Chiming in with my experience.
Strength - as much as you need to feel comfortable with your carry weight. Also slightly increases melee damage. The carry weight per point keeps increasing as you put more points in. 1000 carry weight at least is decent, but more never hurts (having to stop what you're doing and go sell stuff to town can get pretty annoying). Inventory slots are pretty much unlimited due to the bags you can carry, the actual weight is the only limiting factor. The gear you carry + various items like healing, consumables and several weapons can weigh several hundred alone.
Speed - very slightly speeds up the combat animations and you also get more armor. Armor per point increases by 5 after every 10 points. Starts at 5 per point and caps out at 25 armor per point once Speed reaches the value of 60. Faster animations are very good and extra Armor is always good. Any points spent here are not wasted.
Combat - the only point of this stat is to unlock more moves with weapons. Whenever you find a weapon that doesn't have all moves unlocked, put points in here until it has. Ignore it otherwise. A few weapons require 80+ Combat to unlock all moves, but 60 is a very good stopping point. Using 20+ more points to unlock 1 or 2 moves for 1 or 2 very specific weapons isn't really worth it. I tried going to 84 (before loading the game) and there was still one weapon that had a move locked, which would probably have required 90 Combat to unlock.... Level it progressively as you find better weapons. Important to note that in the vast majority of cases, the weapon attacks further down the list are usually more powerful than the base attack, so keeping up with the curve is somewhat important. Unlocking any kind of stabbing attacks (Stab on Sabres or Head Stab on Spear) is especially important as they are pretty much the only type of move that can punch through heavily armored enemies. Any slashing attacks usually deal minimal damage after the early game.
Health - you can't go wrong with this one. Increasing returns per point, I put at least 1-2 points here every level up. Pumping this stat early on is pretty important. You start with 100 HP. A single level fully invested in vitality will get you to 181HP, which is an 81% increase. Also, the effect of the best healing item (full health potion) directly scales off of your max HP, as does the best healing spell (Cauterize). In the late game, one point can give you 50+ HP per point. Caps out at +70HP per point once Health reaches 69 points.
Magic - same function as Combat but for unlocking spells and increases max mana. I just I realized that the "level" which is listed in the spell descriptions is actually the amount of Magic you need to have to unlock it. I'm level 16 and still have magic at 9 points. Was wondering why no new spells were unlocking... But honestly, the magic seems kinda underwhelming so far. The other attributes are much more important in the early game. I'll probably put points here later on, but only just enough to unlock some specific spells. 45 points will probably be my end goal. If you want to have access to and be able to cast every spell in the game, you're going to need to raise Magic to a whopping 95 points!!! The mana per point increases by 1 every point and there doesn't seem to be a scaling cap like for health.
Lastly, even though the level cap is 41, you will never reach it. Expect to end the game around level 37 or 38. That gives you 216-222 skill points to distribute. There are also a couple items that boost stats, namely Speed and Strength, up to +5 and up to +15 respectively.
Post edited July 03, 2023 by idbeholdME
