100 Elden Ring Tips, Tricks & Hidden Mechanics

Here is a list of 100 tips to help you get started in Elden Ring if you are a beginner player

100 Elden Ring Tips

1. One of the biggest reasons you will be killed in this game is panic rolling. if you time your rolls to exactly when the enemy attacks you are far more likely to survive.
2. If you prefer to block attacks a shield a shield with parry can work great
3. If you dont like scrolling through summons, and usable items especially during a boss fight to reach your flasks. You can equip up to 4 items in your pouch to quickly use them.
4. If you haven’t discovered it yet the location of maps are already marked on the map for you.
5. On the map you can mark sites of grace, useful for keeping track of caves, mines and catacombs you have already searched.
6. Another very useful tip for caves and mines etc. If you go there and it wont let you fast travel, because there is a red line through all the grace points. It means you have not yet beat the main boss inside.
7. If you want to move quicker through rot or lava, try jump backwards, it goes quicker. you can also use a weapon with quickstep ash of war or bloodhound step.
8. Always send your elevator back down after using, so if you die, you dont need to wait for it to come back down.
9. When using spells, be careful of the weather, fire will do 10% less damage in the rain, while lighting spells will do 10% more.
10. Get your horse torrent as soon as possible. When you enter Limgrave run straight to the gate front point of grace.
11. You should always spend runes if you can level up, just incase you lose them, i once lost 300,000 climbing down the side of a cliff, respawning and accidentally jumping backwards.
12. If you have runes that you lost in a boss fight and you want them back but cant defeat the boss. Go into the boss fight collect your runes, and quit. You will respawn back outside the room with your runes.
13. Going to roundtable hold, instead of moving your curser all the way to the big circle. Quickly hit site of grace, roundtable hold, and confirm, it takes less than one second.
14. Dont want to spend time consuming your golden runes, you can quickly sell them for the exact same amount, saving you time.
15. When talking to new NPCs always exhaust all of there dialogue, dont stop talking to them until they start repeating the same line over and over.
16. On that note you should also speak every NPC you come across. Some NPCs will require you to reset the area by sitting at a site of grace before giving you new dialogue options.
17. If you accidentally hit and NPCs and they are now hostile towards you, you can absolve your sins at the church of vows to get them back to being friendly.
18. Most NPCs in the game can be killed, if you do kill them, then any questlines they have will stop there and then and cant be completed.
19. Sometimes its easier to run away from an enemy attack than to dodge or parry, especially if you want to keep a distance.
20. Keep a shield with 100% damage negation on you, its handy for super tough boss fights, especially ones where avoiding attacks is really tough, like against this guy who uses a whip or if you come across fast attacking enemies that can stagger like dogs and rats.
21. Jumping attacks and heavy attacks do disproportionate poise damage and are very useful for stance breaking bosses and enemies.
22. Charged heavy attacks can stagger your enemies, allowing you to deal easy damage
23. Slower enemies can very easily be backstabbed, use a regular attack when behind them.
24. Ashes of War allows you to alter your weapon drastically like making a wakizashi with lightning damage.
25. You can change the attribute scaling for most regular weapons, currently this sword does lightning damage and it scales, with strength or dexterity, so when i level up my strength or dexterity attribute, the weapon will gain a small increase in damage. However if I equip the sacred affinity, it changes to doing holy damage but it can also now increase in damage if I level up my faith attribute.
26. Heavy attacks with some weapons or parrying against enemies in horseback is a great way to deal with them.
27. You can respec your character after defeating Renalla, but you can only do it with a larval tear which are limited.
28. When levelling up, you should put stats mainly into three things, vigor, stamina and one other attacking stat and for me its intelligence. If you find you run out of FP you can increase mind a little bit or if a spell requires a little but of faith then increase it but try to stick to the three main stats until you reach the soft caps.
29. Soft caps, are levels at which the amount gained from levelling that stat decreases. For example Vigor has a soft cap of 40 at which point levelling up vigor past 40 will add less to your Hp, then the same thing happens at 60. Once you level up vigor past 60 the amount of HP gained is really no longer worth increasing the stat anymore.
30. Keep that in mind when equipping talismans, the final soft cap for intelligence is 80 and the Marika’s Sorseal talisman adds 5 to your intelligence so I have only raised my intelligence to 75.
31. If you dont know what a stat does when levelling up you can press help and then explanation to see.
32. When out exploring two of the most useful talismans you can equip are the gold and silver scarabs. One gives you a 20% increase in runes from enemies, which is huge. The other increases your discovery by 40%, thats the stat that increases item drops from enemies.
33. You can slimb ladders faster with the sprint button, or slide down them with the sprint button
34. Upgrading your weapons does more for your damage than levelling stats. Early game levels should be used to meet the base requirements for weapons and runes should be used levelling Vigor and Endurance.
35. Roll into attacks, not away from them as much as possible. Rolling into them almost always puts you in a better position to avoid the follow up attacks. This clip shows that perfectly
36. The best way to level up is to explore and kill things as you go, if you try to head through the story outright you will find it near impossible as a new player with most not beating the game until there close to level 140 or above.
37. These creepy statues point towards catacombs on the map
38. These red circles are undiscovered caves
39. One of the easiest ways to get smithing stones and other upgrade materials is to find the bell bearing and give it to the twin husks, that way you can simply buy them.
40. Also killing any NPC who sells you things will drop a bell bearing that can be given to the husks, who will sell you those same things. If you wanted to you could kill every vendor in the game and take there bell bearings so that the twin husks is the only vendor you need to visit.
41. If you dont want to use a torch as one of your pieces of equipment, buy a lantern which is a reusable item instead to light your way.
42. Get a useful spirit summon. Some are extremely good and you can just back and relax while they do the work for a change.
43. Always be on the look out for these trees that have golden seeds and churches of Marika that have scared tears, which allow you to add flask charges and increase amount replenishes. Once of the easiest ways to improve your survivability is to improve your flasks.
44. Find the wondrous physik flask and tears in order to make one charge flask that can do many different things, like full damage negation, no FP consumption for 10 seconds, boss stamina and many more.
45. Use Rainbow stones to see if you will die jumping of an edge, if it breaks you will die
46. Every demi god enemy in game drops a great runes, there different ones. However they need to be activated at one of the six divine towers, then equipped at a site of grace and finally the effect only takes place after consuming a Rune Arc, but it can be worth it. Like this one temporarily boosts all stat attributes by 10.
47. You can sort your inventory, on console click the left stick
48. There’s no best way to play the game, no class is far better than the other its whatever feels natural to you. One class will struggle with something another class finds easy, it all balances out.
49. At some point you will have to farm runes to level up, however, dont spend longer than you need to, if you can kill the next boss on your list, thats all you need, leave long farming until you reach areas near the end game where you can get a million runes an hour.
50. You can use the mimics viel to sneak past objects
51. Pressing the strong attack after blocking allows you to do a swift counterattack with your weapon in hand.
52. Holding the up directional button will change your spell to the first slotted spell.
53. Similarly, holding down will change your item to the first slotted item.
54. Locking on works well as a method to discover enemies lying in wait.
55. Glowing Skulls break them on Torrent to get free golden rune
56. An enemy with glowing yellow eyes will drop more runes usually 4-5 times more
57. They yellow markers on the map point you in a direction you should be going
58. Don’t always listen to the NPCs and what they tell you, some are out for themselves and can even ruin other quests, so make sure you talk to all the NPCs you can and if it seems like you shouldn’t do something then dont.
59. When on your horse you can swap to your second weapon, useful if you need a torch when on your horse for example. Press y on xbox and then LB or Triangle and L1
60. summon torrent to avoid being hit, these are called iframes, essentially the frames of an animation in which you are invincible.
61. Horse Jumps let you reach some high places, but they also work in reverse and let you jump down from high places
62. Hold heavy attack on your horse to drag your weapon along the ground to hit multiple enemies as you go
63. Redirect your jumps on torrent to reach new areas
64. It’s possible to avoid certain attacks using emotes
65. Enemy attacks are far more likely to bounce of a Greatshield making them great for counter attacking.
66. White souls fly out of enemies that drop an item, making it quicker to farm items from enemies
67. An enemy with glowing red eyes will drop more aggressive and tougher to beat
68. If you get trapped in any grab attack by an enemy keep pressing the triggers to get released from the attack early.
69. When you enter poison or rot, your meter increases when in it and decreases when you leave it, however if you roll in it you get covered and your poison or rot meter continues to rise.
70. The Merchant in Caelid will sell Preserving Boluses, an item that removes and prevents rot build-up. Also great for bosses that deal rot damage.
71. Enemies after a certain amount of hits can break there stance, where they drop down allowing you to hit them. However what is not shown is that they have a stance break meter that decays over time, so multiple quick heavy attacks are far more likely to break an enemies stance, like this giant here.
72. You can switch any one handed weapon to become two handed dealing only heavy attacks, this is great against enemies that use shields to prevent your sword bouncing off them.
73. Combo attacks deal more damage, so try to get successive hits on an enemy, every successive hit on this crab deal 2 extra damage.
74. Don’t have enough strength to wield a weapon, well two handing the weapon increases your strength, allowing you to equip a weapon you couldn’t previously use.
75. Thrusting swords can still be used when your shield is up
76. You can trick enemies into attacking each other
77. You can use arrows and other throwables to distract enemies and sneak past or sneak attack them.
78. The same works with any noise you make with a weapon, allowing you to ambush tough enemies.
79. You can punch kick and heal while on a ladder
80. Lightning attacks have splash damage while in water
81. Jump to avoid low sweeping and ground attacks, also you can jump normally when your equipment load is heavy, so a great replacement for regular dodge when over encumbered.
82. Every weapon has a quick sneak attack, it comes in handy if you want to quickly hit an enemy before they attack you, quickly hit crouch and regular attack to perform.
83. You can jump or roll to stagger some enemies
84. You can quick attack with your bow while rolling and jumping
85. you can set enemies on fire and even blow some up
86. Lower your shield to let your stamina recover faster
87. Two handed shields are a good way to avoid taking much damage against an enemy
88. Attacking near a ledge will let you know if you can survive jumping off it as the game wont let you fall off an edge thats too high while attacking.
89. when sprinting quickly tap crouch to recover a large portion of stamina
90. Double Drink flasks for faster recovery
91. Equip a shield with no skill, or find the ash of war no skill, skill and apply it to your favourite shield to remove its skill. This allows you to have a shield while being able to use your weapons skill.
92. Skelton’s need to be hit when there down to be killed, but the cool thing is this also applies to skeleton summons, they will keep returning if not finish off.
93. Switching to the shield while on your horse and pressing the heavy attack but not fully following through with it allows you hold up your shield on horseback blocking forward facing damage.
94. Some tough enemies only come out at night, so be careful when travelling after sundown.
95. Your horse wont take damage while travelling through poison or rot
96. Be on the look out for enemies carrying a chest, they drop decent golden runes
97. When choosing an armor, dont just look at stats, switch the display to look for hidden properties, like healing, damage buffs and more, especially on head pieces.
98. One of the first things you should do is help Roderika, to so you can get the ability to upgrade your spirit ashes.
99. You can change your appearance at anytime at roundtable hold, you can even switch between male and female and save characters to switch between them as you please.
100. Everyone loves a free hug from Fia, but doing so gives you baldachins blessing, and while it just sits in your inventory it reduces your health by almost 100.