Everything About Elden Ring Soft Caps

In the cold dungeon, the chain sound opens the new act of your way, welcome – bonfire lights the title letters!

Okay, Soulsborne gamers, let’s refresh your knowledge of how to optimize your builds, ensuring they receive the maximum benefit from their levels while avoiding unnecessary rune expenditure on diminishing returns.

This guide details each one of the Elden Ring soft caps, helping you tailor your character for success in the Lands Between.

What are Elden Ring’s soft caps for all stats in 2024?

Elden Ring stat caps in 2024 remain crucial for optimizing your character’s build and maximizing efficiency. Soft caps are specific thresholds where the benefits of leveling a stat begin to diminish significantly, helping players allocate their Rune investments wisely. Each stat – Vigor, Mind, Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith, and Arcane – has unique soft cap points that impact attributes like health, stamina, spell casting, and damage scaling. Understanding these caps ensures you strike the perfect balance between survivability and damage output, tailored to your preferred playstyle. Let’s dive into the latest soft cap details to refine your build!

What are soft caps in the Elden Ring?

Soft caps Elden Ring are thresholds within a stat's progression where the effectiveness of further investments significantly diminishes. As you allocate points to attributes like Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence, you’ll notice that the benefits – such as increased damage, health, or mana – gradually decrease after reaching specific levels.

These diminishing returns, or soft caps, encourage players to diversify their builds rather than maxing out a single stat. Elden Ring's attribute caps play a crucial role in character optimization. For instance, Vitality may provide substantial boosts to health up to a certain point, but beyond the soft cap, the increases become marginal. Understanding soft caps is essential for optimizing your character's performance and ensuring that your leveling decisions align with your desired playstyle.

Elden Ring soft caps in 2025

While the core mechanics haven't changed, understanding these thresholds helps players allocate their stat points efficiently, ensuring a balance between power and versatility. Whether you're building a melee-focused warrior or a spellcasting sorcerer, staying mindful of these diminishing returns is key to mastering the game.

Vigor soft caps

• First Soft Cap: Around level 40 – Vigor’s health boost begins to slow down.

• Second Soft Cap: Around level 60 – The returns on Vigor become even more limited.
• Maximum Effectiveness: Vigor’s effectiveness continues to decrease beyond these caps, making it less efficient to further invest in this stat for health boosts.

For optimal survivability, players should consider balancing Vigor with other stats once these soft caps are reached.

Mind soft caps

• First Soft Cap: Around level 30 – Mind begins to slow down in terms of increasing FP.
• Second Soft Cap: Around level 50 – The effectiveness of Mind continues to decrease, offering smaller boosts to FP.
• Maximum Effectiveness: Beyond these caps, Mind's contribution to FP becomes less impactful, so it’s often better to focus on other stats if you’re not heavily relying on spells.

To maximize spellcasting potential, it's important to balance Mind with other stats like Intelligence or Faith, depending on your build.

Endurance soft caps

• First Soft Cap: Around level 30 – Endurance starts to slow down in terms of increasing stamina and equip load.
• Second Soft Cap: Around level 50 – The gains from Endurance become more modest, with smaller boosts to stamina and equip load.
• Maximum Effectiveness: Beyond these caps, Endurance’s benefits diminish further, and additional points may not be as effective for stamina or equip load increases.

For builds focused on heavy weapons or armor, reaching these caps will allow you to maintain mobility and sustain longer combat engagements.

Strength and Dexterity soft caps

Keep strength soft cap Elden Ring in limit:

• First Soft Cap: Around level 20 – Strength begins to provide significant damage increases for heavy weapons and scaling.
• Second Soft Cap: Around level 40 – The returns start to slow down, but Strength still provides decent boosts for weapons with high Strength scaling.
• Third Soft Cap: Around level 60 – Further increases in Strength offer minimal damage benefits, as the stat's impact starts to taper off.

The Strength soft cap in Elden Ring is typically reached at level 50, where the scaling starts to slow down, making further investment less efficient for most weapons.

The Dexterity soft cap Elden Ring looks like this:

• First Soft Cap: Around level 20 – Dexterity provides solid damage scaling for lighter weapons and bows, as well as faster weapon attack speeds.
• Second Soft Cap: Around level 40 – Dexterity's damage scaling continues but with diminishing returns.
• Third Soft Cap: Around level 60 – After this point, the effectiveness of additional Dexterity points becomes minimal, though it still contributes to faster weapon usage.

Reaching the dex soft cap Elden Ring at level 40 is crucial for maximizing the damage output of lighter weapons and bows before the returns diminish significantly.

Intelligence, Faith, and Arcane soft caps

In Elden Ring, the Intelligence, Faith, and Arcane stats have specific soft caps that influence the effectiveness of spells and incantations.

• Intelligence: Soft caps at 40, with diminishing returns after this point.
• Faith: Soft caps at 40, after which the scaling slows down.
• Arcane: Soft caps at 50, where the effectiveness starts to decrease significantly.

These soft caps are important for players focusing on magic builds, as they determine the point at which further investment yields diminishing returns. Reaching these soft caps allows for optimized scaling, ensuring maximum potential from each stat.

Reaching the level cap is a massive challenge, requiring players to farm a total of 1,692,558,415 Runes. The max level cap Elder Ring is set at 713 because no stat can be leveled beyond 99, making it the highest achievable level in the game.

Caps in Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree DLC

In the Elden Ring DLC, Erdtree Shards become far more significant than traditional stat boosts, reflecting a shift in the game's balance.

• Vigor: 40, 60
• Mind: 50, 60
• Endurance: 30, 50
• Strength: 60, 80
• Dexterity: 60, 80
• Intelligence: 50, 60, 80
• Faith: 50, 60, 80
• Arcane: 60, 80

After the first soft cap, the return on investment for each stat becomes less impactful, and players must strategize around these caps to optimize their builds, especially with the new gear and abilities introduced in the DLC. With the new content, players may need to allocate points into specific stats like Intelligence or Faith for the latest weapons that deal split physical and magic damage.

While the original game emphasized stat progression for power, the DLC introduces shards imbued with the primordial life energy of the Erdtree's amber, offering unique and transformative effects. These shards, remnants of the Erdtree's blessings from its age of abundance, echo the era when Queen Marika spread divine favor across the lands. Now, in a world where the Erdtree's sap no longer flows freely, the shards hold unparalleled value, overshadowing classic stat boosts that provide far less benefit compared to their earlier prominence. This evolution aligns with Erdtree's history of adapting to the tides of faith and survival, making the shards the centerpiece of progression in the DLC.