Elden Ring provides its players with a sandbox to experiment with various playstyles. As was the case with previous From Software games, the physical damage side of the experience was very much preferred over the magic side for pure damage, and the leftover mentality from those games has seeped into the Elden Ring player base too.
Every fresh new player to this Soulsborne genre usually ends up going for either Strength or Dexterity builds, as it’s more accessible as opposed to the magic side. There are many variations in weapon variety and how you approach most combat situations in these two styles. Hence, it’s an important question to get an answer to before you begin your adventure.
Elden Ring has soft and hard caps for all the attributes/stats, so maximizing any of the stat levels to 99 is a waste, and one should figure out which levels bear the most fruit.
If you insist on wanting to know, and from what we have figured out from the tests we conducted, we can frivolously say that Dexterity at max level has better average damage output than Strength. We are doing great injustice just by trivializing the answer, as effectiveness relies on many factors.
Dexterity vs Strength
The different soft and hard caps are listed below, and the best you can do is upgrade the stat to the third soft cap cause after that, there are great diminishing returns.
| Strength | First Soft Cap: Level 20 Second Soft Cap: Level 55 Third Soft Cap: Level 80 Hard Cap: Level 99 |
| Dexterity | First Soft Cap: Level 20 Second Soft Cap: Level 55 Third Soft Cap: Level 80 Hard Cap: Level 99 |
Testing and Conclusion
In each of our testing, we upgraded the respective stat to the max level of 99 and kept the other stat at the base level the weapon required. We used the weapons seen below, where Keen affinity was chosen for the Dexterity weapon for exclusive stat scaling and Heavy affinity for the giant hammer for exclusive scaling, respectively.
These weapons were chosen as they get an “S” scaling in their particular stat once adequately upgraded, and with the affinity chosen, they will only be dealing damage of the stat in question. We used a bunch of moves like the basic R1 combo, R2 combos, and jump attacks on a selection of handpicked enemies to get the specific damage numbers.
We tried to keep things as non-biased as possible, and with that, we got a list of damage numbers for each attack type and the enemies targeted. Taking all the numbers and averaging them, we came up with these results:
- Dexterity= 1637
- Strength= 1560
Looking at the results, we can deduce that dexterity deals with higher damage overall in pure-stat testing. But it doesn’t work like that, as it depends on your type of gameplay the most. Strength weapons are better at breaking poise and deal more damage with single hefty swings; conversely, a dexterity weapon will be more nimble and deal more damage spread over multiple fast hits.
Strength weapons consume a lot of stamina and can exhaust you when you have to roll away, compromising your defensive actions. In contrast, dexterity weapons use lesser stamina and can help you dodge more. Strength builds can also wield great shields, adding to their defensive prowess.
And the most crucial thing to consider in all of this is that weapons have unique moveset and Ash of War that can change up the game quite a lot for the weapon; a case in point is Fallingstar Beast Jaw which has a devastating skill that can overcome any of its lacking in moves.