Poise in Cinders is always active, and the stats related to it are Poise Damage, Armor Poise and Poise Health.

• Cinders Poise Calculator (1.83)

Armor Poise

The Poise stat shown in the stat menu that comes mostly from Armors and certain effects (check table below) is a reduction (%) to the Poise Damage taken.

Example:
An enemy hits you with an attack that does 15 Poise Damage while you are standing (25 Poise Health) and wearing armor that gives you 20% Poise.

This means the 15 Poise Damage is reduced by 20% and becomes 12 Poise Damage, then it is substracted from your 25 Poise Health, leaving you at 13 Poise Health, which means the attack will not stagger you.

The total Poise is calculated with the following formula, in which "x" is the current value your character has and "y" is the new value added to it:

$Total Poise = x + y - [ ( x * y ) / 100 ]$

Armor Poise Boosting Effects

Armor Poise Reduction Effects on Hit

Poise Health

Poise Health is 25 for all character animations, which gets depleted when getting hit by enemy attacks.

The only ways to recover Poise Health is to get hit until the player gets staggered or by attacking with a Weapon, Shield, Spell Tool, casting a Spell, and using any item or Gesture.

Movement actions like walk, run, rolls or backsteps do not restore Poise Health.

Player Poise Damage

Weapons have a base Poise Damage value assigned to them, to which a Poise Damage modifier is applied when attacking. This modifier is different for each attack.

Poise Damage attack modifiers

List of the general Poise Damage modifiers for attacks.

Base Poise Damage of Weapons

Notes

• Certain attacks with high stagger level can ignore the Poise mechanic and will stagger the player character no matter what (i.g. Attacks that cause knockdown, air juggle, etc).
• This also means that attacks with a sufficiently high stagger level done by the player character will ignore the mechanic and stagger the target (i.g. A great hammer with lower Poise damage than the rest will still stagger enemies as any other great hammer would, as long as the enemy doesn't ignore such stagger level).