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  • Soft Caps Vs. Hard Caps
  • All Stat Soft Caps

Dark Souls three is the Night Souls of Dark Souls. Information technology's maybe the hardest game in the series and y'all will want to scrape together each and every advantage you tin can when facing off against its toughest foes and nearly fearsome bosses.

Ane affair you'll probably want to practise is learn how to level up properly. You level up in Night Souls 3 by spending souls to increment your diverse stats - Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, and and so on. What y'all might not know, still, is that there are limits to the usefulness of these stats and towards the end of the game y'all might exist throwing your souls away without realizing it.

Updated February 3, 2022: For a more thorough dive into how soft caps work with your stats in Dark Souls 3, we've added our video caption breaking it all down!

Soft Caps Vs. Hard Caps

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In this context, a "cap" is the upper limit of a certain variable, such as a item stat. In Nighttime Souls iii, there are two types of cap:

  • Hard caps: this is the very upper limit of a stat. Once a stat has reached this high, it cannot get whatsoever higher - information technology is a cap enforced by the game engine. In Dark Souls 3, stats have a hard cap of 99 .
  • Soft caps: when a stat reaches a soft cap, increasing it stops being as useful equally information technology used to. It is a cap that serves a few purposes:
    • To stop yous from getting likewise powerful through blow or through level grinding and subsequently making the game too easy.
    • To encourage diversity in grapheme builds.
    • To have different scales of power for different stats and then they don't all take to exist counterbalanced effectually the difficult cap.

All Stat Soft Caps

Depiction of the soft stat caps in Nighttime Souls 3

The tabular array below details every stat's soft cap as well as what benefits there would be were you to increment them past this cap.

Stat Soft Cap Caption
Vigor 44 Every level of Vigor provides HP, merely at higher levels, each incremental increase volition provide less of it. At 44 Vigor, extra levels provide less than 10 HP.
At 44 Vigor you will take ane,260 HP. Increasing your Vigor to 99 volition only increment that value to 1,400.
Attunement xxx / 40 In one case yous hit 30 Attunement, you volition only get one more Attunement Slot per ten levels. 30 Attunement provides five slots, while 40 provides 6 and so on.
It is possible to accomplish x Attunement Slots with 99 Attunement, but this is never likely to exist useful, even for the near magically aligned.
Endurance 40 Endurance's main quality is to upgrade your Stamina. At 40 Endurance, your Stamina growth volition halt severely, as will your resistances.
At 40 Endurance you will have 160 Stamina, and at 99 yous will have only 170 Stamina.
Vitality 40 Vitality affects your Equip Load and your Defence force stats. Every single level will improve your Equip Load by 1, merely your Defence stats will stop improving well at 40 Vitality.
At twoscore your Equip Load will be fourscore and your base of operations Defence force will be 135. Going up to 99 volition better your Equip Load to 139 but your Defense to just 177.
Strength 27 / 40 / 60 The normal soft cap for Force is 40 - this is when yous will start getting diminishing returns on your damage.
When wielding a weapon is two hands, your Strength is multiplied by 1.5 automatically. This means that if you utilize 2 hands for one weapon, the soft cap is lowered to 27.
60 is the highest Strength requirement to be able to use a weapon effectively, attached to Ledo'south Slap-up Hammer.
Dexterity 40 / 50 Dexterity will, similar Forcefulness, stop providing a skilful return on investment one time you reach forty.
Dexterity also affects spellcasting speed, nonetheless, and this will soft cap at l instead. This is worth considering for optimizing mage builds.
Intelligence twoscore / 50 Magic damage and defense scale well with Intelligence until you hit xl, though some Sorceries require 50 Intelligence to be equipped.
Faith 40 / 45 / 60 The damage scaling of Religion-based weapons (read: lightning infusions) scales well only until twoscore Religion.
The effectiveness of Miracles, Pyromancies, and Dark Magic scale with Religion, but just Miracles cast with certain Catalysts advantage going over 45.
A Faith of 45 is required for casting the strongest Miracle in the game.
Luck 50 / 99 Certain weapons such every bit Anri'south Sword and any weapon with a Hollow Infusion scale with Luck, with the impairment bonus falling off at l Luck.
Detail Discovery never stops scaling, and therefore for treasure hunting purposes Luck is useful all the mode to the hard cap of 99.

A character with all of these soft caps reached will exist effectually Level 395, depending on which class they began equally. With every stat at the hard cap of 99, they would be effectually Level 800, though this is entirely overkilling it even with this game'due south difficulty level.

Side by side: Dark Souls: The Commencement Flame, Explained