Leveling in Elden Ring is very flexible; most mistakes can simply be corrected over the course of the game. However, there are a few important things to consider that can potentially ruin your character. MeinMMO tells you everything you need to know.
In this article, we explain everything you need to know about leveling in Elden Ring. We start with the basics of the menus and also go into the details of things you should consider for the endgame.
This guide therefore has this structure. Click on the heading to go to the relevant part of the text:
- For beginners How and where to level? – Unlocking and using leveling up
- For advanced players: What to level? – Attributes, weapon scaling, building a build
- For experts: How far to level? – Max level, meta-level, soft caps
Elden Ring: How and where to level? – Unlocking and using leveling up
How does leveling work in Elden Ring? To level up in Elden Ring, there are just 3 requirements:
- The leveling option must be unlocked.
- You need enough runes to level up.
- You must be at a Site of Grace.
We explain to you what to consider in each case.
Here’s how to unlock leveling up: To unlock the leveling menu, you need to have spoken with Melina once. This happens automatically when you rest at the third Site of Grace (the yellow glowing save points in the game) in the open-world. By the way, this is how you also get the horse.
For most new players, this happens when they follow the intended main path after the tutorial dungeon. It looks like this on the map:
However, it doesn’t matter which Sites of Grace they actually are or in what order. At the 3rd Site of Grace where you rest, the option will be unlocked for you.
Where do I level up? Once you have unlocked the option through Melina, you can level up at any Site of Grace in the game. But don’t worry: Even if it sounds later in the story as if you lose the leveling function, this is never the case!
When you rest at a Site of Grace, select the “Level Up” option. This will take you to the menu where you can level up.
In the upper left corner of the menu (the blue box in our screenshot), you can see how many runes you have and how many you need. As long as you have enough runes, you can now level up your desired attribute. To do this, select the appropriate attribute and press the directional pad (controller) or the arrow key (keyboard) to the right.
This is what all attributes mean:
Vigor: Vitality influences your hit points and affects fire resistance and poison immunity.
Mind: Mind affects FP (mana) and focus-related resistance. Important for magic and sorcery builds.
Endurance: Increases your character’s stamina and also enhances physical defense. Particularly important for melee fighters since stamina allows dodging and blocking.
Strength: Required to wield heavy weapons. It also increases the attack power of weapons that scale with strength.
Dexterity: Required to wield advanced weapons. It also increases the attack power of weapons that scale with agility. Reduces casting time for spells, mitigates fall damage, and makes it harder to fall off a horse.
Intelligence: Increases the spell power of intelligence-scaling spells and improves magic resistance. Also increases how often you can use spells.
Faith: Required for casting summons. It also enhances summons that scale with faith.
Arcane: Affects death resistance and certain spells and summons.
Now the number should display in blue, and you can clearly see how the leveling up of the attribute generally affects your stats. If you also activate “Help” (the correct button for that you can see on the lower left of the screen), the game will also tell you what each stat means in detail.
Elden Ring: What to level? – Attributes, weapon scaling, building a build
To decide correctly which attributes you should level and how, there are a few tricks. This is how you can simply build a build.
This is how you build your own build: First, you should decide whether you want to be a melee fighter, stay at a distance with magic, or play a hybrid of both.
This choice doesn’t have to be made with full conviction, as it is not final. With the respec function, you can freely redistribute your attributes. However, you cannot reduce your level and have lower values than those with which your class starts.
- Your strength attribute should always come first. You should always have enough hit points (HP) to not be killed by just one usual hit from a boss.
- The endurance value is also important and should ideally be between 15 and 25 points – depending on your needs and play style, you can increase it until you are agile enough to wear the desired armor set without rolling slower.
- Choose one or more weapons that you want to use. Our complete weapon tier list can help you with the decision.
- Once you know which weapon you want to use, your stats should be good enough to meet the required attributes of the weapon (see the green box in the lower image).
- Then invest in the attributes that your build needs.
- If you want to focus on agile katanas and sabers, you should primarily focus on dexterity.
- If you prefer heavy greataxes and maces, strength is the right choice.
- If you want to use and try out as many weapons in the game as possible, it’s worth investing in both strength and dexterity. Most weapons utilize either one or both of these attributes.
- Casters focus on mind for sufficient FP (mana) and then invest points so that they can use their desired spells and summons.
Very important in your attribute distribution is the scaling and the required attributes, without which you cannot use the weapon to its full potential.
This is attribute scaling: Each weapon starts with a base damage that varies from weapon to weapon. Additionally, the damage increases with the attributes you have. How much extra damage you get per attribute depends on the weapon’s attribute scaling.
- The better the scaling in an attribute, the more extra damage the weapon gets per point in that attribute.
- The strength of the scaling is indicated by the letter. They correspond to the following hierarchy, with E being the worst and S being the best scaling: E < D < C < B < A < S
- The scaling improves with many weapons using weapon upgrades.
- With ash of war, you can change the weapon affinity and thus the scaling of the weapons. This only applies to weapons that can use an ash of war. Most combat tools use standard smithing stones for their upgrades.
Here’s how it looks with the concrete example of the Bloody Helix, which is used in the example image above. This weapon has the following scaling at upgrade level +10:
- Strength: E
- Dexterity: C
- Arcane: B
With the other attributes, the weapon does not scale.
This means that the weapon improves hardly at higher strength attributes, whereas it benefits significantly more from higher arcane. Improvements in dexterity are worse than improvements in arcane, but more significant than additional points in strength.
This means that every point invested in arcane with this weapon improves the damage of the Bloody Helix more than any other attribute improvement.
However, this does not mean that you should invest endless points in arcane and ignore strength and dexterity. Elden Ring uses a so-called “soft cap” system with each attribute.
Elden Ring: How far to level? – Max level, meta-level, soft caps
What are soft caps? In FromSoftware games, you can level up almost endlessly, but there’s a catch: the soft caps.
Initially, each additional point in an attribute gives you equally strong improvements per level. However, after a certain point, this gain diminishes – the business administration student would call it “diminishing returns”.
Most attributes have several thresholds at which the proportional increases per higher level diminish. These thresholds are called soft caps. So always try to pay attention to these soft caps when distributing attributes.
These are the soft caps for each attribute:
- Vigor: 40 / 60
- Mind: 55 / 60
- Endurance:50 (for stamina); 25 / 60 (for equipment weight)
- Strength: 20 / 55 / 80
- Dexterity: 20 / 55 / 80
- Intelligence: 20 / 50 / 80 (for weapons); 60 / 80 (for spells)
- Faith: 20 / 50 / 80 (for weapons); 60 / 80 (for summons)
- Arcane: 20 / 50 / 80 (for weapons); 30 / 45 (for summons)
At each soft cap, you gain less per invested point. To illustrate this with arbitrarily chosen example numbers, where our example attribute has soft caps of 20 / 55 / 80:
- Attribute level 0 – 20 (before soft cap 1): +5 per level
- Attribute level 20 – 55 (after soft cap 1): + 4 per level.
- Attribute level 55 – 80 (after soft cap 2): + 3 per level.
- Attribute level 80 – 99 (after soft cap 3): + 1 per level.
The numbers chosen here are exemplary to illustrate the principle – the exact improvements depend on the attribute, the base value, and the scaling. If necessary, you can also have it visually explained in a reddit thread.
How do I find the right soft cap? The right soft cap depends on your desired build and weapon choice. For example, if you primarily focus on a weapon with S-scaling in strength and only level dexterity as support, it would be smart to bring strength to 80 and dexterity to 20.
However, if your desired build equally focuses on strength and dexterity, 55 on both values is the right choice. Generally, surpassing the highest soft cap is never worthwhile.
An easy way to test how to best distribute your attributes is the respec menu with Rennala. You can play around with the scaling-relevant attributes in the rebirth menu until you achieve a good balance of values. If you abort the rebirth, you won’t lose any valuable larval tears.
This image here shows how my character values would change with a variation from a strong blood build if we go to soft cap with dexterity instead of arcane. Our main weapon R 1 decreases by 4 points, whereas the alternative weapon in slot R 2 improves by 6 attack power:
With this method, you can equip up to 6 weapons (3 per hand) and observe how your attack power changes with which values. This helps you simply make the right decision.
What is the max level? The maximum level in Elden Ring is 713. You reach this when you bring every attribute to level 99. The rune costs become horrendously high with the higher levels, but with the right farming trick, you can theoretically achieve this.
However, there’s another important reason, besides the time investment, why you shouldn’t do this: the meta level.
What is the meta level? The meta level is not a fixed value in the game. Instead, it is a level that the community has agreed upon.
Whether for co-op or PvP: the matchmaking in Elden Ring seeks players who have roughly the same level as you. The exact range varies by level: For example, at level 50, you find players between level 35 and 65, and at level 100, players from level 80 to 120.
To help Elden Ring fans find sufficient players to experience multiplayer, they agree in the largest forums on a so-called meta level. Anyone wishing to participate seriously and long-term in multiplayer should have their character at this level.
What the meta level in Elden Ring is is still hotly debated. The community is currently particularly divided between fans of level 150 and those who advocate level 125.
As of now, both meta levels are working well for you. Tending to lean more towards level 150 seems to be the community’s preference. However, if you have no interest in multiplayer, you can completely ignore this.
