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The world of Lost Ark offers many different challenges for heroines and adventurers. Some try to complete achievements, while others want to maximize their character through fine-tuning. If you belong to the latter group, we have some tips for you.
What are these tips? This guide is aimed at players who want to take home the MVP (Most Valuable Player) title after a dungeon. Most of it is irrelevant for normal quests and exploring the world.
The article comes from our reader “Imperator” from the EU server “Thirain”. He has already reached a gear score of 1,330 in Tier 3 with his diligent progress guild “Empyrean” in the EU version.
However, some of the screenshots are from his account on the Russian server, where he had been previously active.
In this guide, we reveal tips to help you become the MVP. 1. This is how the equipment system works
Lost Ark distinguishes between:
- 6 pieces of equipment (helmet, chest armor, pants, gloves, shoulder armor, and weapon) in each of 25 item levels, which determine the base effects depending on the character class. Together, they result in the “level of equipment” or gear score (GS) or item level.
- 7 accessories (necklace, 2 * earrings, 2 * rings, ability stone, bracelet). The bracelet is only available from GS 1,490.
Each piece of equipment has a quality rating between 1 and 100, which greatly influences the granted bonus effects.
Additionally, the gear score is divided into 3 progress classes (Tiers). This is also the ticket to higher regions – Yorn only opens up at the end of T1, while Punika is only accessible at the end of T2. This ensures that in the highest possible region, items will always drop appropriate to your current gear score.
- T1 (Tier 1 or Class 1) up to GS 600
- T2 (Tier 2 or Class 2) up to GS 1,100
- T3 (Tier 3 or Class 3) up to GS 1,575
Unlike many other MMOs, in Lost Ark players do not hope for a lucky item drop, but essentially, all players farm the same equipment. 10 skin slots determine the visual impression and also grant valuable virtue points.
All equipment pieces are available per progress class in 5 different ranks, ascending in power:
- Uncommon (green)
- Rare (blue)
- Epic (purple)
- Legendary (orange)
- Relic (red).
For the higher ranks, you need reward tokens obtained in dungeons. In a grinder game like Lost Ark, you basically need patience, luck, or gold.
Comparison between two armor pieces. 2. General Tips for Equipment
Generally, the following applies:
- A T2 blue piece is always better than a T1 purple piece.
- To reach a new tier class, it is generally sufficient to upgrade all 6 equipment pieces to item level 15. However, the power of the purple and orange pieces is significantly better.
- Additionally, there are class-dependent set bonuses with a certain number of set pieces. You can acquire these sets from the NPC “Abyss Trade” or “Abyss Equipment Crafting” for reward tokens from the dungeons. Which of the offered sets you choose depends primarily on your playstyle.
3. How to Get the Best Equipment
How do you get equipment? To obtain the best equipment, it is mainly worth running dungeons and guardian raids. However, each dungeon has a weekly visit limit. If you want to progress faster while collecting your sets, you should definitely buy the reward chest at the end for gold, as it always contains reward tokens.
When exchanging reward tokens, a new equipment piece is created, and its quality is determined randomly. For the purple T2 sword, the range of additional damage is between 5% (at quality 1) and 10% (at quality 100). So if you get an item with a quality below 80, you should immediately “dismantle” it in the inventory window to convert it back to original reward tokens and make a new attempt.
This way, you don’t lose any materials, and the fun only costs you a few small silver coins. You can only do this before you transfer the item level of the previously used equipment piece at the NPC “Equipment Enhancement”.
How do you enhance equipment? To make your equipment stronger, you need to use equipment enhancement. However, as the item level increases, the success rate continuously decreases. From item level 20, you can expect to spend between 60,000 and 150,000 gold for a single successful enhancement attempt (depending on luck).
The enormous element of luck – and the associated frustration factor during crafting in the late endgame is likely the Achilles’ heel in the long-term motivation of Lost Ark. Nevertheless, remember: during crafting, just don’t lose your nerve.
4. Buy a Strong Equipment Piece from the Marketplace
Many equipment pieces are soulbound and therefore not tradable. However, in the late endgame, with the orange T3 set (which you can obtain from gear score 1,340 only through countless Argos runs), you have the option to buy all pieces directly from the auction house for gold.
This way, you can easily acquire strong equipment.
In the auction house, you can buy a special set directly. 5. The Right Accessories and Engravings
What are engravings? The right engravings are an essential part of your character’s power. There are a total of 40 different positive engravings – some of which are unique to each character class, while others are the same for everyone.
For each engraving, you can allocate up to 15 points (more does not provide any advantage) – there is a bonus at every 5, 10, and 15 points. There are also negative engravings, which are always displayed in red.
The points for these engravings come from engraving manuals (of which only 2 can be active at the same time), accessories, and the ability stone.
First, you should decide on a handful of engravings that fit your character class and playstyle. To do this, you can check the engraving overview with Alt+I to read about the different bonuses available. You can find a list of how to obtain the various engravings with our colleagues at Scentculture (via Scentculture).
Engravings play an important role. Buying Engravings in the Auction House: If you don’t want to rely on luck, you can give it a boost yourself. To do this, do not go into the standard “market” activated in the auction house, but into the detailed search of the “Auction House” tab. There, you can search through all currently available equipment pieces for the needed engraving effects or preferred combat stats. Sort the results by quality and act fast.
For each acquisition in this tab, a certain number of Pheons fee is also due, depending on item level, in addition to the gold used. You can obtain these quite rarely in the game – thus, you should use this feature wisely.
Engraving manuals (books) are also available for purchase in the auction house. Naturally, it’s a supply-demand model, so the sought-after engravings quickly become quite pricey. Legendary (orange) books can cost up to 15,000 gold each, and you need 20 copies of the same item.
You can also buy ability stones in the auction house. However, their final usability only emerges after grinding them at the NPC “Ability Stone Mason” – which is a matter of luck.
This is how the detailed search in the auction house works. Important Tip: You can even activate the same engraving manual twice – the points will also be doubled. Thus, it is also quite fast possible to bring the most important engraving to maximum level 3 even in T2 and thus reap significant bonuses.
6. Gems
At certain points in the endgame starting from level 50 (e.g., end boss rush), you can find gems. They are available in both T2 (all gems are blue) and T3 (all gems are orange) in 10 gem levels, categorized in the usual background colors: green, blue, purple, orange, and red.
There are essentially two different variants, each tied to a specific combat skill:
- They either increase damage by a percentage depending on the gem level (these are the triangular ones)
- They reduce the cooldown of the skill by a percentage depending on the gem level (these are the round ones)
At the NPC “Gem Expert”, you can randomly change the bound skill for a fee in silver. With increasing gem levels, this becomes increasingly expensive. In the late endgame, a change attempt costs more than 100,000 silver, and with 18 skills available, this is truly a lottery.
In your inventory, you can merge 3 gems of the same level into 1 gem of the next higher level using “Merge Gems”.
Important: The final version of the result is always random – you can merge two angular gems and one round gem and thus receive a round gem.For higher-quality gems, the auction house is worth considering. Search for the appropriate gem through the detailed search and throw in some gold coins. Gems of level 7 cost about 1,000 gold.
From T2, gems also become important. 7. Understanding Combat Stats
Besides the base stats of the character such as attack power and health points, there are some combat stats whose deeper understanding can be quite helpful. You should adjust your investment in these points based on your preferred playstyle.
- Critical hit chance
- Specialization primarily affects class-specific combat skills, like how the Paladin increases the speed of piety growth
- Mastery increases damage against impaired enemies
- Swiftness increases attack and movement speed and reduces cooldown of your skills
- Toughness increases defense, shield, and healing
- Competence increases the duration and intensity of opponent debuffs (e.g., stumbles) and reduces your own received debuffs
The Roster Level: The progress of your roster experience will increase the main attributes of your character class and vitality at regular intervals, just like rewards through quests or collection tasks. Both make you stronger and more efficient.
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Lost Ark
The action MMORPG Lost Ark from Korea is very similar in gameplay to Diablo 3. However, it has all the necessary MMORPG elements such as dungeons, raids, crafti...
