Max Out Your Character’s Stats

Like the Story Mode protagonists, your GTA Online character has various skills that impact your character’s performance in certain tasks. Maxing out the stats of those skills will give you significant benefits in Missions and some daily activities.

When you create a GTA Online character, you need to set the character’s initial stats. Because the difficulty of maxing out a stat varies according to the skill, you should assign more points to the stats that are hard to max out.

This article covers how you should assign the stat points during character creation and how to boost your character’s stats in a short amount of time.

Stats in Character Creator

Here is my suggestion on how to assign the points to your character’s stats in the Character Creator:

• Change the following stats to their minimum:
  • Stamina
  • Stealth
  • Driving
  • Lung Capacity
• Now, you have plenty of points to assign. Change the following stats to their maximum:
  • Shooting
  • Strength
  • Flying

After those steps, the stats for your character should look like this:

In this way, you have more points assigned to skills whose stat is hard to max out and less points for stats that can be boosted easily.

Boosting Your Stats

In general, every stat can be maxed out by doing the activities related to it. However, some skills can be improved very quickly by using tricks.

Stamina and Stealth

Stamina can be boosted by running, and stealth can be improved while you walk in stealth mode. Thus, the fastest and most effortless way to max out them is to keep your character running or moving in stealth mode while you are AFK.

You can find an open space and let your character run or sneak in a circle, so your character can stay in that place without going too far away from it. In addition, it’s better to do this in a session without disturbance from other players, preferably an Invite Only Session.

If you use a keyboard, you can put some small but heavy objects on your keys to hold keypresses. For boosting stamina, keep pressing Shift-A or Shift-D; for stealth, press left Ctrl once, and hold a press on either A or D. Then, you are ready to go AFK.

If you use a controller, you can use a rubber band to fix the left joystick into a position that can let your character move in a circle, then you are ready to go AFK (away-from-controller, to be accurate). To boost stamina, you should also use something to hold the sprint button on your controller to keep your character running. To max out stealth, press the left joystick once to enter stealth mode before applying the rubber band.

Driving

The driving stat will usually increase as long as you play GTA Online because driving is an activity frequently done in the game. Simply keep playing, and your character’s driving ability will improve gradually.

Shooting and Flying

These stats will also increase in common in-game activities. Certain Missions, such as Heists, give you opportunities to shoot enemies and use aircraft. In addition, there is special activity for boosting each of those stats. The shooting ranges in Ammu-Nation and your Bunker can be used to increase your shooting skill, and completing Flight School lessons boosts your flying stat.

If you want to increase your flying stat quickly, you should consider going to the Flight School. Each skill is maxed out at 100 points; you need 10 minutes of active control in an aircraft to gain 1 flying point. But getting a gold medal for a Flight School lesson directly gives you 3 to 5 points according to the GTA Wiki on Fandom, which saves you a lot of time. As always, I suggest you do Flight School lessons only after you already have some experience with aircraft in the game.

Notice that using an Oppressor Mk II does not count towards flying because it is a motorcycle, not an aircraft.

Lung Capacity

This stat can only be boosted by diving into the water. In fact, don’t feel obligated to boost lung capacity because it only affects how long you can stay submerged before drowning, and missions that require underwater works will provide scuba gears or rebreathers. There is no clear evidence showing that lung capacity influences your character’s running or cycling performance.

One effective way of expanding lung capacity is to play The Cayo Perico Heist, and use entry and escape routes that require swimming. Make sure your character stays submerged for as long as possible. The lung capacity should gradually increase while you are grinding The Cayo Perico Heist.

If you want to manually boost it, you can buy the scuba gear from a clothes shop for $155,000, then dive into water and stay submerged. The scuba suit will allow you to dive underwater indefinitely. If you don’t want to spend that money, you may still go under water and stay submerged until the oxygen bar below the radar flashes in red, then come up, rebreathe, dive into the water again, and repeat the process.

Strength

Strength is the hardest skill to max out because gaining 1 skill point for it takes you 20 punches, and there isn’t any other shortcut. However, it is still a very important skill that is worth maxing out. If the strength stat is too low, your character will take more damage in falls, collisions, explosions and fire, increasing your character’s risk of dying due to those accidents.

I recommend increasing the strength stat to at least three bars, which is sufficient for preventing damages from most common falls.

The best way to boost your character’s strength stat is to find a place with a lot of NPCs and take them down using your fists. You can do this with the following steps:

1. Start a Mission where Wanted Levels are disabled, such as Pier Pressure. This Mission is unlocked at Rank 6.

   

2. Go to the Vanilla Unicorn strip club.

   

3. Use a vehicle to block the front door.

   

4. Use another vehicle to block the rear door.

   

5. Now, the NPCs in the strip club cannot leave the building. Enter the strip club and start punching them with your fists. Most NPCs will be frightened and will try to leave the strip club, but they will be trapped inside because you have blocked all doors of the building (you can climb through the cars, but they can’t!).

If you get bored during this process, you can do some alternative activities that can also boost your character’s strength stat, like golf and tennis, though the stat increases slower in those activities. Or, you may take a break and continue to hit NPCs in the Mission later, because maxing out the strength does take a non-trivial amount of time.

Summary

In my suggestion about setting your character’s initial stats, stamina, stealth, driving and lung capacity would get the fewest points. After all, stamina and stealth can be boosted while you are AFK, the driving ability will be improved seamlessly as long as you play GTA Online, and lung capacity is not very important. Maxing out shooting, strength and flying takes longer time and requires more effort, and they are all important abilities that improve your performance in Missions, so it is better to assign as many points as possible to each of them.