The following article was contributed by Stochastic with help from Cryptid Tracker and Narcolept.

Elden Ring Survivability

One of the major complaints I have seen in the last month or so of Elden Ring’s release is that things deal too much damage. “I got one shot through x vigor” is a rather common statement. The purpose of this article is to break down what is going on behind the scenes and help the reader make informed decisions. Health, at the end of the day, is an abstraction of how many and what types of mistakes can be made. A very simple example is this: If I have 901 health and each attack does 100 damage, how many mistakes can we make? The answer is 9. The next value of health that matters is 1001. Anything between 902-1000 still means death on the tenth hit. Depending on the encounter it might take multiple levels to reach the point where increasing health meaningfully helps us. The other side of the coin is defenses. Unfortunately, determining what our defenses do in Elden Ring is very unintuitive. The three factors that matter are attack rating(ATK), defense(DEF), and Negation (Neg). DEF comes from stats, whereas NEG comes from armor. There are a whopping 5 damage calculations that may or may not be relevant. For completeness, here is some code to compute the damage.

Okay, what is going on here? Let’s look at the very bottom first.

return int(damage * (100.0 - NEG) / 100)

Any damage taken is a percentage of the total value dependent on NEG. Now let’s zoom in on the other equation. We have some polynomial garbage multiplying ATK. The effect of that quadratic term is (mostly) to make sure that the functions meet at their transition points. We can simply average the values on each interval to simplify things.

The higher our DEF is, the less powerful the equation we interact with is. Notice that the more DEF gets exceeded, the higher the multiplier is on ATK. The biggest noticeable jump is when DEF and ATK are almost comparable. So we want a high DEF right? Well… we can’t. A max level character with 99 in every stat has a whopping 195 physical DEF. The scaling is also atrocious. A level one character starts off with 75 physical DEFand it takes 31 levels in strength to reach 100 physical DEF. In addition, only by raising particular stats can we increase DEF for the relevant damage type. So we dumped a lot of points into strength to raise our physical defenses? Well the boss is shooting lasers now. Too bad, so sad. In addition, the attacks that one or two shot are not going to be meaningfully impacted by DEF because of how low the cap is. Let’s sit down and really demonstrate how bad this is. Suppose we started as a wretch. We have 75 DEF and something(Tree Sentinel) is two shotting us. We have 414 health, so each attack must be doing at least 207 damage. Using our simplified calculations above, the attack rating is ballparked around 260. We would need to get to around 104 DEF not to get one shot. Negation is the only thing that matters. Let’s return to our original example. Our equation for hits to kill looks like:

901 / (100 * (100 - NEG) / 100 )

Now let’s look at the hits to kill on different NEG values

Notice that as our Neg increases, the rate of return on Hits To Kill increases greatly. Now, there is no free lunch as Neg is calculated in such a fashion that getting past around 50 is difficult without heavy investment in endurance. But, a relatively modest 20 endurance gives us 64.1 equip load. The chain mail set (average of 22~ physical NEG and purchasable at the start of the game) weighs 21 points, leaving a massive 23 points to use without Fat Rolling. For context, this lets us equip the iconic (and incredibly heavy) Greatsword and still have a medium roll. The takeaway should be this: consider endurance and armor counter-picking in tandem with leveling vigor to improve survivability.

Credits:

This is not a solo effort in the slightest and the datamining and data organization of CryptidTracker, Narcolept, and many others provided the foundation for this work.

-Stochastic