By GARRETT BABB
Staff Writer
Anyone who is involved with the gaming community knows about FromSoftware’s latest massive success “Elden Ring” which as of now has sold over 12 million copies and counting. Many players who have never played a FromSoftware title or any of their souls-like games may have heard of the game’s incredible difficulty and variable stat system, so there are plenty of people wondering how they should build their character for a good success rate in their first run. One thing that I can recommend to any new player coming into the game is this – don’t miss out on the magic. By choosing not to use magic or put points into intelligence or faith you are blocking yourself out from enjoying what is easily one of the most fun parts of the entire game AND you’ll be making the game far more difficult because having the utility of magic makes life a lot easier for you. So that begs the question, what kind of magic should you use? In general, it depends on what you’re looking for, but in my opinion, Faith-based magic (incantations) are more useful and provide you with more utility whereas sorceries give you more dps (damage-per-second) options and higher dps in general. So if you wanna dish out massive amounts of magical damage then maybe sorceries are your bet, you can also get huge benefits by putting points into intelligence while using weapons that get damage boosts from intelligence. But here is my argument for why faith is the better choice, by putting your points into the faith you gain access to a higher variety of damage types allowing you to use lightning damage, holy damage, and fire damage along with having some decent physical damage type incantations as well. Not only that but faith incantations have a wide variety of buffs and enhancements that sorceries lack, such as buffs that increase your damage negation for certain damage types and increase your damage not to mention the healing spells that you get access to. Also, they have a better variety of really good weapons that stack with Faith, as most of the boss weapons in the do fire or holy damage which means that they will stack with faith. The biggest downside to faith magic in my opinion is the fact that you don’t get very good incantations when you’re early in the game, you’ll likely be stuck flinging around the same lackluster fireball for while until you get some better stuff whereas you get some fairly powerful and consistent sorceries right out the gate. But overall if you’re a new player looking into starting your first run, do yourself a favor and put some points in faith and make your life a whole lot earlier and way more fun.