Stat Progression Guide for Beginners in Elden Ring
If you have never played any games from the Souls series, deciding which stats to increase may seem hard. Below is a guide for new players and beginners on how to allocate stats that will hopefully make a first playthrough of the game much easier.
Increase Stats by Leveling Up
In Elden Ring, you can manually increase any of your character’s 8 stats (Vigor, Mind, Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith, and Arcane) by allocating stat points when you level up. Runes are required to raise your character’s level, making it necessary to spend time farming them by defeating enemies and looting them from chests.
Recommended Stats to Focus on For Beginners
Vigor and Endurance are Essential Stats
Your character’s Vigor determines how much HP they have while their Endurance affects their maximum stamina. These two stats are arguably have the most impact in terms of your competence and survival during encounters. Because of this, you should consider raising Vigor and Endurance to sufficient levels throughout the game.
Choose Other Stats to Raise Based on Your Playstyle
Aside from Vigor and Endurance, you will want to focus on attributes based on your preferred playstyle and main weapon of choice. If you want to wield heavy weapons such as large swords, axes, hammers, and great spears, consider investing your stat points on Strength. If you want to go for melee armaments with fast swing speed like daggers, straight swords and katanas or weapons that have good range like spears and bows, focus on Dexterity.
A popular route to take in terms of allocating stat points that have have been popular with players of past Souls games is to raise both Strength and Dexterity. This allows them to take advantage of weapons that gain immense damage bonuses through near-equal investment in both Strength and Dexterity, resulting in what is commonly called a “Quality” build.
If you wish to wield Sorceries as your main form of offense, consider pumping up Intelligence and Mind. The former directly increases the damage dealt by Sorceries while Mind increases the number of casts you can have for certain spells. Meanwhile, those who wish to rely on Incantations should invest in Faith that increases this spell type’s power. It should be noted that most healing and protective spells scale with Faith, making it among the priority stats for Cleric-style builds.
Take note of stat soft caps.
Stat soft caps are values for each of the 8 attributes where the bonuses gained by your character to their parameters start to diminish. Make sure to know the soft caps for each stat to be able to decide if further investment will be worth it based in your character’s playstyle.
It is not recommended to raise all of your stats equally.
Putting points into all of your stats to raise them all equally is generally a bad idea as it will result in your character having no real strengths to progress smoothly in the game. Spreading your attributes too thin will prevent you from being able to adopt a clear playstyle which, in the long run, will make the game less fun and engaging.
You can reset your stats late in the game.
If you somehow misallocated stat points too much to make your current build enjoyable, you can respec your character by obtaining Larval Tears throughout the game. Note that the NPC to reset your stats is encountered quite late in the story so try to stick to a clear build as much as possible.
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