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Regarding the range of things you have to keep an eye on in a video game, your stats should be near the top of the list.
This need is especially true in Elden Ring, where the difficulty spikes keep you constantly trying to push your character to the next level. One of the most important stats to focus on is your vigor for its huge impact on the game.
NEW READ: What Does Vitality Do In Elden Ring?
What is Vigor in Elden Ring?
Vigor is the stat that governs your character’s health in Elden Ring. Because of this, it is a stat that can’t be stressed enough. To upgrade this stat, you must plan accordingly to maximize its benefits for your class and play style. This guide will help you to do this and get the most out of your vigor.
The biggest benefit that vigor gives your character is adding to your total hp every time you put runes into it. The first level will give you +4 to your health for 304 hp. The next time you put runes into the stat, it adds a +8 and brings your total to 312 hp.
This growth continues until you get between 26 to 40 hp on each upgrade. This increase does have its limits, and now we have to talk about the leveling caps in Elden Ring.
Leveling Caps In Elden Ring
Leveling caps are a mechanic that will reduce the benefit of upgrading a stat when you hit a certain level. There are two level caps to consider: soft level caps and hard level caps. These play different roles, but both are important to keep in mind as you plan and upgrade your character.
For instance, when you hit level 40, this is the first soft level cap, and it starts to lower the hp that is given to anywhere from 26 to 13 on each subsequent level. This reduction isn’t technically bad but is nowhere near as good as the upward climbing numbers were.
Keep in mind that two other level caps diminish the amount of HP you get. In total, these are the soft-level caps that go like this.
- Level 40: your hp gain drops to 26 -13
- Level 60: your hp gain drops to 13 – 6
- Level 90: your hp gain drops to 6 – 3.
These are all of the soft leveling caps in the game, but of course, there is another type that we need to talk about.
The second type of level cap is the hard cap which kicks in at level one hundred. This cap permanently shuts down your ability to get any more hp from leveling up your vigor stat. This system raises an interesting question: how far should you take your vigor?
How Far Should You Go With Vigor In Elden Ring?
Vigor is one of those stats you want to dump runes into as early as possible. Still, due to the level cap system, it will eventually have diminishing returns. Because of these lower numbers, it might be smart to limit the number of runes you dump into the skill.
This choice will be based on two considerations, one is your class, and the other is your play style.
Most classes should invest in their vigor up to level forty, even for caster classes like the astrologer or the confessor. They will benefit from the nice cushion that this will give them.
However, even if you don’t want to be a somewhat tacky spell caster, you should still get as close to forty as you can to avoid being one-shotted. This risk is considerably different if you want to be in a melee class.
For any melee class in Elden Ring, vigor is not just a necessary stat but a mandatory one. You will be getting up close and personal with everything that wants to kill you, and that is deadly in this game. The risk to this can be put off by investing continuously in your vigor skill to get it as high as possible.
The bare minimum you will want is to be at least level sixty as soon as possible. The class that will benefit the most from this will be the warrior, the samurai, and the vagabond, as they are some of the most prominent melee fighters.
These recommendations are based on the classes you use, but that is not to say that you don’t have an alternative play style. If for some reason, you like to play as a spell caster who works from medium to close range, then you are going to need the health.
On the other side, if you are a fighter type that uses a bow or crossbow, you might be able to take a little less on the vigor.
Weapons to Upgrade With Vigor In Elden Ring
Like many RPGs, there remains the question of whether you can find or buy items that will augment your stats. Since vigor is a stat and arguably one of the most important ones, you would have to ask if there were items to improve it. Fortunately, some items can do this, three specifically.
The crimson hood is a wearable item that will give you a +1 to your vigor when you where it. The second item is Radagon’s Scarseal is an item which will raise your vigor, strength, dexterity, and endurance stats by three.
In exchange, you take 10% more damage. The last item is Radagon’s Sorseal. This is like the Scarseal but ups the same stats up to 5 in exchange for taking 15% more damage. The Radagon’s Scarseal and the Radagon’s Sorseal can not be used together.
Maximum Amount Of Vigor Points In Elden Ring
If you stack all of your vigor points and items together, you could get the maximum amount of vigor in the game. You can get up to 99 vigor naturally in the game that gets you to 2100 hp.
You could then stack the crimson hood and Radagon’s Sorseal to give you an extra 6 to your vigor. This combo probably wouldn’t be a benefit since it would most likely hit the hard cap and wouldn’t provide benefits if you were already at max level.
You could use this to get extra health without investing extra points into vigor at lower levels.
