Beginner and Leveling Guide: Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
The Fall of Avalon has no classes, no fixed level cap, and a respec system gated behind a finite resource. That sounds intimidating, and it does not have to be. The single best thing a new player can do is start a Pure entity:mage: it is the most forgiving build in the game, it covers your mistakes with entity:mana-shield, and it teaches you the systems from behind a wall of mana. This guide covers the six attributes, how leveling and skill points work, how to respec without wasting it, why armor weight matters more than it looks, and what New Game Plus does when you finish.
Build: e581412ed8dfThe six attributes
Every level grants one attribute point, and you spend it at a bonfire. There are only six attributes, and each one governs three things.
Strength drives Melee Damage (plus 1% per point), Max Stamina (plus 3), and your Armor Weight Multiplier (minus 1%, which lets you wear heavier gear). It carries every melee build and feeds the One-Handed, Two-Handed, Unarmed, Blocking, and Athletics proficiencies.
Endurance is survivability: plus 8 Max Health per point, plus 10 Encumbrance Limit (carry weight), and plus 1.5 per second Stamina Regen. It governs the Light, Medium, and Heavy Armor proficiencies. Every build wants some Endurance, but few builds want it as a primary stat.
Dexterity powers Attack Speed (plus 4% per point), stealth (minus 3% Noise and Visibility), and Ranged Damage (plus 1%). It carries bow builds and the stealth half of the assassin, and feeds Archery, Evasion, Agility, Sneak, and Theft.
Spirituality is the mage stat: plus 1% Spell Power, plus 6 Max Mana, and plus 0.3 per second Mana Regen per point, and it makes casting more mana-efficient as it climbs. It governs Magic and gates caster gear.
Practicality is the support attribute. It grants a Crafting Bonus, plus 5% Weak Spot Damage, minus 1% Stamina and Mana Cost, and a large boost to the price of goods you sell (roughly 10% of value at 1 point, climbing to 500% at 50). It feeds Alchemy, Cooking, and Handcrafting, and its weak-spot and cost reductions matter for archers and casters.
Perception is the universal crit and stealth attribute: plus 1% Critical Chance, plus 5% Critical Damage, and plus 8% Sneak Damage per point. It has no proficiencies of its own, but it rounds out any glass cannon, archer, or assassin.
How leveling works
Experience comes from a range of actions, not only combat, so exploring and crafting move you forward too. Once you have enough, craft a bonfire and sit at it to open the stat-distribution screen.
Each level gives you one attribute point. Skill points are not handed out per level directly. Instead, spending attribute points earns you skill points every few points invested, which you then spend across the skill trees. Each of the six attributes has its own tree, and individual skills cap at level 100.
There is no level cap. Players routinely pass level 100, and the practical ceiling sits around level 594, which is enough to max all six attributes and fill every tree. An ordinary playthrough lands somewhere between level 76 and 119, so you will never feel starved for points across a normal run.
The most important early-game advice the community repeats: do not over-commit. Hitting a piece of gear's stat requirement and taking the correct skills matters more than raw attribute totals. Leave a few points unspent for a couple of levels while you test what you actually enjoy, then commit. Spreading points thin across every attribute is the most common new-player mistake.
Respec without wasting it
You respec with a Potion of Origin, used at a bonfire, which refunds all your attribute points (and resets skills) for redistribution. The catch is supply. Origin Potions cannot be crafted. You find them in fixed locations or buy them from a handful of vendors that do not restock, so a single save has a finite number, around ten by the middle of Act 2.
The trap is hoarding them. Players sit on a stack of entity:origin-potions, afraid to spend one, and never actually fix the build they dislike. You have enough to course-correct several times across a playthrough. Use one when you genuinely want to change direction, and do not treat them as too precious to touch.
Armor weight, and why Light matters
Armor weight is the quiet system that shapes more of your build than any single skill. Your total equipped weight, as a percentage, drops you into one of four bands.
Under 20% weight is Light: plus 20% to regen, movement, attack, cast, and dash speed, with three Dashes. The 20 to 50% band is Medium: no modifier, two Dashes. From 50 to 100% is Heavy: minus 10% to regen and speed, one Dash. Over 100% is Overloaded: minus 50% and no Dashes at all.
For any caster, archer, assassin, or mobility build, staying Light is close to mandatory. The three Dashes are your defense, the speed bonus is real damage on a mage (entity:power-in-swiftness converts movement speed into Spell Power), and the regen keeps your resources flowing. Casters who do not want to spend Endurance reaching the Light threshold take entity:endurance-training from the entity:practicality tree, which raises the weight thresholds by 5% per rank. Heavy armor is for the tank and two-handed builds that want the physical mitigation and can live with one Dash.
New Game Plus
New Game Plus unlocks when the final main story quest ends and the credits roll. It carries over your character level and attribute points, your skill points (secret-tree points are refunded so you can re-spend them), the Sanctuary of Sarras skill tree, and your entire inventory. It resets the world, the map, quest-based powers, recipes, and secret-tree progress, all of which you earn again.
Each cycle scales: enemies gain stats, and you take a stacking armor debuff, minus 50 armor at NG+1, minus 100 at NG+2, and so on at minus 50 per cycle. Your loot and crafted items improve by plus 10 levels each cycle to keep pace. Starting Bonuses, Druid Shrine Bestowments, and Shrines of the Beasts stack across cycles, so a repeat run gets steadily stronger in the ways that matter. There is no cycle limit.
Where to start
Build a Pure Mage. Pour every early point into entity:spirituality, take entity:arcane-teachings as soon as you have skill points, grab entity:casters-focus for a passive 10% Mana Shield, and stay Light. Mana Shield converts incoming damage to mana drain, which forgives the positioning mistakes every new player makes, and the early spell list (entity:poison-spray, entity:blood-transfusion, entity:burning-ember) carries Act 1 with almost no setup. Melee builds reward timing you have not learned, and the assassin punishes a single detection, so the mage is the gentlest on-ramp into the game's systems.
The full caster allocation is in the Mage Build Guide. When you want to compare every archetype, the Best Builds hub ranks them all, and the Class and Build Tier List explains the reasoning behind each placement.