I’ve spent literal days studying how stats and scalings work in this game and I’ve never once seen someone explain it as clearly as you have, things are actually making some sense
If the game wasn't so great, it wouldn't be worth doing all the homework it assigns you. I think its good that the game market also has dumbed down games you can just pick up and play. When I finish Elden Ring, I'm gonna play something simple like Far Cry just to decompress.
In the early levels, scaling on any weapon will be a very small % of your damage, it really only starts to pick up around +16. On the other hand, going hard on vigor early will get you huge returns. Priority early on should be enough offensive stats to equip whatever you are going to be using (using talismans to hit these numbers is also a great idea), then Vigor to 40, then going back and increasing your damage and end/mind.
I’ve noticed this too. I’m just about to start a playthrough using exclusively the Zwei, and my plan is to get the required 19/11 to wield it, then pump Vigor to 40 or so.
you are 100% right, but even 2y after release ppl. dont invest into vigor 8 out 10 times. as an invader i just love the dumbness of those dude‘s. it just seems that nobody is able to do math these days - perfect.
Small but important note: Dexterity has a side effect that allows you to cast spells and shoot bows and arrows faster the higher it goes. Caps out at 70 where you’ll basically cast spells/incants instantly.
@@justhair17 You’re probably right. 40 is lower than I thought, though. Is the talisman that good that it makes up for 30 levels in Dex? Even though each level doesn’t increase the casting speed much, I’d think it would be like 50 or something. But you may be right.
That’s correct. The talisman essentially adds 30 dexterity levels worth of casting speed, so at 40 dexterity it would get you to the cap at 70. Azur’s staff adds 40, so if you use that and the talisman, you can actually hit the casting speed cap without leveling dexterity at all
There is another soft cap for mind which is 38. This is the point where you have 221 mana and a fully upgraded flask gives you 220 mana. So before level 38 you get a total mana increase of the base increase + the base increase × the amount of flask you have. While after 38 your total mana pool will only go up by the base increase
I would still say to get around 40 because this assumes you’re going to be using spells that completely drain your FP (you’ll have some FP left over unless you use continuous spells like comet azure)
@@xyzavenger If you're gonna go hard on mind I'd say even 50 is safe. More than that is kinda "ehh..." Looking at the wiki, 50 mind means the flask will refill 3/4 of your fp. I never went that high on mind, tho.
Completely underrated videos. I just watched both and I thought they had like hundreds of thousands of views. The pace at which you explained was great. Thanks for your work, really appreciate it!
I clicked because of the thumbnail, I stayed because it was informative (even if I completed Elden Ring 7-8 times...) and I subscribed because of the Cowboy Bebop banner on your page. See you space cowboy !
how are the only 2 videos of eldenring on your aocount the most useful guides ive seen like XD id been trying to find this shit for ages and you made it sound so simple
49:58 this last section is the best part and summation of the whole video. Gamers are often so dogmatic about how to make builds in RPGS they dont consider all the true opportunity costs. Not just your character stats but your actual real life time investment. You've put everything together in such brilliant way here.
129 hours into the game and I feel like I don't know anything, hints why I'm here. This video definitely breaks it down the way I can understand how the stats work. I thought Vitality was to increase HP, time to replace that Vitality Boosting Talisman.
You're really good at going in depth in your guides I can easily see your channel getting loads of success if you keep maintaining this quality and type of content.
25:38 as a fellow kind of dark mode enthusiest, you have my deepest thanks and appreciation. Thank you for bejng a shining beacon of darkness in this light mode world.
This video has helped me out a ton. You explained everything very well and it easy to understand even for someone who’s only a few hours in the game to get ready for that insane looking DLC. Definitely will be coming back to this video to help on my journey to become the Elden Lord
I might just be misinterpreting the way you phrased this, but I think you might be slightly off. Black flame initial hit damage scales with faith but it does have a damage over time effect that does a percentage of the target’s max hp. The community consensus is that the damage over time does 2-5% of the max health, but I honestly have no idea what determines exactly where in that range the damage will be because the DoT itself doesn’t seem to scale with anything. My bad if I read the comment wrong and you already knew that.
Your ability to explain everything in detail, while also being easy to follow are top notch! You deserve way more subs! Thank you for the hard work, time, and research you put in to your videos. I hope you are blessed by the algorithm! You deserve it.
The one thing you omitted is that with mind is that there's a virtual soft cap at the amount of mind that gives you exactly the amount of FP that you can heal with a single swig of your flask. Below that point, you are effectively giving up extra FP each time you take a drink. After that point, you are essentially only getting the extra FP once per rest. This effect doesn't matter much for vigor because of how impactful the extra vigor is, but spells are proportionally pretty expensive. So you are really only getting a handful of extra casts between sites of grace once you have more than a flask can heal. Edit: going from memory, the virtual cap is 38.
Yeah 38 is right. I probably should have still mentioned it, but I don’t personally find that breakpoint terribly important because I often drink my cerulean flasks before I’m totally out of FP anyway for the sake of being able to just enter the next fight at full FP to reduce the chances I need to drink mid fight. Since I’m already “wasting” a lot of my flasks in that regard and not getting the full amount of FP I could with each drink, I’m not worried about optimizing it to that point. That’s just me personally, but that’s why including it slipped my mind.
Early game I always prioritize Vigor and Endurance over damage. I don't put any levels into damage stats until I get Vigor to 35 or 40 and Endurance to 25 or 30, the damage I get from upgrade materials will get me by until I can start putting points into damage stats. I honestly don't worry about meta levels, I just naturally level through the entire game and see where I end up. In Elden Ring 180 seemed to be the sweet spot, 60 Vigor, 80 Damage Stat, 50/50 for a split build. Weapon requirements, and enough Mind and Endurance to be comfortable melee builds will have roughly 25 Mind and 35 Endurance, Caster builds will be the reverse 35 Mind and 25 Endurance, or if a hybrid build it might be an even 30/30. Quite a few levels will be in weapon requirements because I like to have a good variety of options on a build. I have 10 builds/characters and for all of them 180 seemed to be the sweet spot. I still get plenty of action with pvp. The soft caps are much higher in Elden Ring than Dark Souls 3 and it's a much larger game so I think doing New Game, New Game Plus and whatever DLCs at 180 is fine. I can always delete my builds and make 150 meta builds if needed, but I honestly ain't worried about it. All my Dark Souls 3 builds were at 150 and I still get plenty of action in pvp with them as well. Bloodborne same thing, 150 is where I stopped but could have probably stopped at 125, it's not a very stat hungry game.
My base is to always go for 40 Vigor, 20 Mind & 20 endurance first for any build, if you wanna use alot of weapons I'd go for at least 20 strength and dex to get a high variety of weapon choices if not u dont need to bother with this, with 2 hand u can get wield 30 strength weapons too, from there I go from where I need, am I power stancing, two handing, using spells, incantation.
20 strength and Dex would be high priority for a newer player as I'm assuming they want to use as many weapons as possible, but for expirenced players u will know what u need off the bat.
Hey man I truly appreciate this video! This is my first souls game and I am getting near the end of the game, but I have never truly understood the scaling. This is a truly remarkable breakdown and you deserve so many more people to see this video and subscribe to your channel. I can't wait for the next video!
I began watching this bc it seemed interesting. Come to find out this information is extremely beneficial to my level 260 character with 99 Vigor, and 90 Endurance. Meaning I have so many runes to play with to really make my character a pvp monster. Definitely subscribed.
You can only pvp with people similar level to you meaning you would have to find someone who is also 260… There are “pvp metas” in the souls games usually capping from 125-150 anything past that just causes builds to blur together because you have too much stat investment
@solcerer0006 eldenring is so popular you can just ignore the prescribed metas and still fine people easily. It's not dark souls 3 you don't have to play that way. Some builds require level 200 easily as well. They don't start losing there uniqueness by then at all. Especially wizards who want 80 int can easily go to 200. This is a very dark souks 3 mindset and things change.
@@jamesn0va I agree. Pvp arena is intense! I enjoy seeing all the crazy builds people come up with. My pvp build is purely strength and intelligence. Both capped at 80. I have 3 weapons to hot swap with. It's the b@$t@r& sword. Great sword. And the collosal one with wolfs assault. 113 poise. A Glintstone staff. And it's extremely good with spam builds. Mostly I just stick to a my sword for a fair fight. But the amount of chaos I can unleash upon someone trying to spam is ridiculous. I'm so excited for dlc. The rumors are we should hear something about it this month. But another online source says we won't see anything until the year 2025.
@@jamesn0valiterally not a dks3 mindset at all its a 2 chromosomes mindset dks3 is 90-120 and elden ring is 120-180 anything over that you are not part of the community literally so you dont need to communicate here.😊
@@solcerer0006Is that true? My buddy was level 300 with a +3 normal weapon and we got invaded but a seemingly low level player, he had little health and was doing like 70-100 dmg per hit, this was yesterday.
My Elden Ring copy arrives later today. I’m going to try to think of what style I want to use for my first run. The magic in this game looks amazing but I also like using bows and swords
I've always been more of a fan of spellblade type builds rather than pure caster, so you can definitely have both. For what it's worth, there are also multiple sorceries that allow you to conjure a magic greatbow or various sizes of magic swords.
Thank you for making this video possible, it was very helpful and easy to understand. For some reason, my brain struggles to comprehend the more nuanced and heady aspects behind certain gameplay mechanics and this helped me a lot.
I bought the game recently and am planning to jump into it, and this and your weapon scaling videos are by far the most concise and clear in explaining the stat system of the game. Thank you.
This is brilliant! I've been a fairly casual player up to this point, but I want to get a better understanding of these kinds of details ahead of the DLC. I'm definitely saving this video and my screenshots.
Fantastic guide, thank you for the easy to follow explanations in one video! I've played Elden Ring since release and I still forget about all the numbers like poise threshold 😂😂
The bit about the rolling I frames and recovery frames makes me think that for the purpose of rolling and queueing up a drink or an attack, the roll is using two different animations for the roll (or three? you can definitely skip the last chunk of recovery frames with some actions) and that's why when I roll and push the button to drink he doesn't always drink. It gets more annoying if I want to drink twice and think "Ok I'll roll and push the drink button twice that makes sense" only for the game to eat some or all of the inputs seemingly at random, and it seems like attacking after rolling always follows different rules. If I gain a more concrete understanding of when I've gotta push the button I think I can control the character better, of course. It's also nice to confirm that Vitality isn't as important early as it might seem from the urge to "make red bar bigger." As your durability from damage block and damage resistance goes up, increasing your hp becomes more valuable. This means that in the very early levels Vitality won't be giving you as big of a return as something that gets you to your next intended weapon and also increases your level defenses. Even leveling endurance early could increase your early durability more than leveling vitality early would if you can then slip on some heavier armor without fatrolling; and then as your hardness increases those vitality levels become more attractive.
Yeah the older dark souls games were really bad about letting you queue up a ton of inputs and would really punish you if you were panic spamming roll/heal. I feel like it has gotten better over time and your character’s actions are a little bit more predictable in Elden Ring if you queued up multiple actions, but that could just be me being more conscious of not spamming the buttons when possible. It would definitely be interesting to see exactly what the timings are for all those animations.
i watched the entire video and got so much useful information explained clearly with no bs in between. keep making stuff like this and im sure you'll blow up.
I played a bunch of Elden Ring when it was brand new on Xbox series x. It was my first ever souls like game and I never beat the story. About a year ago I got a pc and waited for a sale to get Elden Ring again, holiday sale I got it again on steam. Looking for a refresher on the mechanics and found this. Damn dude this is the most in depth breakdown of stats and mechanics I’ve seen for any game potentially. Mad props for the time you must’ve taken to do videos like this. They’ll help tons of new and players like me returning to the game. You’re clearly very dedicated to what you do. You got my sub 100%
For anyone curious the tiny defence bonuses from specific attributes appear to have a soft cap at 32 and another somewhere between 50 and 60 This is useful for me because of my level 365 character on ng+8 that I’m currently trying to get every weapon and armour piece on the game on (and then fully upgrade those weapons) and I want to know what to level with the rune gain from bosses (I need 1.4million per level atm so it takes like half the early story bosses for 1 level (and 2-3 late game ones))
Good thing to add in here 32:58 *_Most things_* in the game have lower Lightning Resistance. Some things take extra damage from lightning. Lightning also scales with Dex.
Excellent video and people should definitely watch the weapons video as well, which I did at the pause point. Thanks for taking the time to do this. ⭐⭐⭐
i keep coming back to this video to look up the softcaps for any new build/ the coming levels of my current build. Thx for the extensive work with the graphs.
By the way you are amazing at making videos for us stat nerds who love to see the numerical value associated with leveling your attributes. Very detailed and easy to understand with all information concisely yet meticulously explained. You should do more of these definitely got yourself a new subscriber.
Great explanation, thank you, there’s always something in these stat videos that I take away and appreciate, this is IMO one of the better stat videos I’ve seen recently, nice job
You deserve more subs. The quality is top-notch. I've been watching your deep dives and I'm going to watch your play through next. Please keep making great content.
The Level stat actually does matter a lot. It determines the amount of runes required to upgrade the stats again. I don't know the formula, but after the first few levels it starts getting expensive, and when you're over level 100 it starts getting extremely expensive
The silliest thing to me is that a lot of people still think that leveling absurdly high "takes all the challenge away" as if overall level magically spikes your power at all times, like this is some traditional RPG where being level 100 is just linearly better. In reality, unless you exclusively use weapons like the Sword of Night and Flame or the Prince of Death and Golden Order catalysts, the majority of stat levels will have... literally zero effect on most builds because you can't benefit from scaling that isn't on a weapon, and leveling one single damage stat to 80 has almost the same effect as having them all at 80 for maybe 90-95% of weapons. The biggest difference in "difficulty" is maybe having an extra batch of levels to pump Mind and Endurance past the minimum viable endgame values to at least 60, after getting Vigor to 40 for the base game or 60 for the DLC. And then comes the 80/80 Int and Fai thresholds that make the hybrid catalysts start surpassing anything else, while the other three basically just... expand your available gear variety laterally. And of course anything above 60/60/60/80/80/80/80/80 is worth single digits of AR at best, at which point Endurance for extra equip load ironically becomes the highest value again. Maybe people would understand that if they actually knew how softcaps and scaling work. Even so, due to how the game scales things up, the entire range from like 300 to the level cap really doesn't make the game much "easier" beyond saving a few larval tears...
Always level up ur vigor first, take it to 40 asap, only level up ur damage stats for weapon requirements, NOT for scaling damage. Once you have 40 vigor, do whatever you want, but 40 vigor should be your n°1 priority in the early game
I love this video just because I know this shit can get complicated so for some people it’s confusing and frustrating even though I know all the information within it’s still nice to see actual numbers in relation to caps and your build.
The discovery stat isn’t as misleading as it might seem, but it may be unintuitive for somebody new to a game with a discovery type stat. Its simply showing you the total normalized drop chance of items. If an item has a 40% chance to drop, 100 discovery means the item’s drop chance isn’t affected at all. It will remain 40. It’s 100% of 40%. Not sure if it can go negative (most item discovery stats cannot) but if it COULD, then you’d see a reduction. 50 discovery would mean all your drops are cut in half so that item with a 40% chance to drop now has a 20% chance to drop. It is just as simple as said in the video- 109 discovery means you’re at 109% total normal percent or an item’s drop chance multiplied by 1.09.
I'm currently doing a bonk build, with the brick hammer, heavy affinity, with cragblade... I either 1 shot most things, or stagger them after 2-3 hits. Almost 60 poise to, so I just can't be stopped.
Excellent video. Thanks for the graphs. I love to theory craft builds with people. Finding out what they want to do and pull off. This helped me immensely.
I really love your explanation. Going to add this video to my channel's Elden Ring playlist for my viewers. You got my sub. Great work and i now understand it a lot more. Going to be sending people with questions to this vid.
Dudeeeeeee I just need to say thank you ur tip about 51 poise literally just helped me beat malenia on my second play through rn. I was able to trade and deal the final blow Bc her hit didn’t stagger me
Embarassing confession. Iv played every souls game except sekiro coz i cant parry for shit. And i never bothered to understand atributes until ER. And this is by far one of the most simple and digestable videos in the topic iv found. Thanks man
I havent seen anyone mention it yet but you can skip out on your strength stat to some extent if your only interested in the 2 handed moveset. By 2 handing a weapon your strength gains a 1.5x virtual increase allowing you to meet the requirements to use it as well as increasing your strength saturation. This effect will always apply to bows since you need to 2 hand them to even attack with them and at 66 strength or higher 2 handing will effectively grant you 99 strength for your weapon damage this does make 66 strength something of a secret softcap for 2 handing as you really do start getting big diminishing returns from 2 handing beyond that point as even virtual strength will never go above 99 total strength. At 99 strength you won't see any total ar increase at all from 2 handing. A weapons 2h attacks will still probably do more damage but thats due to an invisible value built into each individual attack a weapon can do which accounts for things like heavy attacks doing more damage than light attacks and stuff.
It’s worth noting that dexterity also scales with casting speed of spells and incantations. No idea if there are soft caps, but the hard cap is 70 dex for the fastest casting. Azur’s staff has a virtual dex (casting speed dexterity equivalent) of 40, Radagon’s Icon has a virtual dex of 30.
Yeah, hardcap at 70 and soft cap at 60, so if you’re focusing dex you’ll probably hit it anyway without both of those extra items, but if you do stack azur’s staff and radagon icon you can get away with almost no dexterity which is pretty nice.
I think the MOST important part of caps is if you're casual PvE, nearly none of this applies to you. Raise that key stat to 99 (STR goes higher!), it really doesn't matter. Yup, between certain levels your gains will be little -none, but the gains WILL come back, then after a certain point the gains get really slow....but they're still gains. Don't worry about being a sweaty tryhard and just have fun!
Exactly. Builds are so versatile there really is no wrong answer. And all those people who claim pumping vigor before strength is best just have lead feet and need to learn the more important skill: dodging.
@@RecluseBootsy People get SUPER spooked when they see me at less than 18VIG (like 700HP)..."You don't know what you're doing, look at your VIG! You NEED to...blah blah blah" then they see me no death the entire series, rarely get hit...they get REAAAL quiet. My fav was someone commenting when I was playing Elden Ring, "You leveled INT to 85? Newb...lol. Soft cap is....blah blah blah".....not 5 minutes later, same doofus, "Why are you doing so much damage with Ranni's Dark Moon and the DMGS? You running hacks?"
@@KainiusTheGreati wouldn’t even need to dogde vs u, i’d just trade and kill u lmao. pve or not, with that low vigor you are always at a disadvantage, it’s more than fine if you like playing the game this way, but vigor is the single most important stat in the game. anyone can run as a mage back dodging and spamming comet azur to beat the game, do the same on a strenght/dex build in pve and you’d have a really hard time
@KainiusTheGreat Sad times we live in. Folks are so bent on following the meta builds on youtube instead of experimenting and practicing with something they actually enjoy using. Although, you gotta love when they shush themselves by eating crow. 😂
Me who has finished the base game coming back to the drawing board since the DLC is rocking me. I love katanas because I loved the book of 5 rings growing up, but my stats are pretty random.
Thank you Sir, both videos are not only informative and without any bs inbetween. They're giving me the strength to attempt this game once more, maybe this time with success =)
Was wondering why the Prince of Death staff started doing much less damage, I didn't know it was backloaded and going from 80 to 60 in both Int & Fai significatly decreased it's power. Thanks for the guide 👍
Hey dude idk if youll read this but i just wanted to thank you for this video and the ashes one as well. Ive stayed away from playing Elden Ring not because of the difficulty, but specifically because of the convoluted stats system. When you look at it at first it looks like a vomit of random numbers. Just when you get the hand of the barebones basics, then you have to understand how those numbers change in relation to your attributes, weapon scaling, armor weight and effects, infusions, talismans, flasks, incantation debuffs/buffs, skills, status effects, etc. The vague descriptions of items/equipment's also doent help because they dont give specific numbers. Simply put, its not beginner friendly. Ive probably watched a dozen hours at this point just trying to understand the basics of this game, and i dont even own it on Steam yet. I left a like and saved it to my ER playlist for when i get the game so i can come back to it. There is a certain way i would like to play (daggers or beast claw build) so i want to be able to focus on that as im playing instead of constantly having to experiment with things i dont want to and waste my time.
Hey man, love the amount of research you did for this-. Any chance you can post a video with just the stat scaling graphs? Or link to them if they're posted somewhere else?
One thing I've been worrying about, is that if I accidently go too hard into one stat (eg. Int, where I started off as an astrologer and put 10 pts into Int, and ended up swinging over to Str and using those weapons) that I'll be screwed when I reach end game using melee weapons. That strain had me completely start again to protect myself against being super weak later on.
Enemies don’t scale to your level so 10 wasted levels won’t actually hurt you at all in the long run. The only reason it would be a problem is if you’re trying to keep your character under a certain level for PvP or something. You can also always take a larval tear to Rennala after you finish Raya Lucaria Academy in Liurnia and redistribute all of your levels to move those int levels over to strength. Astrologer starts with higher int and lower strength than some other classes, so if you know you want to go for a strength build, then yeah it would be more optimal to pick a different starting class, but by the end of the game it’s not a difference you’ll ever notice unless you are personally restricting how many times you level up.
I’ve spent literal days studying how stats and scalings work in this game and I’ve never once seen someone explain it as clearly as you have, things are actually making some sense
Could have spent this time to level up everything to 99
@@eSKAone-you really only need 60 after that its very small increase
If the game wasn't so great, it wouldn't be worth doing all the homework it assigns you. I think its good that the game market also has dumbed down games you can just pick up and play. When I finish Elden Ring, I'm gonna play something simple like Far Cry just to decompress.
In the early levels, scaling on any weapon will be a very small % of your damage, it really only starts to pick up around +16. On the other hand, going hard on vigor early will get you huge returns. Priority early on should be enough offensive stats to equip whatever you are going to be using (using talismans to hit these numbers is also a great idea), then Vigor to 40, then going back and increasing your damage and end/mind.
Exactly
I put enough into other stats to equip gear and then bring vigor to at least 50
I’ve noticed this too. I’m just about to start a playthrough using exclusively the Zwei, and my plan is to get the required 19/11 to wield it, then pump Vigor to 40 or so.
Direct quote from onlywaifu lol
you are 100% right, but even 2y after release ppl. dont invest into vigor 8 out 10 times.
as an invader i just love the dumbness of those dude‘s. it just seems that nobody is able to do math these days - perfect.
Small but important note: Dexterity has a side effect that allows you to cast spells and shoot bows and arrows faster the higher it goes. Caps out at 70 where you’ll basically cast spells/incants instantly.
Also, I believe if you use the talisman that increases casting speed, it caps around 40. Could be wrong tho
@@justhair17 You’re probably right. 40 is lower than I thought, though. Is the talisman that good that it makes up for 30 levels in Dex? Even though each level doesn’t increase the casting speed much, I’d think it would be like 50 or something. But you may be right.
That’s correct. The talisman essentially adds 30 dexterity levels worth of casting speed, so at 40 dexterity it would get you to the cap at 70. Azur’s staff adds 40, so if you use that and the talisman, you can actually hit the casting speed cap without leveling dexterity at all
@@wolfiemuse yeah, its great, because you can basically stop dex at 40 and level int higher for dex/int builds.
Is this for incantations as well?
Everybody focuses on the finish line, but not how they get there. Very informative video. I learned a good bit from this.
There is another soft cap for mind which is 38. This is the point where you have 221 mana and a fully upgraded flask gives you 220 mana. So before level 38 you get a total mana increase of the base increase + the base increase × the amount of flask you have. While after 38 your total mana pool will only go up by the base increase
I would still say to get around 40 because this assumes you’re going to be using spells that completely drain your FP (you’ll have some FP left over unless you use continuous spells like comet azure)
@@xyzavenger If you're gonna go hard on mind I'd say even 50 is safe. More than that is kinda "ehh..."
Looking at the wiki, 50 mind means the flask will refill 3/4 of your fp. I never went that high on mind, tho.
@@xyzavenger same i left my mind at 40 just to full recover from mp flask
Completely underrated videos. I just watched both and I thought they had like hundreds of thousands of views.
The pace at which you explained was great. Thanks for your work, really appreciate it!
I clicked because of the thumbnail, I stayed because it was informative (even if I completed Elden Ring 7-8 times...) and I subscribed because of the Cowboy Bebop banner on your page. See you space cowboy !
Stepped in all 3 traps I laid. Too easy 😏
how are the only 2 videos of eldenring on your aocount the most useful guides ive seen like XD id been trying to find this shit for ages and you made it sound so simple
Fr
Complete. Comprehensive. Clear and Concise. Great job buddy you’re a master of your craft ! 🙏🏽
49:58 this last section is the best part and summation of the whole video. Gamers are often so dogmatic about how to make builds in RPGS they dont consider all the true opportunity costs. Not just your character stats but your actual real life time investment. You've put everything together in such brilliant way here.
129 hours into the game and I feel like I don't know anything, hints why I'm here. This video definitely breaks it down the way I can understand how the stats work. I thought Vitality was to increase HP, time to replace that Vitality Boosting Talisman.
This is probably THE best guide to stats in ER I have ever seen
You're really good at going in depth in your guides I can easily see your channel getting loads of success if you keep maintaining this quality and type of content.
25:38 as a fellow kind of dark mode enthusiest, you have my deepest thanks and appreciation. Thank you for bejng a shining beacon of darkness in this light mode world.
This video has helped me out a ton. You explained everything very well and it easy to understand even for someone who’s only a few hours in the game to get ready for that insane looking DLC. Definitely will be coming back to this video to help on my journey to become the Elden Lord
For those wondering if black flame has scaling it scales on max HP for some reason and faith if you’re casting it as an incantation
I might just be misinterpreting the way you phrased this, but I think you might be slightly off. Black flame initial hit damage scales with faith but it does have a damage over time effect that does a percentage of the target’s max hp. The community consensus is that the damage over time does 2-5% of the max health, but I honestly have no idea what determines exactly where in that range the damage will be because the DoT itself doesn’t seem to scale with anything. My bad if I read the comment wrong and you already knew that.
@@TheGhostInitiativeI believe you are correct.
Your ability to explain everything in detail, while also being easy to follow are top notch! You deserve way more subs! Thank you for the hard work, time, and research you put in to your videos. I hope you are blessed by the algorithm! You deserve it.
The one thing you omitted is that with mind is that there's a virtual soft cap at the amount of mind that gives you exactly the amount of FP that you can heal with a single swig of your flask. Below that point, you are effectively giving up extra FP each time you take a drink. After that point, you are essentially only getting the extra FP once per rest. This effect doesn't matter much for vigor because of how impactful the extra vigor is, but spells are proportionally pretty expensive. So you are really only getting a handful of extra casts between sites of grace once you have more than a flask can heal.
Edit: going from memory, the virtual cap is 38.
Yeah 38 is right. I probably should have still mentioned it, but I don’t personally find that breakpoint terribly important because I often drink my cerulean flasks before I’m totally out of FP anyway for the sake of being able to just enter the next fight at full FP to reduce the chances I need to drink mid fight. Since I’m already “wasting” a lot of my flasks in that regard and not getting the full amount of FP I could with each drink, I’m not worried about optimizing it to that point. That’s just me personally, but that’s why including it slipped my mind.
My Intro to Analytics class is paying off! I can understand these stat charts perfectly! See!? College isn't useless!
Early game I always prioritize Vigor and Endurance over damage. I don't put any levels into damage stats until I get Vigor to 35 or 40 and Endurance to 25 or 30, the damage I get from upgrade materials will get me by until I can start putting points into damage stats. I honestly don't worry about meta levels, I just naturally level through the entire game and see where I end up. In Elden Ring 180 seemed to be the sweet spot, 60 Vigor, 80 Damage Stat, 50/50 for a split build. Weapon requirements, and enough Mind and Endurance to be comfortable melee builds will have roughly 25 Mind and 35 Endurance, Caster builds will be the reverse 35 Mind and 25 Endurance, or if a hybrid build it might be an even 30/30. Quite a few levels will be in weapon requirements because I like to have a good variety of options on a build. I have 10 builds/characters and for all of them 180 seemed to be the sweet spot. I still get plenty of action with pvp. The soft caps are much higher in Elden Ring than Dark Souls 3 and it's a much larger game so I think doing New Game, New Game Plus and whatever DLCs at 180 is fine. I can always delete my builds and make 150 meta builds if needed, but I honestly ain't worried about it. All my Dark Souls 3 builds were at 150 and I still get plenty of action in pvp with them as well. Bloodborne same thing, 150 is where I stopped but could have probably stopped at 125, it's not a very stat hungry game.
Im level 300+
My base is to always go for 40 Vigor, 20 Mind & 20 endurance first for any build, if you wanna use alot of weapons I'd go for at least 20 strength and dex to get a high variety of weapon choices if not u dont need to bother with this, with 2 hand u can get wield 30 strength weapons too, from there I go from where I need, am I power stancing, two handing, using spells, incantation.
20 strength and Dex would be high priority for a newer player as I'm assuming they want to use as many weapons as possible, but for expirenced players u will know what u need off the bat.
@@Mc_Jordan2000Facts
Hey man I truly appreciate this video! This is my first souls game and I am getting near the end of the game, but I have never truly understood the scaling. This is a truly remarkable breakdown and you deserve so many more people to see this video and subscribe to your channel. I can't wait for the next video!
Thank you for the kind words, glad it helped!
I began watching this bc it seemed interesting. Come to find out this information is extremely beneficial to my level 260 character with 99 Vigor, and 90 Endurance. Meaning I have so many runes to play with to really make my character a pvp monster. Definitely subscribed.
You can only pvp with people similar level to you meaning you would have to find someone who is also 260…
There are “pvp metas” in the souls games usually capping from 125-150 anything past that just causes builds to blur together because you have too much stat investment
@solcerer0006 eldenring is so popular you can just ignore the prescribed metas and still fine people easily. It's not dark souls 3 you don't have to play that way. Some builds require level 200 easily as well. They don't start losing there uniqueness by then at all. Especially wizards who want 80 int can easily go to 200. This is a very dark souks 3 mindset and things change.
@@jamesn0va I agree. Pvp arena is intense! I enjoy seeing all the crazy builds people come up with. My pvp build is purely strength and intelligence. Both capped at 80. I have 3 weapons to hot swap with. It's the b@$t@r& sword. Great sword. And the collosal one with wolfs assault. 113 poise. A Glintstone staff. And it's extremely good with spam builds. Mostly I just stick to a my sword for a fair fight. But the amount of chaos I can unleash upon someone trying to spam is ridiculous. I'm so excited for dlc. The rumors are we should hear something about it this month. But another online source says we won't see anything until the year 2025.
@@jamesn0valiterally not a dks3 mindset at all its a 2 chromosomes mindset
dks3 is 90-120 and elden ring is 120-180
anything over that you are not part of the community literally so you dont need to communicate here.😊
@@solcerer0006Is that true? My buddy was level 300 with a +3 normal weapon and we got invaded but a seemingly low level player, he had little health and was doing like 70-100 dmg per hit, this was yesterday.
I am on ng7, but between your voice and straightforward info, I stayed for the whole video. Amazing qork
My Elden Ring copy arrives later today. I’m going to try to think of what style I want to use for my first run. The magic in this game looks amazing but I also like using bows and swords
I've always been more of a fan of spellblade type builds rather than pure caster, so you can definitely have both. For what it's worth, there are also multiple sorceries that allow you to conjure a magic greatbow or various sizes of magic swords.
Okay, that actually gave me a better understanding of building a character, thanks.
Thank you for making this video possible, it was very helpful and easy to understand. For some reason, my brain struggles to comprehend the more nuanced and heady aspects behind certain gameplay mechanics and this helped me a lot.
I bought the game recently and am planning to jump into it, and this and your weapon scaling videos are by far the most concise and clear in explaining the stat system of the game. Thank you.
This is brilliant! I've been a fairly casual player up to this point, but I want to get a better understanding of these kinds of details ahead of the DLC. I'm definitely saving this video and my screenshots.
Fantastic guide, thank you for the easy to follow explanations in one video! I've played Elden Ring since release and I still forget about all the numbers like poise threshold 😂😂
so simple and straight to the point in a cohesive manner. great video
The bit about the rolling I frames and recovery frames makes me think that for the purpose of rolling and queueing up a drink or an attack, the roll is using two different animations for the roll (or three? you can definitely skip the last chunk of recovery frames with some actions) and that's why when I roll and push the button to drink he doesn't always drink. It gets more annoying if I want to drink twice and think "Ok I'll roll and push the drink button twice that makes sense" only for the game to eat some or all of the inputs seemingly at random, and it seems like attacking after rolling always follows different rules. If I gain a more concrete understanding of when I've gotta push the button I think I can control the character better, of course.
It's also nice to confirm that Vitality isn't as important early as it might seem from the urge to "make red bar bigger." As your durability from damage block and damage resistance goes up, increasing your hp becomes more valuable. This means that in the very early levels Vitality won't be giving you as big of a return as something that gets you to your next intended weapon and also increases your level defenses. Even leveling endurance early could increase your early durability more than leveling vitality early would if you can then slip on some heavier armor without fatrolling; and then as your hardness increases those vitality levels become more attractive.
Yeah the older dark souls games were really bad about letting you queue up a ton of inputs and would really punish you if you were panic spamming roll/heal. I feel like it has gotten better over time and your character’s actions are a little bit more predictable in Elden Ring if you queued up multiple actions, but that could just be me being more conscious of not spamming the buttons when possible. It would definitely be interesting to see exactly what the timings are for all those animations.
Vigor*
i put off this game for so long because it was hard to understand. your videos helped me alot. thanks
The Mike Tyson part from out of left field took me the fuck out ngl lmao.
i watched the entire video and got so much useful information explained clearly with no bs in between. keep making stuff like this and im sure you'll blow up.
Today I learned light roll doesnt have extra I frames
Also no less recovery frames than medium rolling 👍🏻
I played a bunch of Elden Ring when it was brand new on Xbox series x. It was my first ever souls like game and I never beat the story. About a year ago I got a pc and waited for a sale to get Elden Ring again, holiday sale I got it again on steam.
Looking for a refresher on the mechanics and found this. Damn dude this is the most in depth breakdown of stats and mechanics I’ve seen for any game potentially.
Mad props for the time you must’ve taken to do videos like this. They’ll help tons of new and players like me returning to the game. You’re clearly very dedicated to what you do.
You got my sub 100%
Definitely worth the time investment to watch both your videos. Thanks for the work you put into putting this together and the clear explanation
I just wanted to play some Elden Ring today for the first-ish time, then I found your channel and the min max cycle begins.....
For anyone curious the tiny defence bonuses from specific attributes appear to have a soft cap at 32 and another somewhere between 50 and 60
This is useful for me because of my level 365 character on ng+8 that I’m currently trying to get every weapon and armour piece on the game on (and then fully upgrade those weapons) and I want to know what to level with the rune gain from bosses (I need 1.4million per level atm so it takes like half the early story bosses for 1 level (and 2-3 late game ones))
Thanks for taking time out from banging super models to make this vid
No problem man, and you can keep borrowing my lambo for as long as you need it
While listening to this I realized that the Knight Set gives exactly 51 poise
And wear all that if you want to move and roll in slow motion
Good thing to add in here 32:58
*_Most things_* in the game have lower Lightning Resistance. Some things take extra damage from lightning.
Lightning also scales with Dex.
Just picked up the game and you made this complicated aspect of the game easy. Thanks!
Excellent video and people should definitely watch the weapons video as well, which I did at the pause point. Thanks for taking the time to do this. ⭐⭐⭐
i keep coming back to this video to look up the softcaps for any new build/ the coming levels of my current build. Thx for the extensive work with the graphs.
By the way you are amazing at making videos for us stat nerds who love to see the numerical value associated with leveling your attributes. Very detailed and easy to understand with all information concisely yet meticulously explained. You should do more of these definitely got yourself a new subscriber.
This is a perfect video no notes does its job , excellent presentation. Professional level quality.
Great explanation, thank you, there’s always something in these stat videos that I take away and appreciate, this is IMO one of the better stat videos I’ve seen recently, nice job
As a new player this helps TREMENDOUSLY, thank you so much
Thank you. I finished the main and DLC, still had no idea about the soft and hard, just adding attribute to what I feel
You deserve more subs. The quality is top-notch. I've been watching your deep dives and I'm going to watch your play through next. Please keep making great content.
This video is great! You did a fantastic job explaining everything even as complex as it all is. Well done!
The Level stat actually does matter a lot. It determines the amount of runes required to upgrade the stats again. I don't know the formula, but after the first few levels it starts getting expensive, and when you're over level 100 it starts getting extremely expensive
The silliest thing to me is that a lot of people still think that leveling absurdly high "takes all the challenge away" as if overall level magically spikes your power at all times, like this is some traditional RPG where being level 100 is just linearly better.
In reality, unless you exclusively use weapons like the Sword of Night and Flame or the Prince of Death and Golden Order catalysts, the majority of stat levels will have... literally zero effect on most builds because you can't benefit from scaling that isn't on a weapon, and leveling one single damage stat to 80 has almost the same effect as having them all at 80 for maybe 90-95% of weapons. The biggest difference in "difficulty" is maybe having an extra batch of levels to pump Mind and Endurance past the minimum viable endgame values to at least 60, after getting Vigor to 40 for the base game or 60 for the DLC. And then comes the 80/80 Int and Fai thresholds that make the hybrid catalysts start surpassing anything else, while the other three basically just... expand your available gear variety laterally. And of course anything above 60/60/60/80/80/80/80/80 is worth single digits of AR at best, at which point Endurance for extra equip load ironically becomes the highest value again.
Maybe people would understand that if they actually knew how softcaps and scaling work. Even so, due to how the game scales things up, the entire range from like 300 to the level cap really doesn't make the game much "easier" beyond saving a few larval tears...
Always level up ur vigor first, take it to 40 asap, only level up ur damage stats for weapon requirements, NOT for scaling damage. Once you have 40 vigor, do whatever you want, but 40 vigor should be your n°1 priority in the early game
60 for the DLC, because otherwise, many bosses will simply two-shot you below extremely high Scadutree blessing levels.
I love this video just because I know this shit can get complicated so for some people it’s confusing and frustrating even though I know all the information within it’s still nice to see actual numbers in relation to caps and your build.
Just found a new content creator to follow. Great vid.
Man if only something like this existed in the dark souls days when i really needed it 😂
I like the way memory works in this game at least you don’t have to dump into a stat you won’t use just for buffs
My first play through I had no idea you could get more Memory Slots and I played through the whole game with like 4 slots lol
The discovery stat isn’t as misleading as it might seem, but it may be unintuitive for somebody new to a game with a discovery type stat.
Its simply showing you the total normalized drop chance of items. If an item has a 40% chance to drop, 100 discovery means the item’s drop chance isn’t affected at all. It will remain 40. It’s 100% of 40%.
Not sure if it can go negative (most item discovery stats cannot) but if it COULD, then you’d see a reduction. 50 discovery would mean all your drops are cut in half so that item with a 40% chance to drop now has a 20% chance to drop.
It is just as simple as said in the video- 109 discovery means you’re at 109% total normal percent or an item’s drop chance multiplied by 1.09.
God tier knowledge, great work! Just watched my 2nd time, and it’s all making so much sense now. Thank you !
Your channel logo is cool af. "Ghost" is spelled out in every layer starting from the outermost. 🔥
very good job, the detailed information with graphs in this 50 minute video can save you a week of confusion on google
I'm currently doing a bonk build, with the brick hammer, heavy affinity, with cragblade... I either 1 shot most things, or stagger them after 2-3 hits. Almost 60 poise to, so I just can't be stopped.
Did you write about it in your declassified lands between survival guide?
@@TheGhostInitiative I am in the process yes.
Excellent video. Thanks for the graphs. I love to theory craft builds with people. Finding out what they want to do and pull off. This helped me immensely.
I really love your explanation. Going to add this video to my channel's Elden Ring playlist for my viewers. You got my sub. Great work and i now understand it a lot more. Going to be sending people with questions to this vid.
Dudeeeeeee I just need to say thank you ur tip about 51 poise literally just helped me beat malenia on my second play through rn. I was able to trade and deal the final blow Bc her hit didn’t stagger me
That’s sick haha
Embarassing confession.
Iv played every souls game except sekiro coz i cant parry for shit.
And i never bothered to understand atributes until ER.
And this is by far one of the most simple and digestable videos in the topic iv found.
Thanks man
Seriously… that helped so much. Thank you for caring enough to put out this Elden Ring content. This game is deep.
I'm new on elden ring. It was very informative and nice to understand more about this.
Thank you for this excellent video 👍
What do you do for a living good sir? This level of detail and organization of ideas... quite the talent. Thanks for your time. Very valuable.
I’m a grad student studying mechanical engineering and industrial design
@@TheGhostInitiative checks out
I havent seen anyone mention it yet but you can skip out on your strength stat to some extent if your only interested in the 2 handed moveset. By 2 handing a weapon your strength gains a 1.5x virtual increase allowing you to meet the requirements to use it as well as increasing your strength saturation. This effect will always apply to bows since you need to 2 hand them to even attack with them and at 66 strength or higher 2 handing will effectively grant you 99 strength for your weapon damage this does make 66 strength something of a secret softcap for 2 handing as you really do start getting big diminishing returns from 2 handing beyond that point as even virtual strength will never go above 99 total strength. At 99 strength you won't see any total ar increase at all from 2 handing. A weapons 2h attacks will still probably do more damage but thats due to an invisible value built into each individual attack a weapon can do which accounts for things like heavy attacks doing more damage than light attacks and stuff.
Yeah absolutely. If you’re ok with not being able to use the weapon with one hand you can definitely go for minimum strength requirements.
Vigor also levels fire resistance because esoterically fire is associated with vigor, the etheric flame behind metabolism, will,etc. aries
It’s worth noting that dexterity also scales with casting speed of spells and incantations. No idea if there are soft caps, but the hard cap is 70 dex for the fastest casting.
Azur’s staff has a virtual dex (casting speed dexterity equivalent) of 40, Radagon’s Icon has a virtual dex of 30.
Yeah, hardcap at 70 and soft cap at 60, so if you’re focusing dex you’ll probably hit it anyway without both of those extra items, but if you do stack azur’s staff and radagon icon you can get away with almost no dexterity which is pretty nice.
Excellent video, extremely informative and with a nice touch of humor. Well done!
I think the MOST important part of caps is if you're casual PvE, nearly none of this applies to you. Raise that key stat to 99 (STR goes higher!), it really doesn't matter. Yup, between certain levels your gains will be little -none, but the gains WILL come back, then after a certain point the gains get really slow....but they're still gains. Don't worry about being a sweaty tryhard and just have fun!
Exactly. Builds are so versatile there really is no wrong answer. And all those people who claim pumping vigor before strength is best just have lead feet and need to learn the more important skill: dodging.
@@RecluseBootsy People get SUPER spooked when they see me at less than 18VIG (like 700HP)..."You don't know what you're doing, look at your VIG! You NEED to...blah blah blah" then they see me no death the entire series, rarely get hit...they get REAAAL quiet. My fav was someone commenting when I was playing Elden Ring, "You leveled INT to 85? Newb...lol. Soft cap is....blah blah blah".....not 5 minutes later, same doofus, "Why are you doing so much damage with Ranni's Dark Moon and the DMGS? You running hacks?"
@@KainiusTheGreati wouldn’t even need to dogde vs u, i’d just trade and kill u lmao. pve or not, with that low vigor you are always at a disadvantage, it’s more than fine if you like playing the game this way, but vigor is the single most important stat in the game. anyone can run as a mage back dodging and spamming comet azur to beat the game, do the same on a strenght/dex build in pve and you’d have a really hard time
@@RecluseBootsy parrying is also a good skill set
@KainiusTheGreat Sad times we live in. Folks are so bent on following the meta builds on youtube instead of experimenting and practicing with something they actually enjoy using.
Although, you gotta love when they shush themselves by eating crow. 😂
This video is so good btw W guide
Me who has finished the base game coming back to the drawing board since the DLC is rocking me. I love katanas because I loved the book of 5 rings growing up, but my stats are pretty random.
Best explanation on YT. 👍
thanks man parts of this were a good refresher course after not playing the game for a few months
Omg thank you for your hard work brother. I couldn’t figure out the defense stats. I love the game but it feels like work sometimes 😂
Thank you Sir, both videos are not only informative and without any bs inbetween. They're giving me the strength to attempt this game once more, maybe this time with success =)
Best of luck
Nice info ,dude. Thanks a lot!
i already knew all this but i just wanted something to watch and MAN your voice is AMAZING!! love the vid keep it up brother.❤
Listenening to this during work . But im already lvl 300+
great video! your voice is really soothing which goes very well with these types of videos
I could've used this when i started playing. 💀
Great video
This is amazing , helpful for min max. Thanks brother 💪🏻
Was wondering why the Prince of Death staff started doing much less damage, I didn't know it was backloaded and going from 80 to 60 in both Int & Fai significatly decreased it's power. Thanks for the guide 👍
I always rush my mind stat to 60 as fast as possible. I know you’re probably asking “Why would you do that?” And that’s a great question.
Amazing guides I've learnt so much more from watching your videos appreciate it!
Really well explained ,should have 100k subs
your videos are so clear and easy to understand! keep up the amazing work! new sub
Great info and very well explained. You know it's good when my 56yo mind understands it. Thank you!
Hey dude idk if youll read this but i just wanted to thank you for this video and the ashes one as well.
Ive stayed away from playing Elden Ring not because of the difficulty, but specifically because of the convoluted stats system. When you look at it at first it looks like a vomit of random numbers. Just when you get the hand of the barebones basics, then you have to understand how those numbers change in relation to your attributes, weapon scaling, armor weight and effects, infusions, talismans, flasks, incantation debuffs/buffs, skills, status effects, etc. The vague descriptions of items/equipment's also doent help because they dont give specific numbers. Simply put, its not beginner friendly. Ive probably watched a dozen hours at this point just trying to understand the basics of this game, and i dont even own it on Steam yet.
I left a like and saved it to my ER playlist for when i get the game so i can come back to it. There is a certain way i would like to play (daggers or beast claw build) so i want to be able to focus on that as im playing instead of constantly having to experiment with things i dont want to and waste my time.
Yeah I’m sharing this video to anyone who starts playing Elden Ring. Wish this video was out before. Would’ve helped me out a lot
Hey man, love the amount of research you did for this-. Any chance you can post a video with just the stat scaling graphs? Or link to them if they're posted somewhere else?
All in the description
Very good video
One thing I've been worrying about, is that if I accidently go too hard into one stat (eg. Int, where I started off as an astrologer and put 10 pts into Int, and ended up swinging over to Str and using those weapons) that I'll be screwed when I reach end game using melee weapons. That strain had me completely start again to protect myself against being super weak later on.
Enemies don’t scale to your level so 10 wasted levels won’t actually hurt you at all in the long run. The only reason it would be a problem is if you’re trying to keep your character under a certain level for PvP or something.
You can also always take a larval tear to Rennala after you finish Raya Lucaria Academy in Liurnia and redistribute all of your levels to move those int levels over to strength. Astrologer starts with higher int and lower strength than some other classes, so if you know you want to go for a strength build, then yeah it would be more optimal to pick a different starting class, but by the end of the game it’s not a difference you’ll ever notice unless you are personally restricting how many times you level up.