What's more important, armor or vigor?

[Insane Scientist]

Haven't played Dark Souls 1 in quite a while since I mainly play Dark Souls 3 but I want to get back into this one. A few questions for the veterans so I can better plan my build. In Dark Souls 3 armor is barely important and vigor is far more important for survivability and good defense.

I seem to remember in Dark Souls 1 because armor could be upgraded it made a huge difference and if you had fully upgraded armor you could tank lots of things. I like to make my builds viable for both PvE and PvP, so in Dark Souls 1 can I get away with investing fewer stats in vigor if I'm wearing lots of good armor or is it still very important to have a high vigor like in Dark Souls 3?

[Groen90]

Well running around with low HP is always a bad idea, but armor does help quite a bit here.

[Insane Scientist]

Originally posted by Groen90:

Well running around with low HP is always a bad idea, but armor does help quite a bit here.

How low is considered still viable in Dark Souls 1 if you want to do PvP? In Dark Souls 3 27 vigor is the absolute minimum any build would use, most people go for 40. Is 20 to 30 vigor viable in this game?

[Bullett00th]

I invested 10 points into vitality (same as vigor I presume?) so I only had 20 by the end of the game, which some may consider way too little.

Most of the game I've spent in Hard Leather set +5 and switched to Black Iron set +5 closer to endgame after having enough Endurance to avoid fatrolling (with Havel's ring). It does require quite a bit of END if you really want that, but you can live with fatrolling if you have high poise and good def.

Do keep in mind that I was concentrating on PVE, this is likely a terrible setup for PVP.

[nomoreblues]

PVP not pure mage > vit 40 at least, up to 50 is reasonable for sl125, so in general just always lvl along
weapon upgrade > armour upgrade

[MaenaZ]

Dark Souls 1 has different statistics than 3.

Leveling up itself boosts your physical / elemental defenses. There's a separate stat that boosts resistances, called Resistance appropriately, but *nobody invests in that unless they're playing an overleveled character and are not interested in PVP*.

In place of vigor, vitality, and endurance of 3 you now have vitality, resistance, and endurance. Endurance is equip load AND stamina, vitality is HP.

How much you invest in endurance and vitality depends solely on your playstyle and whether you prefer fast rolling, medium rolling, or being a tanky tank and fat roll. All of these playstyles are actually viable for PVE and to a lesser extent PVP (by the time you start seriously PVPing there's little reason to still be fat rolling. However, Greatshields and/or high poise are actually a lot of help against many enemies and bosses, since poise works completely differently than in the sequels). You only have two ring slots, but the rings themselves help with equip load more than they do in DS3.

In general, consider 20 in both vitality and endurance to be the barest minimum and upgrade from there depending on your playstyle, choice of weapons, and choice of armor. A lot of builds has these stats MUCH higher. 30 and 50 are considered 'soft caps'.

Level 120-125 is considered the 'meta' range for PVPing so if you plan on doing that remember to have a character that is summonable/can invade in that range. SL 60-100 is probably when you'll be finishing your first NG experience depending on how many souls you lose, how much you grind, how much you coop as a summoned phantom/PVP and win, and so on.