Lost Ark endgame nerfs detailed in full

Expect six hours of downtime tonight as the balance patch is applied.

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While the first big update forLost Arkis due later this month, a lot of conversation among players has been about theannouncementthat the next weekly update would rebalance some tier 1 and tier 2 endgame activities—several of its Abyssal Dungeons and Guardian Raids are being nerfed. Hardcore players wailed their game was being ruined for the sake of casuals, though there were also plenty of players pointing out that Guardian Raids in particular—activities intended to be repeated daily—don’t need to be quite as drawn-out as they currently are.

As well as detailing the changes in full, the latestblog postexplains more of the reasoning behind the rebalance. “In other regions,” it says, “players had to stay in Tier 1 and 2 for a considerable duration, as Tier 3 had not yet been released. With the amount of time spent in these stages of the game, players had a long time to study the patterns and mechanics of the Guardians and Demons they encountered— leaving only a few monsters that ended up posing as challenging hurdles for them.”

Meanwhile, the western version of Lost Ark launched with three tiers of endgame activities. Rather than being the be-all-and-end-all, the first two tiers of our version were intended to be a gentle ramp-up into what follows. But that’s not how they were working.

“With the different purpose of Tier 1 and Tier 2 in our regions,” the post continues, “there were some overly difficult Guardians and Abyssal Dungeon encounters left behind. This balance update isn’t about simply adjusting the difficulty as [a] whole. Rather, the focus is to improve some of the difficult patterns to better prepare players as they progress through each Tier and work their way toward Tier 3 endgame content.”

The actual updates aren’t nearly as cataclysmic as some were predicting. Many of them simply tweak the amount of damage caused by specific attacks or alter attack patterns rather than being sweeping changes. Here they are:

ABYSSAL DUNGEONS

ANCIENT ELVERIA

PHANTOM PALACE

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GATE OF PARADISE

GUARDIAN RAIDS

Vertus

Nacrasena

Flame Fox Yoho

Tytalos

Achates

Lava Chromanium

Levanos

Alberhastic

The update will also include several bugfixes and some improvements to how matchmaking works. It’s going live tonight, meaning an expected downtime of six hours will begin at 10pm PST / 5pm AEST / 6am UTC.

Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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