There are five attributes that affect combat, loot, health, energy, skill learning, and bargaining with merchants. Which attributes you spend more points on will depend heavily on your starting profession and your preferred play style. For example, if you want to go all-out offense, load up on strength, which improves your damage (both normal and critical) and increases your damage resistance. However, if you want to be more well rounded, you might pour points into intelligence, which aids your energy recovery, increases the amount of skill points you earn each level, and improves your chances of negotiating with merchants.
Strength
This is a vital attribute for almost any profession or play style. It enhances your normal damage, increases the multiplier for your critical damage, and bulks up your damage resistance so you suffer less damage from incoming attacks. When in doubt, spend points in strength.
Agility
If you want to attack faster, spend points in Agility to increase your attack speed. Hit chance also goes up, which means you’ll miss less and will more consistently deal damage over the course of combat. If you’re thinking defense, your deflection score goes up with Agility; this isn’t as reliable as sinking points into Health through endurance, but it gives you a percentage chance to reduce damage taken by two-thirds or to make a dodge (see the “Luck” section).
Luck
Luck is better than you might think at first glance. It increases your dodge chance, and you can avoid damage if you successfully dodge attacks. Your critical hit chance also improves, and that extra damage can prove pivotal in a battle if you take out enemies quickly through damage spikes caused by critical hits. As an added bonus, your loot chance increases, which adds to your chances of finding additional objects inside loot spots.
Endurance
If you’re looking to toughen up your character, and almost everyone should, drop points into Endurance. Each point increases your Health score, which makes it more difficult to kill you. Health recovery also helps you regain the edge in longer battles. The Energy cost of all your abilities is also lowered—another benefit not to be overlooked.
Intelligence
Intelligence does a little bit of everything. You gain Energy recovery, add to the skill points you earn each level, and increase your bargaining chance. Though it’s nice to negotiate lower prices with merchants, you’ll generally find the best items through questing, so you won’t do too much shopping at merchants. Skill points are good, but you get a minimum of 10 points each level anyway, and by game’s end you’ll have maxed out in a couple of categories without any help. Overall, intelligence is the least critical attribute.