Oblivion Remastered: What are the best Attributes to increase?

Oblivion Remastered has an Attributes system that defines the starting stats of your character, as well as potenitally your overall class trajectory. Naturally, the best Attributes will just be the ones that are relevant to your build. Unlike in Skyrim, it's not a good idea to try and be a jack-of-all-trades, which would spread your points too thin.

However, due to their relative relevance and the ability to bypass said relevance with specific game mechanics, some Attributes in Oblivion Remastered are more expendable than others. In this guide, we'll go over this pecking order.

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All Oblivion Remastered Attributes explained

Much like all the Fallout games, Oblivion Remastered has eight base Attributes that you can spec into. To identify what's good for your build, first, we'll need to give a quick rundown of what each Attribute does.

They also affect four crucial stats: Fatigue (your stamina bar), Health (your total health pool), Magicka (your mana reserves), and Encumberance (your carryweight capacity, i.e., how much stuff you can carry before getting encumbered).

Here is what the basic attributes do:

• Strength: Each point in Strength increases maximum Fatigue, and more importantly, damage done with all melee weapons and hand-to-hand. Your Encumberance (carryweight) is your Strength value multiplied by 5.
• Intelligence: Increases your total Magicka pool. Your base Magicka is Intelligence multiplied by 2, but you also get a big boost on top from racial bonuses, and potenitally your chosen Birthsign.
• Willpower: Points in Willpower increase your natural Magicka regeneration. Note that you will still have a base Magicka regen even at zero Willpower.
• Agility: Increases your total Fatigue and the damage dealt with bows in Oblivion Remastered.
• Speed: Determines how fast you go, of course. Specifically, those with 100 points in Speed will move roughly 40% faster than those with 0 points. Higher Speed also increases your jump length (not height).
• Endurance: Each point in Endurance increases your base Health and total Fatigue. Specifically, your starting Health is twice your Endurance, which is then usually modified by racial bonuses or penalties. You also gain 10% of your Endurance stat as extra Health every level.
• Personality: This affects NPC Disposition, which is a whole other mechanic of its own. The gist is that the character with the higher Personality points will get more favorable buying and selling prices when haggling, and they will also have an easier time convincing others to do their bidding. On an extended note, this also lets you punch characters more often before they turn hostile, if you care about that as a metric.
• Luck: Points in Luck give you a little bit of everything. Quite literally. Luck affects the value you get out of all your Major and Minor skills, and this is done through an invisible formula that the game never directly advertises on the character sheet. Notably, though, Luck does not affect Acrobatics, Athletics, and Speechcraft.

So, with the quick math out of the way, which Attributes are good to increase?

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Best Attributes to increase in Oblivion Remastered

Best Attributes vary based on builds (Image via Bethesda Softworks)

As we said earlier, the best Attributes to take will depend on what type of build you're doing.

• For a melee-oriented character, Strength and Endurance are greatly important to soak up and dish out damage.
• For characters who use bows, you want to get Agility first, and then some Speed to go with it. We also advise getting some Endurance to shrug off inevitable damage.
• For mages or magicka-using characters, you need a lot of Intelligence and a little Willpower to go with it. Mages also need to kite enemies, so you also want some Speed as a tertiary stat.

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What about Luck?

Thieves (basically characters who want to lockpick or pickpocket) will need some help from the Luck stat, which improves the success rate of these roguish activities. Another example is the success rate of placing bets in the Arena, for which your total Luck is a make-or-break.

That doesn't mean you can treat Luck as a dump stat, though. Due to how it affects all effective Skill calculations, lower Luck will make your spells and swings do less damage, make characters less likely to auto-persuade, and even make haggling harder. Which makes sense, of course. Fortune favours the lucky, it's in the name.

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What Attributes can you ignore in Oblivion Remastered?

If you are a mage with access to Illusion spells (specifically Guile), you can completely ignore Personality. Overall, the conversation-related mechanics gatekeep a lot of quest progression, but due to this bypass, Personality is something you can dump with virtually no downsides.

Other than that, the rest of your dump Attributes depend on what your build is, as prescribed earlier.

Another point of consideration is specifically the Speed stat. Unless you like just sneaking around all over the place, Speed is something you shouldn't overcommit to.

Your character spends the whole game moving and jumping, and the Athletics and Acrobatics skills level past 100, so you will eventually have more than enough Speed for any character in Oblivion Remastered.

That's all about Attributes in this game. Note that just like the original, building a character is incredibly complex for Oblivion Remastered, so what Attributes you take is ultimately down to the specific class or multiclass fantasy you are going for.

This guide is simply here to give you some initial guidance if you're new. Check out more of our guides on Oblivion Remastered:

• Oblivion Remastered: Deluxe Edition content, pricing, and is it worth getting?
• Is Oblivion Remastered on Xbox Game Pass?
• Is Oblivion Remastered releasing on PlayStation 5?
• 5 things The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion does better than Skyrim
• 5 reasons to be excited for the rumored The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered