What Does Arcane Stat Do In Elden Ring: Effects Explained

Arcane is one of many Attribute scaling stats determining your character’s strengths and weaknesses in-game. It also influences your combat capabilities and the armor and weapons equipped and wielded, mainly when engaged in combat.

While it doesn't have significance compared to other Attributes like Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence, many weapons, Incantations, and a few Sorceries available require some Arcane to wield or cast. Keeping this in mind, this guide explains what Arcane is, how it affects your character, and everything else you'll need to know to survive The Lands Between in Elden Ring.

What Does The Arcane Stat Do In Elden Ring?

The Arcane stat primarily influences the Holy Defensive stat, meaning how well your character defends itself from Holy Damage Negation. Additionally, having a high Arcane stat allows you to find items more quickly, especially if enemies and bosses should drop them.

It also influences the efficacy of various Sorceries and Incantations by improving their power, damage output, and resistance to different status effects, which will be Death Blight. To increase your Arcane stats, you’ll need to spend Runes to add points to this specific Attribute which also can enhance its secondary stats like Holy Defensive stat and Vitality.

Increasing your Arcane stat increases the ability to discover new items more frequently by one point for every Arcane level reached. Improving your Holy Damage Negation varies between Arcane levels as you can gain +2 between Arcane levels 1 to 20 and +0.25 between Arcane levels 61 to 99.

The same can be applied to when Arcane improves your Vitality, which increases the chances of resisting Death Blight or Death Blight build-up. This, too, sees you gaining +1/+0.6/0.5/0.25 Vitality which depends on your Arcane level according to Fextralife.

Multiple weapons scale with Arcane, which has varying passive effects such as inflicting Hemorrhage (or Blood Loss), Madness, Poison, and Sleep build-up. Additionally, you can apply Arcane scaling on weapons without Affinities bound to them by using the Black Whetblade to add the Blood, Occult, or Poison enhancements.

Below, we’ve listed all weapons currently available that scale primarily with the Arcane stat in Elden Ring:

Like with the weapons, there are a few items that influence the Arcane stat by increasing its level and power once equipped, which we’ve listed all known items below:

Lastly, as previously mentioned, certain Sorceries and Incantations require a high Arcane level for you to cast. Only two Sorceries listed first* scale with Arcane as they generally scale with Intelligence and Dexterity for a handful of Sorceries.

And finally, to start you on your journey to mastering Arcane, the Bandit starting class has the best Arcane stats of 14 with a reasonably high Dexterity stat of 13. This can form the foundations of various niched Arcane/Dexterity builds based on status effects like Bleed/Blood Loss or Scarlet Rot or based on weapons like the Magic Archer build.