How Poise Works In Elden Ring’s Combat (Compared To In Dark Souls)

The gameplay of Elden Ring, an RPG about undying Tarnished journeying through the war-torn Lands Between in search of the fabled Elden Ring, draws heavy inspiration from previous FromSoftware RPGs such as Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, but Poise works a little differently. The combat system of Elden Ring blends the weapon arts of Dark Souls 3 with classic Dark Souls mechanics such as the Poise system. Going by gameplay footage and play-tester experimentation, Elden Ring‘s Poise system is designed to reward players for creating heavily armored, high-Endurance characters while also not being quite as exploitable as Poise was in the first Dark Souls game.

Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls series, the newly released Elden Ring, and other RPGs designed by FromSoftware each take place in distinct fantasy worlds, but share the same core premises. The protagonists of these Souls RPGs are typically underdogs frequently overwhelmed by the powerful enemies they encounter, but blessed with the ability to resurrect from each death, adapt, and overcome. Though Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and other Soulslikes have a reputation for being brutally difficult, these games have a number of tools that players can exploit in order to even the odds and make things less daunting – attribute upgrades, new gear and spells, the ability to summon other players, and exploitable game features such as Poise.

The first Dark Souls game introduced a mechanic called Poise – a property of armor that lets Dark Souls PCs absorb a certain level of damage without getting staggered – as an incentive for players to create characters with the height Endurance score need to wear heavy armor without fast-rolling. The combat systems of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Soul 3 wound up changing the functionality of Poise in order to make it less potentially game-breaking. But the combat system of Elden Ring seems to have a Poise mechanic almost, though not quite as strong, as Poise in the original Dark Souls.

High-Poise, Fast-Rolling Characters Were Ideal For Dark Souls PvP

Professional gamers and online commentators have sometimes compared the Poise attribute of armor in Dark Souls to an invisible, slowing generating shield. This invisible Poise shield shrinks whenever a Dark Souls PC takes damage from an enemy attack, and player characters only get staggered by attacks when their Poise is depleted. Furthermore, heavy suits of armor such as the Havel’s Armor Set grant PCs more Poise. Theoretically, Dark Souls players were supposed to choose between creating heavily-armored characters with high Poise and low mobility or making lightly-armored characters with low Poise but a fast-rolling animation for dodging attacks.

In practice, however, many Dark Souls players tried to create High-Endurance character builds capable of wearing the heaviest armor sets and swiftly rolling across the level (with the GiantDad Dark Souls build being the most infamous example of this kind of min-maxing). In response to these over-powered builds, developers at FromSoftware reduced the potency of Poise in Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 in favor of Super-Armor mechanics where players with heavy weapons couldn’t be interrupted in the middle of a swing.

Elden Ring Combines Dark Souls’ Poise With DS3’s Hyper Armor

As the newest iteration of FromSoftware’s signature dark fantasy RPGs, Elden Ring brings back gameplay features from Dark Souls, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and other previous Soulslikes while also refining classic combat mechanics such as Poise and Hyper Armor. Playtesters and video gamers, while pouring over the game’s various character build options, discovered an Elden Ring Poise gameplay mechanic very similar to Poise in Dark Souls – an invisible shield that protects players from being stunned and gets depleted when players are struck by attacks.

Attacks from mundane Elden Ring weapons such as longswords generally deal 50 Poise damage in addition to their health damage, meaning players must increase their character’s Poise above 50 if they want to tank most enemy attacks without being staggered. At first glance, this makes Poise in Elden Ring a lot weaker than in Dark Souls. However, certain Talismans, heavy weapons with Super-Armor attacks, and Ash Of War skills such as Wild Strikes grant invisible bonuses to Poise, giving clever players the ability to make Poise-focused characters in Elden Ring that are powerful, but not quite as powerful as they were in Dark Souls.

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