Best Elden Ring Attributes to Focus On
This Best Elden Ring Attributes guide will teach new players all about which Elden Ring Attributes they should focus on and why.
If you’re playing Elden Ring, you know that leveling up your attributes is the biggest contributing factor to your character gradually getting stronger throughout the game. If you’re a new player, you may not understand what all the Elden Ring attributes do, and it’s not immediately obvious.
In addition to what the Elden Ring attributes literally do, it’s important to know what they do in practice in the game and why you want to invest points in each one.
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So, with that in mind, here is a Best Elden Ring Attributes guide for beginners so that you can begin the game confident you know what you’re doing to some degree, at least until you die 40 times to the same boss and question every decision you’ve ever made.
Elden Ring Attributes Explained
When it comes to making wise decisions about the best Elden Ring attributes for your character, you need to know what each of the attributes does.
You have 8 different attributes to choose from when thinking about choosing the best Elden Ring attributes. These are:
- Vigor
- Mind
- Endurance
- Strength
- Dexterity
- Intelligence
- Faith
- Arcane
Vigor raises your HP, modestly increases Fire Resistance, and increases Immunity, which is basically poison resistance.
Mind raises your FP (mana) as well as Focus, which is basically resistance to sleep, confusion and other similar status effects.
Endurance increases your Stamina. It also increases weight capacity, which is what allows you to wear heavy armor, and Robustness, which is resistance to bleeds and frostbite.
Strength increases your damage with Strength-based weapons, which are typically things like axes, clubs, greatswords, etc. Also increases your physical defense.
Dexterity increases your damage with Dexterity-based weapons, which are typically things like daggers, bows, katanas, etc. Also increases spell casting speed, reduces fall damage, and makes it more difficult to fall off your horse.
Intelligence increases the damage of sorcery spells, which are mostly attack magic, and increases magic resistance.
Faith increases the effectiveness of incantations, which are a combination of heals and elemental magic.
Arcane increases your item drop rate, gives Death Resistance, Holy Resistance and is a requirement for several exotic pieces of equipment and spells.
Additionally, raising your level in general tends to raise all of your parameters very slightly, regardless of which Elden Ring attributes you focus on.
Why Focus on Each of the Elden Ring Attributes
So, you have 8 attributes to choose from when deciding which are the best Elden Ring attributes for your build. I’ve explained what each attribute does technically, but let’s talk a little bit about why certain attributes are actually good in practice, because it’s hard to know just from the descriptions which attributes you’ll actually need.
Vigor: There are not very many things that raise your maximum health outside of pumping points into this stat. And when I say not very many things, I mean almost nothing. If you’re a build that’s going to be getting up close and personal with enemies, you’re going to want to put some points here.
Mind: This is the main way to increase mana. If you’re not an Astrologer you can probably mostly avoid this stat. Even for an Astrologer, it doesn’t really make much sense to increase mana beyond what your potions fill. Boost this stat enough that your mana potions don’t fill more than your mana bar can hold.
Endurance: The main this about this is that it lets you heavy equip armor. If you don’t pump up this stat, you’re not going to be able to roll through the world of Elden Ring with best-in-slot gear in every slot. You’re going to have to pick and choose which pieces of gear you get to wear. For example, you need about 14 Endurance to rock full chainmail-level armor with a shield.
Strength: In addition to increasing your damage with most weapon types, most weapons also have a Strength requirement to even equip them, so if you’re a physical build you’ll need to be investing in Strength at least somewhat occasionally throughout the game, even if you’re a Dexterity-focused build.
Dexterity: The main reason you’d choose Dexterity over Strength is that Dexterity governs most ranged damage. A Strength build will typically have more survivability (higher defense, more health, better armor, better shields), and a Dexterity build will have much better ranged damage.
Intelligence: If you’re a mage, you need Intelligence, and a lot of it. Simple as that. Higher level staffs require 50-60 Intelligence. Higher level spells can require 70+. Otherwise, almost everyone else can skip this stat pretty much entirely.
Faith: If you’re a Faith-based mage, you’ll need Faith, which affects both healing effectiveness and damage output. Lots of Faith (and typically a fair amount of Arcane) is required to equip most Faith-based spells.
Arcane: Arcane is mainly useful for item drops for characters that do a lot of crafting, and for opening up some more exotic gear choices. There’s a great dagger early on that requires 13 Arcane. Dragon magic Incantations require Arcane. Several other things of that nature.
Which are the Best Elden Ring Attributes to Focus On?
When deciding where to spend your hard earned runes, you have to make a tough decision every level regarding which attributes are the best Elden Ring attributes for your build.
You can’t really hold onto runes and see which attributes may come in handy later on. You’re always at such a risk of losing all your runes that you tend to want to spend them quickly, rather than hang onto them and lose them.
Which attributes are the best Elden Ring attributes to focus on largely depends on your build.
Every weapon in the game scales off of particular attributes and requires attributes to equip.
In this example of a staff, if you don’t have 18 Intelligence, you won’t be able to equip it. Its damage will increase when you spend points in Strength or Intelligence, but it only has a D in Strength so you’ll get less damage per point of Strength than you would per point of Intelligence, although this staff would be stronger with 50 Intelligence and 50 Strength than it would be with 50 Intelligence alone.
There are sort of 3 standard archetypal builds you can run around with.
- Strength/Vigor/Endurance
- Dexterity/Vigor/Strength
- Intelligence (or Faith)/Vigor/Mind
No matter what you’ll typically need to branch out of those three main attributes in order to equip some random pieces of gear you might find. As a mage you might find yourself investing a few points in Endurance or Strength to open up more equipment options, for instance.
In general, each of these builds has strengths and weaknesses:
Strength Build: High health, heavy armor, high defense, blocking is extremely effective, great melee damage. Limited ranged options. Can use bows or darts or throwing daggers but mostly only to pull far away monsters. You will be largely melee with this build.
Dexterity Build: Medium health, medium armor, medium defense, great ranged damage, great melee damage. You may find yourself spending a lot of time hunting for crafting materials for arrows, or spending your runes on arrows.
Magic Build: Low health, light armor, low defense, extremely great ranged damage, terrible melee damage. You might want to increase Endurance and Vigor to bring your survivability close to the Dexterity build.
So basically, when it comes to the best Elden Ring attributes, you’ll have your main damage stat (Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence/Faith) and then you’ll probably want to bump up Vigor, while investing points where they need to go in order to equip what you want to equip, generally speaking.
That about covers it for the Best Elden Ring Attributes guide. Be sure to check the main page for more RPG guides, and check out the Elden Ring section for more guides for Elden Ring.
