Lost Ark

[Ashamanchill]

Weirdly enough, the one I'm sticking to the most, is the most basic bitch been there done that one: the paladin.

[Hoax]

Pally doesn't fuck around at all in pvp, actually quite mobile with good openers and some poke.

[Draegan]

This game continues to draw me in. Sitting T2 at just over 1000 gear score.

[Hoax]

https://lost-ark.maxroll.gg/resources/post-50-guide

For anyone on the fence still, use this, do the 4hr version. The Guardian Raids are when you reach something like the real content of the game and they are still babyfood I'm told compared to how taxing the true lategame gets. I've found them plenty challenging as nothing prior really asked you to learn how to play so much as rub your face on your kb.

I'd say if you purely speedrun the orange quests you can get to Vern (where that guide starts) in ~~~20hrs /played even on your first time picking up the game.

[Threash]

Man I got ten minutes into the tutorial and I just could not take it any more. I am sure the game is great, it just isn't for me any more.

[SurfD]

Supposedly (though I am not sure if an effort won't be made to stomp on it) it is possible to score yourself about 4 months worth of free Crystalline Aura by swapping to the EUWest region, making a character on every server, and just logging them all in for 5 days to collect the login rewards since they are doing a "new region" login promotion. The CA reward is apparently account wide, and not region locked to the roster like most stuff, so you should be able to carry it over to other regions after collecting.

Sure, it's a pain in the ass cause it takes about 10 minutes per character, but there are currently 8 servers available, and each one offers 14 days of CA as the login reward after a few days.  

[Draegan]

Seems like a lot of work for $50 or whatever the cost is.

[Soulflame]

Man they haven't even bothered with the slightest bit of effort to keep the state of your questline in sync with the world.

Had to roll my eyes at the zones in the level 15-17 range.  You show up, are there for maybe 10-15 minutes and then being hailed as the great hero that everyone's heard of.  Despite my doing the bare minimum, solving no actual problems, and racing around as fast as I can on a horse to get through yet another set of "move 10 feet with my laundry" to advance a quest.  Shades of that penny arcade comic where I smash open two cages holding a person, and then ride past a third.

I actually leveled from "cross a bridge while on a horse."  That's... not a joke.  That actually happened.

 

I'll keep pressing on, I guess, for now, because I would like to play an MMO, but given that the group I'm playing with spans a bunch of levels, I doubt we'll sync up until we're mid 30s or something.

[Fraeg]

Playing a Pally.  Hit 50. Gear score of 245.  Friends who I came to play with are all 500 and up.  Game has been out 11 days? and already I am too under geared to group with my friends despite the fact that we are all the same level. I am guessing that these gear score brackets are intended to make you open your wallet in order to "catch up" in order to play with your friends etc. 
The dungeons are cool, I like them, the combat is fun, and that is about it.   

hmm I think this:     pretty much sums up my entire experience with New World and Lost Ark.

I am bitter

[Velorath]

Playing a Pally.  Hit 50. Gear score of 245.  Friends who I came to play with are all 500 and up.  Game has been out 11 days? and already I am too under geared to group with my friends despite the fact that we are all the same level. I am guessing that these gear score brackets are intended to make you open your wallet in order to "catch up" in order to play with your friends etc. 
The dungeons are cool, I like them, the combat is fun, and that is about it.   

hmm I think this:     pretty much sums up my entire experience with New World and Lost Ark.

I am bitter

Or to put it another way:

This game continues to draw me in. Sitting T2 at just over 1000 gear score.

[Trippy]

I actually leveled from "cross a bridge while on a horse."  That's... not a joke.  That actually happened.

To be fair you got XP from that and therefore dinged because it was a sidequest for using your newly acquired* mount which you may not have noticed showing up on your quest list. In WoW you can ding just wandering around as well since that game gives exploration XP for discovering new (to your) areas. In Lost Ark exploring will net you Mokoko seeds instead.

* In the KR release, in NA/EU they actually give it to you earlier but the quest is still in the same place

[Hoax]

Man they haven't even bothered with the slightest bit of effort to keep the state of your questline in sync with the world.

Had to roll my eyes at the zones in the level 15-17 range.  You show up, are there for maybe 10-15 minutes and then being hailed as the great hero that everyone's heard of.  Despite my doing the bare minimum, solving no actual problems, and racing around as fast as I can on a horse to get through yet another set of "move 10 feet with my laundry" to advance a quest.  Shades of that penny arcade comic where I smash open two cages holding a person, and then ride past a third.

I actually leveled from "cross a bridge while on a horse."  That's... not a joke.  That actually happened.

 

I'll keep pressing on, I guess, for now, because I would like to play an MMO, but given that the group I'm playing with spans a bunch of levels, I doubt we'll sync up until we're mid 30s or something.

Questing is dogshit. who cares. They get massive kudos from me for admitting that by making it so that you get 2 free lvl 50 alts (Power Pass) and then you spend not much gold and you can get 3 more alts to 50 (umm some thing you do in stronghold I forget the name) if you desire. So unlike poe/diablo they aren't forcing me to do the utterly boring stupid part over and over to try new shit.

That said... a larger concern is how dogshit most of the dailies seem to be. I do hate fucking heavy time req daily task shit designed to FOMO you the fuck out, tends to kill my fun. But we'll see how annoying that is medium term. There's not a huge reason to race race race to run yourself out of content other than stupidity and epeen that I can see.

As for sync'ing up, you'll be sync'd up for pvp or you will sync up with them for the raids. If not their main then the alts of the people who are ahead. It works decently I've found. The real issue is if play ability doesn't sync up Lost Ark doesn't give people a lot of places to hide. More on playing with friends below.

Playing a Pally.  Hit 50. Gear score of 245.  Friends who I came to play with are all 500 and up.  Game has been out 11 days? and already I am too under geared to group with my friends despite the fact that we are all the same level. I am guessing that these gear score brackets are intended to make you open your wallet in order to "catch up" in order to play with your friends etc.  
The dungeons are cool, I like them, the combat is fun, and that is about it.  

I mean you should be score 302 at 50 and then you can easily juice yourself to 320-340 or whatever that next step is quickly. I posted a hand holding guide a bit back. Once you clear 320-340 you can for sure tag along with them doing Islands, doing the special timed stuff tho I haven't been impressed with the fun in the chaos portal things, stupid train of 30 players just massacring bosses, felt like D3. if they are nice they'll do Una Task dailies with you as I don't think you'll cost them much, you should be high enough to do raids and loot pinata mode (chaos dungeon) with their alts every day.

If they are having zero time to play with you and acting like its impossible that's not on the game honestly.

To get your gear score up quickly hit some of these islands:
Starlight Isle
Toto Silver Isle
Panda Island
Serenity Isle

Try to get yourself into the highest tier chaos dungeon you can as early as you can to keep working on it. Im not sure what to tell you about tower, it doesn't really help your first character progress just unlocks big progression for every other char you have when they clear it.

The gear tiers are really wide for Cube, so if they are actually friends they should take you along once you have some Cube tickets I'd think.

My Q:
How's cross server grouping anyways? The insanely short queue times for everything makes me feel like I must be in a region wide queue not just my server??? If that's true which of you fucks is on US-West?

[Trippy]

My Q:
How's cross server grouping anyways? The insanely short queue times for everything makes me feel like I must be in a region wide queue not just my server??? If that's true which of you fucks is on US-West?

Yes, matchmaking and the auction house are region-wide:

https://forums.playlostark.com/t/need-an-official-answer-about-regions-and-servers/37390/7

I'm on US-West too (Enviska) but I didn't make the start of Tier 1 before Forbidden West released so Lost Ark is on hold until like the end of March after I finish Forbidden West and goof around with Elden Ring for a bit.

[Ashamanchill]

Questing is dogshit. who cares.

I wouldn't, except they are forcing me to do it for, what? 30-35 hours? Am I missing something? I tried to grind grind dungeons for XP for a bit, because yes the combat is fun, but they don't even give a pittance. They give dick all. If the game wants me to quest for a relaxed full time work week, to get to max level where the fun begins, and the ability to get this powerpass, then I'm going to have to judge it on that. I'm forced to care about questing by the game itself, and yes, its pure dogshit.

[Trippy]

If you do some research on the fastest path Hoax’s estimate of 20 hours to hit 50 and the start of Tier 1 is probably about right for people new to Lost Ark but experienced with the genre in general. The people who played KR / RU at a high level and who speedran through NA / RU to the start of Tier 1 did that in about 10 hours, plus or minus depending on subclass. And unlike KR, the XP in NA / EU is setup so that you can just do the story quests and hit 50 at the start of Tier 1. I.e, no grinding should be necessary, just do the story quests as quickly as possible if you want to get to the start of the “end game” as soon as possible.

[Falconeer]

No the fun does NOT start at 50. I am having a great time with the game and I think it's great in the genre. To me the fun was already there at level 1 and it's still holding strong at iLevel 500. But mileage varies as usual and I don't see the game getting drastically better or different at the soft cap. Lost Ark is all about enjoying the combat for its own sake and enjoying collecting and absorbing more of its world, its environment and lore or numbers and percentiles, depending on what kind of person you are.

So in short, chaos gates and guardian raids or anything like that won't probably change your appreciation of the game if you are not in a good disposition already. Either it clicks for you from the start and you want "more" of it, or I don't see it changing later.

To me, the most welcome aspect of higher item level content is that you can finally die and have a challenge, and that did increase my fun (and I was already having plenty). But I wouldn't count that as enough for most players to change their reviews because as the challenge grows, the diversity of things you do or discover or unlock narrows until it grinds to a halt by a lot, so I'd be hard pressed to think that just getting into a harder grind in stead of a flowing steamrolling would necessarily boost anyone's enjoyment.

[Ashamanchill]

See that's the thing: I do like the combat. But I've timed it out, I spend more time out of combat than in it  even just spamming main quests. By a long shot. Between the bouncing me around town just to tell me to kill bandits, to jamming the G button to skip dialogue, to running past irrelevant mobs on my mount to the desired location, only to eradicate all the needed mobs in the press of two buttons of the skills I have leveled up. Then fast travel back and do it all again, but this time it has a go to the next town step in the middle.

That's why I said I wish I could just do dungeons or something. They actual have me be in combat, and threaten to actually kill me if I don't at least humor thier bosses abilities. That is fun. That I can try out my very generous amount of skill presets to make the most of the fucking amazing skill system. Being ping ponged around only asking how fast I can press G to skip is not. I can see how when the game involves mostly the former it will be awesome. But for right now, it is mostly the latter and is crushingly boring.

[Hoax]

No the fun does NOT start at 50.
So in short, chaos gates and guardian raids or anything like that won't probably change your appreciation of the game if you are not in a good disposition already. Either it clicks for you from the start and you want "more" of it, or I don't see it changing later.

Falc is built different.

I don't think the game even starts until you hit guardian raids.

I think the fun totally starts when you are finally honing gear, getting engraving drops, using soul stones/engravings/runes so you actually have some interesting build choices and the content becomes quite difficult quite fast unless you hella good at this (I it turns out am not).
I spend a good chunk of last night getting my shit pushed in by the 4th Guardian Raid (Ice dragon dude) and tbh I looked up a yt video of my class "solo'ing" it and twice it was just someone way overgeared with double my hp getting hit left and right lol. I also ran some MM's into him and everyone was getting hit. We took him to under 1% on one very good run with an amazing Bard who seemed to be buffing everything at all the right times. He was literally changing the damage windows for a whole group single handedly. There is a /ton/ of player skill input into raiding I've seen almost every class vastly outperform and underperform their gear score and this is just the training wheel raids that really don't ask that much of people. Except Icy Dragon fuck   those two tail attacks and lack of pattern really do fuck with me.

Can we please cry about gear diversity and how sorc's dont get pants and can't be made to be fat hagbeasts next, I really want to hear people's thoughts

[Soulflame]

I mean, really, bards only get hot shorts.

What the hell.

[SurfD]

Is there any way to turn off friendly spell effects entirely?  Like, holy fuck is it almost impossible to see any of the action cues you need to avoid on the ground when in a group with basically anything.   Just gets drown out under an absolute riot of visual effects.   I can't even imagine how crazy raids must be if 5 man dungeon content is this bad.

[Trippy]

Yes you can. You can even set it so you only see friendly beneficial effects like buff circles.

Edit: checked the game, the full list of Battle Effects Display settings is:

* For all targets
* Include raid members
* Include party members
* Include Buff Effects of Party Members [sic]
* Display foes only

[SurfD]

And they hotfixed the "4 months of free Crystaline Aura" thing with the EUW server.   Logged in on one of the characters I had made there right now, and the login rewards have been changed (today would have been the day I could collect the free aura too).  Kind of a dick move.

[Falconeer]

The biggest let down for me so far is that it's impossible to do chaos dungeons and guardian raids with friends in the evenings on my server. Matchamking fails every team during peak times which is also when most of us can play. 2 weeks after launch and still being unable to do pretty much the only content that makes sense to play together is quite disappointing.

[rattran]

Finally got around to attempting to fire this up, after having to download it twice due to steam fucking up decoding it.
Won't launch, stuck with the LosTark splash. Only solution from the helpdesk? Reinstall from scratch. 

Maybe I'll try Elden Ring instead.

[Soulflame]

It takes a fairly long time (couple minutes?  i have not timed it) for it to go from splash screen to letting me pick a server.

Also here is the full experience, in a minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF7_svEraMU

[Rasix]

Finally got around to attempting to fire this up, after having to download it twice due to steam fucking up decoding it.
Won't launch, stuck with the LosTark splash. Only solution from the helpdesk? Reinstall from scratch. 

Maybe I'll try Elden Ring instead.

First time I loaded it up, it took several minutes. I've only logged in a few times, but every time it's a somewhat long process for a modern game.

[Trippy]

It's the Easy Anti-Cheat.

[Ashamanchill]

Ya my process is click play, about 3 minutes go by, then Lost Ark logo pops up and it freezes my current screen (but not my second screen) for about 2 minutes, then the into ident plays and server select.

[Draegan]

People hit level 50 at different points in the story line. I like the design of the game the way it's set up.

Ding 50 now your gearscore is your level. You can increase your gearscore by honing equipment. Honing mats are gotten by dailies, raids, dungeons exploring islands, doing side quests etc.

All this stuff is divided into tears. up to 600 is T1, up to 1100 is T2. T3 is barely released in the West.

Having alt is a design element of the game. Get your main into T2, get as many alts as you like feeding your "main alt" materials to level up. Get your main alt in to T2 so it can start feeding mats to your main to get into T3. The west is basically accelerating 2ish years of content.

[Hoax]

How I tell anyone to do it now:
-pick the dps that most satisfies the rule of cool for you
-do literally nothing but the orange quests to 50 just burn through this shit if you dont like it (I didn't), you'll be going back and filling in the adventure book later and collecting collectables and whatnot so dont worry about missing out on stuff in these areas
-the second you can you make sure if nothing else you do chaos dungeon x2 each day, the rest is optional
-use your first power pass immediately on another class, its ok to use both power passes at this step if you feel comfortable
-now you are running chaos dungeon x4/day, everything not bound to alt#1 gets put in roster storage so you can feed your main mats to speed up ilevel gain, if you are doing this right Harmony Shards (the small bright green currency/crystal) will be the thing holding you back on honing, you can get loads of it from 1-time sources npnp and if you are sure on your pick of main and have the time do so feel free
-once you are to 460 ilevel and the final (4th) guardian raid is unlocked before the next major city/continent/content chunk unlock and you've run it a few times paying some attention to group members, use your second power pass on whatever interests you & start running chaos dungeon x6/day, figure out which of those 3 (hopefully one is a big hit with you) classes you want to main, pump that with the others, you'll be able to create another three alt's using memory xfer in your stronghold with gold soon so don't hold back trying classes, there's very little risk of FOMO on the class front, if you have found a main you are sure of you can make tactical choices on alt classes to save yourself time and effort and resources advancing them
-you can basically pick btwn six classes using gold and power passes in a short time to figure out your main, getting a fresh 50 to 460 is cake when you have alts up and running, so try things in pvp, raid content, abyss, tower, whatever. Ideally though you want to hit on a class that clicks early and then just giga boost him with alts and plow through the first 600 ilevels as fast as playtime allows imo so you can get a sense of all the shit going on in the game and decide if you wanna play it or not, then chill and do the content you like at whatever pace, start fucking around with all the collection or exploration or bizzare branch content etc.

[SurfD]

Dinged 50 just as I got to althetine, but my Ilevel is only 230ish.  Do I just follow the story for 300+ gear? or is there something faster.

[Falconeer]

As soon as you unlock Chaos Dungeons (it happens with the story) do those at least twice a day. If you know what you are doing (which you don't the first time) you'll grow to 300 the first day, 400 the second day, 500 the third day. Then things slow down and the game forces you to pick up the story again, which is nice, while unlocking more stuff for you. Guardian Raids, Abyssal Dungeon, Tower, Cube and so on. All worth doing, but don't forget to keep following main story and also side story and islands, they provide A TON of materials to keep raising your iLevel.

Short version: do Chaos Dungeons
Longer version: do everything you can.

[Draegan]

Dinged 50 just as I got to althetine, but my Ilevel is only 230ish.  Do I just follow the story for 300+ gear? or is there something faster.

You have to complete the story for things to unlock. Just follow all the quests you see. Yellow quests reward you with stuff, Blue/Purple quests unlock game elements for the most part.

[Trippy]

Progression flow chart:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/sif5oi/visual_flowchart_for_game_progression/

[Setanta]

Gunlancer is so tanky it tends to negate some Abyssal Dungeons... but then I jump on another class and watch the damage fly. I'm at 500 on the lancer with 4 L50 alts (burned some gold plus the 2 power passes.

I really wish the screen clutter would piss off - pickups in particular is offensive when you are seeing drops rain from heaven.

Pally is fun, scrapper is an acquired taste, Sorceress is awesome when you get the hits off. Deathblade is paper thin. I'm going to take the Gunlancer to 600 and then see if I prefer the pally role or the Sorc - although I see some gunners running around with heavy ranged weapons... this game has kept me from playing the Destiny 2 expansion I paid for - but carpel tunnel is real