The leveling system of an RPG is the basis on which the entirety of the game rests. The same is true for Lords of the Fallen, which sports a very normal and simple stat sheet for players to dump their Vigor (the souls in the game) into.
Though these stats are all useful in some way, they are slightly different from what you might first think. Putting your points into the correct stats from the start is important because these kinds of games usually make the player wait quite a bit before they can respec and fix their mistakes.
Endurance For Increased Stamina
The single most useful stat to level up at the start is Endurance. It increases your Stamina by a fair amount and increases the amount of weight you can handle, letting you wear heavier and better armor and use bulky weapons.
While other stats are situational and vary from class to class, Endurance is something you’ll want to level up no matter what kind of build you’re trying to create. Higher stamina will let you run further, deal more damage, block more attacks, and dodge as much as your heart desires.
Radiance / Inferno For Magic
If you’ve decided to go with a magic-wielding class, you will definitely want to spend some of your hard-earned vigor into either the Radiance or Inferno stat, depending on which route you want to go down. Even if you plan to go with Umbral magic (which requires you to spec into both of the magic domains) at the end, you should only focus on one or the other at the start since good Umbral catalysts/spells are hard to find and expensive to purchase.
Magic is a very powerful tool in Lords of the Fallen, so you might want to splurge and multi-class as a part-time mage if you’re a close-range build for some powerful long-range capabilities. Both Radiance and Inferno will give you extra mana to use spells, and they’ll enhance the damage output of their respective catalysts.
Vitality To Increase HP
As you might expect, Vitality increases the total HP of the player. It will also increase the amount of weight you can lift, making it quite useful for making tank builds. Unlike in a lot of other Soulslike games, Vitality plays a fairly important role in Lords of the Fallen.
Typically, you want to play in a way that encourages you to never get hit. The faster you kill the enemy, the better it is for your run. However, due to the loss of health — the withering mechanic — even on a perfect parry, you’ll want to have a decent-sized HP bar available lest you die trying to stagger the enemy.
Strength / Agility For Weapon Prerequisites
The least important of all the stats by far are the Strength and Agility stats. These two stats are just a stat barrier that stops you from using different weapons effectively. Both also give a boost to the physical damage of any weapon that depends on them, and they increase the Defense and Resistance Stats, with Strength giving a bigger boost to pure defense.
The damage of each weapon is dictated mostly by their own individual stats, and somewhat by their stat dependency, so don’t expect Strength to make your build an incredible damage dealer. Furthermore, Agility doesn’t actually make you faster; it only lets you use weapons that depend on Agility and boosts them. You only need to level up these stats to the point where you meet the requirement of your favorite weapon, and then you can forget about them altogether if you want.