Dragon's Dogma: weight, vocations, and stat growth

Character creation advice: how do size and weight affect the game?
Character growth advice: how do stats change based on vocation (job class)?
Includes tables and a sample "job development" plan for balanced battle stats up to level 155 and beyond.

Character Creation: Gender, Size, and Weight

Here you will find THE TRUTH about size and weight of your Arisen (or Pawn) and how it affects gameplay.

GENDER

First of all, your choice of male or female has zero impact on the game. The only thing is, there are a few "special" armor and clothing sets that are gender-specific, and the female-only ones have slightly better defensive abilities. Also, if you are running through the mountains near the Greatwall (north and west from Gran Soren city) there is a fortress full of feminist bandits there who will attack men but will speak with and befriend women. You can "cheat" that by having male characters wear a lady's dress so everyone thinks they "play for the other team." That really is the only plot instance where gender might affect your game though.

HEIGHT

Use longer legs, longer arms, longer torso etc. to make your character taller or shorter during character creation.

Quite simply, height really does not matter a bit, it is up to your personal preference. Though there are a few advantages to being tall and only one (very minor) advantage to being short.

Short characters can enter the goblin holes inside the Shadow Fort's inner courtyard. There is just basic loot in there though, mushroom/flower/ore harvesting primarily. Nothing worth the effort to go short just for that. The bigger hole that leads under/behind the fort to the room with the Cyclops is accessible by characters of ANY HEIGHT.

Tall characters walk faster... because their legs are longer.

Tall characters have better melee success because they can reach farther with those longer arms.

SUPER-short midget characters can walk between the legs of a cyclops. But really, why would you even want to do that??

WEIGHT

Use thicker gut, wider thighs, and beefier arms to make your character heavier (or go the other way for lighter) during character creation.

Your weight will affect the game quite a bit! After playing this game on the PC and Xbox360 for several hundred hours I can safely say that HEAVY IS BETTER, 99% of the time. This is because of the simple fact that the world is quite large and there is a ton of free stuff just begging to be taken home by you. The heavier you are, the more stuff you can carry without losing your ability to run fast. Even as a fat person, you will find yourself needing to return to town often to deposit all of your new stuff into your storage box at the inn, or sell it, or have the blacksmith upgrade it and then put it into storage. As a skinny person, you will run out of inventory space MUCH TOO QUICKLY AND TOO OFTEN to really enjoy the game the way it was meant to be played.

Your weight also affects your STAMINA. Not the amount you get, but how fast you burn it and how fast you regenerate it. Skinny people burn it faster, but also regenerate it faster, than fat people do. Honestly, after playing both fat and skinny, I can say that the difference in stamina is only really obvious at the beginning of the game when you still don't have much stamina yet. As you levelup, you'll stop being annoyed at how slowly your fat Arisen catches his breath while running between the city wall and the Prayer Falls.

Skinny people are also easier to knock down or knock back by big monster attacks. However, if their attack is strong enough to knock you down in my experience your weight only plays a tiny part in figuring the final knockdown/back chance. So you can ignore this part of the weight equation completely. The one place this may become an issue is if you are running down to Bluemoon Tower or the Duke's Manse where those canyons have very strong winds blowing... skinny people will have trouble walking forward and must RUN to get through, while fat people can just walk fairly easily.

One other instance where weight matters is with HARPY enemies. Light characters can grab them by the feet as they dive, and they will FLY you up to a higher platform where you might find some secret loot (such as one of the Badge of Vows for From a Different Sky quests). Heavy characters are too much burden and the harpy can't lift them. There are only one or two places where this is even possible, so it is almost never really a concern.

Your movement speed (particularly in the agility department) is also affected a bit by your weight. But don't let this worry you at all because really the effects are negligible.

So, when you look at the chart here, you can basically IGNORE the columns for Movement Speed, Knockback Resist, and Stamina Consumption. The biggest factors in choosing your desired weight (other than aesthetics) will be weight class and encumberance limit, while stamina restoration might be a secondary concern for you. Also pay attention to the encumberance limit chart at the bottom. At Very Light, Light, and Average you will RUN VERY FAST. When you are Heavy, you slow down a bit. When you are Very Heavy your run is barely faster than your walk. And if you are Overencumbered then you cannot run at all AND you cannot accept any more items into your inventory until you get back below overencumbered weight.


Remember that EQUIPPED items still count towards your encumberance limit, as do UNEQUIPPED items, materials, consumables, and basically everything else in your backpack. For example: you build a character who weighs 57kg - weight class S. Now you pickup a big sword and a bunch of potions totalling 36kg. 35<36<40 so you are "Very Heavy" now. Elsewhere, your friend builds a character who weighs 98kg and is classed as L. Those same 36kg pickups (for L 20<36<40) put your friend's encumberance at just Average level. So he can run faster/farther than you because his own weight offsets the weight of the junk in his backpack.

Vocations 101

Vocations are "job classes" that determine what sorts of weapons and armor you can use and which battle skills you can use. At first, you only have a choice of three: ranger, mage, or fighter and you choose your vocation simply by choosing your first weapon when you first wakeup after the dragon attacks your town. If you are really determined to change your vocation early, visit Olra on the Cassardis pier at night and follow her to Bitterblack Isle. Once there, talk to her and eventually she will become like an "innkeeper" NPC and offer some special services - including vocation training and changing vocation. Otherwise, you have to wait until you reach the city of Gran Soren because the only other person who can change your vocation is Asalam the innkeeper there.

After level 10, you gain access to advanced vocations. Since you will almost certainly be level 14 - 22 when you first reach Gran Soren, this limit seems a bit pointless. Nevertheless, it is a limitation you must observe even if you have Olra change your vocation early. You may change vocation at any time as long as you are in Asalam's inn or with Olra on Bitterblack Isle, and you may change as often as you like. Each NEW vocation you unlock will cost you 1000 discipline points the first time. After that, if you change to another vocation and then decide to come back, it is free.

The more you play as a certain vocation, the higher your Vocation Rank will go. Your Vocation Rank has a max of 10 and at each increase you will unlock new skills, spells, and other abilities for that Vocation to use. First though, you will need to LEARN them and then SET them by visiting one of the three skill trainers: Asalam in Gran Soren, Olra on Bitterblack Isle, or the innkeeper at the Encampment outside of Cassardis. Learning skills costs Discipline Points, but once they are learned you can set them for free. To learn or set skills for a vocation you must currently be using that vocation.

You can earn Discipline Points by killing monsters and by using your vocation's skills and spells. That is also how you earn additional Vocation Ranks. The higher your vocation rank goes, the longer it will take to reach the next rank. Sometimes going from 9 to 10 feels like forever.

Most of a vocation's skills and abilities will be specific to that vocation only; if you change you will lose the ability to use them. For instance, why would a Warrior who uses giant warhammers need to know a dual-dagger attack skill from his previous time as a strider? There are a few that cross-over from one discipline to another. These typically include dagger skills (ranger, strider, magic archer, and assassin all can use those daggers), shield skills (fighter and assassin share a few skills there), or magic spells (some - not all - are common to both the mage and the sorceror). There are also certain special skills that each vocation can learn that you can transfer and apply to ALL vocations. These typically do things like boost your stats, give you better prices when selling your loot to shops, double the reputation boost when giving gifts to NPCs, and a few other things. There are even some skills that will add to the amount of weight you can carry before becoming overencumbered, or help you grip giant monsters better.

Vocations and Stat Levelups

Some people choose to pick one combat specialty (melee, bows, or magic) and stick with it forever. Others prefer to play as a specific vocation - particularly the Assassin which lets you dabble in all sorts of physical weaponry but has no magical ability. They are going to have a tough time with some of the stronger monsters in the game, particularly if they delve too deep into the Everfall or Bitterblack Isle. This is because your vocation determines which of your combat stats (HP, MP, Stamina, Str, Def, Mag, MDef) will rise - and by how much - when you levelup. These people are effectively stacking all of their levelups into a single category so they will have severe deficiencies. Playing as an Assassin for example will give you extremely high strength but you will have no defense or magic defense to speak of so you will be a "glass cannon." By changing your vocation every few levels, you can ensure you get a balanced stat load and you get more fine-tuning control over your character's growth.

You will get your biggest stat growth (from any vocation) between levels 1 and 10. From 11 to 100 you still get pretty good growth. After 100, your stat growth slows down to almost nothing. It is important, therefore, to follow some sort of plan STARTING EARLY so you can control what stats you end up with when you have to start fighting those big end-game monsters (like the Grim Reaper and the Gore-cyclops). An important fact to remember is that you only gain stats when you levelup by gaining that last XP to cross the level threshold. So if you play your first 24 levels as a ranger, then play 99.999% of the way up to 25 so that one more goblin kill will pop you to 25, then switch to a fighter, then kill a monster to levelup, then switch BACK to ranger... for those first 24 levels you will earn stats as a ranger. But for level 25, despite the fact that you were a ranger for 99% of it, you will earn stats as a fighter. Your vocation rank poins, on the other hand, will all go to ranger because you only killed one measley goblin as a fighter. So, you can sort of play the system a bit if there is one class you particularly like but you still want to smooth out your stats (i.e. you want to play an assassin but you also want to gain a little DEF from fighter levelups and MDEF from mage levelups). The charts below illustrate this, showing how many points you get in each stat at each levelup when you are at a certain XP level.


This next chart shows my typical plan that I try to follow when I play. This is just a suggestion, to give you an idea of what a "Vocation XP Training Plan" looks like. I like to have solid STR and MAG so that I can switch as needed between my sorceror, magic knight, and ranger as needed for certain situations. Sometimes I really need a bow to blast the medallions off of a golem, but sometimes I just want to spam that tornado spell at a room full of giant gore-cyclops monsters. But I also like to pile on enough DEF and MDEF so that I can survive the deeper levels of Bitterblack Isle and the Everfall. This is a fairly balanced stat progression plus it allows me to try out all the different vocations and see what I love/hate about each of them. But feel free to make your own plans for leveling up, this is just an example for you. If you really prefer magic over melee for example, you can change it up so you get more levelups to MAG and fewer to STR, but still you should keep an eye on your DEF and MDEF.

[no1schmo]

Okay, I just did. From Gran Soren gates to the waycastle on the near side of Moonsbit Pass took me 50 seconds for SS, M, and LL weight classes, using up about 80% of my stamina, and then I also tested how many Sunflares I could pull off with full stamina--31 each time. If there appears to be a microscopic difference in stamina usage, it's actually because bigger characters have slightly more stamina. Or because of encumbrance differences, since smaller characters reach higher levels of encumbrance faster and THAT definitely affects both run speed and running stamina usage. So like I said, I agree that heavier is generally better because encumbrance is a very big factor, and I also agree that lighter characters recharge faster, but weight level, in and of itself, does not affect stamina usage.

[Mr. Moyer]

I always welcome different opinions.
Try this: JUST RUN. Burn through the entire stamina bar by running from the Gran Soren city gates to the bridge leading to the north forest. Do it with a skinny person and again with a fatso. TIME your runs as well. You'll see the skinny person burns more stamina on the way to the bridge than the fat person does. BUT then the skinny person recharges and will be ready for another jog in just a few seconds while the fat person will need to wait half a minute to fully recharge the stamina.

[no1schmo]

Well, the community at the wiki has been testing for 9 years and no one has yet managed to prove any difference in knockdown resistance or that lighter characters use stamina faster. I don't say this to be snarky; I think they'd legit love your testing results, like what you move you spammed as a fatty and then again as a bean pole and how many more uses you got when fat.

[Mr. Moyer]

Trust me I've done SO MUCH TESTING regarding the different weights and heights in this game that I am 100% certain of my conclusions about them. I have not looked at the game's actual code but in my observations (think of it like a proper science experiment since I am a scientist):
fat people are harder to knock down than skinny people - but the difference there is very very minor and the biggest advantage is in those super-windy paths where small characters will get blown backwards by the wind; skinny characters burn through their entire stamina a tiny bit faster (perhaps due to having a slightly smaller stamina max than fat people) but they also recover stamina TWICE AS FAST as fat characters; and yes those encumbrance limits are pretty annoying - which is why I use pawns like pack mules and only hire big fat pawns LOL.

[no1schmo]

Minor corrections; character weight has no effect on knockdown or stagger resistance (or causing them to enemies) and also has no effect on stamina consumption. Lighter characters get significantly faster stamina regeneration, and this is the ONLY factor determining stamina regeneration, but the low encumbrance levels are very bothersome, especially for classes that wear heavy armor and wield heavy weapons and I agree that generally offsets the advantage. Oh, and heavier characters get a small boost in total stamina, pretty negligible in the long run though.

[480p Lich]

Cool advance, thanks for the tips fellow internet user

[Mr. Moyer]

My other guide is here (click the word "guide")

[Mr. Moyer]

Check my other guide. There are a lot of side quests you might want to do, as well as collecting some materials on the beach and such, before you leave the first fortress area. Look for my other guide to see all the quests in chronological order, some of them are time sensitive and if you're only level 10 at Gransys then you definitely missed a few.

[Kalypso]

I usually reach Gran Soren at 9 after doing all the quests i can REASONABLY do, then I level up to 10 when the quest for reaching it gives you the EXP. Wtf are you doing to be lvl 22 just getting to Gran Soren?

[IchigoMait]

You only have 9 vocation ranks not 10.
Also you gain vocation ranks based on discipline points gained, considering you can kill smaller monsters faster you can gain with 1 level of 100-101 9 vocation ranks, as the DP scaling is way more different from xp gains.
https://dragonsdogma.fandom.com/wiki/Discipline_Points