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Poise, explained: why some hits don't stagger you
Poise is an invisible pool built from your armor that has to run out before you flinch — and it has nothing to do with why a Colossal Sword never flinches at all.
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Poise is an invisible pool built from your armor that has to run out before you flinch — and it has nothing to do with why a Colossal Sword never flinches at all.
Poise is a hidden pool of "hits you can take without flinching," built from the poise value on every armor piece you're wearing, plus whatever your talismans add on top. It isn't a percentage or a chance — it's a bar that empties as you get hit and resets to full the moment it hits zero and you stagger, or after roughly thirty seconds of not being hit at all.
Your poise stat, visible on the equipment screen, is the sum of the poise rating on every piece of armor equipped — helm, chest, gauntlets, legs — with talismans like the Bull-Goat's Talisman adding a flat bonus on top. None of your starting classes hands you meaningfully high poise from the outset; heavy armor has to be earned or bought, and equip load is the tax you pay for it. There is no poise from a weapon itself, only from what you wear.
Not every point of poise is equally useful. Both Fextralife and outside breakdowns of the mechanic converge on the same practical threshold: 51 poise is where you start reliably shrugging off the game's common, lighter hits — daggers, straight swords, most PvE trash-mob swings — instead of being knocked out of your own attack. Below that line, extra poise barely changes anything: 20 poise and 40 poise both still lose to the same attacks 0 poise loses to.
Above 51, the returns keep climbing — enough armor and the right talismans push you toward near-immunity to everything but the heaviest hits — but the exact numbers above that first tier get quoted differently from source to source, and vary by patch, so this guide won't put a figure on them. Treat 51 as the one number worth building around; everything past it is "more is better," not a hard second wall.
Heavy and charged attacks — swinging a Colossal Sword, a Greataxe, or a fully-charged heavy R2 — grant hyperarmor: a window, tied to the weapon and the specific attack, during which you cannot be staggered at all, regardless of your poise stat. This is not poise scaled up; it doesn't drain a pool, and it lasts only for the frames the animation grants it, not the whole swing. It's the reason a player in cloth robes can still trade a hit with a boss mid-swing of a big weapon, and also why that same player gets stunned instantly the moment the animation ends and hyperarmor runs out.
Poise governs whether you get staggered — it has no effect on whether an enemy does. Breaking an enemy's stance (the state that opens them up for a critical hit) runs on their own separate stagger threshold, unrelated to your poise value. Poise also doesn't stop grabs, doesn't block status effects like Bleed or Poison from applying, and doesn't reduce the damage you take — it only decides whether that damage interrupts you.
Three ordinary reasons account for most of it. First, a single heavy attack can simply deal more poise damage than your whole remaining pool, emptying it in one hit regardless of your total. Second, a string of smaller hits chips the same pool down between resets, so the fifth hit in a combo can stagger you even though the first four didn't. Third, poise has been a moving target: Bandai Namco has repeatedly rebalanced how much poise damage various weapons deal — patch 1.13, for instance, raised the poise damage of Light Greatswords, Backhand Blades, Hand-to-Hand Arts and Beast Claws — so a matchup that felt safe before a patch can stop feeling safe after one. Those changes mostly target PvP balance, but they're the reason "how much poise is enough" doesn't have a permanent answer.