Survivability in the harsh lands of Elden Ring is mostly determined by your character’s stats. This game has eight major player attributes. However, unlike the main stats that you spend your runes to put levels in, these attributes are not explained explicitly in the game.
Vitality is one of the essential attributes Elden Ring has to offer. And just like most other attributes, details about vitality are not explained either. Therefore, many players, especially those unfamiliar with the souls-like concept, can be a little confused when it comes to understanding what this stat does.
At first, it may seem that it has no effect at all, but in reality, ignoring these attributes can be quite fatal in the long run of your playthrough. Let’s find out what is vitality in Elden Ring and what other attributes it is linked with.
Vitality
Vitality is a defensive stat in Elden Ring that directly affects and indicates your character’s resistance to the Death-Blight status effect.
There are many status effects in this game, for example, frostbite, bleed or hemorrhage, death-blight, madness, etc. Once the player experiences any of these effects, a bar starts to fill up with the respective effect’s symbol next to it.
via Sportskeeda
Once this bar fills up, the status effect triggers, and the player experiences the respective negative effects or debuffs. For instance, the death-blight or instant-death status effect, when filled up, will kill the player on the spot, all while completely ignoring the Hit Points that may still be remaining.
Unlike a status effect like sleep, quite a lot of enemies that traverse the lands in Elden Ring will threaten the player with this status effect.
If you want to last in battles against such enemies, then you need to have higher levels of vitality. Since vitality directly defends against, players with higher vitality level counts will have a better chance of taking down the enemy triggering the effect.
Focus
Focus is a defensive attribute that works in similar ways to vitality; it also gives players additional defensive properties against status effects. The status effects that focus directly help increase the player’s defense against attributes like sleep and madness.
The status effect, sleep, when triggered, makes the player fall asleep, leaving you completely vulnerable for a period of time.
via PC Gamer
Only a handful of enemies pose the threat of this status effect. It is used far more in PvP however, so the focus attribute will help you stay on your feet and prevent you from dozing off to some extent. Madness, on the other hand, the second effect that focus defends against, is quite common.
You can easily experience madness from common enemies like corrupted soldiers, hooded trolls, etc, and many other sources as well. Once madness is triggered, you are prone to get hit by critical attacks, have your Hit Points reduced, and lose the ability to cast spells.
Why Upgrade Focus And Vitality?
Raising both of these stats will increase your ability to defend against status ailments rather than just physical damage. No matter how well you time your dodge rolls, they are useless when you are surrounded by a mist of sleep, it will continuously fill up whether you roll or you block.
via Prima Games
Having higher levels of focus and vitality will give you more time to escape for example sleep mist or death mist etc. This will help you focus more on your combat, dodge roll timing, and PvE in general.
Increasing Vitality And Focus – The Prime How-To
Both vitality and focus depend on the player’s equipment and armor quite a lot. In fact, you can scale your vitality and focus levels by simply using the correct armor and equipment.
The best armor and equipment that you can collect and use for increasing vitality are given below:
- Prince of Death Cyst (adds a total of +140 points).
- Pillory Shield (adds a total of +50 points)
- Prince of Death’s Pustule (adds a total of +90 points).
- Grave Scythe (adds a total of +35 points).
- Equipment like the Lusat’s Set along with the infamous Fire Set can also help provide an overall boost to your character’s vitality.
via Ars Technica
Moving on to the best armor and equipment for focus.
- Fire Prelate set (adds a total of +215 points)
- Deathbed Set (adds a total of +63 points)
- Mushroom Set (adds a total of +214 points)
- Astrologers Set (adds a total of +201 points)
One thing to note is that some of these can provide an increase in both vitality and focus at the same time as well, for example, the Mushroom Set along with theFire Prelate.
Other than equipment and armor, the best way to increase both vitality and focus permanently is to spend some runes and put some levels into the Arcane stat.
In fact, this is the reason why Vitality and Focus always go hand in hand. Bleed builds naturally tend to have very high vitality and focus levels since most bleed weapons scale with arcane.
Conclusion
Getting better at combat is undoubtedly a major factor in getting better at Elden Ring. Vitality is a crucial stat that you need to upgrade if you wish to get better at Elden Ring combat.
Since vitality levels increase naturally as you level up, it would still be recommended to increase them by collecting the aforementioned equipment and using them for this purpose.
To sum up, Vitality will increase the time it takes for the death-blight effect to trigger. Other than equipment, increasing your Vitality and Focus at the same time can be done effortlessly by putting levels into Arcane.
