Smart Calculators SmartCalculators

Elden Ring Weapon AR Calculator

Calculate the exact attack rating of any Elden Ring armament at your Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith and Arcane. Real correction curves per weapon, one- and two-handed, every affinity ranked, and the AR your next attribute point actually buys.

Esta calculadora aún no está traducida al Español.

Te mostramos la versión en Inglés mientras trabajamos en la traducción.

Your build

STR

DEX

INT

FAI

ARC

Vigor, Mind and Endurance don't change attack rating.

One armament in depth: damage split, best affinity, and what your next attribute point buys.

Weapon

Popular armaments
Longsword
Uchigatana
Bloodhound's Fang
Greatsword
Moonveil
Rivers of Blood
Blasphemous Blade
Dark Moon Greatsword
Hand of Malenia
Milady
Lusat's Glintstone Staff
Erdtree Seal

Showing the first 80 of 480 matches — keep typing to narrow it down.

+

+0
+25

Total attack rating

452

▲85Lightning

Longsword · Standard · +25

Physical452

Lightning is the best affinity for this build: 537 AR (+85 vs Standard).

Two-handing adds +41 AR

Best affinity for these stats

Every affinity this armament can take, at your stats, this upgrade level and this grip.

AffinityTotal ARvs selectedDamage typesStatus
Lightning
Best
537+85Physical + Lightning—
Fire
525+73Physical + Fire—
Cold
507+55Physical + MagicFrostbite
Flame Art
491+39Physical + Fire—
Sacred
491+39Physical + Holy—
Magic
476+24Physical + Magic—
Quality
475+23Physical—
Standard
Selected
452—Physical—
Keen
444-8Physical—
Heavy
437-15Physical—
Poison
419-33PhysicalPoison
Blood
419-33PhysicalBlood loss
Occult
346-106Physical—
Changing affinity needs an Ash of War and the matching Whetblade.

Is another point worth it?

Where this armament's scaling curve slows down, and what your next point actually buys.

AttributeNowNext pointNext breakpointPoints neededAR gainedAvg AR/point to 99
Strength C (0.75)40+2 AR6020+41 AR1.41
Dexterity D (0.5)40+1 AR6020+27 AR0.92

Damage split

Damage typeBaseScalingTotal
Physical
269+183452
Total attack rating452

Each attribute's share of the scaling bonus at this upgrade level.

AttributeValueEffectiveCoefficientCurve %AR contributed
Strength4040C (0.75)54.5110
Dexterity4040D (0.5)54.573
Scaling bonus183
A letter is a bucket, not a ranking — always read the coefficient next to it.

Where the diminishing returns actually start for this armament.

Attack rating vs Strength186080You: 40 → 452 AR199535161

Attribute points invested · Total AR

Total attack rating at each value of Strength
StrengthTotal AR
1161
10365
20398
30426
40452
50475
60493
70508
80524
90529
99535

LevelTotal ARGain
+0159—
+1170+11
+2180+10
+3191+11
+4201+10
+5212+11
+6223+11
+7234+11
+8245+11
+9256+11
+10268+12
+11279+11
+12291+12
+13302+11
+14314+12
+15326+12
+16338+12
+17350+12
+18363+13
+19375+12
+20387+12
+21400+13
+22413+13
+23426+13
+24439+13
+25
Current
452+13

Weapon type
Straight Sword
Upgrade path
Smithing Stones, up to +25
Attribute requirements
STR 10 · DEX 10
Affinity
Can be changed with an Ash of War
Armament values are datamined from Elden Ring patch 1.16, including Shadow of the Erdtree.Parameter extraction adapted from the MIT-licensed elden-ring-weapon-calculator project.If this disagrees with your character screen, trust the character screen and tell us.

Elden Ring AR calculator. Attack rating for any armament at your stats.

An Elden Ring AR calculator works out an armament's attack rating from your Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith and Arcane. This one reads the game's own per-weapon scaling curves, ranks every affinity the armament can take at your build, and shows what your next attribute point buys.

What is attack rating (AR) in Elden Ring?

Attack rating is the attack-power number on your character screen: the total damage an armament can deliver before an enemy's defence is applied. The game shows it as two numbers, base plus bonus — the base comes from the weapon and its upgrade level, the bonus comes from your attributes running through that weapon's scaling. English-speaking players shortened "attack power" to "AR" years ago; the game itself never uses the abbreviation.
Reproducing that number outside the game means reading the same parameter tables the character screen reads: each armament's own correction curves, its reinforcement rates per upgrade level, and the separate row every affinity gets. Pick a weapon, an affinity and an upgrade level, type your five damage attributes, choose one-handed or two-handed, and you get the total attack rating split per damage type, the status buildup, and a ranking of every affinity that armament can legally take. The dataset covers 480 armaments — base game and Shadow of the Erdtree — across 3,216 armament-and-affinity combinations, 13 affinities, and both upgrade paths (+0 to +25 with Smithing Stones, +0 to +10 with Somber Smithing Stones), on patch 1.16.
The in-game menu cannot answer the question players actually have. It shows the attack rating of the build you already own, at the stats you already paid for. It cannot show you the Heavy version of a weapon you infused Keen three hours ago, it cannot show you what 60 Strength would look like before you burn a Larval Tear getting there, and it will not tell you that the affinity you picked is the third-best option for your spread. That gap is the whole reason a calculator exists.
The tool is built around three questions rather than one table. Single weapon takes one armament apart: the damage split per type, the status buildup, requirement warnings, a full affinity ranking, an "is another point worth it?" table with the AR your next point buys and where the next curve breakpoint sits, an attribute-contribution breakdown, an attack-rating-versus-attribute chart, and the AR at every upgrade level. Compare puts up to four armament, affinity and upgrade combinations side by side at the same build and names the winner. Find weapons ranks all 3,216 rows for your exact stats, with filters by category, affinity and "only armaments I can use", sorted by total AR, any single damage type, any status, or spell scaling.
One thing this calculator is unusually careful about is where the scaling curves bend. Elden Ring does not use one universal soft-cap table — it uses eleven separate correction curves, and which one applies depends on the damage type and on the affinity, not on the attribute. Standard-affinity physical damage bends at 18; Heavy, Keen and Occult bend at 20; Quality bends at 16 and then 58; magic, fire, lightning and holy bend at 20 and then 50, and then stop dead at 99.
Fextralife's Strength page gets the physical split right and says so plainly — 18 / 60 / 80 by default, 20 / 60 / 80 on heavy affinities, 16 / 60 / 80 on quality. Three widely-read guides flatten it into one table instead: zosygo publishes a single "20 / 55 / 80", and 55 appears in no curve the game ships; Game8 lists 60 and 80 with no first breakpoint at all; GameRant gives 16 / 60 / 80 for everything regardless of affinity.
Three things none of the four publishes, and all three are on this page. Quality's real middle stage is 58, not the 60 that even Fextralife rounds it to. Catalysts do not all share one curve, so there is no single staff-and-seal row to copy — Lusat's Glintstone Staff bends at 25 where the Academy Glintstone Staff bends at 18. And none of them marks the breakpoints on the specific armament you are holding, because that means reading a curve id off that weapon's own row, which is exactly what the calculator does before it draws the chart. The one caveat Fextralife does carry is that Strength-scaled elemental damage hard-caps at 99 effective; it matters enough that it is spelled out in the two-handing rule below.

How Elden Ring builds an attack rating, step by step

The whole system is one formula applied once per damage type, plus nine rules that decide what goes into it and what the number means. None of it is hidden — it is just spread across parameter tables nobody reads out loud.
The formula, per damage type. Physical, magic, fire, lightning and holy are each computed separately, at full precision:
exact(T)=base(T,L)×(1+∑A curveT(statA)×coefA(L))\text{exact}(T) = \text{base}(T, L) \times \left(1 + \sum_{A}\ \text{curve}_T\big(\text{stat}_A\big) \times \text{coef}_A(L) \right)
Here T is the damage type, L is the upgrade level, A runs over Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith and Arcane, coef is that attribute's scaling coefficient at that upgrade level, and curve is the percentage of the coefficient the game actually applies at your stat value.
The total floors the sum, not the parts. The floor sits on the outside, and it is applied exactly once:
AR=⌊∑Texact(T)⌋\text{AR} = \left\lfloor \sum_{T} \text{exact}(T) \right\rfloor
Each row you can see is truncated on its own for display, but the headline attack rating truncates the summed exact values a single time. On a split-damage armament that can put the total one point above the rows: an Erdtree Seal at +10 with 80 Faith reading 216 physical and 129 holy shows a total of 346, not the 345 those two numbers add to. This is the character screen's own arithmetic, not ours — a tool that floors each damage type and then adds under-reports split damage, and when our QA pass caught us doing exactly that it was wrong on 49 percent of every split-damage evaluation in the dataset. The calculator prints the same note under the damage-split table so the number never reads as a bug.
Base attack does not grow by a flat percentage per level. The rate comes out of the game's reinforcement table for that weapon's upgrade family, and it climbs by a constant step rather than a constant percentage. A Dagger's base physical attack is 74 at +0, 78.292 at +1 and 82.584 at +2 — the same +4.292 twice, so the base value itself travels in a straight line while the percentage gain per level shrinks. Scaling coefficients grow on their own separate, piecewise schedule — a Heavy Dagger's Strength coefficient changes slope at +11 and again at +21. Any tool that assumes "about two percent per level" drifts, and the drift is what the min-max crowd notices first.
Correction curves are where the soft caps live — and there are eleven of them. A curve maps a stat value to a percentage of the scaling coefficient that gets applied. It is defined by four segments between five breakpoints, and the middle three breakpoints are what the community calls soft caps. The real values, read from the game's own curve table — all eleven curves, grouped where several share breakpoints:
1. Physical damage on a Standard-affinity armament bends at 18, 60 and 80 — with exactly two exceptions in the entire dataset, the Club and the Curved Club, which bend at 20, 60 and 80.
2. Physical damage on Heavy, Keen and Occult bends at 20, 60 and 80.
3. Physical damage on Quality bends at 16, 58 and 80.
4. Magic, fire, lightning and holy damage bend at 20, 50 and 80 on most armaments — a minority of rows put an elemental bar on the physical curve instead, so read the curve off the armament.
5. Arcane's effect on status buildup bends at 25, 45 and 60 — with two exceptions, the Poisoned Hand and the Madding Hand, which bend at 25, 60 and 80.
6. Sorcery and incantation scaling on a group of ten staves and seals bends at 25, 60 and 80 — Lusat's Glintstone Staff, the Erdtree Seal, the Carian Regal Scepter. Eight of the ten read a single attribute; the Prince of Death's Staff and the Maternal Staff read two.
7. Sorcery and incantation scaling on the Glintstone Staff family and the plain seals bends at 18, 60 and 80 — the Academy Glintstone Staff, the Astrologer's Staff, the Finger Seal. All thirteen armaments on this curve read exactly one attribute, which makes it the largest uniformly single-stat group — curve 14's pair is the other one.
8. Seven more, all of which read more than one attribute, bend at 15, 30 and 43 — the Gelmir Glintstone Staff, the Clawmark Seal, the Golden Order Seal, the Dragon Communion Seal. Past 43 they are nearly flat, which is why a seal that reads several attributes wants moderate values in each rather than one tall one — and the Frenzied Flame Seal reads four.
9. The Demi-Human Queen's Staff and the Dryleaf Seal bend at 20, 40 and 80, and nothing else in the game uses that curve.
Three things follow. First, the ubiquitous "soft cap at 20, 55 and 80" is wrong on two of its three numbers for most weapons: the first breakpoint is 16, 18 or 20 depending on the affinity, and 55 appears in no curve at all. Second, physical and elemental curves genuinely differ at the second breakpoint — 60 for physical, 50 for elemental — so "Dexterity soft caps at 50" is true for a Lightning weapon's lightning damage and false for the same weapon's physical damage. The physical segments are also non-linear, convex from 1 to the first breakpoint and concave from there to 60, which is exactly why Strength "feels bad early and good late" while Intelligence feels the opposite. Third, catalysts do not even share a curve with each other: Lusat's Glintstone Staff and the Erdtree Seal slow down first at 25 Intelligence or Faith, while the Academy Glintstone Staff and the Finger Seal slow down at 18, and the Clawmark Seal is nearly done growing at 43. There is no such thing as "the catalyst curve" to look up — it has to be read off the individual staff or seal, which is what this tool does.
Two-handing multiplies Strength by 1.5, floored, with no ceiling at 99. At 99 Strength two-handed your effective Strength is 148, so investment above 66 raw keeps paying on physical damage — unlike earlier games in the series, there is no clamp back to 99. The elemental curve does stop, though: magic, fire, lightning and holy scaling runs out at 99 effective and is flat from there to 148. So on a Fire or Lightning weapon, every raw point of Strength above 66 lifts the physical half of the bar and adds nothing to the elemental half — the caveat Fextralife's Strength page publishes as a hard cap at 99. The physical curves keep climbing to 150 effective, which no build can reach. The formula is:
effective STR=⌊STR×1.5⌋\text{effective STR} = \left\lfloor \text{STR} \times 1.5 \right\rfloor
The multiplier is applied before the requirement check, so two-handing can satisfy a Strength requirement you do not otherwise meet. It never touches Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith or Arcane, and it never touches status buildup. Bows, light bows, greatbows and ballistae always count as two-handed because the game holds them that way; paired armaments never get the bonus at all, because they are dual-wielded rather than two-handed.
Not meeting a requirement is a flat multiplier, not "reduced scaling". Any damage type that draws on an attribute whose requirement you have not met loses all of its scaling and is multiplied by 0.60. It is one factor, applied per row, and multiple unmet requirements do not stack it. Status buildup is cut the same way — but only when the attribute you are short on is Arcane, because nothing else scales buildup, which almost nobody mentions: a Rivers of Blood at 19 Arcane — one point short of the 20 it asks for — shows 30 bleed where 20 Arcane would show 52 at +10. The canonical case is the Club: 103 base physical, 10 Strength required. At 9 Strength it reads 61 attack rating instead of the 103 base it would show with no scaling at all. Two-hand the same Club at 9 Strength and effective Strength becomes 13, the requirement clears, and the number jumps to 118. The penalty also fires on attributes the weapon barely uses: a Heavy Greatsword scales only with Strength but still asks for 12 Dexterity, and because physical damage is a Strength-and-Dexterity type, sitting at 10 Dexterity with 99 Strength two-handed costs more than two thirds of the weapon's attack rating for two points you would never otherwise spend.
A scaling letter is a display bucket, not a ranking. The letter is a band over the numeric coefficient: S starts at exactly 1.75, then A at 1.40, B at 0.90, C at 0.60, D at 0.25 and E at 0.01. Two weapons can both show B and differ by 0.49 in coefficient, and a B-scaling weapon with a high base attack routinely beats an S-scaling weapon with a low one, because the coefficient multiplies the base — it does not replace it. The calculator always prints the number next to the letter for this reason.
Arcane raises exactly four statuses. Blood loss, poison, sleep and madness scale with Arcane. Frostbite, scarlet rot and death blight never do — they come from the armament and its upgrade level and nothing you level changes them. Affinity-granted frostbite, poison and blood loss do grow with upgrade level; a weapon's native scarlet rot, sleep and madness values do not. And because the two-handed Strength bonus is a damage-only rule, two-handing a Blood Uchigatana raises its attack rating and leaves its bleed buildup untouched.
Split damage is not the same as more damage. The game checks each damage type against the enemy's own defence for that type, separately. An armament reading 265 physical plus 272 lightning for 537 total can land softer than one reading 475 physical, because the 537 is being audited twice by two defence values instead of once. Total AR is the right way to compare two weapons of the same damage profile and a misleading way to compare a split weapon against a pure one.
Somber and standard upgrade paths meet only at the top. Standard armaments go to +25, somber ones to +10, and the matching level is:
Lsomber=⌊(Lstandard+0.5)×1025⌋L_{\text{somber}} = \left\lfloor \left(L_{\text{standard}} + 0.5\right) \times \tfrac{10}{25} \right\rfloor
So +25 maps to +10 and +12 maps to +5. "Somber +10 equals standard +25" is true at the endpoint and only approximately true anywhere else, which matters when you are comparing a half-upgraded somber weapon against a half-upgraded standard one.

The real correction-curve breakpoints (Elden Ring's actual soft caps)

What the curve governs1st breakpoint2nd breakpoint3rd breakpoint
Physical damage on a Standard-affinity armament (except Club, Curved Club: 20/60/80)186080
Physical damage on Heavy, Keen or Occult206080
Physical damage on Quality165880
Magic, fire, lightning and holy damage205080
Arcane's effect on status buildup (except Poisoned Hand, Madding Hand: 25/60/80)254560
Spell scaling — Lusat's, Erdtree Seal, Carian Regal Scepter256080
Spell scaling — Academy, Astrologer's, Finger Seal186080
Spell scaling — the Gelmir Glintstone Staff, Clawmark Seal, Golden Order Seal and four more153043
Spell scaling — Demi-Human Queen's Staff, Dryleaf Seal204080

How to use the Elden Ring weapon AR calculator

Your build is entered once, above the tabs, and every tab reads from it. The page opens on a 40 Strength / 40 Dexterity / 10 Intelligence / 10 Faith / 10 Arcane spread with a Standard Longsword at +25, one-handed — a recognisable mid-game quality build with a weapon every player owns.
Enter your build once
1. Type your Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith and Arcane exactly as the character screen shows them. Vigor, Mind and Endurance are not asked for, because they cannot change attack rating.
2. Set the grip. Switching to two-handed shows your effective Strength beside the field — 40 becomes 60, 99 becomes 148 — and the delta the grip is worth in attack rating for the selected armament.
Single weapon — the depth pass
1. Search the armament by name, or take one of the popular picks. Search matches the in-game name and the English name, so a name copied out of a build guide resolves.
2. Pick the affinity. Only the affinities that armament can legally take are offered; unique and somber weapons show the field locked, because they cannot be infused.
3. Set the upgrade level. The slider stops at that armament's own ceiling — +25 on the standard path, +10 on the somber path, and disabled entirely for the handful of armaments that cannot be upgraded.
4. Read the headline attack rating, then the affinity ranking directly under it. That table is the answer to "which Whetblade should I use", and it is never hidden.
5. Open the "is another point worth it?" table before you spend a Larval Tear. It gives, per attribute, the AR your very next point buys, the next curve breakpoint, how many points away it is, the AR you gain by reaching it, and the average AR per point all the way to 99.
6. Check the damage split and the status buildup. If any requirement is unmet you get a warning naming the attribute, how many points short you are, which damage types are on ×0.60, and whether two-handing would fix it.
Compare — the A-or-B pass
1. Fill slot 1 and slot 2; add up to four. Each slot has its own armament, affinity and upgrade level, and they all share the build panel.
2. Read the winner line and the per-slot deltas. When the winner splits its damage across two or more types, the tool says so — a higher total is not automatically the harder hit.
Find weapons — the discovery pass
1. Set the upgrade level on the +0 to +25 scale. Somber armaments are mapped to their matching level automatically and labelled.
2. Narrow by weapon type and affinity, and leave "only armaments I can use" on unless you specifically want to see penalised rows.
3. Sort by total AR, or by a single damage type when you are hunting pure physical, or by a status when you are building for bleed, frostbite or poison, or by spell scaling when you are picking a staff or a seal.
4. Click any row to load it into the single-weapon tab and take it apart.
Everything recalculates as you type, and the build and slot selections live in the URL — so a comparison you want to argue about in a Discord or a forum thread can be pasted as a link that reopens exactly as you left it.

Worked examples on the calculator's own numbers

Which affinity should I put on my Longsword at 40/40?

A Longsword at +25 on a 40 Strength / 40 Dexterity / 10 Intelligence / 10 Faith / 10 Arcane build, one-handed, reads 452 attack rating on Standard. Rank all thirteen affinities it can take and the order is Lightning 537, Fire 525, Cold 507, Flame Art 491 and Sacred 491 tied, Magic 476, Quality 475, Standard 452, Keen 444, Heavy 437, Blood 419, Poison 419, Occult 346. Lightning is +85 over Standard, Fire +73, Cold +55, and the two 491s +39 each. Note where Quality lands: 475, seventh on the list, one point behind Magic and 62 behind Lightning, despite being the affinity built for exactly this stat spread. That is not a bug — Quality lowers base attack in exchange for balanced Strength and Dexterity coefficients, and at 40/40 that trade is worth less than bolting a whole second damage type on. The two affinities named after the build (Heavy 437, Keen 444) come in below plain Standard, because each one raises one attribute's coefficient while cutting base attack and the other attribute's coefficient — a bad deal when you have both stats at 40.

But the Quality Longsword often kills faster than the Lightning one

Same build, same weapon. The Lightning version's 537 is 265 physical plus 272 lightning. The Quality version's 475 is 475 physical, full stop. Because the game checks each damage type against its own defence value separately, the Lightning weapon gets audited twice on two smaller numbers while the Quality weapon gets audited once on one big one. Against an enemy with even resistance the split loses ground; against one that shrugs off lightning it loses badly. Total attack rating ranks these two correctly against each other only if you already know the target's resistances. This is the single most common reason a player says "the calculator said this was better and it isn't" — the calculator said it had a higher attack rating, which is a different claim.

Is one more point of Strength worth it? Heavy Greatsword, two-handed

A Heavy Greatsword at +25, two-handed, at 40 Strength. Two-handing puts effective Strength at 60 — sitting exactly on the Heavy curve's second breakpoint. The next single raw point buys 4.00 attack rating. The next breakpoint on that curve is effective 80, which you reach at 54 raw Strength (effective 81): 14 points for +81 AR, about 5.8 per point, better than the 4.00 you would get for the very next one. Averaged all the way from 40 to 99 you get 3.08 AR per point. And the grip itself is worth 92 AR at this build — almost exactly what twenty raw points of Strength buy, since 40 to 60 is worth 94 — except the grip costs nothing, which is the real lesson: before you spend runes on Strength, check whether you have simply been holding the weapon in one hand. For reference, at 60 Strength two-handed the same Heavy Greatsword reads 839 AR against 759 for the Standard version at 12 Dexterity, so the Heavy infusion is worth 80 AR there, and a heavy Giant-Crusher on the same build reads 911.

Why is my damage so low? The Club at 9 Strength

A Club at +0 has 103 base physical attack and asks for 10 Strength. At 9 Strength the calculator shows 61 attack rating — below the raw base, because unmet requirements strip every point of scaling and then multiply what is left by 0.60. Switch to two-handed and effective Strength becomes floor(9 × 1.5) = 13, the requirement clears, scaling comes back, and the same weapon at the same character level reads 118. That is a 93 percent jump from changing nothing but the grip. If your weapon's number looks absurdly low, this is almost always why, and the fix is usually free.

Keen or Blood on my Uchigatana? A 16/60 dexterity build

At 16 Strength / 60 Dexterity, a Keen Uchigatana at +25 reads 543 attack rating with 45 bleed buildup — that 45 is the katana's innate bleed, which Keen does not touch. Move 35 points into Arcane so the build is 16/60 with 45 Arcane, and a Blood Uchigatana at +25 reads 494 attack rating with 108 bleed. You trade 49 attack rating for 63 bleed buildup per hit, and 45 Arcane is not an arbitrary number — it is the second breakpoint of the Arcane status curve, where the curve has climbed from 10 percent of the coefficient to 75 percent. Below 25 Arcane, Blood infusions barely notice your Arcane at all; the community's "45 Arcane for bleed" rule is that curve, not folklore.

The highest attack ratings at a 40/40 build

Rank all 3,216 armament-and-affinity rows at +25 for a 40 Strength / 40 Dexterity / 10 Intelligence / 10 Faith / 10 Arcane build, one-handed, hiding anything the build cannot wield, and the top of the table is Duelist Greataxe / Lightning at 816, Greatsword / Lightning at 805, Duelist Greataxe / Fire at 797, Dragon Greatclaw at 795 (a somber armament, so it is sitting at its own +10), Golem's Halberd / Lightning at 790, Greatsword / Fire at 787, Rotten Greataxe / Lightning at 781 and Golem's Halberd / Fire at 772. Seven of the top eight are Lightning or Fire, and that is the split-damage effect showing up as a leaderboard artefact: colossal weapons have enormous base attack, and an elemental infusion adds a whole second damage bar on top of it. Sort the same table by physical damage only and the order changes completely. Both sorts are useful; they answer different questions.

Bleed at 45 Arcane — where the ceiling actually is

Sort every Blood-affinity row by bleed buildup at 20 Strength / 40 Dexterity / 45 Arcane, +25, one-handed, and 159 is the number the top rows converge on: Lordsworn's Shield at 159 bleed and 312 AR, Spiked Palisade Shield at 159 and 364, Wooden Greatshield at 159 and 299, and a Zweihander at 159 bleed with 576 attack rating. Banished Knight's Greatsword follows at 132 bleed and 539 AR. The 159 bleed ceiling holds at any Strength and Dexterity because Arcane is the only attribute that touches buildup, but those AR figures are that specific 20/40/45 spread — change the melee stats and the bleed column stays put while the attack-rating column moves. The shields are a genuine result, not a glitch — bleed buildup is a property of the weapon-and-affinity row, and shield bashes carry it. But the practical pick is obvious once you see both columns: the Zweihander reaches the same 159 ceiling while carrying 576 attack rating, which is why "sort by status, then read the AR column" is the right way to use that tab.

Best staff and seal for 80 in your casting stat

Catalysts run through the same formula, but the headline output becomes a percentage instead of an attack rating. Lusat's Glintstone Staff at +10 with 80 Intelligence shows 413 percent sorcery scaling and 243 attack rating as a melee weapon. An Erdtree Seal at +10 with 80 Faith shows 353 percent incantation scaling, and 346 attack rating split as 216 physical plus 129 holy. Add those two rows and you get 345, one short of the 346 headline — that gap is correct, not a rounding error. The game truncates each damage row for display and truncates the summed exact values once for the total, so on any split-damage armament the visible parts can read one point under the total.
That percentage is what multiplies your spell's own damage, so comparing two staves is a straight comparison of two numbers. Both of these catalysts sit on the 25 / 60 / 80 curve, not the 18 / 60 / 80 one that covers the Academy and Astrologer's staves — read the curve off the armament, never off the category. Because 60 is that curve's second breakpoint rather than the 50 an infused sword's magic damage bends at, a point at 55 Intelligence is still adding about 1.1 percent of the coefficient on Lusat's while the same point on a Magic Longsword's magic bar adds 0.5 percent. Between 50 and 60, a casting stat is worth more than twice as much on these two catalysts as it is on a split weapon's elemental half.

A Shadow of the Erdtree weapon: Milady, Keen versus Standard

Milady at +25 on a 16 Strength / 60 Dexterity build reads 527 attack rating with a Keen affinity against 487 on Standard — 40 AR for one Whetblade and one Ash of War. That is a smaller gap than the 85 Lightning gives the Longsword at 40/40, and it is the honest shape of most infusion decisions on a single-stat build: the specialist physical affinities buy tens of AR, while the elemental ones buy more raw number and hand you a split-damage problem in exchange. Milady is also a useful sanity check that the DLC armaments are in the dataset with real values rather than approximated ones.

Build and respec tips that come out of the numbers

  • Check the grip before you spend runes. Two-handing multiplies Strength by 1.5 and it is free — on the Heavy Greatsword example above it is worth 92 attack rating, about what twenty raw points of Strength buy, and it costs nothing. If you fight with a shield out of habit, the cheapest damage upgrade available to you costs zero levels.
  • Read the affinity ranking before the Whetblade, not after. Affinity is not a modifier stacked on Standard — every affinity is its own row with its own base attack, its own coefficients and its own curves. That is why Occult drops a Longsword to 346 while Lightning lifts it to 537 on the same 40/40 build. Ranking all thirteen takes one glance and saves an Ash of War.
  • Aim at the breakpoint, not at a round number. Levels are only worth spending in the steep part of the curve. If you are at 44 Dexterity on an elemental weapon, the next breakpoint is 50 and the points to it are cheap; the ones from 50 to 80 are not. The "is another point worth it?" table gives you the AR per point at your exact value, which is a different number for every weapon and every affinity.
  • Two extra points in a stat you never use can be worth hundreds of AR. Requirements are checked against every attribute the weapon lists, not just the ones it scales with, and missing one puts the whole affected damage bar on ×0.60 with zero scaling. Clear every requirement first, then optimise. This is the single largest and most easily fixed error the calculator finds.
  • Compare split-damage weapons on their biggest bar, not on their total. If one candidate reads 265 physical plus 272 lightning and the other reads 475 physical, the totals say 537 to 475 and the fight often says the opposite. Use total AR to compare like with like, and sort the Find tab by a single damage type when you are choosing between a split weapon and a pure one.
  • Ignore the letter and read the coefficient. S starts at exactly 1.75 and A covers everything from 1.40 up to 1.7499, so two weapons showing the same letter can be meaningfully different, and a high-base B weapon out-damages a low-base S one constantly. The coefficient is printed next to the letter for exactly this reason.
  • For bleed, poison, sleep or madness builds, 45 Arcane is the number to reach and 60 is where it stops mattering much. The Arcane status curve bends at 25, 45 and 60: below 25 your Arcane is barely doing anything to buildup, between 25 and 45 it climbs from 10 percent to 75 percent of the coefficient, and after 60 it is nearly flat. For frostbite, scarlet rot and death blight, Arcane does nothing at all — spend those points elsewhere.
  • Judge a respec by the delta, not by the new number. Set up your current build, note the attack rating, then change the stats to the build you are considering and read the difference. If the swing is under about 30 AR you are trading a Larval Tear — 18 in the base game plus 9 more in the Land of Shadow — for a rounding error, and a Smithing Stone or a better Ash of War is almost certainly the cheaper upgrade.
  • Use the upgrade table to plan stones, not just stats. The AR-at-every-level table shows the gain from each individual Smithing Stone, and the curve is not flat — knowing whether +21 to +25 is worth the Smithing Stone [8]s and the single Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone you have banked is often a bigger decision than two attribute points.
  • Paste the URL into the thread. The build and every comparison slot are encoded in the address bar, so the artefact you post is a live calculator at your exact numbers rather than a screenshot somebody has to trust.

What this calculator deliberately does not model

Attack rating is one specific number, and being exact about it means refusing to fold in things that do not belong to it. Every exclusion below is a decision, not a gap.
Scadutree Blessing and Revered Spirit Ash Blessing. Both work only inside the Land of Shadow, and the Scadutree Blessing does change what your character screen says — the boosted stat is highlighted in yellow on the Status screen, and 20 levels of it reach as high as 2.05× attack. The Revered Spirit Ash Blessing strengthens your spirit summons and Torrent rather than your own armament. This calculator reports the un-blessed attack rating, because the blessing is a percentage laid on top of that number, it applies in one region only, and it depends on a level you would have to type in by hand. So inside the Land of Shadow your own screen reads higher than this page, and that difference is the blessing rather than an error — compare the two outside the Land of Shadow, or read our figure as the value the blessing multiplies.
Talismans, greases, Physick tears and buffs. Golden Vow, Flame Grant Me Strength, a Ritual Sword Talisman, a blood grease — all real, all applied as a separate layer on top of attack rating, and all governed by stacking rules that are easy to get subtly wrong. They also rarely change which weapon wins, because a percentage buff scales the whole ranking roughly evenly.
Motion values, enemy defence and actual damage per swing. A weapon's attack rating is multiplied by the motion value of the specific attack you throw, then reduced by the target's defence and negation for each damage type. Modelling that needs a per-attack motion-value table and an enemy dataset. The split-damage warning explains the consequence; the calculator does not compute the outcome.
Ashes of War skill damage and FP costs. Same reason as motion values: skills have their own multipliers and their own attack parameters.
Vigor, Mind and Endurance. They cannot change attack rating, so they are not inputs. Asking for eight attributes when five of them move the number is three pointless fields on a phone.
Guard boost, poise, stamina damage, weight and equip load. Real stats, not attack rating.
Elden Ring: Nightreign, and mods. Nightreign is a different game with different parameters and does not share this formula. Elden Ring Reforged, The Convergence and Clever's rewrite the weapon tables outright; players on those are already well served elsewhere.
Two smaller honesty notes. The physical damage subtype — Standard, Strike, Slash, Pierce — changes nothing about attack rating and only interacts with enemy resistances, so the calculator does not model it. And when a requirement is unmet the game also slows your attack animations, which is a real and painful effect that has nothing to do with the number, so the warning mentions it without pretending to measure it.

Elden Ring AR calculator — frequently asked questions

What does AR mean in Elden Ring?
AR stands for attack rating, the community's name for the attack-power number on your character screen. It is the total damage a weapon can deliver before enemy defence is applied, made of the weapon's base attack plus the bonus your attributes add through scaling. The game itself says "attack power".

How is attack rating calculated in Elden Ring?
For each damage type, attack rating equals the base attack at that upgrade level multiplied by one plus the sum, over every attribute, of that attribute's scaling coefficient times the percentage its correction curve applies at your stat value. Each damage row is truncated on its own for display, but the total truncates the summed exact values once — so on a split weapon the rows can add up one point short of the total, and that is correct. Two-handing multiplies Strength by 1.5 first, and any row with an unmet requirement instead gets a flat ×0.60 with no scaling.

What are the real soft caps in Elden Ring?
They depend on the affinity, not just the attribute. Standard-affinity physical damage bends at 18, 60 and 80. Heavy, Keen and Occult bend at 20, 60 and 80. Quality bends at 16, 58 and 80. Magic, fire, lightning and holy bend at 20, 50 and 80. Arcane's effect on status buildup bends at 25, 45 and 60.

Is the soft cap 55 or 60?
60, for physical damage. The number 55 does not appear as a breakpoint in any correction curve the game ships — guides copy it from each other, zosygo's table among them. Elemental damage genuinely does bend at 50, which is probably where the confusion started.

Does two-handing increase damage in Elden Ring?
Yes, if the weapon scales with Strength. Two-handing multiplies your Strength by 1.5 and rounds down, with no cap at 99 — so 99 Strength two-handed counts as 148. It also applies to the requirement check, which means two-handing can let you wield a weapon whose Strength requirement you do not meet, removing the ×0.60 penalty. It never affects Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith, Arcane or status buildup.

What happens if I don't meet a weapon's stat requirements?
Every damage type that draws on the unmet attribute loses all of its scaling and is multiplied by 0.60, and status buildup takes the same cut. It is one flat factor per row, and several unmet requirements do not stack it. A Club with 103 base physical drops to 61 attack rating at 9 Strength instead of the 10 it needs, and two-handing it restores 118. A Rivers of Blood at 19 Arcane shows 30 bleed where 20 Arcane would show 52 at +10.

Which affinity should I put on my weapon?
It depends on your exact stat spread, and it is rarely the one named after your build. On a 40 Strength / 40 Dexterity build a +25 Longsword reads 452 on Standard, 475 on Quality and 537 on Lightning — the affinity designed for balanced Strength and Dexterity comes seventh. Enter your stats, read the affinity ranking, and then sanity-check the winner against the split-damage caveat before you spend the Whetblade.

Does Arcane increase frostbite or scarlet rot buildup?
No. Arcane raises blood loss, poison, sleep and madness only. Frostbite, scarlet rot and death blight buildup come from the armament and its upgrade level, and no attribute changes them.

Why does my S-scaling weapon do less damage than a B-scaling one?
Because scaling multiplies base attack rather than replacing it. The letter is only a band over the numeric coefficient — S starts at 1.75, A covers 1.40 to 1.7499 — so a weapon with a big base and B scaling routinely out-damages one with a small base and S scaling. Always read the coefficient and the base together, which is why the calculator prints both.

Why doesn't this calculator ask for Vigor, Mind and Endurance?
Because they cannot change attack rating. Vigor is health, Mind is FP and Endurance is stamina and equip load — none of them appear anywhere in the attack-power formula. Adding them would be three fields that never move the result.

Does Scadutree Blessing change my attack rating?
Yes, inside the Land of Shadow. A Scadutree Blessing raises the attack power your character screen shows, with the boosted stat highlighted in yellow on the Status screen, and 20 levels of it reach as high as 2.05× attack. This calculator deliberately reports the un-blessed value, so a blessed player in the Land of Shadow sees a higher number than this page — that gap is the blessing, not an error. Outside the Land of Shadow the blessing does nothing and the two agree.

Is a somber +10 weapon the same as a standard +25?
At the top of both paths, effectively yes. In between, not quite: the matching level is floor((standard level + 0.5) × 10 ÷ 25), so +25 maps to +10 and +12 maps to +5, but the intermediate steps do not line up cleanly. The Find tab does this conversion for you and labels somber rows so you are never comparing a +25 standard weapon against a +25 that does not exist.

Does a higher attack rating always mean more damage?
No, and split damage is the usual reason. Each damage type is checked against the enemy's defence for that type separately, so a weapon reading 265 physical plus 272 lightning for 537 total can land softer than one reading 475 pure physical. Attack rating is a fair comparison between weapons with the same damage profile and a misleading one across profiles. Motion values, which the calculator does not model, matter too — a fast weapon with lower AR can out-damage a slow one with higher AR over a fight.

How accurate is this calculator compared to my character screen?
It reproduces the game's own parameter tables — per-weapon correction curves, per-upgrade-level reinforcement rates, per-affinity rows and the same flooring the character screen uses — for patch 1.16 including Shadow of the Erdtree. Where a community source and the game data disagree, the tool follows the data. Where the tool and your character screen disagree outside the Land of Shadow, the character screen is right and it is a bug on our side worth reporting — inside it, expect your screen to read higher by whatever your Scadutree Blessing is worth.

Is this Elden Ring weapon calculator free?
Yes. All three tabs — single weapon, compare and find weapons — run in your browser with no sign-up, no download and no account. Every result recalculates as you type, and the build is encoded in the URL so you can share a specific comparison as a link.

How do I decide whether a respec is worth the Larval Tear?
Enter your current build and note the attack rating, then change the stats to the build you are weighing and read the difference. There are 18 Larval Tears in the base game and 9 more in the Land of Shadow, so treat anything under roughly 30 AR as noise and look at a Smithing Stone, a different affinity or a different grip first — those cost less and often move the number more.

Elden Ring attack rating glossary

Attack rating (AR)

The attack-power number on the character screen: total damage an armament can deliver before enemy defence. Shown in-game as base plus bonus, where base comes from the weapon and its upgrade level and bonus comes from your attributes through scaling. "AR" is community shorthand; the game says "attack power".

Affinity

The damage-and-scaling profile applied to an armament with an Ash of War and the matching Whetblade — Standard, Heavy, Keen, Quality, Magic, Cold, Fire, Flame Art, Lightning, Sacred, Poison, Blood or Occult. Each affinity is a wholly separate set of values with its own base attack, coefficients, requirements and curves, not a modifier layered on Standard.

Correction curve

The function mapping a stat value to the percentage of a scaling coefficient the game actually applies. Elden Ring ships eleven of them, chosen per damage type per weapon-affinity row. Its middle breakpoints are what players call soft caps: 18 / 60 / 80 for Standard physical, 20 / 60 / 80 for Heavy, Keen and Occult, 16 / 58 / 80 for Quality, 20 / 50 / 80 for elemental.

Soft cap

A community term, not a game term, for a correction-curve breakpoint where the payoff per point drops. There is no single soft-cap table in Elden Ring — the value depends on the damage type and the affinity, which is why one weapon's Strength soft cap is 18 and another's is 20.

Scaling coefficient and scaling letter

The coefficient is the multiplier an attribute applies to base attack at a given upgrade level; the letter is a display band over it. S starts at exactly 1.75, then A at 1.40, B at 0.90, C at 0.60, D at 0.25 and E at 0.01. Because the coefficient multiplies base attack, a letter is never a ranking on its own.

Effective Strength

Your Strength after the two-handed multiplier: floor(Strength × 1.5). It is the only attribute that can exceed 99 — 99 Strength two-handed counts as 148 — and it is applied before the requirement check, so two-handing can clear a Strength requirement. Bows and ballistae always count as two-handed; paired armaments never get the bonus.

Requirement penalty

The flat ×0.60 multiplier applied to any damage type or status buildup that draws on an attribute whose requirement you have not met, together with the complete loss of scaling on that row. One factor per row, never stacked. It fires on attributes the weapon does not scale with but still requires, and it cuts bleed, poison, sleep and madness buildup as well as damage — a Rivers of Blood at 19 Arcane shows 30 bleed where 20 Arcane would show 52 at +10.

Split damage

An armament dealing two or more damage types. Each type is checked against the enemy's defence for that type separately, so a split weapon's higher total attack rating does not reliably beat a pure weapon's lower one. Total AR compares like with like; across damage profiles it needs a caveat.

Status buildup

The per-hit meter an armament fills for blood loss, frostbite, poison, scarlet rot, sleep, madness or death blight. Affinity-granted frostbite, poison and blood loss grow with upgrade level; native scarlet rot, sleep and madness do not. Arcane raises blood loss, poison, sleep and madness only, through a curve bending at 25, 45 and 60.

Spell scaling

The output a Glintstone Staff or Sacred Seal produces instead of a headline attack rating, shown as a percentage: the same scaling total expressed as 100 × (1 + scaling). Catalysts do not share one curve, so it has to be read per armament: Lusat's Glintstone Staff and the Erdtree Seal are on 25 / 60 / 80, the Academy Glintstone Staff and the Finger Seal on 18 / 60 / 80, multi-stat seals like the Clawmark and Golden Order on 15 / 30 / 43, and the Demi-Human Queen's Staff and Dryleaf Seal on 20 / 40 / 80. Lusat's at +10 with 80 Intelligence reads 413 percent; an Erdtree Seal at +10 with 80 Faith reads 353 percent.

Somber path

The upgrade track for unique armaments, running +0 to +10 on Somber Smithing Stones against +0 to +25 on ordinary Smithing Stones. The matching level is floor((standard level + 0.5) × 10 ÷ 25), so +25 maps to +10 and +12 to +5. Somber armaments cannot be infused with a different affinity.

Whetblade

The item that unlocks a family of affinities for Ashes of War — Iron for Heavy, Keen and Quality, Glintstone for Magic and Cold, Red-Hot for Fire and Flame Art, Sanctified for Lightning and Sacred, Black for Poison, Blood and Occult. Changing an affinity needs both an Ash of War and the matching Whetblade, which is why the affinity ranking is worth reading before you commit.

Contenido verificado por el equipo de Smart Calculators