Elden Ring stats explained: How to plan your build

The stats in Elden Ring are more intricate than in previous FromSoftware games, so here’s a full walkthrough on how character attributes work so you can craft the most effective build for your style.

Many players ponder the roles and relevance of different stats in Elden Ring, particularly in comparison to Dark Souls. That’s why it is key to understand what each one does in the game to make your time in The Lands Between much easier.

To avoid squandering points on stats that won’t benefit your character’s development, here’s how to plan your build.

All stats in Elden Ring

Every Tarnished in The Lands Between has six stat to worry about:

• HP: The amount of health your character has.
• Stamina: The physical endurance to run, roll, attack, and block. You can restore it, but it replenishes itself with time.
• FP: The mana that allows you to cast spells, summon spirits, and use the Ashes of War.
• Equip Load: The amount of gear and items you can carry with you. If you cross certain weight limits, you’ll lose the possibility of running or rolling, turning you into an easy target for enemies.
• Memory Slots: The amount of spells your character can learn. You can increase it using the Memory Stones you’ll find scattered around The Lands Between.
• Discovery: The odds of enemies dropping loot when they die. This can be increased with the Arcane attribute or some special items the game has.

All attributes in Elden Ring explained

Character attribute: Vigor

Vigor is the attribute that governs the amount of health (HP) your character has. The more you level this stat, the longer your red bar will be. It also boosts your fire and poison resistances, so it’s a useful stat to upgrade, whatever your build is.

Remember, vigor may increase your health, but it doesn’t increase your physical defense – that’s the Endurance stat. Therefore, if you’re building a character designed to take lots of damage it’s wise to level both. Think of vigor as the amount of health you have, while endurance is how effective it is.

Vigor has a soft cap of 40, then another at 60, so once you get to this point, leveling it further results in diminishing returns. Of course, you can continue to level it, but each point you add now will only give you a fraction of what it did before. Therefore, once you reach 40 Vigor, it may be worth spending your points elsewhere.

Character attribute: Mind

This is the attribute governing your focus points or FP. It’s the blue bar beneath your health and depletes when you use sorceries, incantations, or other FP-related skills.

Leveling this stat also helps boost focus-related resistances. So, not only will this let you cast more spells, but it’ll also make you tougher in the face of some damage types too.

Remember, this stat only governs how many focus points you have, not how powerful your sorceries, incantations, and skills are.

It’s advisable to stop leveling Mind at 40 points due to diminishing returns. This is unless you really need more for your build, then you can take it to 55 or 60 before the caps start to kick in.

Character attribute: Endurance

The endurance attribute governs the amount of stamina you have as well as your physical defense. Leveling this stat will make you tougher and nimbler.

Stamina is essential in Elden Ring and will allow you to do more in combat before you need to back off and let it regenerate. It can also save your life if you have enough stamina to roll or dodge attacks.

Getting hit by enemies will also reduce your stamina, therefore, having enough to escape combat quickly can be critical to survival.

Endurance has two soft caps, your stamina will stop increasing after 50 points. However, your carry weight will continue to be boosted until you’ve allocated 60 points.

Remember though, only allocate 60 points to Endurance if you truly need it. For example, you plan on using very heavy armor and still moving quickly. For most sets, 50 will be plenty.

Character attribute: Strength

Strength does several things in Elden Ring, it increases your physical damage output, allows you to wield heavier weapons, and increases your equipment load. This means you can wear heavier armor to increase your defense.

If you’re rocking a strength and endurance build, your character will be able to use large weapons, wear heavy armor, and still move quickly in combat.

Wearing heavy armor without enough strength will cause your character to ‘fat roll’ which means they won’t be able to dodge effectively. It also impedes the regeneration speed of your stamina and causes you to move slower.

Depending on your build, it’s usually wise to stop leveling Strength once you’ve allocated 50 points to it. Any more results in diminishing returns. However, you can push to 60 if you feel like you need to.

Character attribute: Dexterity

Dexterity is used to let your character wield more advanced weapons effectively. For example, it will boost damage done by bows, crossbows, and curved or smaller swords.

It’s essentially for players who want to play as a rogue-style character, rather than a tank, so it serves as an alternative to strength in many ways. However, there are plenty of builds that benefit from leveling both strength and dexterity.

Leveling dexterity also reduces the casting time of spells, softens fall damage, and makes it harder to be knocked off your horse. This means it’s useful to magic builds and shouldn’t be written off by strength-building characters either.

Like Strength, it’s usually wise to stop leveling Dexterity once you’ve allocated 50 points to it. Any more results in diminishing returns. As with Strength, you can push to 60, just be aware each point will mean less and less.

Character attribute: Intelligence

Intelligence is required to perform Glintstone sorceries, Elden Ring’s version of magic

Leveling the stat also increases the damage output of intelligence-scaling spells, but also does the same thing for weapons that scale with intelligence.

Essentially, this will allow spells to become more powerful and those with a lot of FP will be able to cast more of them. Intelligence also boosts magic damage resistance, making it helpful to a variety of builds.

Your first target should be leveling Intelligence to 20 points this is when the first soft cap sets in. The next slightly harder cap is at 50 points, before a full cap at 80.

Character attribute: Faith

Faith in Elden Ring is primarily used for performing incantations. These are defensive and offensive spells that are different from Glintstone sorceries. Incantations are basically Elden Ring’s version of Miracles from previous Souls games.

Some strength or dexterity players may choose to include a few incantations in their build to buff certain things like their health or weapon damage. Although some character builds are created around the faith stat, such as the Prophet.

Like Intelligence, the first cap is at 20 points added to Faith, but most builds can push to 50 points.

Character attribute: Arcane

Not to be confused with the arcane stat in Bloodborne, arcane in Elden Ring is essentially the game’s Luck stat. The attribute governs item discovery but also boosts certain resistances, sorceries, and incantations.

Arcane can be useful if pushed to 20 points, but we don’t see much value in leveling this much further unless you’re pushing for an Arcane-heavy build.

How to increase your attributes

Players have 8 attributes in the game to enhance. Each one improves different offensive as well as defensive skills needed for survival.

These attributes can be leveled up with runes in any Site of Grace around The Lands Between in Elden Ring. The runes are acquired by killing enemies or breaking Golden Runes, however, keep in mind that every time you increase an attribute, its costs will increase.

To do so, follow these steps:

1. Interact with a Site of Grace.
2. Select the “Level Up” option from the menu.
3. Pick which stat from the “Attribute Points” list to enhance (and check at the top how many runes it requires).
4. Move the joystick to the right to level it up.
5. Select “Confirm” at the bottom.

Remember, should you commit to certain stats or a particular build, you can always change this later and respec your character into something else using the Larval Tear items. These are finite resources but there are enough of them to do multiple respecs.

That’s all you need to understand stats in Elden Ring. You can also check out our guides with all the character classes explained and the best early weapons, as well as how to level up to get ready for the challenges you’ll face in The Lands Between.