level up vigor

Don’t worry too hard about what’s “viable” and what’s not. Play with the tools you enjoy using. Near the end of the first quarter of the game you can respec so there’s no real risk in experimenting. People will say this or that is “easier” but honestly outside of trying to become a parry monster each play style is good at some things and bad at others. The game throws so many tools at you and around every corner is a new tool so try things out and see what works.

Losing your souls sucks but isn’t the end of the world. Early days you’ll be upset you lost 10k souls. Late days bosses give you 150k souls. You aren’t missing out.

Early game stats exist only to allow you to use things. So like don’t worry about increasing dex or str past the absolute minimum to use what you want to use; scaling doesn’t matter until mid game. So increase damage stats to the minimum you need and then focus hard on vigor.

Backtrack often. Check in with NPCs you’ve talked to, all of the “quests” in the game are missable if you aren’t careful. Mostly it’s fine to miss quests but if you want to do them then do them as far as you can whenever you get the quest. If you get an item you can’t use and don’t know what it does go talk to NPCs, someone will tell you.

Anyways I’ve got over 1k hours in elden ring, it’s incredible and you will definitely enjoy it. It’s an amazing game and I don’t think we’ll see anything like it for many years to come

Don’t be afraid to just sprint through a tough area just grabbing items, even if you die a few times doing it. You’d be surprised at just how powerful you can get with a couple of trips through an area you have no business being in.

(Note that this works best in the open world and in larger dungeons. It can be effective in caves and small dungeons too but it’ll take experimenting.)

Range and using your levels to get health and armor is a surefire way to minimize your deaths and go through the game easily, with still a good amount of challenge.

Like others have said, level up vigor. If you want to run a spell caster, there’s two different kinds of spells, sorceries which usually scale with intelligence, and incantations which usually scale with faith. Dexterity can also speed up spell casting time. But dont worry too much about weapon stats at first. Just meet the minimum for the weapon and upgrade it with smithing stones

Play online and read peoples messages, esp if you’re stuck. Um dont listen to people who tell you to jump into a cavernous abyss, 90% of the time its a troll, but usually other people will put up messages that say “liar ahead”. There are legit invisible platforms and even walkways. There’s an abundant item called “colored stone” that you can drop off a ledge, and if the drop will kill you it shatters. But lots of people do leave helpful messages and point out hidden walls and secrets.

If you’re stuck on a boss, dont keep throwing yourself at it, just go somewhere else. It is a very large game and there arent any real chokepoints until late game. So if you’re stuck, just go follow a road you haven’t been down. This is a general strategy for souls games.

Use summons, and summon help for bosses if you’re stuck. Many bosses are kind of like puzzles that have specific strengths and weaknesses, especially the difficult ones. Heavily armored enemies are weaker to pierce, and often magic damage; stone enemies are weaker to blunt and magic; lightly armored enemies are weak to slash, undead enemies are weak to holy; beast enemies are weak to fire; dragon enemies and enemies wearing metal are weak to lightning, etc.,

sometimes the difference between being strong enough to beat an enemy is the weapons and defenses you use against them. Buffs are very strong, so spells and incantations that improve your attacks and defenses are very effective, but there are also craftable items that help as well. Your strategy gaming experience can def help. But if something kills you in 1-2 hits you just aren’t strong enough, come back later.

Dont listen to people who tell you the “right” way to play, these people are toxic. They tell you to “git gud” and then use a stack of buffs they got from a youtuber and then spam overpowered Ash of War (special attacks). The game is hard but a solid strategy works better than anything.

Shields are your friend, rolling and jumping are very effective at avoiding damage. Take your time, pay attention to enemy attack patterns, look for openings. DON’T GET GREEDY. take a beat and heal up before finishing something off.

Gimme tips, hints and tricks.

Bows/Crossbows just straight suck against bosses, they’re only good for picking off enemies, or pulling one enemy at a time. If you want to play ranged against bosses, sorceries (int spells) are the way to go. Incantations (faith spells) are like sorceries, but a lot of them require you to be more aggressive to get mileage out of them.

Frostbite is busted against bosses. How busted? So when you apply the frostbite proc against a boss, it does 15% of their health pool in a single chunk (like a bleed proc), and slows down their movement and has them take more damage for 30 seconds and can’t have another frostbite proc until this is over. However you can attack with something that does fire damage, which will reset the frostbite proc cooldown (and gets rid of the debuff) so you can go and apply the frostbite proc again.

Black flame incantations (a faith spell) do some % (I think it’s like 2%) of a enemy’s healthbar in DoT damage on top of the on hit damage when you hit someone with, this is useless against run of the mill guys, but for bosses…

Doing any sort of faith build is good, Strength/Faith, Dex/Faith, Arcane/Faith, or pure faith. It gives you a wide array of damage (Fire and Lightning damage), healing spells that ease your red flask burden, and faith users are the based spellcasters.

Don’t use Holy damage, nearly every single boss has absurd holy resist in base game. There are exceptions to this, but I think you can figure out which enemies are weak to holy.

The best piece of advice I can give about the game is that if you get stuck doing something (boss, puzzle, quest etc.), that’s the game telling you to go somewhere else, do something else, level up and then come back later. Contrary to popular perception there aren’t really any “Git Gud” checks and the game is really forgiving provided you don’t self mandate slamming your head into walls and are open to using all the game systems available (at least imo compared to something like Sekiro which was kinda literally “learn to Parry or die”).

Most of the fun of the game is in the exploration so make sure to explore every nook and cranny.

If a boss/combat encounter is too tough, don’t hesitate to summon some allies. Any win is a win.

Having some form of ranged attack (from a spell or ash of war) in your kit might be useful when you’re learning enemy move sets, so you can still attack them even after you’ve retreated back a bit.

The parry frames for the basic parry ash is slightly worse than the ones you unlock later. Thops’s barrier and Carian retaliation also flash up some magic during parry frames which can help you learn the timings a little better.

Level vigour. It’s less of an if you’ll get hit and more of a when you get hit. Make sure you have enough health that you can take a punch.

Don’t commit to upgrading your weaponry in early zones unless you’ve found something you love. There’s a bit of a drought of upgrade materials early on. And buying more at roundtable can be a bit costly.

Edit: you gonna want some means of dealing strike damage for when you go up against some of the rockier enemies like crystalians and dragons. Flails are pretty useful for Dex builds in that regard.

Don’t be afraid/ashamed to ask for help (this applies to IRL too)

HELL YEAG

Here’s some tips and resources:

• Damage in this game is really high compared to other FromSoftware games, so leveling Vigor (health) is really important in general.
• Equipment load is also important in these games, if you are too heavy, dodging becomes really hard, unless you’re trying to just tank through hits, then it’s mostly fine.
• Rolling is important but you can also just turtle with your shield if you want, jumping is also a good tool instead of rolling.
• If you want an easier time or just enjoy being a mage, go for it, otherwise playing whatever you want is fine, FromSoftware games are pretty open in how you can build, you can even make a strong mage and bonk people in the head with a giant magic mallet if you want. Also magic does look really pretty in this game in general. I’m usually a Dexterity girl, but my brother have played a mage every game since Dark Souls 2. I usually use sorceries/encantations for buffing weapons and stuff.
• Starting classes are not set in stone, they are just a starting point, you can start with a warrior and end up building a mage, or start with a mage and end up building a warrior or a cleric or an absolute tank unit or whatever.
• You can also redo your build anytime after unlocking it and having the necessary item, so experimentation is good.
• This game also has spirit summons, which are spirits you encounter during your playthrough and can summon on most places with enemies to help you out, some puritan players don’t want to use them, but that is bullshit, use them if you want, some are really strong, you can always look at the wiki or youtube for help too. (Don’t use the fextralife and fandom wikis, they suck major ass, use Eldenpedia instead)
• Spirit summons are separate from actual summons, these range from NPCs to other players, they are yellow marks on the ground you can find near bosses fog walls.
• There is no level cap so to speak, you can level every skill to 99 if you want, but that takes a long time and gets rid of builds altogether since you can do anything, usually you’d only care about that if you’re doing multiple NG+ runs on a single character.
• There is soft and hard caps tho, the falloff points where leveling a skill past that becomes less beneficial or kind of stops being beneficial since it gives you too little for the investment, I attached a cheat sheet of it at the bottom.
• Take your time, if a boss or enemy is too difficult, you can just come back later, or if you’re the type of person to just bang your head on a wall until it breaks, go for it, do whatever you enjoy, just know that frustration can be high if it’s your first soulsborne game and that’s okay.
• There’s a lot to explore, like really a lot, I’m the type of player to look at every nook and cranny so it took a lot of time for me to go through it all, but you are not required to do that, the game does tend to reward you for exploring well tho.
• In the same vein, if an area feels too hard, you can come back later.
• If you care about NPCs quests and storylines don’t be afraid to look it up, FromSoftware doesn’t have a quest log in their games, Elden Ring I feel is the better one in this regard because a lot of character encounters you will naturally progress through and they tend to tell you where they are heading, but it is still convoluted at times.
• You can put pins on your map, do it trust me, this will help you keep track of stuff you need/want to do.
• The game has 3 endings, you can always just do another run to get them or look them up on youtube after your first ending.
• There’s New Game+ (restarting while keeping everything but key items and all enemies being stronger) up to 7 times, after that NG+ has no scaling on enemies.
• I highly recommend the DLC, you can only access it after a while and is better experienced after finishing the main game in my opinion, scaling in the DLC is different from the main game since they didn’t want your character level to influence the experience there, so it can feel pretty brutal at the start of it, but you can wait to get the DLC if you have a legit copy since you might not like the game. As a rule of thumb, FromSoftware DLCs are easily the best part of their games.
• There is also another DLC that launched recently on platforms other than Switch 2 (Elden Ring there comes with it already), called Tarnished Pack, honestly this should have been free, all it does is add one new weapon that is pretty sick, Torrent skins (your horse) and puts some variant of the new weapons from the first DLC in the base game, alongside a few new armors and starting classes. It is pretty cheap tho, 5 dollars I think. Get it if you want.
• If you like PVP there’s 2 ways of fighting other players in this game, invading them and the arena, arenas you unlock by opening them up in the map and can start an arena match on a statue in the Roundtable Hold. Invasions you unlock after progressing a little bit with Varré’s quest, he’s the first NPC you encounter in the game.
• If you like coop you can also do that, like I mentioned before you can summon other players to help you fight an area/boss, but it is pretty limited, if you want to play the entirety of the game with a friend, there’s the incredible Seamless Co-op mod. You can also put your sign down to help someone else, it’s a great way of farming runes since you can just keep killing the same boss over and over again this way.
• One thing you have to keep in mind for online play is that level matters, there are ranges you are gonna be paired with, and for PVP, there’s is a level cap the community agrees upon so that builds are still relevant, while also being as high as possible for it to be super enjoyable, in Elden Ring the PVP level meta is this according to this post: lvl 125 is the dueling meta, lvl 150 is the invasion and dueling meta, 200 is good for invasions but there will be less players. Lvls 137-139 let’s you match with both lvl 125 players and lvl 150 players.
• If you prefer to play completely offline that’s also fine, but you do miss on messages left behind by other players, these range from troll messages all the way to actually really useful stuff and is a part of these games socialization that I genuinely love.
• The youtuber ChaseTheBro have a lot of PVP videos if you want to take a look.
• The youtuber VaatiVidya have a lot of great lore videos for FromSoftware games in general, but I also recommend this incredible video essay about Colonialism and Genocide in Elden Ring by Aegon of Astora.
• The youtuber Zullie the Witch have a lot of short videos about cut content and other cool details and secrets in FromSoftware games.
• I recommend to look into these 4 channels/videos only after playing the game tho.

Make sure you don’t have a heavy equipment load. Rolling is gonna be your bread and butter for not getting hit, and with a heavy load the recovery animation is much slower. Some of the character classes are already at heavy load from the start, so make sure to check and unequip some stuff if needed!

Elden Ring is a fun game, it’s not as difficult as its reputation implies. You’ll probably die a lot, but its the most forgiving souls-like out there. It’s challenging at points, but with summons and some patience you can get through all of it.

Highly recommend fucking around with sorceries because they’re really fun and useful. Got for an int/Dex build until you get a handle on things and then decide if you wanna switch to int/strength or keep trucking with the int/Dex split because either will carry you to the end. Int/Dex and grabbing the moonlight katana is a common path, and for good reason, that shit slaps. You can keep distance and blast with spells and moonlight slashes, or get up close and do fun melee combat.

Have fun, dont take it too seriously, and try your best to follow the story but dont feel bad if you feel completely lost plot wise because it’s pretty convoluted especially if you’ve not played previous Souls games. Elden Ring lore is really interesting but a lot of it comes across in very “what the fuck am I reading?” ways.

Pumping vigor early on to at least 30-40 will make your life much easier untill almost the end. Don’t be greedy while fighting bosses

Go quality build, str and dex, so you can strategically use strike, slash, or pierce weapon against any boss.

Magic is fun but with greases, weapon arts, and, whetstones you can add elemental and status effects directly to your weapon. Now you can exploit both physical and magical weaknesses.

Once you have 40 vigor, and enough mind to summon a spirit ally, level str and dex based on which one gives you more attack power on your current favorite weapon. That ensures you get the most out of each stat before hitting diminishing returns from soft caps.

If you go magic, look up how to asap get the rock sling sorcery and the meteor staff that boosts it so you have non-magic damage in your arsenal.

Good luck tarnished

Good luck

Dark Souls 1 is way better and cheaper, and has a much shorter playtime. If you want to see whether soulslikes are worth trying I’d honestly recommend it over Elden Ring.