Dark Souls Stats II - Decision Points

In my last blog (here: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=396507), I examined the damage equation in Dark Souls and the implications this equation has on things like weapon selection and stat allocation. This time around, I thought I’d focus on more general strategy, and add some points of analysis regarding the various decisions a person makes in a playthrough.

Stats

There are many general uses for stats. What they do is broken down below:
Source: http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/Stats

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Vitality
Vitality governs the player's maximum Health points.
• From 40 vitality onwards increasing this stat becomes less useful. The amount of health points gained decreases from around 20 at 41 vitality to around 8 at 51 vitality.

Vitality: 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 99
Health: 572 792 1100 1325 1500 1588 1675 1758 1837 1900

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Attunement
Attunement governs the amount of Spell slots.
• Spell slots determine how many spells you can equip, and includes all the Magic classes; Sorceries, Pyromancies and Miracles.
• At 50 attunement you have reached the maximum number of spell slots (10).
• The White Seance Ring and the Darkmoon Seance Ringgives one additional spell slot each, when equipped.
o These rings will also grant an attunement slot (two if both rings are worn) even if you have none. This lets you use Pyromancy effectively, if you are in need of a support spell, since it's power is not dependent on stats.

Attunement: 10 12 14 16 19 23 28 34 41 50
Spell Slots: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Endurance
Endurance controls the player's Stamina, max Equip Load and resistance to Bleeding.
• Stamina will not be increased after 40 Endurance, but Equip Load and Bleed Resistance will.
• The roll and run speed of the player will vary with the amount of equipped weight.
o Equip weight above 100% of total Equip Load leaves the player unable to roll and run.
o Equip weight between 50% to 100% of Equip Load gives slow movement, and causes the player to 'fat roll'.
o Equip weight between 25% to 50% of Equip Load gives medium movement.
o Equip weight below 25% of Equip Burden gives fast movement.
• Max equip burden can be increased further by wearing Havel's Ring, Ring of Favor and Protection or Mask of the Father.

Endurance: 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 99
Stamina: 91 110 133 160 160 160 160 160 160 160
Equip Load: 50.0 60.0 70.0 80.0 90.0 100.0 110.0 120.0 130.0 139.0

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Strength
Strength controls the player's Attack Power for weapons that scale with Strength. Strength does NOT affect your weapon swing speed as shown in this video.
• Most weapons require a minimum strength level to be wielded properly.
• Two-handing the weapon will give a 50% strength bonus, affecting both the weapon requirements and damage modifier.
o If you do not meet the minimum strength required, the weapon damage is decreased and the moveset is altered to a single slow swing.
o Strength is the only stat that affects the moveset, but not meeting the Dexterity, Intelligence or Faith requirements of the weapon will make it rebound upon contact, and also decrease the damage.
• Strength is especially useful for Ultra Greatswords, Axes and Great Axes, Hammers and Great Hammers.

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Dexterity
Dexterity controls the player's Attack Power for weapons that scale with Dexterity and increases casting speed for most spells.
• Some weapons require a minimum dexterity level to be wielded properly.
• If you do not meet the minimum dexterity required, you will stagger after every hit on an opponent.
• The speed of spell casting increases with dexterity, max speed at 45 dex.
o Casting speed is only affected by Dexterity in the range of 35-45. Anything below 35 and there will be no change in casting speed.
o Dexterity only effects casting speed of attack spells. Buffs and utility spells such as weapon buffs and Tranquil walk of Peace are not affected.
o 45 Dexterity varies on the casting speed for different spells.
 Pyromancy: Increases attack pyromancy between 20-27%
 Sorcery and Miracles are increased by roughly 8-10%*
• Dexterity is especially useful for Daggers, Katanas, Thrusting/Piercing Swords, Curved Swords, Spears, Whips and Bows

*Even though the Miracle Wrath of the Gods is an attack spell the casting speed for this spell is not increased.
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Resistance
Resistance increases physical and flame defense and resistance to poison.
• Defense (including physical and flame) are also affected by your total level and the diminishing returns from both appear to stack, causing resistance's effectiveness at higher levels to become negligible. Poison defense does not suffer from this double diminishing return effect, although armor and the poisonbite ring are better options.
• Resistance offers a static debuff on damage. 1 point of res = 1 point less damage taken, or 1% less damage taken, whichever value is -lower-. Attacks that would normally kill you have about a 7 time multiplier on damage reduced. This only has effect on PvE enemies in game, not other Players and hence is not useful for PvP.
• Resistance offers a reduction in fall damage take by the player (Please Confirm)
NOTE: Starting classes level's are unaffected by their Resistance level. Leveling resistance at bonfires should increase your level like normal.
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Intelligence
Intelligence governs the Sorcery Power. It also controls the player's attack power for weapons that scale with Intelligence.
• Sorceries require a minimum intelligence level to cast.(You can acquire without the required stats and even attune the spell, but attempting to cast will leave your character scratching their head, literally.)
NOTE: This stat does NOT increase Pyromancy spells, Pyromancy Power only increases with the level of the Pyromancy Flame. Intelligence only increases the fire damage from punch attacks with the pyromancy glove.
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Faith
Faith governs the Miracle Power and also increases the Magic Defense. It also controls the player's attack power for weapons that scale with Faith.
• Miracles require a minimum faith level to cast. (You can acquire without the required stats and even attune the spell, but attempting to cast will leave your character scratching their head, literally.)

Here are, however, a few basic tips I tend to follow for choosing stats.

Strength’s main use is offensively – without a high strength, the most damaging weapons in the game become very difficult to use (to the point that you wouldn’t actually use them). Yet at the same time, you don’t actually need to spend all that much points in strength to get its maximum effect. The reason? You can 2-hand your weapon to get 50% more strength behind your weapon. In other words, if you have 30 Str, and you switch to 2-handed, you hit as if you had 45 strength. However, this also means that if you already have 40 Str or above, you get virtually no benefit from switching to 2-handed (as AP is cut way, way down – from 8 AP per Str to 1 AP per Str on a Greatclub). The implications of this are that if you can become comfortable playing without a shield, you can wield some of the most damaging weapons in the game at some of the highest AP in the game with only a 31-35 strength (as opposed to the 45-50 some of them require).
This is one reason I love the Great Club – it only requires 28 STR (large club, which is slightly better, is 26), so you can wield it 1-handed and still use a shield and then right before you attack switch to 2-handed and get AP right up near the soft cap.

Endurance is an amazing stat IMO, regardless of how you plan to play. Practically everything you want to do costs Stamina – attacking, parrying, rolling, and especially blocking. In addition, points of Endurance let you wear more weight before taking movement penalties – and that can mean bigger weapons, heavier armor, and the ability to have a backup weapon to switch to. 40, again, is the effective maximum cap. Beyond 40, though, you still get to wear more gear – which makes Endurance one of the better stats to raise above its soft cap (though you’d still gain more from raising other stats to their caps first). Endurance also tends to be more useful the larger the portion of equip load you intend to use – at least after the point where you’re adding light armor, because defense gains from additional endurance at 25% equip load are quite low when you’re replacing light armor with heavy (it takes a lot of endurance to replace anything, really). For a character who does not intend to block and has a very low equip load, endurance is not very good. For everyone else, it’s pretty amazing.

Dexterity is good for equipping fast weapons and for spellcasters, as it raises casting speed. There are some very good fast weapons, too, that a person would do well to consider using. I used the Silver Knight Sword for a long time after Anor Londo, as fast weapons are much easier to use (despite their lower damage).

The above guide covers intelligence and faith pretty well – they’re good for the spells you become able to cast.

Resistance is not a stat which I view as being worthwhile – at only a few defense points per level (a few points overall, not per defense), Vitality is pretty much always better.

Attunement is likely something you’ll want a few points in (though int/faith-based builds may want more) – but quickly run low on function for two reasons: first, diminishing returns on the number of attunement slots gained per point – and second, as you add more spells the effect of having additional spells becomes notable. For instance, once you have a slot for your best attack spell, the effect of adding additional attack spells is lessened because you only use attack spell 2 when attack spell 1 is gone (or when it isn’t as good). I don’t view attunement as being something anyone will want to invest heavily in.

Put everything in Vitality that you don’t feel like putting into your main stat(s). Vitality adds a good amount of health per point until about 40-50. Even beyond that, though, the values aren’t awful. Vitality is probably the best stat above cap that there is – unless you have a piece of equipment you want to use that you need more equip load for.

Armor Selection

When comparing armor, we must first consider what methodology to use. Physical Armor is generally always useful. Just about everything does physical damage of some kind. And yet, elemental damage is also quite common – even when you don’t see it, sometimes it is attached to an enemy’s attack. The way I choose to compare armor is based on the following train of logic. Armor generally has higher Strike/Slash/Thrust Defense only if it also has high base physical defense. So, in a way, by including all four types of defenses in our calculations, we’re counting physical defense several times over – which is a good thing, because physical defense is always useful (whereas other defenses are situational). Though curses, poison, and toxin are annoying effects, they generally are not terribly relevant to gear choices – as you can avoid them, and they are attached to enemies which are not terribly threatening (save for the fact that they apply debuffs - looking at you, blighttown enemies).

So, the methodology I use is the following – I take a simple average of Physical Defense (or Normal Defense), Strike, Slash, Thrust, Magic, Fire and Lightning. This weights physical defenses 33% higher than magic, and status ailments not at all. For our purposes, then a higher average defense (as I have defined it above), implies a better piece of armor. Then, we consider the weight of the armor by dividing our average by weight – and this gives us considerations for what armor we ought to wear, depending on how much room we have in our equip load.

Of course, this doesn’t give us the optimal armor for each fight (as fights where you only encounter normal and fire damage would only weight normal and fire defense, for example), but it gives us an armor set that is pretty good against every fight we encounter (which can save us from having a million armor sets – and alternatively, gives us a base set upon which to add certain types of gear for certain types of fights).

Results of Armor Comparison on Defenses

Giant’s Armor is more or less the best across the board. The physical defenses are obviously far superior to any other set at +5, but even the elemental defenses are comparable to or better than that of most light sets. If weight is no issue, Giant’s is likely the way to go.

Dingy Robe and Legs make surprisingly good light armor. At a surprising 101.7 average defense (between the two of them) and 5.5 lbs., they are able to fit in a place which is actually better than a lot of heavier sets in terms of average defense (and note: they have 70-90 resist for each of curse, poison and bleed resist, too, which a lot of heavier sets don’t have). For example, at +10 Dingy armor has a defensive average of 60.4, while Crimson has a defensive average of 45.9, and Elite Knight Armor has a defensive average of only 72 – while also weighing only 3 pounds.
Wanderer Gloves also are surprisingly good for light armor at 33.9 average defense for only 2.1 pounds. This is actually a higher average defense than Elite Knight Gauntlets (at 32.6 average defense) which weigh 3.7 pounds.

We can effectively convert the Mask of the Mother’s 10% health bonus into a 9.1% defense bonus (by taking it as 100% damage/110% health ~ 90.9% damage, and ignoring the decreased impact on Estus by having a higher health) by using the damage equation from my previous blog. When we do so, we see that the effect of 1 defense at around 400 attack/300 defense is 0.25% damage reduction (see previous blog). This number gets slightly larger as defense increases (but attack stays the same) and smaller if attack increases. Essentially, this means our defense bonus is worth approximately 9.1/0.25 = 36.4 defense – which applies to all types of damage. Adding this to the helmets inherent 7.1 average defense, we see that Mask of the Mother at 1.2 pounds actually provides a sizeable amount more defensive bonus than the Giant’s Helmet. In order for Giant’s to be better, you’d generally have to have a higher defense than your opponent has attack – which can happen if your enemy is using an attack that hits multiple defenses or just doesn’t hit very hard, but it is by no means the norm.

Of course, a head slot is most often a piece with bonuses attached (e.g. Crown of Dusk) – so the Mask of the Mother is by no means the obvious head choice – but the point we’re making here is that defensively, it’s usually better than other more heavily armored choices.

Heavier Sets

So now, we have a working light set to start out in, and we know that Giant’s would eventually be what we want were we to have unlimited equip load. But what if we have enough for something heavier than our light set, but not enough for Giant’s? If we have enough for just the helmet, should we wear that – or would a couple pieces of a middle set (e.g. Elite Knight’s or Iron – something heavier than what we have but lighter than Giant’s) would be better?

When upgrading to heavier armor, there are two things to keep in mind: defense gain and poise gain. As it turns out, in both cases, upgrading one piece to the heavier armor set gives you more for the extra weight. Iron, for example, has a poise/pound ratio of about 1.6-1.7, depending on the piece, while the gained defense is around 1.5 for the piece that does upgrade defenses (the armor, the other pieces have a lower average defense than our light set). For the giant’s on the other hand, we get 2.1-2.2 poise per pound, depending on the piece, and get 1.4-2.2 def/per pound (1.4 for putting on the legs, 2+ for any other piece except – as we mentioned – the helmet). The analysis I’ve done shows that it’s generally better for defenses to have one heavy piece like Giant’s on than it is to have a couple smaller pieces switched out.

Of course if you only have a few pounds of room to work with, you’ll want a piece from a middle set with a higher average defense over no upgrade at all, but if you can wear a piece or two of the heaviest armor, you probably should – and of course if you want to hit a poise break point for a particular fight (or in general) – then heavier sets become needed. For reference on the value of poise and on what the poise breakpoints are by weapon, see http://darksouls.wikidot.com/poise. In PvP, it’s often thought that 53+ poise is needed, while there is no clear breakpoint to go for in PvE (but more isn’t bad here, either).

This also seems like a good place to discuss portion of equip load. As you gain in equip load, you run slower and your roll animation becomes slower. This is not something that happens gradually, but occurs at fixed breakpoints. Rolling breakpoints (the spots at which the rolling animation changes – there are reportedly different speed breakpoints listed here: http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/Equip Load but because the animation is the same I have difficulty detecting them) occur at 25%, 50% and 100% (at which point you can’t roll). I like to stay at 25%, personally. This means that more of my armor is light, but the increased roll speed is something I feel very strongly about having. I’d strongly caution anyone for using more than 50% of their equip load – as the “fat roll” animation is a long one – and very poor for avoiding damage – which means you’re probably going to find it difficult to move around without being vulnerable. I say this because this is the character I thought I wanted to play at the beginning. Trying to dodge anything becomes very hard – and the damage you take even in the heaviest armor is notable.

In some ways, this analysis also gives us a way to evaluate endurance’s effectiveness through equip load. When we invest 1 point in endurance, this gives us 1 pound of equip load (1.2 with ring of favor, 1.5 with havels, 1.8 with both and 1.89 with both and mask of the father). If we want to stay close to the 50% equip load threshold, and we wear both ring of favor and havel’s ring – 1 point of endurance gives us 1.8 * .5 = .9 pounds more of equipment. When we are adding light armor, this .9 pounds may translate to something like 18 defense (as I mentioned that Dingy is 20 avg defense/pound). Once we’re swapping out for heavy armor, though, the extra .9 pounds translates to only .9 * 2.2 (defense per pound for switching in Giant’s) = 1.98 defense. Considering that most dex weapons only provide 4-5 AP per point of dex, this is nothing to sneeze at (even though the returns are very notably lower). And of course, once you have Giant’s on (or your heavy set, whatever that might be), additional equip load provides very little.

Rings

A lot of good choices here – but most notably, we can value the effectiveness of rings like Havel’s Ring, the Ring of Favor and Protection, Wolf’s Ring and more. Havel’s ring, for instance, adds 20+0.5* Endurance pounds of gear we can wear to stay at 50% equip load, or 10+0.25* End at 25% equip load. This may mean an additional piece of light armor we couldn’t wear before (at 16-20 defense per pound, this would be a monumental amount of defense that this adds – even at the 2 defense per pound of upgrading to heavy armor, this is 25 defense across the board for a character with 20 endurance). Or it may mean that our 50% equip load set becomes out 25% equip load set, adding not defense, but speed. Similar calculations may be done for Ring of Favor and Protection (though honestly, the 20% life gain may be well worth it anyway, even without the effect on equip load).

Wolf Ring adds 40 poise to our character. Based on our above calculation, this is the poise of about 17-18 pounds of heavy armor. This single ring has as much poise as the entire Iron Set and bypasses the poise breakpoint for almost all 1-handed attacks and a fair amount of 2-handed attacks as well.

This tells us how valuable our rings are – and it shows us that when we look at rings like Ring of Steel Protection, any of the Stoneplate Rings, or the rings affording curse/bleed resist just how much those rings need to do to eclipse the defensive ability of these rings. Why would I get 50 slash, thrust and piercing resist, when I can wear a ring that gives me 30 pounds of extra armor on that gives me more than 50 additional slash, thrust and piercing resist. I suppose this could be useful if you already had full Giant’s and still wanted more defense – but it tells us that up to that point, you’d probably do better just wearing Havel’s.

Shields

There are a few stats to look for on shields. The most noteworthy is likely Stability. The higher the stability, the less stamina blocking expends. Higher stability shields are able to deflect larger hits without being staggered – as well as costing less stamina to block to begin with. The next thing I usually look for is block stats. 100% physical is practically a must, with as high a sum as I can get in the other areas. Weight is usually the third thing I consider, but I often tend to consider it a high priority item. For instance, a spider shield (my shield of choice) can get you 100% physical resist and 70+ stability for 3 pounds. I find it hard to add the additional 13 pounds to get the 88 stability, higher resists while blocking and status effect blocker that a person would get from Greatshield of Artorias (but then, I play a lighter character).

Conclusions

This is likely to be my last Dark Souls blog. Though I’ve finished theorycrafting and I’ve beaten the game, I’m far from done with it. NG+ looms in front of my current character, while tons of other options for other builds stand out as viable options for new characters as well.

This is one of the amazing things about Dark Souls – you can learn a ton of information about the combat system and while that gives you an advantage, there’s still a ton more to master. Now if only they had slight item improvements in NG+, NG++, etc. to give a person a bit more of a carrot to chase after beating the game. Then this game would hold my attention for a long, long time. Here’s hoping for Dark Souls 2. : )

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