.
Twiggy Cracked Tear
Found on a stone basin at the base of the Minor Erdtree found north of Lyndell, Royal Capital.
Crimson Crystal Tear 2
Found on a stone basin at the base of the Minor Erdtree found north of Lyndell, Royal Capital.
Crimsonspill Crystal Tear
Dropped by a large version of the sick worm face guys found throughout the northern area of the Atlus Plateau.
Speckled Hardtear
Dropped by a large version of the sick worm face guys found throughout the northern area of the Atlus Plateau.
Winged Crystal Tear
Found in a stone basin near, but not at, the Minor Erdtree north of Lyndell, Royal Capital. Other Crystal Tears can be found at the actual base of that Minor Erdtree.
Leaden Hardtear
Dropped by the Ulcerated Tree Spirit at the base of the torched Minor Erdtree on Mt. Gelmir.
Cerulean Hidden Tear
Dropped by the Ulcerated Tree Spirit at the base of the torched Minor Erdtree on Mt. Gelmir.
Mountaintops of the Giants
Thorny Cracked Tear
Dropped by a Putrid Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree east of Ordinia, Liturgical Town (Haligtree Land/Secret Medallion).
Ruptured Crystal Tear 2
Dropped by a Putrid Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree east of Ordinia, Liturgical Town (Haligtree Land/Secret Medallion).
Cerulean Crystal Tear 2
Dropped by an Erdtree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree south of Castle Sol (regular medallion area).
Crimson Bubbletear
Dropped by an Erdtree Avatar at the base of the Minor Erdtree south of Castle Sol (regular medallion area).
Crimsonwhorl Bubbletear
Located in a stone basin above the nearby Giant’s Gravepost Lost Grace.
If you want to know more about the other types of Flasks in the game, be sure to check out my guide on Crimson and Cerulean Flasks. The Starter Guide for Elden Ring will give you a lot of helpful information to prepare you for your adventures in the Lands Between without spoiling things for you.
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