Honestly at lvl 100-150 you have no excuse to be below 40-50 vigor. Unless you are playing a build that does magic and melee or some shit you have plenty of perk points to reach soft caps in you chosen build.
I never pump vigor because I always tell myself that “I just won’t get hit, I know the attack patterns”. And, this is usually how it goes, up until Margit.
Me, at first because I thought it would be like in previous games and life would increase anyway with other stats being upped... Nope, life doesn't increase at ALL with other stats in this one. I figured that out and since then have to sacrifice a hell of a number of souls (yeah, runes whatever) I wouldn't normally use for that.
My brother is level 73 and has never once put levels into his vigor stat. He gets one-shot by everything and he thoroughly enjoys it. I bow when I enter his presence now.
My advice is to level vigor at least as much as your flask can heal for. You leave soooooooo much healing on the table when you always overheal, and you'll hit that point very quickly without vigor upgrades.
I think this is one of the things that gets so many people one shotted and then complain that these games are too hard. I don't think I am very skilled at these games, but I have never had an issue because I always make sure my health is high enough to get one hit killed in any new area.
@@Frytzlar I have around 30 or so vigor (I always get to 1000 hp and then slowly level from there) I can still be one shot if I roll incorrectly but I can also tank a bit.
I dunno, there is some really powerful stuff in this game. I always play a glass cannon build in souls games as my first run, and I am level 111 with 15 or so Vigor. I do get one shot often, but it honestly hasn't been that bad, even then, with the right armor and using the mixed physick flasks it can be really viable.
My general method on deciding when to level vigor was to watch how much my flask was healing. If I'm over-healing, I'm losing that much potential health multiplied by the number of flasks I had. So taking that into account, leveling vigor increases your health by far more than the numbers show.
I'm almost exactly this way too. Until the endgame, when I could put more points into vigor than the dwindling flask upgrades could keep up with, I always try to keep my health at 2x whatever my flask heals. If a flask heals more than 50% of my hp bar, it feels wasteful, but if it fills less than half, it doesn't feel like enough healing.
This is exactly how I handled my bars. Is my flask full healing/filling my FP me regardless of how low I am? Time to increase vigor/mind Am I not being full healed by a drink? I'm good, time to focus my other stats. Are my other stats where I want them? Time to pump my bars.
Just raise your vigor at the start and get it over with. If you die and lose your runes you can't level up your other stats. It's more efficient to play the entire game with healthy vigor
@Mushroom11G that is one way to play. Really vigor is just a measure of how much you can mess up. I've found that outside of boss kills or specific grinding spots, regular rune gain from enemies is so pointless it doesn't really matter that much. Also the more of a ranged build you are, the less you need vigor.
I didn’t know how stats and scaling worked at the beginning so I thought if I had the minimum stats I needed for my weapon, that was good enough. Started as vagabond and leveled almost nothing but vigor until 52 vigor. Actually an accidental good choice for a big noob like me.
Doing that and adding an elemental effect with poor scaling but high base stats is an old school legitimate build. Unfortunately Chaos doesn't exist anymore. Actually a weapon element that scales with runes carried would be a good way to do it. Carry 1 million runes for max damage
"Doing something like that isn't gonna make you glass cannon, its just gonna make you glass". Lmao loved this line with reference to the 20hp melee builds xD
@@jambothejoyful2966 In low level invades (the 3 you need to do for the bloody finger quest), I 1-shot 2 out of 3 hosts with the Claymore (+3~+4) special move. Didn't even take 2 hits
That's what talismans, incantations like black flame's proctection, and armor are for. You can mitigate so much damage, in conjuction with a high vigor stat.
I’m up to level 100 without putting any points into vigor. Just got to kill everything before they swing on you lol. The only fight that sucked for me was radon. And in that fight the only thing that made it suck was the 4 meteor attack. If it was for that attack that fight would be easy.
@@danielchrist8651 can you post a clip of you destroying radahn? that sounds awesome. i’ve never seen someone say that radahn is easy, have you been able to get a no hit on him yet? very few people have done that, and you’d have to no-hit him to beat him without leveling vigor as all of his attacks do over 500 damage.
@@davesnothere2782 Armor is such an afterthought anyways. Except for some headpieces that actually do something, I just wear what looks good. Even then, I roll with no helmet or a headpiece that shows my characters pretty face lol. Plus after a bloody battle, you get splashes of blood over you and it looks cool af with blood on your face. Vigor upgrades give you waaay more than armor. Maybe in the early game armor matters more.
@@wuizabug2648 I find that Radhan is significantly easier without co-op. I beat him on my second try and almost killed him in my first but I had no idea what to do and used up most of my estus getting peppered with arrows at the start lol. Just use Torrent strategically and get off to do damage, call him to get out of sticky situations. Summon the AI friends as meat shields. Not really very difficult. HOWEVER, I tried getting summoned in coop to help people afterwards and haven't beaten him that way. His health just gets buffed sooooo much in coop and I do pathetic damage. The fight gets longer and eventually someone gets killed.
@@polskillz I think most people get excited by big damage numbers in games. Even though increasing DPS stats early in Elden Ring doesn't produce big damage, weapon upgrades do. There's probably a lack of understanding there. Or maybe they're rushing for minimum requirements of some item or spell. Those things aren't as interesting to me as being able to take hits and survive. And I have enough to play around with at moderate DPS attributes.
I've usually played it a bit thinner than that (I usually aim for my flask to be a bit under 2/3rds of my health bar), but yep, that's also how I usually think about it. Most of your HP is in your flask, but *only if you can drink safely*.
My golden rule with every first run of a new soulsborne game: Always get yourself a good HP-pillow. I can do the crazy glasscannon stuff in later runs, when I know the game. In Elden Ring, my first character was a mage, and yet I still had the golden rule of administering at least every third skill point into vigor, until I hit 40 vigor. This also allowed me to play a magic knight, but without shield, wich was awesome.
I did exactly this went 20 right out of the gate, later I realised that was 100% not enough, I did a respec and axed all my arcane levels to bump it up, I’m sitting at a nice 40 now but once I hit 80 dex think imma push it to 50.
My rule of thumb since dks1 is hitting 30 vig early and then only coming back to this after hitting 40 on my main stat, worked like a charm on my arcane build
@@bEtHeSdA_LAME_sTuDi0s not necessarily, depends on what you diversify. str and dex has always been a strong choice, specially for first playthrough. fth and int are also very, very strong if you find the right gear early on. I did dex and arc and it worked like a charm once I found some bleed weapons
One of the hurdles to get over in Elden Ring is how Vigor and Mind both give pretty low amounts of improvements until after 20.. It feels bad to level them because you feel like you get so little in return, until you try to go over 20 and you suddenly notice the big increases. (less so for Mind, but effectively losing two thirds of a fp flask each time I used one felt bad as a mage xD)
i agree with this. I did the, flawed, mental math and saw the damage output being greater than the damage tanking. Also being an explorer i upgraded my flask so quickly that i figured the 1 hp grace save as a crutch. game was still fun till tryna kill mini bosses in caelid.
I would also recommend picking up the Opaline Bubble Tear at the Weeping Peninsula Erd Tree. It greatly increases defenses for one hit allowing for one more mistake.
At the start of the game, I didn’t pay much attention to it, I was like “one hit isn’t that big of a deal”. I began to use it in the Radahn fight and I never took it off ever since. I only wish we’d get more slots to test other tears
Man that one hit can also be a lifesaver if you summon ashes or buff weapons for example, pop it before you enter the bossfight. If the boss rushes you then instead of taking 40% of your healthbar while you're stuck in animations he takes like 2%
You can get this bubble much more often with parfuming item. I have parfum bottles plus the mixed physics gives me 7 one hit protect bubbles for a boss fight if I want to
i’m fighting this optional boss that’s quintessential to Ranni’s quest line at around 17 vigor using radagon’s scarseal and i must say, i did this to myself.
I learned how important vigor was when i fought radahn at 20 vigor. You get one shot by every move at 20 vigor. I spent the next 10 levels on vigor, came back to radahn, and beat him second try.
Same story with me for Malenia, I spent a day trying to beat her while I had 40 vigor, decided to go out and grind upto 60, was able to beat her a lot easier when I wasn't afraid of her melting my health bar.
Beat him today with 15 vigor at level 50. Honestly, I enjoy the one shot challenge. It took me awhile, but I did Radahn hitless with the hook claws and I’m happy as hell
I kinda figured out that you need more vigor when some bosses started doing what was essentially room wide unblockable attacks that one-shot me. I had someone tell me that it was useless to level vigor because all that does is make bosses two-shot you instead of one-shot you. I also had them complain how hard the game was, so...
Even if that was the case, two-shotting you means you can take a hit for every one of your flasks, whereas being one-shot means you have to run the battle perfectly. I can't think of a better way to increase your odds than making sure you can make 10x as many mistakes.
There's a dramatic shift in how the scaling works for vigor when considering the difference between DS3 and ER. In DS3 the HP return per level drops off substantially around 27 vigor, (in fact, every single one of my efficiency builds never puts more than 22 hard points into vigor, because I always wear the prisoner's chain.) In ER, HP per level *increases* until 40 vigor, and still gives good returns up to 60 vigor, (by comparison between 40 and 60 vigor in DS3, you're only getting about 3 or 4 HP per level, in ER it's in the twenties.) The *biggest* point gain per level in DS3 is at 16 and 17 vigor, which is probably why players think they can get away with that in ER. In DS3 anything more than that is giving you less than previous levels, (but again, the most substantially drop between levels is going from 26 to 27, where you get a full 7 HP less than the previous level.) In ER, the biggest point gain happens *at* 40 vigor. So if you were comfortable at 16 vigor in DS3, the underlying mechanics seem to insist that you should be aiming for 40 in Elden Ring.
Exactly, 40 vigor is what I felt was perfect for the first play through, but someone in another comment said that they needed “60” lol that’s just too much imo.
it should be common sense though lol, at hour 80 i was like "this is a long a** game" obviously you’te going to need more vigor as the designers made it that way. Plus there are A LOT of cheap shots in this game. Creatures hiding behind walls, dropping down on you, and manifesting out of this air, and shooting your from 100 miles away. Im sure thé game devs are laughing in their sleep at everyone trying to get through ER with DS3 health bars.
@@lcunash8093 my goal is pretty much that in fact: level vigor to 40, but use whatever armor i feel comfortable now(currently some aristocrat stuff that nets me roughly 20% damage negation) And if i start to feel like i don't have enough health, either put on something heavier, or level up some more vigor, i have another 20 levels to reach the softcap anyway, but playing with less than 40 vigor now? Oh boy, that's gonna be rough...
I remembered in DS 3 I tried to get about 20 vigor by the great swamp so that I could comfortably tank the poison without just being hard dead, and 30 vigor by irythll dungeon for similar reasons (stupid wardens...). By around that point I stopped doing vigor and started doing other stats, even post DLC I only had about 40-ish Vigor.
@@dandrory805 it "technically" increases your HP on a parabolic curve between 15 and 40 vigor, but that's not a helpful way of looking at it because it's such a depressed parabola. Between 10 and 36 vigor your total health only increases three-fold, so it's not like you're looking at a formula of HP=vigor^2 or anything.
I am level 42 and I just worked this out on my own. I was raising stats in order to use the cool weapons I found. I got a flail that needs 24 dex and a scythe that needs 24 faith. As I was going for dex/faith, it made sense to me to raise those stats to 24. I also raised endurance to 15 and strength to 16 (to use a shield I found). I did not completely neglect vigor, but it is only 18. What made me realize I had made a mistake was the ulcerated tree spirit boss, the one you can find relatively early in the game. I found I could do decent damage to it, and get it below half health, but every hit it did to me was more than half my health. So, to beat it, I had to basically go most of the fight not taking hits - and I am not that good (plus the fight is very random). I realized that if I had a bit more health, I would have beaten this boss already. My low health was making it so I could not afford to make any mistakes. I was also aware that my flasks were +5, and they could heal my entire health bar. It occured to me that the minimum amount of health should be at least more than what my flasks can heal, since otherwise my flask is partially wasted.
I was at like 80 with 14 vigor earlier today, found a new grind spot and went up to level 110 with 38 vigor. I thought that the game was just really difficult and was impressed that so many people were able to do a hitless run. Now I understand that most people can survive a hit.
I realized this early on when I versed margit with 30 strength and 10 vigor. created a new character and got enough dex and strength to barely use that curved bleed sword with two hands then pumped vigor. game is a lot more fun when you aren't clenching your ass every encounter.
In this game you are the Demon's Souls protagonist fighting against Bloodborne enemies with Dark Souls 1 poise, the encounter design of Dark Souls 2, the buggy open world of Skyrim, and the bosses and terrain hangups of Monster Hunter. This game is "just really difficult", because the deck is completely stacked against you. It is impossible to do this game your first try through with low Vigor because the enemies are all designed to trick you, exploit preconceived notions and or previously established logics, and fuck you up. I think the "challenging but fair" philosophy kinda got lost in translation somewhere, but for better or worse is up to personal taste.
It's also worth pointing out that each point of Vigor gives you more HP than the last point, up until 40 Vigor. So you're really selling yourself short by not getting to 40 - I'd say that for any character build.
I think 45 might be the best. It's when the arc of the 2nd soft cap starts to decrease. In fact 1 level at 44 vigor to 45 is the same increase as level 18 vigor to 19 Kind of wacky
@@Waldoz53 Agreed. A lot of people don't care about the pvp, so calling their leveling "shameful" is unnecessarily combative and baseless. Even if we did care about pvp, I think our expectations for "good pvp levels" need to change with this game. Yes, level 150 would have been waaay higher than most pvp players in Dark Souls 3, but with this game being so much bigger and longer, we should be expecting to level up more. And I think this idea is even supported by looking at the soft caps for attributes. They're generally higher than they've been in previous Souls games. This game wants you to level up more. Get 40 Vigor. Do it. Stay alive. Be a badass.
In my experience in souls games, I always recommend new players leveling health first. More health gives them more room for error and increases the time they spend trying to overcome a specific difficulty. Much of the difficulty in souls games is born from being deleted before you can have enough time experiencing a situation or attack. More health usually means you have a window for making mistakesand learning through the process. Because damage increases more with upgrades than stats in the beginning, this seems to be the intended route for new players.
They could have also just put real poise in the game so high HP builds actually make sense. I dont blame players choosing to level up stats for this one OP Katana with this one OP Weaponart, since everyone is running exactly that. I had 76 Poise at one point, sometimes rats staggered me, sometimes they didnt. Its broken.
I've platinumed the game and have done up to NG+4, and in this new run I started I immediately beelined it to Greyoll and the nearby Night Cavalry with a gold-pickled fowl foot for each for the express purpose of getting the early 30-40 levels so that I could get Vigor up. I got it right up to around 30 right away before even doing Stormveil with the intent to get it up to 40 and stop right around there before even leveling anything else to improve my damage. Even though I'm fully-familiar with what to expect at this point and dare I say it, pretty skilled with my extensive history with FromSoft games, having that health buffer is extremely beneficial because unforeseen things will happen and mistakes will be made.
You're totally right. I was level 40 with only 14 vigor and after I saw my level 20 sister surviving hits like nothing, I realized I could make the game more playable with vigor. In fact, it made it way more enjoyable to go up against bosses. More time to learn patterns, less of a chance of losing thousands of runes with no way to get them back, etc.
I always level "Vigor" on a first play through and ignore it on other playthroughs. But with ER it seems to be a near mandatory stat. You have railgun lobsters, cruise missile Ancestral Followers and bunch of magic shitters that will one shot you with base HP.
those damn lobsters got me so good earier, i was riding past them all and thought i got away until i got 1 shot lazerbeamed from a mile away, i had no idea they could do that
@@boskilingenfelter9515 because this community is so dogmatic about "don't get hit", people will think HP is a useless stat and refuse to even consider it, out of pride.
As a Sorcerer in this game: I got my Vigor to 35 before bringing my Int up to 70. It's just enough that USUALLY I don't get one shot, and 70 Int is a MASSIVE power spike.
Seeing all the PVP content with people who had healthbars that go halfway across the screen, I knew they know more about the game's stats system so I just blindly accepted that they were right. Turns out that was a good move lol. I've got roughly 35 vigor and 35 strength currently.
Especially when someone takes a hit and that healthbar gets CHUNKED; when you compare the amount of HP lost to the max HP of low vigor builds it really outs things into perspective
Genuinely, browing the ER subreddit and the amount of people I see rushing the endgame at level 90 with 30 vigor and then complaining it's unbalanced is staggering.
Even at 60 vigor and 40% damage reduction armor, some of the end game bosses are 2-3 shotting me. I cant imagine how people are actually trying to push through with only 30-40. Hell, id even upgrade my VIgor PAST 60 if it didnt only give like 5-6 per level past level 60. If it gave like 10-15, I would have probably pumped it to the max.
@@_NutcasE_ Maidenless response. The game is clearly balanced in a way where making yourself into a glass canon isn't very viable. If you could be a glass canon with no drawbacks, then the HP stat becomes effectively useless. If you try to minmax yourself to be a glass canon, then you're going to have to make a sacrifice. That sacrifice being that you are more and more likely to get one shotted as you get further into the game. The game expects you to be a much higher level by the end than in previous Fromsoft games, use them to level health.
I reached mountaintop of giants probably at 85 level with 30 vigor. Then I thought the late game area is unbalanced. But some of the late game bosses are really problematic for melee builds specially like Malenia, Fire giant and Godskin duo. Str build is weak in this game.
A big problem with some of the stat curves is that they fail to show how much hp you get from leveling vigor early on, it scales very badly at early levels and makes people think it’s a bad stat.
If someone puts a single point into vigor, sees it go up by maybe 5-10 points, and immediately thinks "This stat isn't worth leveling", that is entirely on them. My first character had most their level 11 to level 30 stat increases dumped into vigor, and it made a lot of the harder early game areas much more tolerable. My damage wasn't great, but hey... I wasn't dying like my friends were.
That is not a moot point. The only way you would know is by “mass leveling” which you only see if you respect and manually check every benchmark. I always leveled health until 30 before anything when I play FromSoft’s games but in this game it felt like a mandatory investment.
@@autorobo1000 Your durability from Vigor vs damage to enemies with any offensive stat via STR DEX ARC or Faith are always out-scaled in the early game of Dark Souls, but in Elden Ring the game. But in which game do you only get 10-20 points per Vigor? That sounds like Dark Souls 1 after hardcap.
@@limitlessapocalypse2702 Hardcap is 99. Term you're looking for is softcap. Regardless of how DS1 handled it... This isn't DS1. In a lot of the Souls games you can get by with minimal investment into vigor. If the player level vigor *once* and decide the investment isn't worth it, then that is still on the player, not the game. My previous point about making the early areas a cakewalk because I had more vigor than I did dex, str, fth, or int still stands.
Even if you wanna master the dodge/parry mechanic, vigor can still help you. It gives you that psychological safety net that helps you dodge/parry more confidently. Ironically, I lost less total health when I had more vigor during that battle with that damnable death rite bird.
I always go by this philosophy when playing these games “you may not do 1billion damage when you level vigor but you will last long enough to inflict it”
When I first played this game the only reason why I ever leveled my Strength, Dex, Int, and Faith to 20 was just so I can use the majority of weapons and spells in the game so I can get a feel for what I really want. The rest went to vigor, mind, and endurance to I can use weapon arts more, summon spirits, and wear the armor I liked.
You should increase your damage eventually. I deal WAY more damage beause of the stats than the base weapon damage (around 300 base, 720 with scalling, using power stance with this is extremely powerful. In pvp usually 2 hit enemies, or even instakill them with a jump attack)
20 in any stat doesn't get you close to the majority of the repertoire though, you're really just limiting yourself to a small pool of "just OK" equipment. This isn't like Souls where you can get invaded as a noob by twinks with +17 weapons, the level capping prevents it now
I think this is a fine approach for a first playthrough. Actually, it's pretty smart. I made my first character a dex/fth build as per tradition since ds2 (with some investment in arc just because), and I've been really missing a lot of cool str/int weapons.
Thank you for posting this. I've been running around with Vigor being a heavily neglected stat and dumping most of my stats into hitting harder, and just figured that later game armor would help with better damage mitigation. But the way that you've carefully explained the benefits has converted me, Vigor is gonna start getting some love now. Cheers for that.
What I find funny is that some avoid levelling up Vigor but then proceed to use defensive talismans, massive armor, etc. So the penalty they end up paying is way worse than being able to take those hits and instead be able to retaliate. Of course there isn't a right or a wrong way to play the game. It's just about the tradeoff not making a lot of sense in terms of numbers. But then again, not everyone is trying to minmax their character
This is excellent advice. I would also like to add that, once your Vigor is at 40 and you have the minimum stats to use the weapons and spells you enjoy, consider leveling up Mind. Almost every character build will use FP in some way, and once you start upgrading your flask with Sacred Tears it'll easily start restoring way more FP than your maximum. Instead of putting 10 points into, say, Strength to deal a few more points of damage, you might get a lot more mileage by investing those points into Mind and being able to use your Weapon Arts more often. You might find that using a power special ability one or two more times between flask charges ends up dealing more damage than just raising a stat for scaling. In addition, many of the best Spirit Ash summons require a good amount of FP in order to summon, and you don't want to lock yourself out of some powerful, game-changing allies that can give you an edge in battle.
This is what I have been wondering recently. I am trying for a strength and faith build, and so how should I split my levels between melee stats like strength and vigor and magic stats like faith and intelligence.
@@mayankpant1596 At the start of the game you should invest enough into Strength and Faith to meet the minimum requirements for the weapon you're using and the incantations you're casting. Remember that the weapon you start with doesn't have to be the weapon you stick with through the entire game. After that, you should put every point into Vigor until you reach 40, and then get Mind to 20-25. Once you're in the level 50+ range you should have access to more weapons and incantations, at which point you can invest points in your stats to reach the minimum requirements of those. You may also want to invest in Endurance into the 20-30 range if your equipment gets heavy, so that you have a Medium load. You should really only invest attribute points JUST for scaling purposes once you've gotten standard weapons up to +15 or better, or special weapons up to +6 or better.
Another upsidr to putting points into Mind later, is that it translates to more Health flasks for any build needing FP flasks, since you dont have to have as many of them
Hosts need to level more vigor! And not just for fighting off invasions but also fighting bosses in co-op. Feels rough whenever I try help someone one fight a boss and they get love tapped to death instantly, as I'm clearing the fog gate. If your phantoms with less health are able to tank hits against the boss then something's definitely up.
Or they stand there on the edge of the boss room shooting weak magic or fucking arrows expecting you to do all the fighting then.....die anyways when the boss swats them once out of annoyance.
@@HashBandicoot356 lol, my first run i was that mage, but i had the opposite problem. even with only 9 vigor, i was doing like triple my phantoms damage per hit, and they kept dying. i kept my 9 vigor going all the way till the final boss, at which point its homing crap completely screwed me, doubly so in that even with the strongest build for pure damage, magic just sucks against it.
lmao yea i was letting myself get summoned for Radahn and 15 out of 20 times i didn't even reach him because the host let himself get clapped by an arrow
As a newer Soulsringbourne player the game also gets you to fall into the trap by dropping weapons or spells on you that require 20 to 30 additional levels in a stat if not more
If its a high STR (above 20) requirement, the weapon probably was meant to be twohanded until you get much higher. DEX usually caps at 20-25, with very few endgame weapons going to 40. Sorceries and Incants with >20 INT/FTH border on useless unless you have a lot of FP and HP (to take a hit as you cast some of the longer cast time spells), stick to the easier and usually cheaper but still very efficient spells/incants.
Yeah, a friend that is new to the souls series got his first good staff from Rennala's remembrance. To his dismay, it required a whopping 60 int to even be able to use it (60 of any attribute is super high, especially for a weapon you get really early on). He actually put every talent point he could into INT up until the capital, that's when he understood that his shiny staff wasn't going to carry him if he is getting hit left and right in a place crammed with hard hitting enemies when he had no health. In most souls games, Elden Ring included, you want to stick to a decent early weapon with low requirements and respecc later on when you can use the high requirement weapons without compromising the balance of your character.
@@Hemestal I would even go a step further and say you need to have a clear idea of what you early, mid and late game build will be. These do not need to be identical, but you need to think about it because you can only respec so many times and upgrade so many weapons without wasting too much time farming items. In general most players early build should lean towards whichever class you pick then by mid game you can start transitioning to your late game build if you are looking to change
I think part of why it gets neglected is the stat requirements to use the really cool stuff like that giant murder fireball with 45 Faith or something like that which was obtainable while still pretty weak.
I've always alternated between vigor and other stats in every souls game until I had around 40 into vigor. More health means the game is more forgiving, always has.
Unless ur on new game plus 4-7 cycle, then ur gonna get 3 to 4 tapped regardless of ur health bar, since the souls games get bullshit cheap on higher ng+ cycle tiers.
it very funny seeing people with 20 vigor in elden ring. a dog in mt, gilmir will one shot you. If you’re a veteran player (not in try hard mode) i think 30 to 35 vigor is the sweet spot. You can increase it more with medallions, Great Runes, and spells. almost 200 hours in explored every corner of this world, 35 vigor was perfect.
I remember in Dark Souls 3, 30 vigor was more than enough to tank through the entire game. It was a surprise when I realized bosses still 1 shot me with some attacks in Elden Ring WITH 30 vigor.
talismans man, talismans. ritual shield talisman is really good and the dragoncrest is also pretty good. im running with 30 right now and not feeling all that squishy with the combo of pearldrake, dragoncrest, ritual shield, and heavier armor
I'm so glad you mentioned that weapon upgrading give more stats than leveling up attack stats. Find a weapon you like increase stat to it min cost then only focus on the three core stats Vitality, Mind, and Endurace until they where you want them. Melee early game 30 Vit, 10 Focus, 30 Endurance Makes 30 Vit, 30 Focus, 10 Endurance Note Vitality stays the same
@@Gangerworld I feel like mages get even more value than melee in many regards because you have more room to make mistakes on casting time. You can basically chill out and not feel pressured as much kiting a boss in some contexts (i know some bosses punish you for being distant).
@@Gangerworld Mages need vigor even more because to get the most out of a mage you can't pump as much into endurance to carry heavy armor and get higher defense like a melee class.
@@TheRealPulverize I stopped at 40 vigor and have a health bar almost half the width of my screen. Around 1450HP IIRC. I wear veterans armor for physical defense, I probably don't know what I'm doing though :D
This has been my exact strategy If I want to level up strength I have to keep vigor at an equal level Obviously as one guy said not forever because eventually you have enough health but still need strength or dex
@@TheRealPulverize 60 Vigor is what the difference is between death and surviving in a boss fight getting hit two-to-three times. It has always been the best stat to lvl for any melee build unless you're doing a no hit run.
I noticed that HP scaling actually appreciates the higher level your vigor is, which I don't remember being the case in Dark Souls games. At 10 vigor, 1 additional point of vigor = roughly 20 HP, whereas at level 30 it equals about 41 HP. It's massively +ve
Took me until I hit level 100 @ mountaintop of the giants to realise that it would probably be a good idea to start pumping up vigor, seeing that juicier HP boost at 30+ vigor made me regret not increasing it sixty hours earlier
I think another problem, and it stems from previous FromSoft games as well, is that you cannot see the HP/FP/Stamina bars *while* leveling up. You're just shown the stats' numbers. Which isn't how players visualize the stats in question. If the level up screen allowed the player to see the bar increasing while putting levels into the stats, it'd go a long way towards getting players to put more into those stats.
@@DarkIceKrabby To be honest, I don't think it would. Not unless you're mass leveling, because just one or two additional levels are going to have a negligible effect on the size of your bars, especially at early levels.
@@DarkIceKrabby I mean..... look at the numbers as a percentage increase? I have always looked at numbers, not bar length. Why would a contextless growing bar give you more info than actual numeric increases?
"Except for mages, some of their spells are so powerful they actually are glass canons" - unless they're NPC mages, in which case they are hp sponges while also dropping tactical blue nukes on me. Personally I'm running around with 40 vigor. I could pump it higher, I'm in ng+, but I'm using a fully upgraded fingerprint shield so I have 100% physical block with no stamina consumption so I only have to worry about magic users, and even then I have around 80% damage negation. Most of my deaths at this point are from me getting sloppy or falling off of a cliff.
Putting either of the anti-magic parries on a 100% physical damage reduction shield is so nice, safe from all physical stuff while also capable of negating anything magical. I used medium shields so i had 2 shields with 100% physical reduction i swapped between, one without ashes so i could use weapon skills and another with the Cardian Retaliation parry for places with casters
I'd love to see more on mages. I'm playing a mage and was building pretty glass cannon. For example, I beat all of the main bosses in Stormveil on my first try by nuking them down before they got to take more than three swings at me. Then I started getting wrecked in Raya Lucaria and was confused to see how many people said Stormveil was hard but Raya Lucaria was cake. I started thinking about the damage I was taking and realized I was prioritizing my physical damage reduction but was in a magic academy, and that my hp was just as low at level 30 as it had been when I was level 10. So I swapped out all of my armor to get the most magic resistance possible and put 10 levels into Vigor and suddenly Raya Lucaria was easy. Around the same time, a helpful message on the floor encouraged me to try striking damage against a certain enemy and, sure enough, upgrading a club and putting magic affinity on it allowed me to easily beat those enemies down. Then I met enemies that die easy to holy, and enemies that fall to the floor and flail around if you hit them with fire damage. I'm so used to tailored builds being useless in RPGs that I hadn't even tried to use them, but it's looking like the best way to beat the game may be to customize your damage mitigation and attacks to hard counter the enemies you're fighting. I absolutely demolished a knight enemy that had been 1-shotting me for 20 levels by picking up a lance after reading a game tip that said lances are especially good on horseback or against mounted enemies.
You were getting wrecked in Raya lucaria because it's gimmick is to wreck mage players. The enemies have tonnes of magic resistance and the corridors are tight and unforgiving for kiting. I was getting wrecked in Raya lucaria with the same vigor i used to first try radahn.
@@Krozhin its easy, get a moonviel katana and a pack of demi human ashes at night and she just dies. or get 2 players to help erase the female dog and put her down.
im a level 207 mage 40 vig 50 mind 23 end 70 int 50 faith 18 arcane 20 str and 15 dex. i wouldnt say im complete glass but deff rely on distractions. wasnt until i hit level 170 with some well discovered magic weapons that made it smooth. honestly id still have a lower vigor level of 20 if it wasnt for PVP.
I've always found a good rule of thumb in any FromSoft game is the 20/30/40 rule. Magic builds have a lot of other split stat requirements so theyve always been this weird other thing that doesnt follow the formula, but if you use physical weapons, its really consistent. The first thing you should do is make sure you have the minimum stats to wield a weapon you'll be happy with for a while. Then immediately get 20 points in your health stat. Then spend some time getting your weapon stat of choice to somewhere around 30, which should usually be more than enough to wield all but a very small percentage of weapons you might want. Then beeline straight for 40 in your health stat. That's it. 20 health puts you in a good spot to survive early game bosses and carries you along with your improving understanding of the games pacing to 30 in your weapon stat which let's you wield most of your dream weapons. Then up to 40 vigor to keep pace with the damage of late game bosses. As long as you're pure melee, it works in Elden Ring just like other souls games.
@@netwatch7261 100% phys shields block the meteor's, because like the rock sling mage spell, they are pure physical damage. i found that out by accident lol
I also hit a big realization that alot of players really neglect endurance. Just a clarification, endurance increases your stamina bar, your weight and your robustness (how much bleed you can take). Fashion souls while has been important, the defensive stats of good armor are not to be neglected, couple that with say a heavier and better shield make you better at taking damage, which WILL happen. Next is the stamina pool; dodge? Stamina usage, attack? Stamina usage? Spell? Stamina usage, block? Stamina usage. Just about every single thing you do in combat uses stamina and using the bare minimum means certain death at a single mistake. So many builds treat endurance like it's the most dump stat of dump stat, when its debatablly more important than your health.
I'm doing a DEX/INT build, more DEX than INT. Endurance & Vigor are just as important as the stats that affect your damage output. I think my vigor is a bit ahead of my dex, and my endurance is neck-and-neck with my dex, it's just important to be able to get those swings in with my dex weapons (endurance) and to be able to survive the occasional misstep (vigor) because I tried to get one more hit in too often. Endurance is also so key to being able to dash away from AOE attacks or dodge multiple attacks in succession (considering some bosses' long combos)
I went pure Dex/End/Str The choice for me... seemed like you either go End for Stam, Vigor for Hp, or Mind for Fp And Vigor legit seems like the worst option of the 3... by FAR... with End at least you can carry more... and more stamina in essence means more hp... gives u more time to block and roll... wasting hits... while Mind gives you mana for casting etc... Vigor is just... well... just hp... meh I'm level 72... 15 Vigor, 40 End, 35 str, 35 dex... quality build I have no problems with only dodging/rolling/blocking... it's honestly the most fun I've ever had in a game lol
When I got to around the end of Elden Ring I was surprised at how much health I needed. In DS3 I could get by with just 1000 health but in Elden Ring I needed like 1500.
the longer you live due to a high amount of vigor the longer you can keep on fighting and analyze the attack pattern of a boss. With 3 times the HP it’s like having 3 fights against the same boss back to back instead of dying and repeating the fight 3 times!
This is where I have the problem. Many of the bosses simply don't stop. My almost entire fight against the golden spirit of Godfrey consisted of one continous dodging session with rolling pokes. I managed to disengage once to heal, but generally speaking he just kept attacking nonstop. I had to whip out moonveil to stagger Radagon because when I tried to fight him "fair" I was getting stuff like spear -> lingering AoE that prevents you from closing -> another spear with lingering AoE -> triple beam -> 5 quick teleports -> another spear -> ... Like literally after first spear forces me off his face, it's game over because he won't let me close the distance with ranged spam and half the arena covered by lingering AoE stuff. I can't hold concentration for long against bosses that require perfect roll timing and don't let you reset from time to time. So the obvious solution is to become glass cannon and try bursting the boss down before my brain melts. It was easy in Sekiro beceause there was a rythm to each fight, but in ER I feel like headless chicken.
@@tomf0olery It's not the AoE itself. It's the lingering effect you can't step onto. So you have to fall back out of it. Which triggers Radagon ranged attacks. Which often spawn more lingering AoE.
@@infine-8222 he actually only has 2 attacks you could argue are lingering AOE: the first one you mentioned, being the spear he plants creating a square of DOT, and his triple slam that creates an AOE for each hit, ofc ending at the 3rd hit. everything else has a timer of a delayed AOE blast or a large AOE that you can actually jump to avoid (except that one where he floats in the goddamn air for an eternity, thts just precise timing and i hate tht move). for the most part though you're correct, he baits you into the range game hella hard and it can really halt that push to get in and deal dmg.
@@tomf0olery radagon was one of my most hated fight, I did it with 25 vigor and it's been a bitch!, I get bishotted by bullshit attacks, when he finishes his infinite combo he immediatly runs away and many attacks are literally undodgeable, LITERALLY
I think the one thing I wish was mentioned is that when you put a point into Vigor, not only are you gaining more life, but on the right side you can see that it's also increasing your defense against certain attacks. So not only do you have more HP before dying, but attacks hit you for less. You may not notice a difference between a few points put into Vigor early on, but once you've put a good 10 points into Vigor and you return to the starting area -- even if you're wearing the same starting armor -- the enemies there aren't going to be hitting you as hard. Between Vigor putting in double the work to make you harder to kill, and your Flasks being upgradable and gaining more uses of them, it really does make the areas a lot easier to explore and survive.
@@GamesRule don't sweat the tryhards. All stats increase defense, more accurately your total stat allocation. But some stats do increase specific defenses, like STR increasing fire defense
I never really had issues in this game because I decided to go for a "comfort" build with high vigor. Turns out, "high" vigor was normal vigor in this game.
This is one reason why participating In pvp/ invasions is very useful for the rest of the game. You learn very quickly to level up your vigour. Also very important to have a huge health bar when learning how to no hit/ parry only boss fights, so you can fail many times before having to reload the fight. Once you have learned the fight, then you can do it at low health with much more confidence.
On my first playthrough I went for glass cannon spellcaster. It was rough. What was interesting, regular enemies were harder than the actual bosses. I would get one or two shot by most regular enemies. However, with right strategy, most bosses were 30 second encounters. I had to raise my Vigor when nearing the end. On my current playthrough I decided for tanky arcane build. I rushed 40 vigor. Only stat I leveled up. Until I reached 40 VIGOR I used Longsword because it didn't require leveling up. And let me tell you, Elden Ring became a walk in the park. Invest in vigor. Also if you are far into the game, remember you can respec many times during a single playthrough. If you need extra stats for weapons, (Strenght, Dexterity, Inteligence etc.), remember that there are talismans that raise your stats by +5. That's 5 free levels!
Can confirm, as a super sorceror, I melted (most bosses that didn't have perfect magic dodge) bosses in 15 seconds or less with proper set up, regular enemies gave me enormous shit until I had the dark moon greatsword/moonveil
On my first playthrough, I did'nt level Vigor, at all (started with Samurai), until Malenia. Malenia was the boss that force me to level Vigor, AND to use Mimic Tear, because without that, wasn't able to get through her. My method to get this far in the game without vigor was to use dragon breath's, specifically Rotten Breath and it's upgraded version, since it melts most bosses, and only require 1 casts to apply Scarlet Rot in most cases. I know there's a lot of builds that are far more powerfull and efficient, but that's what I like about Elden ring, there's so much variety to how you can play it.
Yeah, I'm about halfway through as a glass cannon, and imho the rock sling spell is broken. It wrecks everything so far except those crystalline bitches in Sellia.
My first run is being a mage and im having the exact same experience u described. INT to 60 and nothing else. Im starting to upgrade vigor already into late game. Bosses are a strategic short fight, but open world regular enemies are way, way harder. If u dont want to die 6876897146 times just walking arroud u have to play extremely carefuly while exploring, or u are going to get oneshoted by a random mob.
since weapons do pretty solid damage by themselves early on, you really don’t need to spend those early levels on stats unless you’re trying to use a weapon. Going HP early makes you tanky against early bosses, letting you make more mistakes as you learn, and let’s you actually survive a hit from the end-game ones where mistakes are heavily punished since they expect you to be good.
if by heavily punished you mean losing like 100 runes sure. heck even losing 5 or 10k runes is no problem once you get high enough level, once you near one level of xp go level up and then do the fight, nothing wrong dieing a couple times to learn the attack patterns of bosses. they only have so many moves.
just exploit their move set to kill them, or grab a pack of demihuman ashes at night and have them stun lock most bosses, or use the highest level oleg warrior u can.
@@yamiomo7392 the heavy punishment is wasting your time and redoing it from start again, cause what vigor does is allowing you to take more mistakes. Just in case that your 99% dodge and 99.5% parry rate happen to fail, you don't have to redo it. There is nothing more embarrassing than redoing a fight you didn't have to and wasting your time doing it once again with no flask used. Like... "thats what killed me before?"
@@birifumi Yeah I get it vigor is easy mode, but I'm not gona reach that high a level of vigor for a very long time sense I had to get enough int to use comet azur LMAO i'm a mage build I want access to all the best spells as soon as I get them, So yeah, Now I'm blasting bosses away in one shot, and If i mess up on that one shot and die and re do it I really don't care, it feels so good killing bosses with one hit.
Starting with bloodborne I was always told to level vigor/vitality if you're new to the game, and always made it at least a 2:1 priority over the weapon scaling stat, whatever it was
It seems this is inadvertently a guide for only people who picked up the souls series at DS3, because for the other souls games and bloodborne you usually do have to put points into vigor as well unlike DS3
Thank you , i was looking at ways to level up and this helps a lot with decisions. I wasn't much of a dark souls player but the elden ring looked so beautiful that i had to take the plunge.Its a bit overwhelming but i am enjoying it.
The nice thing about focusing on stuff like vigor and endurance early on is that not only will you have an easier time in general, it means you won't be stuck having to commit to a playstyle if you end up finding something you like more later. For example, I started out leveling both STR and DEX but now I'm focusing solely on STR weapons meaning those DEX points are going to waste at the moment. You can respec fairly early into the game, though, so it's not a huge deal.
@@yoso378 a lot of str wepons use a lot of dex! look at godricks axe it needs 22 dex and 32 str . dont respec unless you gona get some faith cus the blasphomy blade is busted.
My first playtrough i was pumping vigor and endurance so i could tank everything, while my str, dex, int and faith were 20 to 30, so i could try out most of the weapons and spells i would find. It worked pretty much until the late game, i rerolled to quality 50/60 on Malenia so i could actually deal meaningful damage to her. For your information. 60 vigor with +2 Favor ring and +2 HP ring is around 2500 hp, it takes 3 fully upgraded flasks to restore to max, and yet some attacks of late game bosses would still shred 2/3 ds of it in seconds, Level vigor, kids.
in my experience, having played almost every FromSoft game, you should almost always take vigor to the soft cap. unless you are experienced and targeting a very niche build.
Love the glass canon comparison at the end! Specially taking into account that with bigger health you can literally trade damage without dying, then in the long run you can actually have higher dps by pumping vigor.
@@skeltaldelegate5408 late game yes but at the start weapon scaling from stats are very low so it isn’t so worth it. The main source of damage early comes from weapon upgrades.
@@higorbotelho3483 the miniscule increases from Scaling to AR are deceiving. Most enemies' HP is tweaked to have just enough HP to survive an extra hit from a weapon the player would have by that point in progression. Never thought it was odd how many enemies are left with almost 1hp after a normal amount of attacks?
@@FranTheMan78 But if yoh have more vigor, you have more hp when grinding for endurance. Having to wear weak armor isnt much of a problem if you have a big hp pool.
I got away with only having about 20 vigour for a large amount of the game, but now I’m working towards hitting the soft cap. It was getting to the point where most enemies forced you to heal after one hit which made the game frustrating to play.
Going through the Haligtree and finally meeting the boss there made me fully respec to jump from 25 to 40 vigor. Without insane RNG, that fight is just not possible without it
In other words Caster builds level int/fai/mind in the early game, vigor late game Melee builds level vig/end early game, dex/str late game played it like that and i had a good time.
I guess it's mostly because everyone's so used to previous soulslike titles, which reinforce the idea that in general you shouldn't get hit by anything, aka "gitgud" principle. That said, it might be a good idea to raise your required stats to wear the preferred gear first and then pump the rest into vigor for a less frustrating experience.
I think its more so that while Vigor was really nice to have... You really didnt need Vigor to be the highest stat. In Caelid, especially the top part, Vigor is definitely needs to be your biggest stat, unless you are one of those top 1% skill level players, which most of us are obviously not and the game wasnt balanced around them either.
Which is just dumb. Because that troll sht only holds so much weight in logic. Even after your gud the game is still specifically made to be unfair and punishing
What really makes it demotivating is the fact that leveling up vigor means you won't get one tapped by bosses, you'll get 2 or 3 tapped instead. Really doesn't look worth it in paper, but in practice it's effective.
In DS3 isnt Vigor not that good? I usually just level it up around 20-30 and dump all my stats on STR or DEX. Able to beat it just fine and I'm an average player.. Maybe DS3 lacked the enemies that deal high amount of dmg?
@@mikec4308 it's about progression and stopping points - any invasion build worth its salt that isn't going for a meme is going to prioritize hp. This was the main distinction in previous souls games as in the main game you could skate by with less hp
Yeah, you really need that vigor if you want to invade people, or survive invasions. Players and certain arts can do massive amounts of damage. The Unsheathe heavy attack can easily kill a lot of players with low vigor in one or two hits.
I remember that HP was always on the low-priority end of the spectrum, for me, whenever I leveled in previous Souls titles, and now I understand why. And with my abhorrent performance playing multiplayer with my friend last night (level 90-ish, with 12 Vigor after respeccing and forcing boss resets every single minute due to one-shots), I have first-hand experience how bad I can make this game for myself (and others). And with how many times I've upgraded my flasks (12 bottles at +9 and just started going through Altus Plateau), I really shouldn't be rolling around with such a small health pool to begin with. Good thing I have more Larval Tears than I can shake a stick at, after completing Ranni's Questline.
Would like to add on to/clarify what you said; your flasks and flask upgrades are basically useless if you have no vigor (I think you hinted at this). Rephrased, you can't heal if you always get one-shotted. Now I need to go get some more vigor...
I was honestly increasing my Vigor every time my flasks started over healing me way too much. Honestly your flask level is a pretty good general indicator for how much Vigor you should have at any time.
I’m so glad I’m getting this kind of advice very early on in the game. I was already experiencing some frustrating moments and kept pumping strength and dexterity hoping to kill enemies and bosses quicker, but your explanation makes a lot of sense and cleared up my misconceptions!!
I actually was hit with that realisation too, somewhere around lvl 50 I guess. As a veteran of the series I am used that you can generally level up your health stat to around 20 and that was enough. Elden Ring functions much more like a usual rpg, when you need to keep increasing your health and armour as you level up, while your damage actually comes from weapon upgrades. So with my uchigatana 5 points in dex mean just around 10 extra damage, 5 points in strenght are like 5 more damage, while 5 points in vigor is what? 150 extra health? Yea, it takes some time to get used to some of the changes in this game.
Vigor is almost always the first stat I level in souls games. The extra buffer room to not just insta die is so important as it lets you always go through all your healing before dying without getting 1 shot. a like 20% increase in damage just isnt worth it when you're dying to every stray hit. With more vigor, you can easily survive longer and then youll easily be able to survive longer to get more than 20% extra hits completely outpacing your previous damage. Suitability is so much better than slightly more damage unless you're like a speedrunner or a legit glass cannon build like a full on mage build or something.
Vigor was not that good in DS1 und DS2, but already insanely good in DS3. Elden ring has so many AE attacks, that blocking is not as good as in dark souls 1, where you were able to block almost everything. So endurance was better in DS1 for blocking tank builds than health.
For me I hit this trap by my build, I discovered the weapon I wanted to use, the Giant Crusher, which has a minimum requirement of 60 Str to one hand (and I like having a shield, so of course I went for the first softcap in str). I also wanted to cast certain incantations, so I rushed for 25 Faith, from there, to be able to run around in something other than tissue paper for clothes I next focused End. Fortunately I habitually leveled my vigor to 20 at the start, but as a level 140ish character I only JUST got my vigor to 30. I didn’t realize the softcap was much higher in this game because I came off a fresh run of DS3
Early game I like to level up enderance so I have plenty of stam to roll, and have enough weight for my heavy armor/weapon builds. After that I grind the hell out of vigor and strength. However I noticed the early game playthroughs we're I only level vigor, actually make me struggle much more because I lack the proper stam for defense when up against a boss.
Yeah I noticed how leveling vigor gives soo much more HP than DS3 and when I pumped some levels into it from 30 to 40, I was shocked at how much HP per level I was getting during those 10 levels, really makes a difference!
I usually start upgrading my vigor as soon as I have the stats to use my desired weapons. Early damage scaling is mostly based on weapon upgrades anyway
That's what I usually do. Get str/dex to where I'm dealing great damage and then focus on vigor/endurance, etc. Helps me git gud when I have to deal with a small health bar.
It just sucks when a weapon wants you to have something ridiculous like 30-40 Strength, Dex, Faith, or Int just to be able to use. So other stats get put by the wayside as you try to get the ability to even properly wield something for your desired build/roleplay.
I definitely made a huge mistake by not prioritizing vigor in my first playthrough, I died an insane amount of times doing Leyndell early (lvl 70ish with less than 20 vigor). It certainly makes you have to play better if you get killed instantly, but at the same time you can progress and enjoy the game so much more just by pumping vigor up to 40 once you get to mid game.
@@_MrBlack And that is why I used to play these games in offline mode. I prefer to keep my vigor low in order to make boss fights challenging. If I double my health, that doubles or triples the amount of mistakes I can make in the fight trivializing a lot of battles. That makes invasions a massive PITA though...
FINALLY someone says it! I swear I'm going insane reading the subreddit and seeing everyone complain about getting one-shot when they have like 2 points in VIG. Even the STRENGTH BUILDS are doing this, and they rely on being able to trade hits to get their damage in!
It's always funny getting summoned for co op and seeing a glass cannon build get one shot to death by the boss. Wish there was that shrug emote from Dark souls 1 would be perfect for such cases
People also aren’t paying attention to resistances and damage types. A lot of people thought all the Three Fingers spells were holy damage for a couple days at launch, turns out they were fire and people had been wearing the wrong armor and getting smoked lol
I respec'd finally (as a mage) to add more HP, and the QoL alone is fantastic. Nothing is more irritating than running to the end of a crypt to get one-shot by some nonsense. Even after the "damage nerf" I gave myself, I was way less stressed playing since I could take a hit and my damage is STILL cracked.
1:30 I am honestly confused by the fact that everyone was so low level in ds3. Having done no farming, exploring everything outside of the dlcs and never losing huge amounts of souls (which really only matters late as losing enough souls for lvl 30-40 in the midgame only amounts to like one level past 100) I finished the game above SL100. Now in Elden ring I stopped leveling past 160 and could have gone a few levels higher off the final boss alone. Nethertheless everythign else in the video was spot on. Hopefully other people won't make my mistake of dual wielding great axes in the earlygame. It does real good damage but you need so much endurance and strength (and dexterity) just to be able to use them without fatrolling, that you need to be like level 40 before you can even start thinking about leveling vigor.
In DS3 in my first playthrough I finished the game at 64 (before dlc). I had lots of souls but I bought basically everything I could find and played a shield + straight sword combo that let me get away with having comparatively low stats. I did about 15 more playthroughs of ds3 and finished the game at 70 for each. Amusingly because I knew which fights I could avoid and wanted to get through without wasting time I had a lot less souls to spend on level ups even when I only spent souls on things for any particular build.
Yeah I finished at 90 my first time through. Maybe cause I spent more time going through areas repeatedly to make sure I explored everything there was. Never farmed for souls either.
Yeah I realized this and started leveling my Vigor when I found so many upgrades for my flasks and flask uses. My flasks were actually much more powerful than my total health, that should be a telltale sign of leveling up your Vigor.
I definitely agree but also want to say I really like how salt&sanctuary solved the vigor problem, there isn't any vigor stat but every level-up you just get some more health automatically, which lets you focus entirely on your build and all the fun stuff
Its so much better to have like 60 vigor or less and just pop a rune arc when youre going into a tough fight and get a massive boost to your health bar
Makes sense that a lot of people messed this up, the vastly superior strategy in previous souls games was to do so much damage that you had less time to make a mistake and die, rather than have a fight drag on long enough to make multiple mistakes. but as you said, damage stats don't contribute much to damage until much later this time around, and hp consistently gives the player much more noticeable amounts of hp per level. I am actually glad it works this way, cause I really dislikes that most people would just hit 27 vig in ds3 then never touch it again.
I literally pumped vigor last night actually haha, so the timing of this vid is great. I went from about 32 vigor to 40 (level ~85 now) as I'm exploring Caelid. 100% worth the investment. When you realize that you get progressive returns until the soft cap it makes so much more sense to invest in it.
@@abelwritesmusic I have high hp, doesn't mean I dont actively parry bosses, exploit weaknesses, or change tactics. I'm exactly where I want to be, playing the way that is both challenging and fun for me. Get outta here with that elitist my-way-is-best crap.
@@abelwritesmusic These games should be for whatever one wants them to be. Don't tell other people how they are supposed to enjoy their games. If you get an achievement boner for clearing Elden Ring at level 15, have at it. Maybe try something actually hard - just imagine the achievement boner you'd have if you were to solve a millennium prize problem. I'll actually salute you, when you get there.
"in ds3 youd have to go out of your way to grind to get to those levels" this is actually true in elden ring too. the enemies even at late game areas reward so few souls that i find myself constantly needing to grind for levels in order to beat a boss. maybe this is because the game assumes you actually kill all enemies everywhere which to be honest is such a ridiculously grindy way to play i lost interest in it on my first character, and was longing for the tighter design of stormveil castle and raya lucaria by the time i beat godrick. i got to fire giant at lvl 95, had to use 200k souls and cheese bs with summons to even beat that thing. even with 33 vigor, morgotts rune and vigor talisman some of his attacks still did 90% of my damage in a single hit and to be honest that feels really bad. and even getting there had required hours of grinding before that, just to even get to that level
I think a large part of the problem is that Vigor is the only stat that doesn't unlock anything. Dex unlocks fast, high DPS weapons, Int unlocks flashy spells, Str unlocks big fucking swords, hell even End unlocks better and more fashionable armor and Mnd unlocks better summons. Vigor is unexciting because it doesn't scale anything, and it doesn't give you new options, it just makes you slightly better at using what you already have. This leads to players ignoring it because it doesn't feel like a lateral upgrade, it feels like wheel-spinning until you get to your next great piece of gear that elevates your build even further.
"Youre not a glass cannon, youre just glass." a great quote
Perfectly describes me in this game lol 😂
"Shut up, you maidenless glass" is gonna be my favorite insult from now on.
You ever one shot a boss before ?
@@LisandroLorea that probably sounded a lot better in your head didn't it?
Honestly at lvl 100-150 you have no excuse to be below 40-50 vigor. Unless you are playing a build that does magic and melee or some shit you have plenty of perk points to reach soft caps in you chosen build.
Remember, you do zero DPS if you're dead or too busy healing.
Get biggor, level some vigor.
Sounds like mug who gets hit talk.
@@_NutcasE_ I love mug
Also remember, surviving 1 hit and 3 hits is negligible if the boss does a 7 hit combo.
In short, the best way to live is to kill enemies faster.
@@vincentthendean7713 yes, to kill a beast you need to be more efficient beast.
It just takes a bit of rigor
I never pump vigor because I always tell myself that “I just won’t get hit, I know the attack patterns”. And, this is usually how it goes, up until Margit.
lol
Margit, The Vigor Examiner
@@xxx_jim_the_reaper_xxx Margit, Chieftan of Vigorology
Hahahaha!
Me, at first because I thought it would be like in previous games and life would increase anyway with other stats being upped... Nope, life doesn't increase at ALL with other stats in this one. I figured that out and since then have to sacrifice a hell of a number of souls (yeah, runes whatever) I wouldn't normally use for that.
My brother is level 73 and has never once put levels into his vigor stat. He gets one-shot by everything and he thoroughly enjoys it. I bow when I enter his presence now.
One thing forsure he knows every boss move set to the T. Or else he would not have beaten them
Facts, your brother is a dark souls god and I also bow to his strength
someone who sees this challenge and smiles at it is an unstoppable force that should be feared
Your brother is an idiot whose trading not being one shot for literally nothing.
@@CoreStarter he's trading it for the challenge and you're pathetic for being so insulting to someone's playstyle.
My advice is to level vigor at least as much as your flask can heal for. You leave soooooooo much healing on the table when you always overheal, and you'll hit that point very quickly without vigor upgrades.
Yeah, and that's bare minimum
I was really shocked how many Tears were in just Limgrave and the Peninsula.
I think this is one of the things that gets so many people one shotted and then complain that these games are too hard. I don't think I am very skilled at these games, but I have never had an issue because I always make sure my health is high enough to get one hit killed in any new area.
I'm of the mind set you want it to be minimal 25% on too of that.
Personal preference is to have your bar as 2 flasks + 25%
I would recommend having health equal to at least 1.5 times total healing
"Doing something like that isnt going to make you a glass cannon, it's just gonna make you glass"
Well put! Couldnt have said it better myself!
@@Frytzlar I have around 30 or so vigor (I always get to 1000 hp and then slowly level from there) I can still be one shot if I roll incorrectly but I can also tank a bit.
I dunno, there is some really powerful stuff in this game. I always play a glass cannon build in souls games as my first run, and I am level 111 with 15 or so Vigor. I do get one shot often, but it honestly hasn't been that bad, even then, with the right armor and using the mixed physick flasks it can be really viable.
@@dotfortun3 That's why you combine it wit a decent armor, there are so many not heavy armors that gets you on decent defense stats.
When people played this for the first time I wonder what Vigor they had by level 60, Because I had about 43 and the rest was in Dex and Strength.
ouch
My general method on deciding when to level vigor was to watch how much my flask was healing. If I'm over-healing, I'm losing that much potential health multiplied by the number of flasks I had. So taking that into account, leveling vigor increases your health by far more than the numbers show.
That is a fantastic way of looking at it.
I'm almost exactly this way too. Until the endgame, when I could put more points into vigor than the dwindling flask upgrades could keep up with, I always try to keep my health at 2x whatever my flask heals. If a flask heals more than 50% of my hp bar, it feels wasteful, but if it fills less than half, it doesn't feel like enough healing.
This is exactly how I handled my bars.
Is my flask full healing/filling my FP me regardless of how low I am? Time to increase vigor/mind
Am I not being full healed by a drink? I'm good, time to focus my other stats.
Are my other stats where I want them? Time to pump my bars.
Just raise your vigor at the start and get it over with. If you die and lose your runes you can't level up your other stats. It's more efficient to play the entire game with healthy vigor
@Mushroom11G that is one way to play. Really vigor is just a measure of how much you can mess up. I've found that outside of boss kills or specific grinding spots, regular rune gain from enemies is so pointless it doesn't really matter that much. Also the more of a ranged build you are, the less you need vigor.
I didn’t know how stats and scaling worked at the beginning so I thought if I had the minimum stats I needed for my weapon, that was good enough. Started as vagabond and leveled almost nothing but vigor until 52 vigor. Actually an accidental good choice for a big noob like me.
Doing that and adding an elemental effect with poor scaling but high base stats is an old school legitimate build. Unfortunately Chaos doesn't exist anymore. Actually a weapon element that scales with runes carried would be a good way to do it. Carry 1 million runes for max damage
@@IRUKANJI or just any soft cap
I dunno, i'm doing pretty alright with 25 vigor, currently in farum azula... malenia was really, really difficult but I managed to beat her..
@@duggme you will enjoy the game so so so much more once you hit around 50 vigor
@@duggme She's the most difficult boss in the game, so you're fine if you were able to beat her. Nevertheless I still recommend upping vigor.
"Doing something like that isn't gonna make you glass cannon, its just gonna make you glass".
Lmao loved this line with reference to the 20hp melee builds xD
Yeah when I invade people with 20 vigor they die in like two hits
@@jambothejoyful2966 In low level invades (the 3 you need to do for the bloody finger quest), I 1-shot 2 out of 3 hosts with the Claymore (+3~+4) special move. Didn't even take 2 hits
You could drop the 'G' and 'L' as well
@@gabagandalfoftheweed 0)-0)
I'm level 141 with the cap of 60 on vigor and you really need it for the later bosses where they can 3 to 5 tap you in a combo.
I'd argue 58/60 vigor is necessary just so that you can learn the combos and not constantly be dying and wondering what hit you.
That's what talismans, incantations like black flame's proctection, and armor are for. You can mitigate so much damage, in conjuction with a high vigor stat.
from my testing even past 60 you get good amount of hp worth the investment especially if you know how and where to farm millions of runes
Respeccing at 150 for this reason. Ive only got 40 rn
I also suggest using dragon credt shield talisman as it negates physical dmg
Ratatosker: “You should really level up vigor”
Strength Builds: “This man speaks the truth”
you also dont get the greatest armor early on, so get vigor, get good.
I’m up to level 100 without putting any points into vigor. Just got to kill everything before they swing on you lol. The only fight that sucked for me was radon. And in that fight the only thing that made it suck was the 4 meteor attack. If it was for that attack that fight would be easy.
@@danielchrist8651 can you post a clip of you destroying radahn? that sounds awesome. i’ve never seen someone say that radahn is easy, have you been able to get a no hit on him yet? very few people have done that, and you’d have to no-hit him to beat him without leveling vigor as all of his attacks do over 500 damage.
@@davesnothere2782 Armor is such an afterthought anyways. Except for some headpieces that actually do something, I just wear what looks good. Even then, I roll with no helmet or a headpiece that shows my characters pretty face lol. Plus after a bloody battle, you get splashes of blood over you and it looks cool af with blood on your face. Vigor upgrades give you waaay more than armor. Maybe in the early game armor matters more.
@@wuizabug2648 I find that Radhan is significantly easier without co-op. I beat him on my second try and almost killed him in my first but I had no idea what to do and used up most of my estus getting peppered with arrows at the start lol. Just use Torrent strategically and get off to do damage, call him to get out of sticky situations. Summon the AI friends as meat shields. Not really very difficult. HOWEVER, I tried getting summoned in coop to help people afterwards and haven't beaten him that way. His health just gets buffed sooooo much in coop and I do pathetic damage. The fight gets longer and eventually someone gets killed.
My rule for Dark Souls & Elden Ring has always been to have my health bar = to twice my HP flask. This rule has served me well for a decade.
This needs more upvotes, this is exactly what I've always done, I've just never really thought about it
With a game as punishing as Elden Ring or any Souls title, increasing your hp is a no brainer.
I legit do not understand why people would neglect this
@@polskillz I think most people get excited by big damage numbers in games. Even though increasing DPS stats early in Elden Ring doesn't produce big damage, weapon upgrades do. There's probably a lack of understanding there. Or maybe they're rushing for minimum requirements of some item or spell.
Those things aren't as interesting to me as being able to take hits and survive. And I have enough to play around with at moderate DPS attributes.
I've usually played it a bit thinner than that (I usually aim for my flask to be a bit under 2/3rds of my health bar), but yep, that's also how I usually think about it. Most of your HP is in your flask, but *only if you can drink safely*.
Me with a +12 flask:
_Thats a lot of health_
My golden rule with every first run of a new soulsborne game: Always get yourself a good HP-pillow. I can do the crazy glasscannon stuff in later runs, when I know the game.
In Elden Ring, my first character was a mage, and yet I still had the golden rule of administering at least every third skill point into vigor, until I hit 40 vigor. This also allowed me to play a magic knight, but without shield, wich was awesome.
I did exactly this went 20 right out of the gate, later I realised that was 100% not enough, I did a respec and axed all my arcane levels to bump it up, I’m sitting at a nice 40 now but once I hit 80 dex think imma push it to 50.
I also did this, its so suitable for doing it because I'm aiming for a Knight Mage. Thank god I invested decent points for Vigor.
My rule of thumb since dks1 is hitting 30 vig early and then only coming back to this after hitting 40 on my main stat, worked like a charm on my arcane build
Yeah i didn't realize the game forces you to specialize and that if you try rounding the game shts on you every moment you play it
@@bEtHeSdA_LAME_sTuDi0s not necessarily, depends on what you diversify. str and dex has always been a strong choice, specially for first playthrough. fth and int are also very, very strong if you find the right gear early on. I did dex and arc and it worked like a charm once I found some bleed weapons
One of the hurdles to get over in Elden Ring is how Vigor and Mind both give pretty low amounts of improvements until after 20.. It feels bad to level them because you feel like you get so little in return, until you try to go over 20 and you suddenly notice the big increases. (less so for Mind, but effectively losing two thirds of a fp flask each time I used one felt bad as a mage xD)
i agree with this. I did the, flawed, mental math and saw the damage output being greater than the damage tanking. Also being an explorer i upgraded my flask so quickly that i figured the 1 hp grace save as a crutch. game was still fun till tryna kill mini bosses in caelid.
THIS!
Mind scaling is annoying for melee builds, I just want a few more fp for weapon skills but points in mind feels so bad
@@HZAres yeah it sucks. At least some weapon skills seem to work even when your FP has run out though
@@CosmicAeon They don't do the special effects. But they do the animations. (And if you have hyperarmor on it, you lose that too)
I would also recommend picking up the Opaline Bubble Tear at the Weeping Peninsula Erd Tree. It greatly increases defenses for one hit allowing for one more mistake.
At the start of the game, I didn’t pay much attention to it, I was like “one hit isn’t that big of a deal”. I began to use it in the Radahn fight and I never took it off ever since. I only wish we’d get more slots to test other tears
Man that one hit can also be a lifesaver if you summon ashes or buff weapons for example, pop it before you enter the bossfight. If the boss rushes you then instead of taking 40% of your healthbar while you're stuck in animations he takes like 2%
@@mjcwvo it's a lifesaver for people who use Mimic Tear
You can get this bubble much more often with parfuming item. I have parfum bottles plus the mixed physics gives me 7 one hit protect bubbles for a boss fight if I want to
@Dennis Capurso i need to invest in perfuming stocks i guess, got those items didnt give two shits to look :x
i’m fighting this optional boss that’s quintessential to Ranni’s quest line at around 17 vigor using radagon’s scarseal and i must say, i did this to myself.
My main on ng+2 is on maliketh now with 9 vigor, 238 HP. I was literally able to tank one of any of melania's attacks with my vigor this low. No joke.
Essential
@@draconiandraco nah you built different wtf
@@roidell5140 just the way I play
@@draconiandraco you can tank a hit if you have the tear that reduces damage tho.
I learned how important vigor was when i fought radahn at 20 vigor. You get one shot by every move at 20 vigor. I spent the next 10 levels on vigor, came back to radahn, and beat him second try.
True I was also at 20 vigor and basically had to defeat him without getting hit once.
Same story here, third try after I respecced from 20 to 35 vigor
Same story with me for Malenia, I spent a day trying to beat her while I had 40 vigor, decided to go out and grind upto 60, was able to beat her a lot easier when I wasn't afraid of her melting my health bar.
Beat him today with 15 vigor at level 50. Honestly, I enjoy the one shot challenge. It took me awhile, but I did Radahn hitless with the hook claws and I’m happy as hell
As someone who actually leveled Vigor reading the wiki entries constantly talking about how he will easily 1-shot you with his bow was very confusing
I kinda figured out that you need more vigor when some bosses started doing what was essentially room wide unblockable attacks that one-shot me.
I had someone tell me that it was useless to level vigor because all that does is make bosses two-shot you instead of one-shot you.
I also had them complain how hard the game was, so...
Even if that was the case, two-shotting you means you can take a hit for every one of your flasks, whereas being one-shot means you have to run the battle perfectly. I can't think of a better way to increase your odds than making sure you can make 10x as many mistakes.
The problem here is the room wide unblockable attack, not your vigor.
It's useless because they two-shot you instead of one shot you? Well that's double your effective HP and you don't get one-shot, seems decent.
There's a world of a difference between two-shot and one-shot.
Two-shooting vs One-shooting is the difference between getting to use your 4-14 flasks and just dying.
There's a dramatic shift in how the scaling works for vigor when considering the difference between DS3 and ER. In DS3 the HP return per level drops off substantially around 27 vigor, (in fact, every single one of my efficiency builds never puts more than 22 hard points into vigor, because I always wear the prisoner's chain.) In ER, HP per level *increases* until 40 vigor, and still gives good returns up to 60 vigor, (by comparison between 40 and 60 vigor in DS3, you're only getting about 3 or 4 HP per level, in ER it's in the twenties.)
The *biggest* point gain per level in DS3 is at 16 and 17 vigor, which is probably why players think they can get away with that in ER. In DS3 anything more than that is giving you less than previous levels, (but again, the most substantially drop between levels is going from 26 to 27, where you get a full 7 HP less than the previous level.) In ER, the biggest point gain happens *at* 40 vigor. So if you were comfortable at 16 vigor in DS3, the underlying mechanics seem to insist that you should be aiming for 40 in Elden Ring.
Exactly, 40 vigor is what I felt was perfect for the first play through, but someone in another comment said that they needed “60” lol that’s just too much imo.
it should be common sense though lol, at hour 80 i was like "this is a long a** game" obviously you’te going to need more vigor as the designers made it that way. Plus there are A LOT of cheap shots in this game. Creatures hiding behind walls, dropping down on you, and manifesting out of this air, and shooting your from 100 miles away. Im sure thé game devs are laughing in their sleep at everyone trying to get through ER with DS3 health bars.
@@lcunash8093 my goal is pretty much that in fact: level vigor to 40, but use whatever armor i feel comfortable now(currently some aristocrat stuff that nets me roughly 20% damage negation)
And if i start to feel like i don't have enough health, either put on something heavier, or level up some more vigor, i have another 20 levels to reach the softcap anyway, but playing with less than 40 vigor now? Oh boy, that's gonna be rough...
I remembered in DS 3 I tried to get about 20 vigor by the great swamp so that I could comfortably tank the poison without just being hard dead, and 30 vigor by irythll dungeon for similar reasons (stupid wardens...). By around that point I stopped doing vigor and started doing other stats, even post DLC I only had about 40-ish Vigor.
@@dandrory805 it "technically" increases your HP on a parabolic curve between 15 and 40 vigor, but that's not a helpful way of looking at it because it's such a depressed parabola. Between 10 and 36 vigor your total health only increases three-fold, so it's not like you're looking at a formula of HP=vigor^2 or anything.
I am level 42 and I just worked this out on my own. I was raising stats in order to use the cool weapons I found. I got a flail that needs 24 dex and a scythe that needs 24 faith. As I was going for dex/faith, it made sense to me to raise those stats to 24. I also raised endurance to 15 and strength to 16 (to use a shield I found). I did not completely neglect vigor, but it is only 18. What made me realize I had made a mistake was the ulcerated tree spirit boss, the one you can find relatively early in the game. I found I could do decent damage to it, and get it below half health, but every hit it did to me was more than half my health. So, to beat it, I had to basically go most of the fight not taking hits - and I am not that good (plus the fight is very random). I realized that if I had a bit more health, I would have beaten this boss already. My low health was making it so I could not afford to make any mistakes.
I was also aware that my flasks were +5, and they could heal my entire health bar. It occured to me that the minimum amount of health should be at least more than what my flasks can heal, since otherwise my flask is partially wasted.
I was at like 80 with 14 vigor earlier today, found a new grind spot and went up to level 110 with 38 vigor. I thought that the game was just really difficult and was impressed that so many people were able to do a hitless run. Now I understand that most people can survive a hit.
Well, what's the point of upgrading vigor in a hitless run ;)
Where is this spot?
I realized this early on when I versed margit with 30 strength and 10 vigor. created a new character and got enough dex and strength to barely use that curved bleed sword with two hands then pumped vigor. game is a lot more fun when you aren't clenching your ass every encounter.
@@theK4b6 I thought I was the only one that clenched my ass everytime I dodged in a boss fight…
In this game you are the Demon's Souls protagonist fighting against Bloodborne enemies with Dark Souls 1 poise, the encounter design of Dark Souls 2, the buggy open world of Skyrim, and the bosses and terrain hangups of Monster Hunter.
This game is "just really difficult", because the deck is completely stacked against you. It is impossible to do this game your first try through with low Vigor because the enemies are all designed to trick you, exploit preconceived notions and or previously established logics, and fuck you up. I think the "challenging but fair" philosophy kinda got lost in translation somewhere, but for better or worse is up to personal taste.
It's also worth pointing out that each point of Vigor gives you more HP than the last point, up until 40 Vigor. So you're really selling yourself short by not getting to 40 - I'd say that for any character build.
Whoa, I didn't know that at all, I figured it would start dropping from the first point onwards.
Thanks for the info bro!
I think 45 might be the best. It's when the arc of the 2nd soft cap starts to decrease.
In fact 1 level at 44 vigor to 45 is the same increase as level 18 vigor to 19
Kind of wacky
@Wimpleton Duck i dont pvp, so who cares?
@@Waldoz53 Agreed. A lot of people don't care about the pvp, so calling their leveling "shameful" is unnecessarily combative and baseless.
Even if we did care about pvp, I think our expectations for "good pvp levels" need to change with this game. Yes, level 150 would have been waaay higher than most pvp players in Dark Souls 3, but with this game being so much bigger and longer, we should be expecting to level up more.
And I think this idea is even supported by looking at the soft caps for attributes. They're generally higher than they've been in previous Souls games. This game wants you to level up more. Get 40 Vigor. Do it. Stay alive. Be a badass.
The most hp you get from 30-40 with around 50hp for each lvl
In my experience in souls games, I always recommend new players leveling health first. More health gives them more room for error and increases the time they spend trying to overcome a specific difficulty. Much of the difficulty in souls games is born from being deleted before you can have enough time experiencing a situation or attack. More health usually means you have a window for making mistakesand learning through the process. Because damage increases more with upgrades than stats in the beginning, this seems to be the intended route for new players.
yeah that makes sense. learning the movements does take time.
thank you for the tips
They could have also just put real poise in the game so high HP builds actually make sense. I dont blame players choosing to level up stats for this one OP Katana with this one OP Weaponart, since everyone is running exactly that. I had 76 Poise at one point, sometimes rats staggered me, sometimes they didnt. Its broken.
Very well said
Funny enough this also applies to Monster Hunter, every tier of gear has a set that makes you tanky
I've platinumed the game and have done up to NG+4, and in this new run I started I immediately beelined it to Greyoll and the nearby Night Cavalry with a gold-pickled fowl foot for each for the express purpose of getting the early 30-40 levels so that I could get Vigor up. I got it right up to around 30 right away before even doing Stormveil with the intent to get it up to 40 and stop right around there before even leveling anything else to improve my damage.
Even though I'm fully-familiar with what to expect at this point and dare I say it, pretty skilled with my extensive history with FromSoft games, having that health buffer is extremely beneficial because unforeseen things will happen and mistakes will be made.
All the skill in the world can’t make up for human error, so being prepped for the worst is a very good approach
You're totally right. I was level 40 with only 14 vigor and after I saw my level 20 sister surviving hits like nothing, I realized I could make the game more playable with vigor. In fact, it made it way more enjoyable to go up against bosses. More time to learn patterns, less of a chance of losing thousands of runes with no way to get them back, etc.
Spend your runes when you can
I always level "Vigor" on a first play through and ignore it on other playthroughs. But with ER it seems to be a near mandatory stat. You have railgun lobsters, cruise missile Ancestral Followers and bunch of magic shitters that will one shot you with base HP.
Fuck those cruise missile ancestral archers
@@joebenjamin7465 yeah and fuck that teleporting npc in the study hall divine tower especially
@@Ssshmoo that guy fucking blows
@@jooot_6850 I think it's a girl but yeah she blows. I gave in and used the cheese method where you make her fall down the elevator shaft
those damn lobsters got me so good earier, i was riding past them all and thought i got away until i got 1 shot lazerbeamed from a mile away, i had no idea they could do that
This, really open my eyes...
Now I know what's wrong with my build, and i know what stat to increase...
Thanks for the Video, really a great help
Yes increase your dex
@@ragon39 but dont tell anyone
Endurance so you can roll more
How was "I should get more health" not your first thought?
@@boskilingenfelter9515 because this community is so dogmatic about "don't get hit", people will think HP is a useless stat and refuse to even consider it, out of pride.
As a Sorcerer in this game: I got my Vigor to 35 before bringing my Int up to 70. It's just enough that USUALLY I don't get one shot, and 70 Int is a MASSIVE power spike.
those last 5 levels of vigor to level 40 give the most points to your hp.
Hey Bro what about your mind stat????
@@303alvaro I mix that in with Vigor, and Int gets a lot of stat bonuses from Armor so I don't need to bring it up ALL THE WAY TO 70 myself.
Seeing all the PVP content with people who had healthbars that go halfway across the screen, I knew they know more about the game's stats system so I just blindly accepted that they were right. Turns out that was a good move lol. I've got roughly 35 vigor and 35 strength currently.
Especially when someone takes a hit and that healthbar gets CHUNKED; when you compare the amount of HP lost to the max HP of low vigor builds it really outs things into perspective
Genuinely, browing the ER subreddit and the amount of people I see rushing the endgame at level 90 with 30 vigor and then complaining it's unbalanced is staggering.
I finished with 18 vigor and they are right. The game is unbalanced because the enemies are maidenless bitches.
Even at 60 vigor and 40% damage reduction armor, some of the end game bosses are 2-3 shotting me. I cant imagine how people are actually trying to push through with only 30-40.
Hell, id even upgrade my VIgor PAST 60 if it didnt only give like 5-6 per level past level 60. If it gave like 10-15, I would have probably pumped it to the max.
@@_NutcasE_ Spoken like a true maidenless :3c
@@_NutcasE_ Maidenless response. The game is clearly balanced in a way where making yourself into a glass canon isn't very viable. If you could be a glass canon with no drawbacks, then the HP stat becomes effectively useless. If you try to minmax yourself to be a glass canon, then you're going to have to make a sacrifice. That sacrifice being that you are more and more likely to get one shotted as you get further into the game. The game expects you to be a much higher level by the end than in previous Fromsoft games, use them to level health.
I reached mountaintop of giants probably at 85 level with 30 vigor. Then I thought the late game area is unbalanced. But some of the late game bosses are really problematic for melee builds specially like Malenia, Fire giant and Godskin duo. Str build is weak in this game.
A big problem with some of the stat curves is that they fail to show how much hp you get from leveling vigor early on, it scales very badly at early levels and makes people think it’s a bad stat.
and then it gets better, then its trash at 60
If someone puts a single point into vigor, sees it go up by maybe 5-10 points, and immediately thinks "This stat isn't worth leveling", that is entirely on them. My first character had most their level 11 to level 30 stat increases dumped into vigor, and it made a lot of the harder early game areas much more tolerable. My damage wasn't great, but hey... I wasn't dying like my friends were.
That is not a moot point. The only way you would know is by “mass leveling” which you only see if you respect and manually check every benchmark. I always leveled health until 30 before anything when I play FromSoft’s games but in this game it felt like a mandatory investment.
@@autorobo1000 Your durability from Vigor vs damage to enemies with any offensive stat via STR DEX ARC or Faith are always out-scaled in the early game of Dark Souls, but in Elden Ring the game. But in which game do you only get 10-20 points per Vigor? That sounds like Dark Souls 1 after hardcap.
@@limitlessapocalypse2702 Hardcap is 99. Term you're looking for is softcap. Regardless of how DS1 handled it... This isn't DS1. In a lot of the Souls games you can get by with minimal investment into vigor.
If the player level vigor *once* and decide the investment isn't worth it, then that is still on the player, not the game. My previous point about making the early areas a cakewalk because I had more vigor than I did dex, str, fth, or int still stands.
Even if you wanna master the dodge/parry mechanic, vigor can still help you. It gives you that psychological safety net that helps you dodge/parry more confidently.
Ironically, I lost less total health when I had more vigor during that battle with that damnable death rite bird.
I always go by this philosophy when playing these games “you may not do 1billion damage when you level vigor but you will last long enough to inflict it”
Such a good mentality
Death by a 1000 cuts
You may not do much damage, but you can survive long enough to annoy your enemy to death.
"The Art of War: Vol 2" by Tytsty
If strength increased equip load this wouldn't be an issue, you can level strength and get survivability and damage, but miyazaki hates strength
When I first played this game the only reason why I ever leveled my Strength, Dex, Int, and Faith to 20 was just so I can use the majority of weapons and spells in the game so I can get a feel for what I really want. The rest went to vigor, mind, and endurance to I can use weapon arts more, summon spirits, and wear the armor I liked.
You should increase your damage eventually.
I deal WAY more damage beause of the stats than the base weapon damage (around 300 base, 720 with scalling, using power stance with this is extremely powerful. In pvp usually 2 hit enemies, or even instakill them with a jump attack)
20 in any stat doesn't get you close to the majority of the repertoire though, you're really just limiting yourself to a small pool of "just OK" equipment. This isn't like Souls where you can get invaded as a noob by twinks with +17 weapons, the level capping prevents it now
@@quinnpage7943 both my weapons require less than 20 in every stat
I think this is a fine approach for a first playthrough. Actually, it's pretty smart. I made my first character a dex/fth build as per tradition since ds2 (with some investment in arc just because), and I've been really missing a lot of cool str/int weapons.
@@hydrasteryx1904 damage scaling won’t do u any good with 20 in every stat…
Thank you for posting this. I've been running around with Vigor being a heavily neglected stat and dumping most of my stats into hitting harder, and just figured that later game armor would help with better damage mitigation. But the way that you've carefully explained the benefits has converted me, Vigor is gonna start getting some love now. Cheers for that.
What I find funny is that some avoid levelling up Vigor but then proceed to use defensive talismans, massive armor, etc. So the penalty they end up paying is way worse than being able to take those hits and instead be able to retaliate. Of course there isn't a right or a wrong way to play the game. It's just about the tradeoff not making a lot of sense in terms of numbers. But then again, not everyone is trying to minmax their character
This is excellent advice. I would also like to add that, once your Vigor is at 40 and you have the minimum stats to use the weapons and spells you enjoy, consider leveling up Mind. Almost every character build will use FP in some way, and once you start upgrading your flask with Sacred Tears it'll easily start restoring way more FP than your maximum. Instead of putting 10 points into, say, Strength to deal a few more points of damage, you might get a lot more mileage by investing those points into Mind and being able to use your Weapon Arts more often. You might find that using a power special ability one or two more times between flask charges ends up dealing more damage than just raising a stat for scaling. In addition, many of the best Spirit Ash summons require a good amount of FP in order to summon, and you don't want to lock yourself out of some powerful, game-changing allies that can give you an edge in battle.
This is what I have been wondering recently. I am trying for a strength and faith build, and so how should I split my levels between melee stats like strength and vigor and magic stats like faith and intelligence.
@@mayankpant1596 At the start of the game you should invest enough into Strength and Faith to meet the minimum requirements for the weapon you're using and the incantations you're casting. Remember that the weapon you start with doesn't have to be the weapon you stick with through the entire game. After that, you should put every point into Vigor until you reach 40, and then get Mind to 20-25. Once you're in the level 50+ range you should have access to more weapons and incantations, at which point you can invest points in your stats to reach the minimum requirements of those. You may also want to invest in Endurance into the 20-30 range if your equipment gets heavy, so that you have a Medium load. You should really only invest attribute points JUST for scaling purposes once you've gotten standard weapons up to +15 or better, or special weapons up to +6 or better.
Another upsidr to putting points into Mind later, is that it translates to more Health flasks for any build needing FP flasks, since you dont have to have as many of them
Spirit summons are gank. Not trying to run them at all
Nope 10 mind with 2 flasks in enough to win 1v3 invasions on sl 120
Hosts need to level more vigor! And not just for fighting off invasions but also fighting bosses in co-op. Feels rough whenever I try help someone one fight a boss and they get love tapped to death instantly, as I'm clearing the fog gate. If your phantoms with less health are able to tank hits against the boss then something's definitely up.
Or they stand there on the edge of the boss room shooting weak magic or fucking arrows expecting you to do all the fighting then.....die anyways when the boss swats them once out of annoyance.
Phantoms dont have less HP in this game. They have the full normal HP. They just cant use great runes while a phantom.
@@HashBandicoot356 lol, my first run i was that mage, but i had the opposite problem. even with only 9 vigor, i was doing like triple my phantoms damage per hit, and they kept dying. i kept my 9 vigor going all the way till the final boss, at which point its homing crap completely screwed me, doubly so in that even with the strongest build for pure damage, magic just sucks against it.
lmao yea i was letting myself get summoned for Radahn and 15 out of 20 times i didn't even reach him because the host let himself get clapped by an arrow
Summons at +10 have more hq than you can dream
As a newer Soulsringbourne player the game also gets you to fall into the trap by dropping weapons or spells on you that require 20 to 30 additional levels in a stat if not more
That's pretty common in Souls games in general too
If its a high STR (above 20) requirement, the weapon probably was meant to be twohanded until you get much higher.
DEX usually caps at 20-25, with very few endgame weapons going to 40.
Sorceries and Incants with >20 INT/FTH border on useless unless you have a lot of FP and HP (to take a hit as you cast some of the longer cast time spells), stick to the easier and usually cheaper but still very efficient spells/incants.
Yeah, a friend that is new to the souls series got his first good staff from Rennala's remembrance. To his dismay, it required a whopping 60 int to even be able to use it (60 of any attribute is super high, especially for a weapon you get really early on). He actually put every talent point he could into INT up until the capital, that's when he understood that his shiny staff wasn't going to carry him if he is getting hit left and right in a place crammed with hard hitting enemies when he had no health.
In most souls games, Elden Ring included, you want to stick to a decent early weapon with low requirements and respecc later on when you can use the high requirement weapons without compromising the balance of your character.
@@Hemestal I would even go a step further and say you need to have a clear idea of what you early, mid and late game build will be. These do not need to be identical, but you need to think about it because you can only respec so many times and upgrade so many weapons without wasting too much time farming items.
In general most players early build should lean towards whichever class you pick then by mid game you can start transitioning to your late game build if you are looking to change
@@Hemestal I mean the spell from Rennala takes 50 int to use so either way you aren’t using either of her boss rewards until way later
I think part of why it gets neglected is the stat requirements to use the really cool stuff like that giant murder fireball with 45 Faith or something like that which was obtainable while still pretty weak.
I've always alternated between vigor and other stats in every souls game until I had around 40 into vigor. More health means the game is more forgiving, always has.
I realized I had been ignoring it too much when I got to radahn lol, quickly got it up to at least 20 which is reasonable for where I'm at in the game
Unless ur on new game plus 4-7 cycle, then ur gonna get 3 to 4 tapped regardless of ur health bar, since the souls games get bullshit cheap on higher ng+ cycle tiers.
@@karls4937 thats not really bad, you opted into ng+ (4-7) ofc its going to be extreme compared to the initial ng
@@awkwardllama0509 Pretty much, the first few run cycles can be a cakewalk.
it very funny seeing people with 20 vigor in elden ring. a dog in mt, gilmir will one shot you. If you’re a veteran player (not in try hard mode) i think 30 to 35 vigor is the sweet spot. You can increase it more with medallions, Great Runes, and spells. almost 200 hours in explored every corner of this world, 35 vigor was perfect.
I remember in Dark Souls 3, 30 vigor was more than enough to tank through the entire game. It was a surprise when I realized bosses still 1 shot me with some attacks in Elden Ring WITH 30 vigor.
Hell 27 Vig was enough in DS3
Counter hits can be brutal in this game
Elden Ring is a longer game than ds3 so you have to lvl up more to keep the rythm. but idk about that ive always been lvl up my vigor at 50
That is why the old souls meta of 120 is not enough especially if you continue till NG+3. So 150 is really the sweet spot
talismans man, talismans. ritual shield talisman is really good and the dragoncrest is also pretty good. im running with 30 right now and not feeling all that squishy with the combo of pearldrake, dragoncrest, ritual shield, and heavier armor
I'm so glad you mentioned that weapon upgrading give more stats than leveling up attack stats.
Find a weapon you like increase stat to it min cost then only focus on the three core stats Vitality, Mind, and Endurace until they where you want them.
Melee early game 30 Vit, 10 Focus, 30 Endurance
Makes 30 Vit, 30 Focus, 10 Endurance
Note Vitality stays the same
for melee dont leave yourself at 30 vigor reduce endurance to 20 and up vigor to 40. 30 to 40 vigor is the single best stat you can lvl up in the game
@@otjustice Would u recommend prioritizing vigor for a mage build as well?
@@Gangerworld I feel like mages get even more value than melee in many regards because you have more room to make mistakes on casting time. You can basically chill out and not feel pressured as much kiting a boss in some contexts (i know some bosses punish you for being distant).
If you are not putting your first ten levels into vigor you are wasting your early game. More vigor = less downtime
@@Gangerworld Mages need vigor even more because to get the most out of a mage you can't pump as much into endurance to carry heavy armor and get higher defense like a melee class.
Quick tip : Every time you up anything else than vigor, the next lvl needs to be vigor
won't work for 198+ players xD and besides that no one should go past 60 vigor if your intention is not to go for insane high lvl.
@@TheRealPulverize I stopped at 40 vigor and have a health bar almost half the width of my screen. Around 1450HP IIRC. I wear veterans armor for physical defense, I probably don't know what I'm doing though :D
@@SerBallister 40 is good, there you meet the soft cap. As a melee 60 can be handy for survivability
This has been my exact strategy
If I want to level up strength I have to keep vigor at an equal level
Obviously as one guy said not forever because eventually you have enough health but still need strength or dex
@@TheRealPulverize 60 Vigor is what the difference is between death and surviving in a boss fight getting hit two-to-three times. It has always been the best stat to lvl for any melee build unless you're doing a no hit run.
I noticed that HP scaling actually appreciates the higher level your vigor is, which I don't remember being the case in Dark Souls games. At 10 vigor, 1 additional point of vigor = roughly 20 HP, whereas at level 30 it equals about 41 HP. It's massively +ve
At about 25 the hp you get per point goes way up, until 40 where you hit the 1st soft cap; and then you hit another softcap at 60.
Took me until I hit level 100 @ mountaintop of the giants to realise that it would probably be a good idea to start pumping up vigor, seeing that juicier HP boost at 30+ vigor made me regret not increasing it sixty hours earlier
I think another problem, and it stems from previous FromSoft games as well, is that you cannot see the HP/FP/Stamina bars *while* leveling up. You're just shown the stats' numbers. Which isn't how players visualize the stats in question. If the level up screen allowed the player to see the bar increasing while putting levels into the stats, it'd go a long way towards getting players to put more into those stats.
@@DarkIceKrabby To be honest, I don't think it would. Not unless you're mass leveling, because just one or two additional levels are going to have a negligible effect on the size of your bars, especially at early levels.
@@DarkIceKrabby I mean..... look at the numbers as a percentage increase? I have always looked at numbers, not bar length. Why would a contextless growing bar give you more info than actual numeric increases?
"Except for mages, some of their spells are so powerful they actually are glass canons" - unless they're NPC mages, in which case they are hp sponges while also dropping tactical blue nukes on me.
Personally I'm running around with 40 vigor. I could pump it higher, I'm in ng+, but I'm using a fully upgraded fingerprint shield so I have 100% physical block with no stamina consumption so I only have to worry about magic users, and even then I have around 80% damage negation. Most of my deaths at this point are from me getting sloppy or falling off of a cliff.
Cliffs at every other corner: Ahem! Allow us to introduce ourselves.
Putting either of the anti-magic parries on a 100% physical damage reduction shield is so nice, safe from all physical stuff while also capable of negating anything magical. I used medium shields so i had 2 shields with 100% physical reduction i swapped between, one without ashes so i could use weapon skills and another with the Cardian Retaliation parry for places with casters
Gravity is our greatest enemy.
I'd love to see more on mages. I'm playing a mage and was building pretty glass cannon. For example, I beat all of the main bosses in Stormveil on my first try by nuking them down before they got to take more than three swings at me. Then I started getting wrecked in Raya Lucaria and was confused to see how many people said Stormveil was hard but Raya Lucaria was cake.
I started thinking about the damage I was taking and realized I was prioritizing my physical damage reduction but was in a magic academy, and that my hp was just as low at level 30 as it had been when I was level 10. So I swapped out all of my armor to get the most magic resistance possible and put 10 levels into Vigor and suddenly Raya Lucaria was easy.
Around the same time, a helpful message on the floor encouraged me to try striking damage against a certain enemy and, sure enough, upgrading a club and putting magic affinity on it allowed me to easily beat those enemies down. Then I met enemies that die easy to holy, and enemies that fall to the floor and flail around if you hit them with fire damage.
I'm so used to tailored builds being useless in RPGs that I hadn't even tried to use them, but it's looking like the best way to beat the game may be to customize your damage mitigation and attacks to hard counter the enemies you're fighting. I absolutely demolished a knight enemy that had been 1-shotting me for 20 levels by picking up a lance after reading a game tip that said lances are especially good on horseback or against mounted enemies.
You were getting wrecked in Raya lucaria because it's gimmick is to wreck mage players.
The enemies have tonnes of magic resistance and the corridors are tight and unforgiving for kiting.
I was getting wrecked in Raya lucaria with the same vigor i used to first try radahn.
@@Krozhin well my strength faith paladin had a good time in raya lucaria, but I struggled in limgrave due to not having good ranged options
@@Krozhin its easy, get a moonviel katana and a pack of demi human ashes at night and she just dies. or get 2 players to help erase the female dog and put her down.
@@shun2240 Anything melee just stomps the academy, and incants aren't as resisted because of their damage types.
im a level 207 mage 40 vig 50 mind 23 end 70 int 50 faith 18 arcane 20 str and 15 dex. i wouldnt say im complete glass but deff rely on distractions. wasnt until i hit level 170 with some well discovered magic weapons that made it smooth. honestly id still have a lower vigor level of 20 if it wasnt for PVP.
I've always found a good rule of thumb in any FromSoft game is the 20/30/40 rule. Magic builds have a lot of other split stat requirements so theyve always been this weird other thing that doesnt follow the formula, but if you use physical weapons, its really consistent.
The first thing you should do is make sure you have the minimum stats to wield a weapon you'll be happy with for a while. Then immediately get 20 points in your health stat. Then spend some time getting your weapon stat of choice to somewhere around 30, which should usually be more than enough to wield all but a very small percentage of weapons you might want.
Then beeline straight for 40 in your health stat.
That's it. 20 health puts you in a good spot to survive early game bosses and carries you along with your improving understanding of the games pacing to 30 in your weapon stat which let's you wield most of your dream weapons. Then up to 40 vigor to keep pace with the damage of late game bosses. As long as you're pure melee, it works in Elden Ring just like other souls games.
40 ain't enough
@@yvngvudu it really isn’t, 50-60 vig is optimal as a melee only build
@@Anonymous9989 bruh you shouldn't be running around with less than 60 vigor in general.
@@yvngvudu oh I never do lol
@@yvngvudu I hit 50 and im good. past NG+ enemies are all gonna one or 2 shot you anyways.
"I keep getting killed because I have low health"
"Well, increase your health then?"
"NO!"
Like what is the thinking behind that?
dps min max autism probably.
I have to keep screaming at people I know to level vigor, it is EXTREMELY important in Elden ring.
The thinking is "I am an elite gamer, I just need to git gud!"
Somehow Miyazaki has used the community's own mantra against them.
@@EionBlue
How tragic.
@@EionBlue
The future is now.
I fought Radahn with 40 vigor. It was surprising to me how little damage he did, because I watched streamers getting near one-shot by him.
The meteor's still one shot me with 40 vig everything else 2 hit ko'ed me
Still beat his ass, but I struggled for bit
@@netwatch7261 100% phys shields block the meteor's, because like the rock sling mage spell, they are pure physical damage. i found that out by accident lol
@@Choryrth Or just jump on your horse and sprint away.
@@Choryrth
I see that you've done your math.
I also hit a big realization that alot of players really neglect endurance. Just a clarification, endurance increases your stamina bar, your weight and your robustness (how much bleed you can take). Fashion souls while has been important, the defensive stats of good armor are not to be neglected, couple that with say a heavier and better shield make you better at taking damage, which WILL happen. Next is the stamina pool; dodge? Stamina usage, attack? Stamina usage? Spell? Stamina usage, block? Stamina usage. Just about every single thing you do in combat uses stamina and using the bare minimum means certain death at a single mistake. So many builds treat endurance like it's the most dump stat of dump stat, when its debatablly more important than your health.
Thank you, this is really helpful.
that is valid but i still gotta value my fashion
I'm doing a DEX/INT build, more DEX than INT. Endurance & Vigor are just as important as the stats that affect your damage output. I think my vigor is a bit ahead of my dex, and my endurance is neck-and-neck with my dex, it's just important to be able to get those swings in with my dex weapons (endurance) and to be able to survive the occasional misstep (vigor) because I tried to get one more hit in too often. Endurance is also so key to being able to dash away from AOE attacks or dodge multiple attacks in succession (considering some bosses' long combos)
Gotta find it funny how fromsoft thinks endurance has nothing to do with health in a fight
I went pure Dex/End/Str
The choice for me... seemed like you either go End for Stam, Vigor for Hp, or Mind for Fp
And Vigor legit seems like the worst option of the 3... by FAR... with End at least you can carry more... and more stamina in essence means more hp... gives u more time to block and roll... wasting hits... while Mind gives you mana for casting etc...
Vigor is just... well... just hp... meh
I'm level 72... 15 Vigor, 40 End, 35 str, 35 dex... quality build
I have no problems with only dodging/rolling/blocking... it's honestly the most fun I've ever had in a game lol
When I got to around the end of Elden Ring I was surprised at how much health I needed. In DS3 I could get by with just 1000 health but in Elden Ring I needed like 1500.
the longer you live due to a high amount of vigor the longer you can keep on fighting and analyze the attack pattern of a boss. With 3 times the HP it’s like having 3 fights against the same boss back to back instead of dying and repeating the fight 3 times!
This is where I have the problem. Many of the bosses simply don't stop. My almost entire fight against the golden spirit of Godfrey consisted of one continous dodging session with rolling pokes. I managed to disengage once to heal, but generally speaking he just kept attacking nonstop.
I had to whip out moonveil to stagger Radagon because when I tried to fight him "fair" I was getting stuff like spear -> lingering AoE that prevents you from closing -> another spear with lingering AoE -> triple beam -> 5 quick teleports -> another spear -> ... Like literally after first spear forces me off his face, it's game over because he won't let me close the distance with ranged spam and half the arena covered by lingering AoE stuff.
I can't hold concentration for long against bosses that require perfect roll timing and don't let you reset from time to time. So the obvious solution is to become glass cannon and try bursting the boss down before my brain melts.
It was easy in Sekiro beceause there was a rythm to each fight, but in ER I feel like headless chicken.
@@infine-8222 Jump to avoid aoe. Also roll late for the spears. The radagon fight was one of my favourite fights. The elden beast was a let down
@@tomf0olery It's not the AoE itself. It's the lingering effect you can't step onto. So you have to fall back out of it. Which triggers Radagon ranged attacks. Which often spawn more lingering AoE.
@@infine-8222 he actually only has 2 attacks you could argue are lingering AOE: the first one you mentioned, being the spear he plants creating a square of DOT, and his triple slam that creates an AOE for each hit, ofc ending at the 3rd hit. everything else has a timer of a delayed AOE blast or a large AOE that you can actually jump to avoid (except that one where he floats in the goddamn air for an eternity, thts just precise timing and i hate tht move). for the most part though you're correct, he baits you into the range game hella hard and it can really halt that push to get in and deal dmg.
@@tomf0olery radagon was one of my most hated fight, I did it with 25 vigor and it's been a bitch!, I get bishotted by bullshit attacks, when he finishes his infinite combo he immediatly runs away and many attacks are literally undodgeable, LITERALLY
I think the one thing I wish was mentioned is that when you put a point into Vigor, not only are you gaining more life, but on the right side you can see that it's also increasing your defense against certain attacks. So not only do you have more HP before dying, but attacks hit you for less. You may not notice a difference between a few points put into Vigor early on, but once you've put a good 10 points into Vigor and you return to the starting area -- even if you're wearing the same starting armor -- the enemies there aren't going to be hitting you as hard. Between Vigor putting in double the work to make you harder to kill, and your Flasks being upgradable and gaining more uses of them, it really does make the areas a lot easier to explore and survive.
That happens to an extent for every stat. As far as I've seen and understood, Strength affects physical defenses the most.
Vigor saves lives.
All stats imcrease defense bro is this your first soulsborne game?
@@BasedRoots yeah it is
@@GamesRule don't sweat the tryhards. All stats increase defense, more accurately your total stat allocation. But some stats do increase specific defenses, like STR increasing fire defense
I never really had issues in this game because I decided to go for a "comfort" build with high vigor. Turns out, "high" vigor was normal vigor in this game.
This is one reason why participating In pvp/ invasions is very useful for the rest of the game. You learn very quickly to level up your vigour. Also very important to have a huge health bar when learning how to no hit/ parry only boss fights, so you can fail many times before having to reload the fight. Once you have learned the fight, then you can do it at low health with much more confidence.
On my first playthrough I went for glass cannon spellcaster. It was rough. What was interesting, regular enemies were harder than the actual bosses. I would get one or two shot by most regular enemies. However, with right strategy, most bosses were 30 second encounters. I had to raise my Vigor when nearing the end.
On my current playthrough I decided for tanky arcane build. I rushed 40 vigor. Only stat I leveled up. Until I reached 40 VIGOR I used Longsword because it didn't require leveling up. And let me tell you, Elden Ring became a walk in the park. Invest in vigor. Also if you are far into the game, remember you can respec many times during a single playthrough. If you need extra stats for weapons, (Strenght, Dexterity, Inteligence etc.), remember that there are talismans that raise your stats by +5. That's 5 free levels!
Can confirm, as a super sorceror, I melted (most bosses that didn't have perfect magic dodge) bosses in 15 seconds or less with proper set up, regular enemies gave me enormous shit until I had the dark moon greatsword/moonveil
On my first playthrough, I did'nt level Vigor, at all (started with Samurai), until Malenia.
Malenia was the boss that force me to level Vigor, AND to use Mimic Tear, because without that, wasn't able to get through her.
My method to get this far in the game without vigor was to use dragon breath's, specifically Rotten Breath and it's upgraded version, since it melts most bosses, and only require 1 casts to apply Scarlet Rot in most cases.
I know there's a lot of builds that are far more powerfull and efficient, but that's what I like about Elden ring, there's so much variety to how you can play it.
Yeah, I'm about halfway through as a glass cannon, and imho the rock sling spell is broken. It wrecks everything so far except those crystalline bitches in Sellia.
My first run is being a mage and im having the exact same experience u described. INT to 60 and nothing else. Im starting to upgrade vigor already into late game. Bosses are a strategic short fight, but open world regular enemies are way, way harder. If u dont want to die 6876897146 times just walking arroud u have to play extremely carefuly while exploring, or u are going to get oneshoted by a random mob.
I did a dragon play through and can agree that I would fucking melt bosses but normal enemies just destroyed me
since weapons do pretty solid damage by themselves early on, you really don’t need to spend those early levels on stats unless you’re trying to use a weapon. Going HP early makes you tanky against early bosses, letting you make more mistakes as you learn, and let’s you actually survive a hit from the end-game ones where mistakes are heavily punished since they expect you to be good.
if by heavily punished you mean losing like 100 runes sure. heck even losing 5 or 10k runes is no problem once you get high enough level, once you near one level of xp go level up
and then do the fight, nothing wrong dieing a couple times to learn the attack patterns of bosses. they only have so many moves.
just exploit their move set to kill them, or grab a pack of demihuman ashes at night and have them stun lock most bosses, or use the highest level oleg warrior u can.
@@yamiomo7392 Runes are not problem since lvl 1 you can farm them in Palace.
@@yamiomo7392 the heavy punishment is wasting your time and redoing it from start again, cause what vigor does is allowing you to take more mistakes. Just in case that your 99% dodge and 99.5% parry rate happen to fail, you don't have to redo it.
There is nothing more embarrassing than redoing a fight you didn't have to and wasting your time doing it once again with no flask used. Like... "thats what killed me before?"
@@birifumi Yeah I get it vigor is easy mode, but I'm not gona reach that high a level of vigor for a very long time sense I had to get enough int to use comet azur LMAO i'm a mage build I want access to all the best spells as soon as I get them, So yeah, Now I'm blasting bosses away in one shot, and If i mess up on that one shot and die and re do it I really don't care, it feels so good killing bosses with one hit.
Starting with bloodborne I was always told to level vigor/vitality if you're new to the game, and always made it at least a 2:1 priority over the weapon scaling stat, whatever it was
It seems this is inadvertently a guide for only people who picked up the souls series at DS3, because for the other souls games and bloodborne you usually do have to put points into vigor as well unlike DS3
@@sp5072 in DS3 I usually go with raw scaling to pump vigor until I can respect. Helps a lot.
As the self proclaimed King of Casuals, I have never ended a play through with my Vigor below 50!
Thank you , i was looking at ways to level up and this helps a lot with decisions. I wasn't much of a dark souls player but the elden ring looked so beautiful that i had to take the plunge.Its a bit overwhelming but i am enjoying it.
The nice thing about focusing on stuff like vigor and endurance early on is that not only will you have an easier time in general, it means you won't be stuck having to commit to a playstyle if you end up finding something you like more later.
For example, I started out leveling both STR and DEX but now I'm focusing solely on STR weapons meaning those DEX points are going to waste at the moment. You can respec fairly early into the game, though, so it's not a huge deal.
@@yoso378 a lot of str wepons use a lot of dex! look at godricks axe it needs 22 dex and 32 str . dont respec unless you gona get some faith cus the blasphomy blade is busted.
My first playtrough i was pumping vigor and endurance so i could tank everything, while my str, dex, int and faith were 20 to 30, so i could try out most of the weapons and spells i would find.
It worked pretty much until the late game, i rerolled to quality 50/60 on Malenia so i could actually deal meaningful damage to her.
For your information. 60 vigor with +2 Favor ring and +2 HP ring is around 2500 hp, it takes 3 fully upgraded flasks to restore to max, and yet some attacks of late game bosses would still shred 2/3 ds of it in seconds,
Level vigor, kids.
Wise words
I love vigor early on. Gives an easier experience, meanwhile smithing can do the job of improving the dps.
in my experience, having played almost every FromSoft game, you should almost always take vigor to the soft cap. unless you are experienced and targeting a very niche build.
Love the glass canon comparison at the end! Specially taking into account that with bigger health you can literally trade damage without dying, then in the long run you can actually have higher dps by pumping vigor.
You dont have to "trade damage" if you level a damage stat instead making that 2 hit enemy become a 1 hit enemy.
@@skeltaldelegate5408 late game yes but at the start weapon scaling from stats are very low so it isn’t so worth it. The main source of damage early comes from weapon upgrades.
@@higorbotelho3483 the miniscule increases from Scaling to AR are deceiving. Most enemies' HP is tweaked to have just enough HP to survive an extra hit from a weapon the player would have by that point in progression. Never thought it was odd how many enemies are left with almost 1hp after a normal amount of attacks?
@@skeltaldelegate5408 Sure but that wouldn't be the case for bosses
@@higorbotelho3483 bosses one-shot or combo you to death at softcapped vig.
I've always stacked vigor first (after weapon reqs) in souls games. can't imagine why not...
same. weapon requirements then HP then endurance for comfy rolling then scaling stats
i always to do some stamina first then requirements followed by health/stamina.
Because, endurance. I stack vigor last so I can move.
@@FranTheMan78 But if yoh have more vigor, you have more hp when grinding for endurance. Having to wear weak armor isnt much of a problem if you have a big hp pool.
Hp first for me other than the single weapon I’ll be using for most of the game
I got away with only having about 20 vigour for a large amount of the game, but now I’m working towards hitting the soft cap. It was getting to the point where most enemies forced you to heal after one hit which made the game frustrating to play.
Same here
I just did not fight enemies, I am not joking
Going through the Haligtree and finally meeting the boss there made me fully respec to jump from 25 to 40 vigor. Without insane RNG, that fight is just not possible without it
This is why i was forced to respec. Lvl 50, lakes of liurnia and every common enemy was 2 shotting me
In other words
Caster builds level int/fai/mind in the early game, vigor late game
Melee builds level vig/end early game, dex/str late game
played it like that and i had a good time.
I guess it's mostly because everyone's so used to previous soulslike titles, which reinforce the idea that in general you shouldn't get hit by anything, aka "gitgud" principle. That said, it might be a good idea to raise your required stats to wear the preferred gear first and then pump the rest into vigor for a less frustrating experience.
I think its more so that while Vigor was really nice to have... You really didnt need Vigor to be the highest stat. In Caelid, especially the top part, Vigor is definitely needs to be your biggest stat, unless you are one of those top 1% skill level players, which most of us are obviously not and the game wasnt balanced around them either.
Which is just dumb. Because that troll sht only holds so much weight in logic. Even after your gud the game is still specifically made to be unfair and punishing
What really makes it demotivating is the fact that leveling up vigor means you won't get one tapped by bosses, you'll get 2 or 3 tapped instead. Really doesn't look worth it in paper, but in practice it's effective.
In DS3 isnt Vigor not that good? I usually just level it up around 20-30 and dump all my stats on STR or DEX. Able to beat it just fine and I'm an average player.. Maybe DS3 lacked the enemies that deal high amount of dmg?
i mean it still works, you just have to be good enough to not make mistakes. which is pretty tough
As someone who spent most of his time making invasion builds, vigor was the first thing I prioritized. I've been having a ball
what kinda builds are non invasion?
@@mikec4308 it's about progression and stopping points - any invasion build worth its salt that isn't going for a meme is going to prioritize hp. This was the main distinction in previous souls games as in the main game you could skate by with less hp
Yeah, especially twink builds, I hate those dudes the most, tbh. Although in ds1 it was more of armor than health
Yeah, you really need that vigor if you want to invade people, or survive invasions.
Players and certain arts can do massive amounts of damage. The Unsheathe heavy attack can easily kill a lot of players with low vigor in one or two hits.
Indeed mate you get one shotted by invaders with you have less than 1k HP its frustrating.
I remember that HP was always on the low-priority end of the spectrum, for me, whenever I leveled in previous Souls titles, and now I understand why.
And with my abhorrent performance playing multiplayer with my friend last night (level 90-ish, with 12 Vigor after respeccing and forcing boss resets every single minute due to one-shots), I have first-hand experience how bad I can make this game for myself (and others).
And with how many times I've upgraded my flasks (12 bottles at +9 and just started going through Altus Plateau), I really shouldn't be rolling around with such a small health pool to begin with.
Good thing I have more Larval Tears than I can shake a stick at, after completing Ranni's Questline.
Would like to add on to/clarify what you said; your flasks and flask upgrades are basically useless if you have no vigor (I think you hinted at this). Rephrased, you can't heal if you always get one-shotted.
Now I need to go get some more vigor...
@@Kithin7 This is exactly what I was hinting at, and having more Vigor has made a boatload of a difference for my playthrough so far. :D
Lmao, bruh a single flask for you has like 3x as many hitpoints in it as you character has. This isn't TF2, you can't over heal!
I was honestly increasing my Vigor every time my flasks started over healing me way too much. Honestly your flask level is a pretty good general indicator for how much Vigor you should have at any time.
Honestly, you sound very OP to me, 12 bottles at +9? Im at Altus with +3 and 9 bottles. PVP builds and solo builds are always different.
counter point:
Play a mage, all the vigor in the world won't save you once you run out of FP.
Yeah but having high health will allow you to allocate more flasks to FP recovery
thats what a real weapon is for like a sword :l
mages don't need HP, but all melee builds sure need atleast 40 vigor
I’m so glad I’m getting this kind of advice very early on in the game. I was already experiencing some frustrating moments and kept pumping strength and dexterity hoping to kill enemies and bosses quicker, but your explanation makes a lot of sense and cleared up my misconceptions!!
Your Strength and Dexterity only will be useful as you upgrade your weapons and infuse them. Until then it is inefficent.
@@limitlessapocalypse2702 Yeah no point on pumping those stats until you get weapons with scaling good enough to take advantage of them.
I actually was hit with that realisation too, somewhere around lvl 50 I guess. As a veteran of the series I am used that you can generally level up your health stat to around 20 and that was enough. Elden Ring functions much more like a usual rpg, when you need to keep increasing your health and armour as you level up, while your damage actually comes from weapon upgrades. So with my uchigatana 5 points in dex mean just around 10 extra damage, 5 points in strenght are like 5 more damage, while 5 points in vigor is what? 150 extra health? Yea, it takes some time to get used to some of the changes in this game.
Vigor is almost always the first stat I level in souls games. The extra buffer room to not just insta die is so important as it lets you always go through all your healing before dying without getting 1 shot.
a like 20% increase in damage just isnt worth it when you're dying to every stray hit. With more vigor, you can easily survive longer and then youll easily be able to survive longer to get more than 20% extra hits completely outpacing your previous damage. Suitability is so much better than slightly more damage unless you're like a speedrunner or a legit glass cannon build like a full on mage build or something.
If you dont level vigor you are not a true veteran lol
Yeah i stopped at 20 and need to focus on it quickly now
Vigor was not that good in DS1 und DS2, but already insanely good in DS3. Elden ring has so many AE attacks, that blocking is not as good as in dark souls 1, where you were able to block almost everything. So endurance was better in DS1 for blocking tank builds than health.
For me I hit this trap by my build, I discovered the weapon I wanted to use, the Giant Crusher, which has a minimum requirement of 60 Str to one hand (and I like having a shield, so of course I went for the first softcap in str). I also wanted to cast certain incantations, so I rushed for 25 Faith, from there, to be able to run around in something other than tissue paper for clothes I next focused End. Fortunately I habitually leveled my vigor to 20 at the start, but as a level 140ish character I only JUST got my vigor to 30. I didn’t realize the softcap was much higher in this game because I came off a fresh run of DS3
Early game I like to level up enderance so I have plenty of stam to roll, and have enough weight for my heavy armor/weapon builds.
After that I grind the hell out of vigor and strength.
However I noticed the early game playthroughs we're I only level vigor, actually make me struggle much more because I lack the proper stam for defense when up against a boss.
Yeah I noticed how leveling vigor gives soo much more HP than DS3 and when I pumped some levels into it from 30 to 40, I was shocked at how much HP per level I was getting during those 10 levels, really makes a difference!
Ratatoskr: “You Need To Increase Your Vigor”
Mages: guess I’ll die
You gotta hit the gym if you want to pick a fight with the big boys.
I have 60 Vigor on my mage.
I usually start upgrading my vigor as soon as I have the stats to use my desired weapons. Early damage scaling is mostly based on weapon upgrades anyway
That's what I usually do. Get str/dex to where I'm dealing great damage and then focus on vigor/endurance, etc. Helps me git gud when I have to deal with a small health bar.
It just sucks when a weapon wants you to have something ridiculous like 30-40 Strength, Dex, Faith, or Int just to be able to use. So other stats get put by the wayside as you try to get the ability to even properly wield something for your desired build/roleplay.
You don't have to be a glass cannon when you can *POWER UP THE BASS CANNON*
-Giantdad
I definitely made a huge mistake by not prioritizing vigor in my first playthrough, I died an insane amount of times doing Leyndell early (lvl 70ish with less than 20 vigor). It certainly makes you have to play better if you get killed instantly, but at the same time you can progress and enjoy the game so much more just by pumping vigor up to 40 once you get to mid game.
I got all the way to margott with 14 vigor and then got 1 shot by everything and realized it was time to farm
if you had an invader mindset, the first stat investment was vigor. you can put the first twenty levels into vigor and not even think twice tbh
Exactly, is crazy how everyone call himself veteran and they are not use to lvl vigor wtf
@@_MrBlack And that is why I used to play these games in offline mode. I prefer to keep my vigor low in order to make boss fights challenging. If I double my health, that doubles or triples the amount of mistakes I can make in the fight trivializing a lot of battles.
That makes invasions a massive PITA though...
@@sniperfox47 you know you can't get invaded in Souls games without being embered, & can't get invaded in ER without summoning, right?
FINALLY someone says it! I swear I'm going insane reading the subreddit and seeing everyone complain about getting one-shot when they have like 2 points in VIG. Even the STRENGTH BUILDS are doing this, and they rely on being able to trade hits to get their damage in!
That’s why I’m running around with 60 vigor
There are a lot of bad takes on reddit gaming communities generally. People go to reddit to complain.
It's always funny getting summoned for co op and seeing a glass cannon build get one shot to death by the boss. Wish there was that shrug emote from Dark souls 1 would be perfect for such cases
People also aren’t paying attention to resistances and damage types. A lot of people thought all the Three Fingers spells were holy damage for a couple days at launch, turns out they were fire and people had been wearing the wrong armor and getting smoked lol
5:50 "Doing something like that isn't going to make you a glass canon, it's just going to make you glass"
That's as good as a sentence can get.
I respec'd finally (as a mage) to add more HP, and the QoL alone is fantastic. Nothing is more irritating than running to the end of a crypt to get one-shot by some nonsense. Even after the "damage nerf" I gave myself, I was way less stressed playing since I could take a hit and my damage is STILL cracked.
1:30 I am honestly confused by the fact that everyone was so low level in ds3. Having done no farming, exploring everything outside of the dlcs and never losing huge amounts of souls (which really only matters late as losing enough souls for lvl 30-40 in the midgame only amounts to like one level past 100) I finished the game above SL100.
Now in Elden ring I stopped leveling past 160 and could have gone a few levels higher off the final boss alone.
Nethertheless everythign else in the video was spot on. Hopefully other people won't make my mistake of dual wielding great axes in the earlygame. It does real good damage but you need so much endurance and strength (and dexterity) just to be able to use them without fatrolling, that you need to be like level 40 before you can even start thinking about leveling vigor.
In DS3 in my first playthrough I finished the game at 64 (before dlc). I had lots of souls but I bought basically everything I could find and played a shield + straight sword combo that let me get away with having comparatively low stats.
I did about 15 more playthroughs of ds3 and finished the game at 70 for each. Amusingly because I knew which fights I could avoid and wanted to get through without wasting time I had a lot less souls to spend on level ups even when I only spent souls on things for any particular build.
when playing new souls games i buy every item at every shop i see even if i dont use it, that also helps to keep me underleveld lol
Yeah I finished at 90 my first time through. Maybe cause I spent more time going through areas repeatedly to make sure I explored everything there was. Never farmed for souls either.
Yeah I realized this and started leveling my Vigor when I found so many upgrades for my flasks and flask uses.
My flasks were actually much more powerful than my total health, that should be a telltale sign of leveling up your Vigor.
Your last example and explanation was genus. I understood the importance of vigor but have never seen it visualized so perfectly.
If people struggle with the idea "what is the right amount of vigor": Just put every second level into vigor.
I definitely agree but also want to say I really like how salt&sanctuary solved the vigor problem, there isn't any vigor stat but every level-up you just get some more health automatically, which lets you focus entirely on your build and all the fun stuff
60 vigor currently and 65 with a great rune, have only fought 2 main bosses.
As a sorcerer I pumped almost all of my levels into vigor and intelligence and still got one shot by Astel's grab in the yelough annix tunnel
60 vigor gang. Crazy how high it needs to be in this game.
Aaayyyyy gang gang
58 vigor gang. gotta minmax for them stat reqs for weapons
✊99 vigor meta
Its so much better to have like 60 vigor or less and just pop a rune arc when youre going into a tough fight and get a massive boost to your health bar
I'd reccommend looking into the strong defensive incantations, if you feel like it needs to be that high.
Makes sense that a lot of people messed this up, the vastly superior strategy in previous souls games was to do so much damage that you had less time to make a mistake and die, rather than have a fight drag on long enough to make multiple mistakes. but as you said, damage stats don't contribute much to damage until much later this time around, and hp consistently gives the player much more noticeable amounts of hp per level. I am actually glad it works this way, cause I really dislikes that most people would just hit 27 vig in ds3 then never touch it again.
This video is going to completely change my experience for the better, thank you so much for sharing this, Father Vigor
When I finally beat the game, I was level 162, with 40 Vigor. And I STILL didn't feel like I had enough health.
At that level I would say 50
I beat the game at level 84, 20 vigor
i've played all of the souls games at 20 vigor but that's just my preference, it isn't till post game or ng+/ng++ I start going to 40 vigor and beyond
@@Xylaax how were you only level 84? Did you skip 50% of the game or did you intentionally stay lower for PvP?
@@Xylaax you definitely rushed through the game
I literally pumped vigor last night actually haha, so the timing of this vid is great. I went from about 32 vigor to 40 (level ~85 now) as I'm exploring Caelid. 100% worth the investment. When you realize that you get progressive returns until the soft cap it makes so much more sense to invest in it.
You are overpowered for Caelid. These games should be about the challenge and becoming more skilled.
@@abelwritesmusic I have high hp, doesn't mean I dont actively parry bosses, exploit weaknesses, or change tactics. I'm exactly where I want to be, playing the way that is both challenging and fun for me. Get outta here with that elitist my-way-is-best crap.
@@abelwritesmusic Literally let people play the game as they wish, it's their game, their playthrough. Who are you to judge them.
@@abelwritesmusic These games should be for whatever one wants them to be. Don't tell other people how they are supposed to enjoy their games. If you get an achievement boner for clearing Elden Ring at level 15, have at it. Maybe try something actually hard - just imagine the achievement boner you'd have if you were to solve a millennium prize problem. I'll actually salute you, when you get there.
Thats a good lvl for caelid cuz fuck caelid those dogs are on sum shi
"in ds3 youd have to go out of your way to grind to get to those levels" this is actually true in elden ring too. the enemies even at late game areas reward so few souls that i find myself constantly needing to grind for levels in order to beat a boss. maybe this is because the game assumes you actually kill all enemies everywhere which to be honest is such a ridiculously grindy way to play i lost interest in it on my first character, and was longing for the tighter design of stormveil castle and raya lucaria by the time i beat godrick.
i got to fire giant at lvl 95, had to use 200k souls and cheese bs with summons to even beat that thing. even with 33 vigor, morgotts rune and vigor talisman some of his attacks still did 90% of my damage in a single hit and to be honest that feels really bad.
and even getting there had required hours of grinding before that, just to even get to that level
An _Elden Ring_ video with _Metroid Prime_ music.
...I'm sorry, but how did you know literally exactly what I need in my life?
I think a large part of the problem is that Vigor is the only stat that doesn't unlock anything. Dex unlocks fast, high DPS weapons, Int unlocks flashy spells, Str unlocks big fucking swords, hell even End unlocks better and more fashionable armor and Mnd unlocks better summons. Vigor is unexciting because it doesn't scale anything, and it doesn't give you new options, it just makes you slightly better at using what you already have. This leads to players ignoring it because it doesn't feel like a lateral upgrade, it feels like wheel-spinning until you get to your next great piece of gear that elevates your build even further.
Here's the secret though, it does unlock something: it unlocks the rest of the game
and Mind