Elden Ring is an action role-playing game by FromSoftware.

Stats

Most stats are soft capped at 20, 60 and 80. You rarely want to go over 60 in any particular stat even if it does give a slight boost. The benefits get much less impressive after 60. There might be some rare cases to go up to 80 if you know what you are aiming for but do take into account your talismans and temporary buffs.

You can't mess up your character in Elden Ring. Elden Ring also has stat resets, at least a couple of them can be found throughout the game. You might lose a couple of stat points based on your starting class and what build you run but the effect is minor.

I'd advice to get Vigor to 20 as soon as possible. It's hard to learn the bosses if you keep dying on a single hit.

1. Increase Vigor to 20
2. Increase your main stat to 20 (Str/Dex/Int/Fai/Arc)
3. Increase your secondary stat to 20 if you have one
4. Increase Endurance to 20 if physical, Mind to 20 if caster, both to 15 if hybrid
5. Alternate between Vigor and main stat so they are both 30
6. Increase Vigor to 40
7. Increase main stat to 60
8. Go wild

Your 120 level character should have something on the lines of:

Vigor:        40 - 60 you can add more up to 60 but gives less health
Mind:         20 - 55 depending how much focus points you need for skills and spells
Endurance:    20 - 45 depending how heavy equipment you want to wear and which talismans
                      you should rely on load increasing talismans for heavy armor

Strength:     20 / 60
Dexterity:    20 / 60
Intelligence: 20 / 60
Faith:        20 / 60
Arcane:       20 / 60

NOTE:
      There are a few items and buffs that change your stats, so you might end up
      reallocating your stats in any case for the most optimal build.

If you are making PvP alts, mind your weapon upgrades. Matchmaking looks for opponents around your level and people that have achieved similar levels of weapon upgrades. This is calculated by the max upgrade level you've ever obtained.

One NPC gives the player Rogier's Rapier +8 normal weapon so that
is the sweet spot if you want to do low lvl PvP. There are also
other random rewards at +8.

"Optimal" Setups for Invading:

118 lvl PvP, matchmaking against <149 lvl between +18 (+7) and +24 (+9)
Normal Weapon: +20 max (uses Smithing Stones)
Unique Weapon:  +8 max (uses Somber Smithing Stones)

71-110 lvl PvP, matchmaking against between +12 (+5) and +17 (+7):
Normal Weapon: +15 max (uses Smithing Stones)
Unique Weapon:  +6 max (uses Somber Smithing Stones)

41-70 lvl PvP, matchmaking against between +8 (+3) and +12 (+5):
Normal Weapon: +10 max (uses Smithing Stones)
Unique Weapon:  +4 max (uses Somber Smithing Stones)

10-40 lvl PvP, matchmaking against between +4 (+1) and +7 (+3):
Normal Weapon:  +5 max (uses Smithing Stones)
Unique Weapon:  +2 max (uses Somber Smithing Stones)

Damage Types

All things that deal damage have a damage type. A damage source can have multiple damage types in the same attack e.g. an enchanted weapon might deal both slashing and magical damage. You can use Ashes of War to fine-tune the damage types of many weapons later in the game.

Weapons can innately have multiple damage types. It depending on the moveset e.g. a thrusting sword that mainly does piercing damage can also deal slashing damage with some attacks. This is the reason why weapons simply list "Physical" as their main damage value; the actual damage type depends on the actual attack. The only way to know for sure is to test these, but you can make a pretty good guesses from the animations.

Physical Damage

Standard Damage:

• All physical damage that is not typed strike, pierce or slash.
• Does mediocre damage to most targets.

Strike:

• Damage of most blunt weapons like maces.

• Good Against: heavy armor, rocky skin

• Bad Against: medium armor, scaly skin

Pierce:

• Damage from most thrusting weapons like spears.

• Good Against: medium armor, scaly skin

• Bad Against: heavy armor, rocky skin

Slash:

• Damage from most sharp edged weapons like curved swords.

• Good Against: light armor, furry skin

• Bad Against: heavy armor, rocky skin

Elemental Damage

Magic:

• Damage from most sorceries, some weapon skills and some weapons.

• Good Against: heavy armor, rocky skin, enemies with high physical resistance

• Bad Against: magic-based creatures

Lightning:

• Damage from some incantations, weapon skills and weapons.

• Good Against: heavy armor, scaly skin

• Bad Against: lightning-based creatures

Fire:

• Damage from some sorceries, incantations, weapon skills and weapons.

• Good Against: light armor, undead, furry creatures

• Bad Against: fire-based creatures

Holy:

• Damage from some incantations, weapon skills and weapons.

• Good Against: undead

• Bad Against: holy-based creatures

Status Effect

Various weapons, skills, spell and items build up and trigger status effects.

Even if your build doesn't allow you to use a specific status effect, all the pots and jars you can craft make it possible for specific fights.

Which status effect works the best against which enemy depends solely on the opponent, but in general:

• Hemorrhage is good against living creatures with a lot of health e.g. bosses.
• Frostbite is good against living creatures with heavy armor e.g. knights.
• Poison is good against enemies that you can flee from e.g. slow ones or open field.
• Scarlet Rot is like poison but higher damage, works great against e.g. Radahn.
• Sleep is good for encounters where you have multiple targets e.g. Godskin Duo.

Note that Madness, Death (aka. Curse) and Blight status effects are usually only applicable to players, most enemies being immune to their effects.

Combat Tips

Get a feeling when to block and when to dodge. In general, you should block all fast attacks and roll out of all the slow attacks. Fast attacks deplete only a small amounts of stamina while attacks that have a lengthy wind up animation totally deplete your stamina.

You can block with almost anything you can wield in your hand. Shields are obviously better for reducing the damage taken, many larger shields have 100% reduction of physical damage taken, but there are many weapons that have pretty decent damage reduction too.

You can play the game with only dodging, but it can sometimes be hard to dodge your way out of a fast flurry of blows from a boss that keeps chasing you.

You can not play the game with only blocking as there are many boss attacks that simply tear you to shreds, even if you try to stack stamina. And that is even before the fact that there are many attacks that inflict status effects that will instantly kill you if you don't dodge them.

The above facts are the reason that you should have up to medium load so your dodge rolls are faster. If you get to heavy load, your rolls become slow. It is possible to play with heavy rolls, but it will be more challenging.

Learn to guard counter. Press L1 to block, and then, after an enemy attack hits, press R2 to do a staggering guard counter attack. This will frequently break the posture of normal enemies and allows you do follow up with a critical hit.

Greatshield blocks can cause enemies to flinch. The only thing that affects enemy flinching is the shield type; small, medium or great. I personally like to use the lighter greatshields to make enemy groups flinch, e.g. Wooden Greatshield you get from Stormveil Castle.

Some enemies have weak spots. If you are doing very low damage, try to find weak spots e.g. some mechanical enemies have weaker spots in their back. The weak spot is usually the head or the back. It also might simply be that the enemy is resistant to the damage type you are inflicting.

Have some ranged attack at hand at all times. Bow, spell, weapon skill or some throwing items. Useful in pulling enemies individually.

Parry

Best parry skills:

1. Medium Shield + Carian Retaliation   Start: 8 frames,  Duration: 14 frames
1. Small Shield + Carian Retaliation    Start: 8 frames,  Duration: 14 frames
2. Buckler + Buckler Parry              Start: 8 frames,  Duration: 11 frames
3. Medium Shield + Golden Parry         Start: 8 frames,  Duration: 14 frames
3. Small Shield + Golden Parry          Start: 8 frames,  Duration: 14 frames
4. Small Shield + Parry                 Start: 11 frames, Duration: 11 frames

Note that Golden Parry has a strange hitbox and costs FP, but might be better
in melee PvP because it has increased range to counter latency.

Carian Retaliation only costs FP if used to counter spells and has similar hitbox
as normal shield parry. A good pick for PvP to punish spell spammers.

Buckler Parry is decent, gives slightly smaller window but costs no FP.

The rest of the shield, dagger, fist, claw, rapier and scimitar parries are much worse.

Spells

Spells scale only based by the spell casting stat of your casting weapon. So either staff or sacred seal. And this means that your spells effectively scale with the stat that your spell casting weapon scales with. This can even be Strength (e.g. Clawmark Seal) or Arcane (e.g. Dragon Communion Seal). Unusual scaling effects are usually mentioned in the weapon description. Upgrading your casting weapon will improve the scaling and thus improve the spell damage.

Terminology:

Efficiency = Average Damage Inflicted / Focus Point Cost
# not with any specific gear or stats so only gives some idea of the efficiency

Sorceries

Glintstone Pebble is one of the most efficient spells. Pebble can be your main workhorse for all of the game. Magic Glintblade that Prisoner starts with is slightly worse to begin with but actually becomes more efficient mid-game if you use the Carian Glintblade Staff.

Glintstone Arc is always more efficient if it hits 2 or more targets.

Carian Slicer is extremely efficient and fast in dealing damage in close combat. Even more amazing with Carian Glintstone Staff. You are effectively high burst melee character. This setup also works great with Carian Greatsword and later with Adula's Moonblade to deal damage to multiple targets.

Incantations

27 Faith is enough to cast most protective incantations. Lord's Divine Fortification (boosts holy defense) requires 27 Faith. 10 Faith is enough to cast most lesser versions of defense boosts.

Areas

The areas below are ordered in the level of difficulty dictated by the game files. There is no enemy level scaling in Elden Ring but the same enemy type gets tougher depending on the zone they are in (probably semi-automated.) The order of the following zones is straight from the game files.

The level ranges are just recommendations. The final difficulty of any particular area also largely depends on your build, equipment and skill.

My Builds

These characters are built with endgame PvP in mind thus limiting the level to 120 so you can actually get matched with other people in online gameplay.

I assume that the PvP level will be 120, but it could also be changed according to the community. You never know. At least I feel like 150 is way too high and makes many builds overpowered and removing meaningful decision making when allocating stats.

Slippery Smaug - The Albinauric Blood Priest

A low level Arcane PvP build.

Class: Bandit (Golden Seed)
29 Vig
17 Min
10 End
10 Str (5 Reduvia, 10 Heater Shield)
13 Dex (13 Reduvia)
 9 Int
 9 Fai (17 Lightning Spear, +3 +5 from talismans)
20 Arc (main damage stat)

You will be level 38 with the above stats.
* You could switch some Vig to End, so maybe stay at Vig 20 first.
* You can take more levels if you wish, but stay around 40.

Start: 20 Vig > 10 Str > 20 Arc > go wild

Get Heater Shield from Twin Maiden Husks.

Get Reduvia from Limgrave, this will be your main weapon.

Get Marika's Scarseal from Siofra River upper level, will give Min/Int/Fai/Arc +3.

Get Two Fingers Heirloom from Purified Ruins in Liuria, will give Fai +5.

Get the Dragon Communion Seal from the dungeon at the start of the game.
Do this after getting Heater Shield and Reduvia as you need to kill a knight.

Get Albinauric Mask and wear it with pride.
You get this from Volcano Manor, which can be tedious.
Get Dirty Chainmail around Academy Gate Town from the mobs that have a chain mail.
Do a few Volcano Manor invasion quests to get some options for hands and feet.

Do the Varré questline in Liurnia after killing Godrick to access Mohgwyn Palace.
You can also use the Bandit bow to farm souls in here.
South of the place where you teleport by shooting the birds.

Spells:
* Lightning Spear: Kill the knight south of Liuria Artist Shack and give to the turtle.
* Swarm of Flies: Found on a corpse along the east wall of the Mohgwyn Palace marsh,
                  directly north from the Palace Approach Ledge-Road Site of Grace.
* The Flame of Frenzy: Callu Baptismal Church in the Weeping Peninsula.

Optionally kill Rennala to get 3rd talisman slot.

Close combat: Swarm of Flies > The Flame of Frenzy > Reduvia weapon skill
Ranged combat: Lightning Spear
Out-of-FP: Reduvia + Heater Shield

You should invade places where people would go _after_ killing Godrick the Grafted.
Sellia Crystal Tunnel and Smoldering Church are fun places to invade.
Anywhere in Liurnia and Caelid work too.