God of War Stats Guide
What They Do and How You Can Build Them
While God of War is hardly a game of min-maxing, knowing how the game's stats work and taking advantage of them can help you to tackle harder difficulties such as 'Give Me a Challenge' and 'Give Me God of War'. Not every stat is vital depending on your playstyle, such as Vitality and Luck, but having at least a bit of each will go a long way toward giving Kratos the boost you need to get through particularly challenging fights and boss battles.
Some stats are harder to test than others. Some stats, such as vitality, have easily testable components while something like Luck is very difficult to determine because of vague statements such as, 'Very high' and 'moderate' proc rates and how those interact with Luck. However I do think I can give you a good idea how most of these work after having spent significant time testing all of them.
Strength Stat
Summary of Strength
- Boosts physical damage - not runic attacks, but all fist, shield, and weapon attacks
- Enemies have defense - boost strength well beyond the enemy's defense (an unknown) to deal the full potential of your damage. Regular Draugr have low defense, but enemies like Travelers and Valkyries have much more.
- Doesn't Boost Atreus - Only his weapons, gear, and skills boost his damage.
Strength increases all physical damage. The way Defense works seems to apply for monsters as well, though we can't know the exact details due to a lack of damage numbers in the game. Higher strength lets you overcome enemy defense. Even with high Strength Kratos seems to suffer a ~20% damage handicap if the enemy is 3+ levels higher, in addition to any defense. That is, when you raise level but not strength you will do more damage but only when the enemy is 3 levels higher.
While you won't see a massive difference on smaller Draugr (going from 8 to 6 hits isn't all that significant) enemies with larger health pools such as Travelers will become noticeably easier to kill with regular attacks and axe throws the more you invest into strength. I noticed that even on Valkyrie fights another 30 strength helped my damage go from 6 14 strength per health segment at 100 strength to 10 hits per bar at 130 strength. Going ever higher will definitely help your DPS on tougher enemies and makes it more likely something with a high damage multiplier like Executioner's Cleave can one-shot Draugr.
The Strength stat does not seem to impact Atreus' damage in my testing. Only his individual perks and equipment can boost arrow damage. Nor does runic make his elemental powers stronger.
Runic Stat: Magical Damage and Runic Attacks
Summary of Runic
- Boosts Runic Attacks - Working similarly to strength, you need to outclass the enemy's defense stat with your runic to deal ever more damage.
- Boosts certain Skills like Permafrost and frost explosions - See Frost/burn listed as a damage type on a skill? This boosts it, every axe attack when charged with permafrost, as well as those skills that say 'explosion of frost' etc.
God of War's Runic stat boosts all forms of magical damage. Frost explosions from throwing the axe, extra elemental damage from your weapons, and of course runic attacks themselves. Special skills you purchase with experience will indicate they do extra elemental damage (for example all caps, 'FROST'). The runic stat governs the damage of those types of skills, along with frostburn that you inflict when your weapon powers up from consecutive hits with the permafrost skill. It looks like defense is relevant here as well. Since defense covers ALL forms of damage (the game lacks direct elemental damage resistance) having extremely low Runic will result in you not being able to overwhelm enemy defenses and deal the full damage of your runic attacks. The further your runic is from their defense, the more damage you'll do. At lower runic (relative to level, such as 80 runic vs 160 for a level 6+ Kratos) the extra damage from frostburn is negligible, while it really comes into its own when you have a much higher value. Great attacks like glaive storm will take chunks off even Travelers with high runic.
Defense Stat: Reducing Damage
Summary of Defense
- Enemy Attacks have armor piercing - They ignore the first x of Kratos' defense based upon the enemy's level. Once you meet the requirement you begin to see rapidly escalating damage reduction.
- Returns diminish on smaller attacks, but... - you're rewarded for larger defense on strong attacks from powerful monsters. A 75 damage skill can be reduced to single-digits!
Defense reduces all forms of damage Kratos will take, whether from fireballs or hammers to the face. I suspect enemies have this too and that you need a higher strength to do full damage. You want as much defense as you can get without handicapping yourself in damage output. Even if you're really good at evading you'll want some defense so that monsters do not do full damage. There is some kind of armor penetration at work in God of War. I like to make my characters tanky, because I make plenty of mistakes and get hit. I have horrible reflexes.
Attacks seem to have a base amount of defense that they will totally ignore. For anyone who's been one-shot from a realm tear encounter, this is why. It's not the level doing it - your level handicaps you in damage you deal not in that you take as far as I can tell. A level 5 poison caster I tested on would do 75 damage to me whether I had 22 defense or 50. When I got my defense up to 59 I started to see gradual damage reduction (he hit for 71). This let me do some tests to see if armor had diminishing returns. It does, but only if you consider weak mobs and not power attacks from stronger opponents like Valkyries and Travelers. Let's look at this in a table so we can also calculate how much life each defense saved. I'll divide the armor by the damage reduction, so Defense/(75-X). The higher this value is, the more work the armor did.
| Defense Kratos | Damage Taken Max 75 | Armor Efficiency Defense/(75-damage) | Hits to Die 220 life: 9 Apples 0 Vitality |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 75 | 0% | 3 hits |
| 55 | 75 | 0% | 3 hits |
| 59 | 70 | 8.47% | 3 hits |
| 61 | 65 | 16.39% | 3 hits |
| 65 | 56 | 29.23% | 4 hits |
| 71 | 42 | 46.48% | 5 hits |
| 80 | 35 | 50.00% | 6 hits |
| 91 | 28 | 51.65% | 8 hits |
| 99 | 23 | 52.53% | 10 hits |
| 111 | 18 | 51.35% | 12 hits |
| 117 | 16 | 50.43% | 14 hits |
| 127 | 14 | 48.03% | 16 hits |
| 137 | 13 | 45.26% | 17 hits |
| 161 | 10 | 40.37% | 22 hits |
| 169 | 8 | 39.64% | 28 hits |
Yes, it jumps by +24 toward the end but shows Defense still working. +24 for 3 less damage at that point. It was getting harder to get close-enough increments the higher I got my def (based on my Enchantment supply). I also got frustrated with the exercise knowing I needed to test other things.
Very Important Reminder About Defense: This data is based on a level 5 caster enemy typical of what you'd encounter in Muspelheim Trials. The armor efficiency is only good to see how it compared against this trash mob. We absolutely know that some monsters have a base damage over 220. I had at least 6 apples (so minimum 180 life) and still got one-shot by monsters from a Realm Tear. Therefore do not let this relatively weak ranged enemy's stats dictate how much Defense you give your Kratos.
You will clearly get great damage reduction from higher numbers, though it's worth realizing that at some point you should put more into offense to shorten fights. You might also go from being able to take 14 hits to 15 hits which is unimportant vs more damage. It is still very interesting to see that there's a minimum required defense before you get any damage reduction from your defense. All mid to late game armor has defense by default. Stacking a bit more via Enchantments may be a good idea depending how good you are at evading and parrying.
Vitality Stat: More HP
Summary of Vitality
- Roughly 1 HP per 2 Vitality - by far not a great amount.
- Outshined by Defense - particularly for stronger monsters' attacks.
- Reduces Stagger Animations - When Kratos is hit hard, having higher vitality may make him stagger less. Even 100 vit didn't stop me getting interrupted by weak draugr, so it's just staggers/burns/poison reactions.
- May be more important on Give Me God of War - though, I'd say most players would prefer more direct defense, offense or cooldown than points going into vitality.
Generally frowned upon because it is viewed so narrowly, Vitality may not be as bad as some people think but it's still no diamond in the rough. Vitality provides 1 HP per 2 Vitality. However it has an additional benefit that I think people are misreading. The in-game description states that it reduces the severity of hit reactions from damage Kratos takes. I've seen it mentioned this is part of defense, as in damage reduction, but I don't believe it's the case.
If you've ever been set on fire by a monster or taken a heavy blow, you've seen Kratos get staggered. He does a special animation for this, and he's vulnerable while it's happening. I think that there is a minimum vitality for strong attacks that will let you avoid a severe hit reaction, as in this longer animation before Kratos recovers. This would apply only to hits that stagger. Going up to 100 vitality and getting hit by trash mobs I was still interrupted.
Vitality and high def could certainly greatly increase your ability to stay in the fight, as the table for defense-alone shows above. However I'd go purely for the defense so that I could ensure the minimum for all powerful attacks is met. The table shows just how powerful defense can be all alone. Points on gear are balanced such that 1 Vitality = 1 Strength or Runic you could have had. You pick up a decent bit of extra vitality from Enchantments like Eye of the Realm that have balanced stats.
Luck Stat and How it Works
Summary of Luck
- Increases XP and Hacksilver gains - A very, very useful early-game stat
- The above is useless late game - however...
- Late game procs depend on it - Luck boosts the rate your 'moderate perk activation chance' and even 'low/high activation' will trigger. Very good for when you have multiple good effects that will trigger often in combat.
Luck in God of War increases amounts of hacksilver found as well as experience gained from combat and quests/favors you complete. However for combat purposes it also gives a boost to the rate at which enchantments and things like grips/hilts fire their special effects. I think it boosts the base percentage chance relatively, so maybe a 15% chance on a 5% is more like 5.75% or a 15% chance increase on 30% leads you to 34.5%. This seems about right, especially based on weapon attack procs and how often you see them activate. Getting it to go off at 5% is rather good when you swing 1x per second. 30% on an Executioner's cleave (base) seems about right.
What we don't know is how much luck you need to make these more reliable. I suspect there are diminishing returns at play though I cannot be sure. What is clear is a bit of luck can help tons if you have certain enchantments. It'd be better to go from low luck - 10-25 to mid-range luck (50+) and experience more nice effects like Blessing of Cooldown vs getting even more Cooldown when that stat has its diminishing returns.
Cooldown Stat and How it Works
Summary of Cooldown
- Reduces the cooldown of runic attacks - Your multiple runic attacks and Atreus' summon can all be used more often with Cooldown.
- Diminishing Returns - The first 50 cooldown is worth 2x the 2nd 50 and 3x the third 50. Insanely high numbers are a waste of good stats. Invest in runic instead.
The cooldown stat in God of War reduces the timer before you can use Runic Attacks and Summons. Cooldown reduction in God of War is non-linear and gives diminishing returns. The first 20 points in cooldown gives you about a .55% reduction each (around 12% total), taking a skill like The River of Knives from 60s to 53s. At 60 cooldown you are getting 0.44% reduction each, with those next 39 cooldown bringing it down to 44 seconds. So you get 7s cooldown from the first 20 and only 9 more for the next 40. With 100 cooldown you receive 0.36% reduction each, and at 165 (the highest I tested) cooldown reduction falls to about 0.27% each. Therefore, you may be better off finding a sweet spot. Something like 60-80 cooldown and using something that will trigger blessing of cooldown frequently based upon your playstyle (such as on block). This is good to know, as the four other great stats (strength, runic, defense, luck) all need more points. You get some luck and cooldown on the all-around Enchantments from later in the game (Tyr's, Eye) and can then use some strong +10-13 ones to bolster these lower stats.
Making a Build
See my Stats Tips for Making a Build for advice regarding the six stats and how you can make use of all this information.
If my guide helps you, share it with other God of War players so that people will know this site exists! There are dozens more pages to be made but it's more encouraging when people visit, so thanks for reading.
Other God of War Guides
God of War Tips - My Intro Page with loads of advice.
Using Stats to Make a Build
Atreus in Early to Mid Game - Making use of Atreus and upgrading his abilities.
Status Effects - Permafrost, Immolation, Shock, etc.
Niflheim (End Game Content) - Increase Mist Resistance.
