Lost Ark (isometric ARPG/MMO) general discussion

I recently tried Gunlancer on the Russian server and ho boy it sure isn’t my playstyle. It was kind of a shock going from any other class with a forward dash to him. Godspeed! :)

The thing is, all that experience in how to play your main in dungeons and the games mechanics you’d be getting in T1/T2 and generally settling in to learn the game’s ins and outs is now right out the door.

Sure you can take your time. But, if you don’t rush to T3 you’ll have an extremely difficult time affording the engravings and materials you need to level your gear by the time you get there because all the early levelers will have already borked the economy. I really don’t know what they were thinking.

Oh, I was just about to say I am going to try Gunlancer too! It looks easier to play than one of the Support classes but does offer some of that playstyle and it is hard to die (until I try it anyway).

Watching all these videos is killing me lol

Tried it briefly tonight and it wasn’t as clunky as I had feared. You can just move the mouse the opposite direction of where you want to jump to.

You have to do this anyway and the effort isn’t wasted, because the enchantment level gets moved over to the new gear (not clear if it is all of it or just a portion)

I understand what you’re saying but I don’t see why this forces me to change how I’m going to play (much). Yeah, if you play one class for a while and then decide on a different main, it takes more time and money to get to the endgame. But if that means I don’t get to do a lot of T3 content for 3 months versus one, why would it matter to me? I don’t feel compelled to rush to the endgame, and I’ll get there eventually. So if I play for a while and don’t enjoy what I’m doing, I’m going to switch to something else that seems like it’ll be more enjoyable.

Also, from what I have read, once they put catch-up mechanics in the game after a while so people who are switching mains have a way to bring their alt up to speed.

To me the bottom line is whether I’m enjoying my time in the game.

I guess the key is how they’re going to implement the initial T3 content in NA. The amount of gold you get from T3 is astronomically higher than from T1/T2. Once people get to T3 and start putting mats and engravings that you absolutely must have in order to level up your gear in the AH, the prices could inflate rather disastrously.

Therefore, those that take their time to get to T3 may find progressing there really hard. Because high gold prices may mean that you’ll have to rely on clearing dungeons and raids instead to get what you need rather than buying it. Which might be fine if you have a guild regularly clearing any high level content you may need to get what you’re looking for. For those that don’t care about T3 progression, I agree that it will probably not matter much.

All that said, if you do get to that point and either have spent a ton of gold on your main or a lot of time running dungeons/raids to progress that character, switching mains at that point is going to be really painful because you have to do all that over again which would be both expensive and time consuming. Everything I’ve read says to switch mains at the beginning of T2 or the beginning of T3 when you need to switch gear anyway. Now, the time to make decisions may be compressed. Or you may have to wait until your main is T3 if they take their time bringing out the unreleased classes and you really wanted to main one of them.

Right now we just don’t have enough information to tell how all of this is going to play out. I hope more info is released in the next few days and I’ll be watching to see what the reaction of the content creators is to all this. It’s enough to be concerned but not yet enough to be alarmed.

Any harder than the people who got there first and didn’t have any market to work with, though? In every MMO I’ve played I’ve always known I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the no-lifers and oftentimes things are easier for those who get there first (exploiting bugs, easy way of getting gold/exp, or things like that that later get patched). I don’t really care if they have it easier as long as I’m able to enjoy myself and not hit a brick wall. I’d imagine once I hit T3 myself, the market is the market and I’m selling items I don’t need for that same markup?

Not being argumentative or trying to play devil’s advocate, I’m just wondering myself how it’ll all shake out. As I’ve said previously I really just don’t have enough context to know how it’ll be or understand the nuances but it doesn’t sound like too much of a problem to me so far, from what I’ve read. Maybe I’m totally pissed off and frustrated in a month or two, who knows! :)

Here’s a new vid on the January update by Wilky who’s one of the main content creators. He does express how shocked he is by these changes and he does have some of these concerns. He says we need more information about how they plan to gate us through this content and I agree. He also had this reply about the economy in the comments:

[

S3Ri0us](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvkNB5ULT8_9Fde_JQSXwuQ)

3 hours ago

Great, now ppl that already have played the game will race to endgame, crash the market and get unreachable for new players.

4
REPLY

Hide reply

Wilky

Wilky
3 hours ago

Hopefully Smilegate thought about this, I am hopeful that they did

REPLY

I listened to Syvo and his take is that it is not a full Tier 3. He feels that as long as they give enough time for new players to play Tier 1 and 2 to reach the low version of Tier 3 it should be fine. I guess he means it depends on when they launch the next patch of the rest of Tier 3.

Apparently with the partial release you will not be able to gear up like you would if it was full Tier 3 release. He places a lot of faith is Smilegate I think we will have to see how it goes,

I do think that most Content Creators will do well if people have to watch a ton of guides to learn what to do with the latest info. I think they may have a vested interest in some Tier 3 being available earlier. Though I think Syvo is not someone in that category.

My only real reservation about having access to T3 is the economy. If they have considered it and can keep it reasonable I think there is no difference between staggering the releases to T3 or releasing it all at the beginning. You can count on players being abusive with the economy and if there are safeguards and adjustments to deal with it, it will be great. Either way unlike some other games there are only two ways to get gear either by drops or auction house (no crafting, etc), and all progress is gated by gear score, so there is no alternative method to achieve that.

The other thing this has made me think of is do I feel strongly I HAVE to play support first. Previously, we had time to get up a few characters and have them in the same place to be able to have options to both solo and gear up or switch and support your guildmates better. I’m kind of torn, especially when they say the Guardian content is more difficult so newer players will have a more difficult time with them (I assume), and failing means you don’t get the materials to upgrade and effectively stop progression until you “learn” the mechanics with less room for error.

So, again, kind of torn.

When you recycle you gain the full upgrade bonus (the +, which dictates it’s gear score which dictates what % of the stats you get for the item)

So, when you get your T1 set to +15 then move it onto your T2 set, it will be +15? If so, what’s the upgrade path from there?

It’s a little more complicated than that but the gist is unless you intentionally mess it up or just don’t know about recycling you transfer your upgrade progress to the higher gear sets and continue on your progress path.

So, for example, I have blue (rare) gear, I get it +15, at X gear score legendary (yellow) gear starts dropping which has higher base stats or a different spread.

Before I go on, something I didn’t expect is that there are only 2 different of the “set” gears of each tier that have the better stats and set bonuses.

So you choose one of those two sets to go for, once you have a piece of that new tier (legendary vs rare) you recycle your +15 rare into the legendary and it becomes +15 legendary. You do that again when you get to the next level (artifact, T3). You could also decide to switch to the other set and recycle your current +15 set to the other.

So from that, you’re never really out anything by upgrading your gear (getting it to +15)? I don’t know what material is needed to upgrade, but if you can upgrade should a player do so since they can recycle it into whatever else they find later?

Yes, as long as you are recycling you don’t lose any progress on the + which is what is important. At the beginning (50 and the start of getting the materials) you should look at what kind of gear you want and move the gear score over to that particular piece. However, once you get into the set gear you basically have 2 options since the set gear is just better than dropped gear once you factor in the set bonuses. As far as I know the gear that drops from the Raids and dungeons after 50 only comes in those particular varieties, there isn’t a big RNG pinata.

So make sure you are locking any gear you have upgraded, you don’t want to lose it by accidentally doing something dumb with it :)

It feels overwhelming jumping into the game for the first time, but damn the game feels good to play (even if I’m just face-rolling skills)

Yeah the feel and feedback from skills is great. It took me a bit to get used to the fact this wasn’t paced like a traditional ARPG but once it clicked it was great.

They released the list of servers for the NA/EU release. There’s a lot of them. Is there any way of telling which Amazon data center server handles one of these?

SERVER LIST

This is the list of servers that will be open for players to select, beginning from the Head Start on February 8th. Additional worlds may be opened based on population levels.

EU Central
  • Neria
  • Kadan
  • Trixion
  • Calvasus
  • Thirain
  • Zinnervale
  • Asta
  • Wei
  • Slen
US East
  • Azena
  • Una
  • Regulus
  • Avesta
  • Galatur
  • Karta
  • Ladon
US West
  • Mari
  • Valtan
  • Enviska
SA
  • Kazeros
  • Agaton

I think, after spending some time with classes today, I’m going to level up a Paladin during the head start. My first alt will probably be a shadow Hunter

Is this a lot of servers? It seems like not very many, however, I do know in Korea they have 5 servers and they do more on those 5 than currently play New World (100k+ daily). I may just have MMO launch day PTSD. Maybe the ques won’t be bad …