What are soft tops in Elden Ring? Answered

If you’re unsure which stats to level up in Elden Ring, there are a few factors to consider when making your decision. Some builds involve meeting some lofty equipment requirements. Others rely on large pools of HP, FP, or Stamina. On top of that, it’s also worth understanding the role of minimum limits in determining how much value you’re actually getting for each level. Unlike hard caps, which prevent you from raising a stat at all, soft caps are points at which leveling a stat will give you diminishing returns.

How soft covers work

As an example, let’s use the Vigor stat, which increases your maximum HP. It has soft caps at 40 and 60. In practice, this means that each point you allocate up to 40 gives increasing amounts of HP per point, up to a maximum of 48 (when leveling from 39 to 40). However, after 40, the HP increases start to taper off, reaching 13. Then at 60 Vigor, there’s an even steeper drop in returns, as each point grants between 6 and 3 HP. The other stats have some slight differences in how they work, but the basic principle is the same, with diminishing returns occurring after one or more thresholds.

Note that when a stat increases attack rating, that’s based on a weapon’s attribute scaling. This means that Strength, for example, will only increase the attack rating of weapons that scale with Force, and the amount that it increases depends on how much Force the weapon scales. Also note that soft caps are far from the only factor in choosing which stats to level. If you want to use our Strength build, for example, you’ll need to get past the first two soft limits of Strength to use the giant crusher one-handed.