Conan Exiles Attributes Guide: What You Need to Know to Build a Powerful Exile

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Emily Parker

Emily, or Zoe if you’re on her discord, is a Conan Exiles guide contributor and long-term fan. She’s been raiding bases since its release, mixing in some Rust, Archeage, Apex Legends, Hearthstone, Don’t Starve, and Horizon Zero Dawn. Video games have been a core aspect of her life since she was a child with an N64. When she needs a break, she’ll switch genres and start a new kind of adventure, though survival games have always been a favorite.

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Customizing your character is one of the most rewarding aspects of any video game. While some games focus only on the cosmetics of your character, and others dive deeply into their combat and characteristics, Conan Exiles lies comfortable between the two.

The combat system revolves around action-based moves against other players in real-time. I think this is why there must be some kind of compromise regarding the depth of its character customization.

While Conan Exiles is not primarily an RPG (role-playing game), it benefits from its RPG elements. Role-playing games have massive character sheets with hugely customizable character builds.

Conan Exiles has taken notes and distilled this concept into what they call an attributes page. Attributes are like any other stat in a role-playing game; investing points in one attribute or the other sets your character apart from your peers and can change your gameplay completely.

TL:DR: Customize Your Character

Attribute points are a way to customize the power of your character. At every level in Conan Exiles, you will be awarded one AP (attribute point), and you’ll need to choose which attribute to invest it into.

Attributes can increase your health pool, make your character stronger or make them deadlier in combat. You will receive a related bonus called a perk at 5, 10, 15, and 20 points invested in a single attribute.

Perks will help you strategize how to spend your points. You’ll only ever receive 60 total attribute points, so not every perk can be unlocked. Additionally, your attribute tree should ideally match your equipment.

Weapons draw their strength from their own specific attribute, and heavy equipment can lead to encumbrance without investing your attribute points to accommodate it.

While this may seem a bit stressful, resetting your attribute points in Conan Exiles is very cheap. Just craft a yellow lotus potion to reset attributes and feats.

My Experience with the Attribute Tree in Conan Exiles

I am an RPG fan first and a survival game enthusiast second, so it was not terribly difficult for me to skim the attribute systems and then decide I knew everything I needed to know and that I would wing it.

What I did not expect was the environment’s effect on my attribute choices. If you focus your attribute points primarily on combat effectiveness, which I tend to do, the rest of your game will be miserable.

I learned the old attribute system, used it for 5+ years, and recently had to re-learn the new one. However inconvenient this might be, I love the changes to the tree.

I can understand that it’s a little less straightforward, but its nuance is necessary to balance the game. I can also see much more room to grow with this system, and I’m looking forward to how they refine it.

Attribute Points: The Basics

While I hate to take the joy out of customizing your character, there are some potential heartaches I’d like to point out for new players to be aware of. While there are no wrong answers when it comes to the attribute tree, there are leveling builds, and then there are difficult-to-manage builds while leveling.

It is most important to prioritize survival when choosing your path at a lower level, and I don’t necessarily just mean vitality. Once you open your attribute tree for the first time and familiarize yourself with its setup. Pay attention to strength, agility, and vitality.

Once you craft and settle on your first weapon, check and see if its damage is affected by strength or agility. These are the only two attributes that affect weapon damage. It is unlikely you would ever commit points to both of these attributes, so you’ll want to ensure you’ve chosen the right one to invest in.

You’ll want to just pick one and stick with it. If you change your weapon in the future, you can always sump those points into the other attribute.

Trading between investing in either strength or agility, depending on your weapon, and then the next point into vitality is a great way to ensure your character can survive the harsh biomes of the Exiled Lands.

This is perfect for exploring the map at a low level because your points will only be committed to your health pool or your damage output.

The downside to this is that your other attributes will suffer. For instance, your quality of life when foraging will be quite low. However, after you get comfortable in an area, you can always respec into a carrying build and shovel a few points into expertise.

This will help with encumbrance issues in an area where you already know you can handle the mobs.

Perks: The Basics

There’s a little more nuance to the attribute tree than what each contributes to your stats. After investing 5, 10, 15, and 20 points into a particular attribute, you will be awarded a perk bonus.

These perks are loosely related to the attribute and make a huge difference in gameplay. Players generally prioritize achieving these perks before spending points on another attribute.

It would be unusual to say, spend 14 points in strength and then start spending them in another perk. You would want to go ahead and spend 15 points in strength to obtain the berserker perk.

This perk allows your character to do 25% more damage when under 50% health and is obviously worth the extra “point.” Adversely it would be unusual to throw additional points into strength after 15 unless you were going for the level 20 perk.

In this way, your attribute page will be strategized around what the attributes actually do and which perks you’d care to reach before investing the points elsewhere. You will eventually become very accustomed to some perks, and when you respecc out of them, your character will feel uncomfortable.

Corrupted Attributes: The Basics

Before we can dive into the meat of your attribute tree, there’s a newly added component we need to take a look at. With the addition of sorcery to Conan Exiles came a complete overhaul of the attribute panel.

In fact, many of the attributes we’re about to discuss were called something completely different, and others had different effects on your character.

This means that much of the information you find online about your attribute panel is dated and hard to relate to the one you’ll find in-game post the sorcery update. Additionally, the sorcery update added the ability to corrupt your attributes. The attribute panel overhaul was likely done to accommodate these powerful corrupted attributes.

To corrupt your attributes, you’ll need to become corrupted through sorcery. The goal here is to unlock extremely powerful corrupted perks. These perks replace the normal perks of that attribute tree, but they are much more powerful.

This new power is balanced because it will permanently corrupt you, harshly cutting your health and stamina pool. This affliction permanently cuts your max stamina and health, and you won’t be able to get it back while remaining corrupted. In easier terms, you will remain weak while accessing these powerful perks.

Corruption degradation to your health and stamina pool is capped at 50% no matter how corrupted you become (or how far you dive into sorcery).

To completely corrupt an entire attribute and all of its perks, you will be penalized with a full 50% decrease in your health and stamina. This means that you may as well corrupt the rest of your attributes.

It appears to be an all-or-nothing decision. Once you’ve committed to learning sorcery, it only makes sense to corrupt your attributes and manage the 50% reduction in your health and stamina pool.

Strength: The Powerhouse

Strength determines your power with strength-based weapons (which is most of them) and slightly increases your encumbrance and damage with agility-based weapons.

The encumbrance bonus works well for strength players because they usually run heavier armor and the agility bonus is helpful for the strength-based player that gets caught in ranged combat.

It is important to note that strength no longer affects concussive damage.

Each point invested in strength raises your character’s damage with strength-based weapons by 5%. It will also add three points to your carry weight and .5% damage to agility-based weapons.

Strength Perks

5 Strength AP – Heavy Blows

• Heavy Blows: Heavy and special attacks deal 10% more damage.

10 Strength AP – Combo Master or Second Skin

Players must choose between two perks at ten AP invested.

• Combo Master: Characters now deal 20% more damage with finishing moves.
• Second Skin: a character’s equipped armor weighs 25% less.

15 Strength AP – Berserker

• Berserker: When their character is below 50% health, they will deal 25% more damage and have an additional 100 points of armor.

20 Strength AP – Blood-Mad Berserker or Crushing Swings

Players must choose between two perks at twenty AP invested.

• Blood-Mad Berserker: characters will not be able to be staggered or knocked down when below 25% health. They will also deal an additional 10% damage, and their armor will go up another 50 points.
• Crushing Swings: heavy attacks will stun for 25% longer and no longer bounce off enemy shields.

Strength Corrupted Perks

Corrupted perks replace the original strength perks you’ve earned at the amount of AP invested. There are no longer choices at ten or twenty AP invested.

5 Strength AP Corrupted – Scourge

• Scourge: characters will now deal additional damage based on their corrupted strength. This scalable damage bonus is more powerful than the capped amount and situational nature of Heavy Blows.

10 Strength AP Corrupted – Mule Kick

• Mule Kick: This powerful kick replaces your character’s standard kick and launches enemies, interrupting whatever they were planning to do and knocking them down for several free hits.

15 Strength AP Corrupted – Wrack

• Wrack: regular attacks are now debuffs, numbing the other player. Wrack’s debuff reduces the amount of damage your opponent can inflict.

20 Strength AP Corrupted – Desecrate

When twenty points of strength AP are corrupted, you are fully corrupted and will suffer 50% penalties to your health and stamina.

• Desecrate: With every hit, characters will have a chance to perform an attack that causes corruption to vent from the earth in a huge radius around them. This blast knocks down and damages enemies.

Agility: The Acrobat

Agility determines your power with agility-based weapons. These weapons are generally ranged or very light. Agility also contributes to stamina and slightly to strength-based weapon damage. High-agility players recover more quickly after attacks, dodges, and damage.

The addition to stamina is helpful for how mobile your character will need to be to wield agility-based weapons and not take damage, and the slight strength-based damage is helpful for when you may need to switch to a strength-based set up in a tight situation (such as a truncheon and shield to capture an unplanned for thrall).

Agility adds 5% weapon damage for agility-based weapons per point. It also adds one point of stamina per point and .5% of a point to strength-based weapon damage.

Agility Perks

5 Agility AP – Backstab

• Backstab: characters deal 15% more damage when attacking from behind.

10 Agility AP – Dead Shot or Precision Strike

Players must choose between two perks at ten AP invested.

• Dead Shot: characters will shoot arrows and throw projectiles further. They will also do 15% more damage from long-range.
• Precision Strike: characters will deal 10% more armor penetration, but only if they carry a light or medium load.

15 Agility AP – Quickfooted

• Quick footed: characters will now jog, sprint, jump, swim, and climb faster than other players. These actions will also cost less stamina.

20 Agility AP – Extended Leap or Rolling Thrust

Players must choose between two perks at twenty AP invested.

• Extended Leap: the infamous Conan Exiles double jump for your character.
• Rolling Thrust: your character’s next attack after dodging will cost no stamina and the next one that hits to be blessed with 25% more penetration. These aren’t necessarily the same attacks but have the opportunity to be.

Agility Corrupted Perks

You cannot currently corrupt agility perks.

Vitality: The Health Pool

Vitality is possibly the most self-explanatory of the lot. The more vitality you invest in, your character’s health pool will become larger. Every type of playstyle and build will need points invested in vitality.

This is because damage can come from many challenges in Conan Exiles. It may even bypass armor or be impossible to dodge. The only thing that will save you is a decent health pool.

Every point in vitality increases your health pool by 10%. This means investing in vitality is cumulative, increasing the value of the points you invest over time.

Vitality Perks

5 Vitality AP – Fierce Vitality

• Fierce Vitality: While out of combat, your character will now receive passive health regeneration. This is one of the most important perks to unlock as a beginner.

10 Vitality AP – Resurgence or Fast Healer

Players must choose between two perks at ten AP invested.

• Resurgence: adds a one-time heal to your character when their health drops below 50%. The perk is permanent, but the heal can only be reset by healing your character completely.
• Fast Healer: characters now receive 50% more healing from healing effects. This perk is a great choice when playing with friends.

15 Vitality AP – Robust

• Robust: This perk simply adds 100 health to your character’s health pool, but with the cumulative nature of vitality AP points, it makes the points you’ve already invested in or will invest much more effective.

20 Vitality AP – Last Stand or Glutton for Punishment

Players must choose between two perks at twenty AP invested.

• Last Stand: removes all status ailments any time your character drops below 50% health. Characters will also receive 50% damage mitigation for a brief period.
• Glutton for Punishment: Characters now receive permanent health regeneration, even in combat. Specifically, Glutton for Punishment regenerates the damage of your most recent hit and resets itself when you get hit again.

Vitality Corrupted Perks

Corrupted perks replace the original vitality perks you’ve earned at the amount of AP invested. There are no longer choices at ten or twenty AP invested.

5 Vitality AP Corrupted – Grotesque Excrescence

• Grotesque Excrescence: characters now have passive health regeneration that scales with the amount of vitality AP that has been corrupted.

10 Vitality AP Corrupted – Twisted Flesh

• Twisted Flesh: characters now have a chance to completely deflect incoming damage. This chance increases with the amount of vitality AP that’s been corrupted.

15 Vitality AP Corrupted – Petrified

• Petrified: characters are now completely immune to bleeding, sunder, poison, and disease.

20 Vitality AP Corrupted – Tainted Vessel

Your character is completely corrupted if you’ve reached 20 points of vitality corruption. They will now have 50% less health and stamina.

• Tainted Vessel: characters spew corruption when damaged, which in turn damages or causes corruption in a small area around the player.

Authority: The Thrallmaster

For those who enjoy playing the game with powerful followers, authority is the perk they should look at. Not only will it increase the damage that your followers deal, but it will also increase your own concussive damage. This will help considerably when capturing powerful thralls.

Authority adds 4% follower damage per point, and your character will enjoy an added 6% concussive damage per point.

Authority Perks

5 Authority AP – Irritate

• Irritate: active followers now possess a taunt. Whenever you’re in combat, your followers try to draw aggression to themselves.

10 Authority AP – Commanding Presence or Healthy Diet

Players must choose between two perks at ten AP invested.

• Commanding Presence: Followers gain health any time the character they follow deals damage in combat.
• Healthy Diet: Followers now have passive health regeneration, but they must be out of combat.

15 Authority AP – Attentive Care

• Attentive Care: followers will now receive 50% more healing.

20 Authority AP – Well-Trained or War Party

Players must choose between two perks at twenty AP invested.

• Well-Trained: Followers receive boosts to their attribute tree.
• War Party: characters may now take one more combat follower on their adventures.

Authority Corrupted Perks

Corrupted perks replace the original authority perks you’ve earned at the amount of AP invested. There are no longer choices at ten or twenty AP invested.

5 Authority AP corrupted – Frenzy

• Frenzy: Followers deal more damage after the character they follow begins dealing damage. For each point of corrupted authority AP, your followers will deal 3% more damage in their frenzied state.

10 Authority AP corrupted – Flesh Bond

• Flesh Bond: all damage taken by your character is split equally between you and your followers.

15 Authority AP corrupted – Devour

• Devour: damage dealt by the character’s active followers heals them.

20 Authority AP – Demon-Lord

At 20 corrupted authority AP, your character will be completely corrupted. It will now only have 50% of its total stamina and health pool.

• Demon-Lord: characters are now powerful necromancers, giving them a chance to summon a chaotic demon to deal damage to their opponents any time they deal damage. They do not directly control this demon, but it will stay focused on its opponents.

Note: The coolest thing about unlocking the Demon-Lord perk is that you can have multiple demons summoned at once. Every time your character deals damage, it has a chance to summon a demon, even if one is already summoned.

Grit: The Athlete

Grit increases the size of your stamina pool and makes your armor more efficient. It’s great for characters that like to move quickly and need lighter armor to perform well.

Grit increases your character’s stamina pool by three points per AP invested. It also increases your total armor by eight points for each point of AP invested.

Grit Perks

5 Grit AP – Tenacity

• Tenacity: increases armor by forty points and stamina pool by twenty points.

10 Grit AP – Endurance or Stout

Players must choose between two perks at ten AP invested.

• Endurance: stamina regeneration is boosted by 25%.
• Stout: armor is increased by a fifth of whatever your current stamina is.

15 Grit AP – Defensive Posture

• Defensive Posture: damage is decreased by 15% whenever a character with Defensive Posture is blocking or attacking.

20 Grit AP – Shield Master or Steel Thewed

Players must choose between two perks at twenty AP invested.

• Shield Master: characters will now be able to block any attack with their shield, even those that are considered unblockable. They will take a larger hit on their stamina when blocking these attacks but will recover much more quickly when blocking any attack with a shield.
• Steel Thewed: characters will no longer be able to take any more damage from a single hit than 25% of their health. This perk is best run with a low health pool and a mobile character.

Corrupted Grit Perks

Currently, you cannot corrupt your grit tree.

Expertise: The Mule

Expertise is a simple attribute. It determines how much weight your character can carry before becoming over-encumbered. Over-encumbered characters move, dodge, and attack more slowly. While expertise is helpful for carrying treasures, it’s instrumental if you hope to wear heavy armor.

Expertise adds fifteen points of carrying weight for each point invested.

Expertise Perks

5 Expertise AP – Survivalist

• Survivalist: Weapons will now last 50% longer, and your hunger and thirst will deplete 33% slower.

10 Expertise AP – Efficient Harvest or Careful Harvest

Players must choose between two perks at ten AP invested.

• Efficient Harvest: a character’s final hit on a node will now collect twice as many resources.
• Careful Harvest: ups a character’s rare resource collection potential. Your character will be twice as likely to collect rare resources per hit.

15 Expertise AP – Hard Worker

• Hard Worker: Characters will now harvest resources twice as quickly.

20 Expertise AP – Beast of Burden or Structural Integrity

Players must choose between two perks at twenty AP invested.

• Beast of Burden: improves the consequences of becoming over-encumbered. Your character will now dodge and move at full speed, though their attacks will still be affected.
• Structural Integrity: improves your prowess as a builder. Buildings that you construct will now be 25% more durable.

Corrupted Expertise Perks

Expertise AP cannot be corrupted.

Start Again with the Yellow Lotus Potion

Don’t stress too much about your choices regarding your attribute page. In fact, you can feel free to try out any build or perks that you want. The recipe for completely resetting your attribute points is cheap and the ingredients are readily available.

To reset all of your attribute points, simply craft a yellow lotus potion and consume it. To craft the yellow lotus potion, you’ll need to build an alchemy bench and find some yellow lotus flowers.

Yellow lotus flowers are located all along the banks of the beginner river in the southern section of the map. You can collect the flower with your hands but will harvest far more with a scythe.

The yellow lotus potion also resets your feats page but won’t upset any recipes you found in the world. Well, I should say that it shouldn’t upset any recipes that you’ve found. Savvy Conan Exiles players wait a couple of days after a patch before using a yellow lotus potion.

Follower Attributes

Much of the depth in Conan Exiles is provided by its follower system. There are quite a few variables in any survival game, but implementing a complex follower system has helped this game stand out in this department.

Followers are so unique because they also have attributes and perks, and even identical-looking followers can be vastly different.

Strength is the only follower stat you’ll be interested in leveling on a PvP server. Nobody will try to take out your thrall before they handle you, so their health pool and armor are not as big of a priority. On a PvE server, you could choose some more unique routes to take, but you’ll likely mostly be concerned with strength and vitality.

You can slightly affect your follower’s attribute spread while leveling them by what you feed them, but first, you must choose the right follower and understand how their attributes work. After you’ve pulled a thrall from the wheel or raised an animal follower in the animal pen, open their character sheet and look at their attribute spread.

There are two numbers next to each attribute. The first is the base number they’ll start with for that attribute, and the second is how likely they are to add to that attribute each time they level.

While choosing a follower to level with a good base strength (if that is what is important to you), it is even more important to choose a follower with a good strength growth percentage.

Their growth percentage on each attribute will eventually outweigh their base AP in that category. Of course, it would be best to have good numbers for both if you can.

Leveling Thrall Attributes

Feeding your thrall their favorite foods is the only way you can affect their progression. Specific foods will add to specific attributes’ growth percentages. If you have a thrall that you want to add a chance that they will level their strength every level, feed them gruel. Gruel increases their strength growth percentage by 14%.

If you would prefer to level vitality, you’ll have to feed grilled steak. Grilled steak adds 14% to their vitality growth percentage. Check out the table on this thrall-specific page for other foods and their bonuses.

Leveling Animal Follower Attributes

The system for animal follower attributes is similar; you can only affect their chance to grow an attribute by what you feed them. Unfortunately, though, animal followers each like different foods. You’ll want to check out our animal follower guides for how to level the attributes of your particular animal follower.

PvP Powerlevel: Attributes First, Build Later

There is a unique quality to attributes and character progression in Conan Exiles: it is one of the few things that other players cannot take from you. This may not sound like much, but on a PvP server, it’s an important opportunity.

This leads us to the attribute-based leveling method or the run-and-gun. Experienced PvP server players know that prioritizing their character’s progress over accumulating goods or building defenses can make sense in the long run. A player hoping to take advantage of this would focus on leveling their character.

Perks and attribute points can make your character formidable, and you won’t have a shot against a fully leveled character until you’ve reached that point yourself.

It makes sense to prioritize filling out your attribute tree first, or you risk another player stealing all of your hard-won goods and turning most of your early-game efforts into a waste of time.

Additional Attribute Boosters

You will only ever have 60 points to spend on your attribute tree and unlock perks with, but there are other ways to increase your attributes. These items and equipment comprise a large part of your character-build strategy in the late game.

Armor

Armor is the number one contributor to stats outside your character panel. It may seem like the most important thing armor could contribute is, well, armor, but as you get into the late game, it’ll start to become obvious that this is not the case.

No matter your character build, your choice of armor will be based on the attributes it provides.

Warpaint and Potions

Build an alchemy bench to explore your options for improving your attributes through potions and a dyers bench to craft some functional warpaints. Unfortunately, only the functional war paints under the functional warpaint feat will add attributes to your character. All other warpaints are purely decorative.

Something to Attribute Your Sucess To

Attribute points and perks are a welcome way to customize your character in Conan Exiles, but with every new feature comes a learning curve. Getting your attribute points exactly right can be complicated, and much of it relies on your own play style. Fortunately, it is easy to reset them to try again. Some players even reset theirs between tasks.

No matter which attributes spread you settle on, your character will perform better now that you know how they work. In the harsh world of Conan Exiles, it’s wise to take every advantage that you can get.

The unfortunate thing about attributes and perks is that you’ll be at a severe disadvantage if you ignore them. If you’re new to the game, it’s best to go ahead and learn everything you can about them now!

Attributes FAQs