There are 7 stats in this game Vigor Endurance Mind Strength Dexterity Intelligence Faith Arcane

Vigor and endurance are going to be important for all players. Vigor increases your health endurance increases you’re stamina bar both of which are important.

The mind stat increases your fp which is used up when casting magic, obviously this important for magic builds.

Strength and dex are important for melee builds. Strength determines your effectiveness with big heavy weapons while dex determines effectiveness with fast and quick weapons. Quality weapons are weapons that scale equally with dex and strength.

Intelligence and faith are the two schools of magic each with a large arrray of different spells and incantations. Intelligence seems to have more ranged spells while faith seems to be more close range with more support spells.

Arcane is a weird one since we don’t really know exactly what it does yet. It affects your discovery rate, ie how often items are dropped by enemies but it also seems to be important for certain mage builds.

When building your character you of course are going to want to increase vigor and stamina throughout your play through to increase your ability to survive. From there your going to want to pick 1 to 2 stats that your going to focus on for your character. You could go pure strength pure dexterity or a mix of both. For a mage build you could go pure intelligence pure faith both or even hybrid melee builds like strength faith or dexterity intelligence etc. If you decide to use magic your likely going to have to reallocate points that you would have put into endurance into mind stat as well. Arcane you should only worry about if you are doing a magic build.

Hope this helped a bit