Health, Mana, Stamina, and absolutely in that order. Video games today offer players red juice for survival, blue juice for casting spells, and green juice for accomplishing general actions such as sprinting, climbing, or rolling.
Provoking the independent video game developer, who will have an opinion or two of their own on the topic, it has to be said that most AAA games today have regressed in the stat distribution towards the player. In some ways, the system that games like Daggerfall helped to popularize coming off of pen-and-paper tropes has either faltered into a system of simplicity or has refused to move forward in any meaningful way.
If you play Morrowind, the system in place is extremely punitive for those who struggle with forward-thinking: Leveling HP is passive and is only effective for players who are likely to level Endurance as a base attribute, which, in turn, levels HP passively as the player progresses. This attribute, in addition, affects fatigue (or stamina) positively.
The system of base attributes affecting derived attributes creates an ecosystem between the player and the design of the game’s mathematics where the long-term planning of a character’s behavior and leveling habits feeds into the player’s health, mana, and stamina allocation, which in turn feeds into playstyle.
The Morrowind system (and, by proxy, the Daggerfall and Oblivion system) wasn’t perfect: Endurance levels HP, and since HP keeps you alive, it is, objectively, the most important stat to level quickly when playing at high difficulties unless the entire run is predicated on cheesing the game. Given the added benefit of having extra fatigue to work with, Endurance was doubly important.
Despite this flaw, the system was in its infancy, and one would think that given a decade or two, it would be fleshed out to a point where the decisions or playstyles that affected red, blue, and green juice would actually be of some meaningful consequence. Or, in other words, players would have to really think about which juice to focus on instead of defaulting to “More HP good!”. In Elden Ring terms, this translates to “Just level vigor.”
In Elden Ring, where combat is as fluid as the emptying and replenishment of the player’s health, the phrase “Just level vigor” is akin to “Git gud”, where the latter phrase means, literally, “Whatever problem you’re solving, the solution is to just get better at the game.”
Given that leveling vigor, then, is akin to getting better at the game, it can be said with relative confidence that if you’re trying to help yourself in Elden Ring, you should really be leveling your HP to at least the soft cap of Vigor level 40 before focusing on anything else that isn’t of strict necessity for the function of your build.
All of this is to say that reliance on HP as the main tool for game completion is pervasive in Elden Ring, as it is in every Soulsborne game that came before it, with the exception, perhaps, of Sekiro. However, this article isn’t intended as an attack against FromSoftware specifically, as this problem is genre-wide.
Bethesda, responsible for the ever-loved Skyrim, also puts this philosophy right into the limelight: Mana usage can become next to obsolete via enchanting or alchemy, and stamina can become next to obsolete via enchanting or alchemy (or by drinking a cheap stew for infinite stamina usage during combat).
Health, then, just like in its younger sibling titles, Oblivion and Morrowind, is the most important stat to level in Skyrim. However, unlike in Oblivion and Morrowind, leveling health isn’t a project of planning and mathematics: it isn’t a stat derived from other stats. Leveling health in Skyrim is a simple process of leveling up and then selecting the option to level health +10 instead of attributing those points to stamina or mana.
If the populous of The United States of America were to have the same build as 99% of characters made in AAA roleplaying games, they’d be extremely healthy folk with an easily acquired near-infinite stamina pool and a penchant for skepticism with regard to anything supernatural. Forgive the generalization, but frankly, the opposite is usually true.
The solution to this is fairly straightforward in theory, though probably extremely difficult to implement in a pragmatic way: Mana shouldn’t just be a tool for casting spells unless those spells are directly linked to a caster’s ability to stay alive (more so than HP). There should also be fewer (or no) methods of obtaining infinite mana usage (looking at you, bubble tears.) Stamina shouldn’t only be linked with allowing certain actions to be performed, but also with how well those actions are performed. This is something Morrowind and Oblivion experimented with but scrapped in Skyrim. Lastly, HP should be but one method of survivability, and should have an extreme cost to leveling that takes a lot away from the player in other areas. Where HP is useful for a tank in specific builds, other builds can rely on armor, spells, and effective usage of stamina (or endurance) to make up the difference between a lost fight and an expertly handled victory.