Lost Ark: One month review

I'm pushing roughly 300 hours on Lost Ark since release. As you can expect from someone who has put this much time into the game I am a massive fan. I enjoy most aspects of the game, but there are a few that drive me insane.

My biggest complaint is the honing system. While this issue goes away as time goes on it drives me insane. I had a massive headstart. By the end of day 1, I was level capped and had all daily content completed. That means chaos guardians, una's etc. I've never missed a reset of those. Abyssal was done before Thursday reset as well.  I fell behind my guild at the end of Tier 2. Even though I was near the end of Tier 2 when they were starting Tier 2. I ended up having 70+ honing fails to get out of T2. Others had ~20 failures. That means I had to spend thousand of potential gold and resources to keep pushing that others did not.

The common reply to this happening is "Hurr durr Black Desert online has lower odds", and that's true. For an Eastern MMO Lost Ark does give you much better odds than other games. However, the most annoying part is that once I am done with my daily content I can not progress vertically anymore. That means in the very beginning luck is almost everything. In other MMOs I can go and grind for hours on end to make up for my bad luck. That's not the case here. Realistically this complaint will not matter for 99% of the player base.

The daily grind is real if you want to be a sweaty player, and it will burn you out. I'm rocking 3x alts right now. That means I do 6 chaos dungeons, 6 guardians, and 18 daily quests a day. This allows me to keep pumping out tradable materials to gain gold or push my main character further. On top of this, I'm doing almost every Abyssal dungeon 3x a week which is very time-consuming. Again this will not matter to 99% of the players.

The game is Pay to Win. This really depends on your take of p2w. I really don't think the game is unless you want to be in the top 1%. You can still do all the content in the game. My main is just shy of 1340 item level. I have spent 70 dollars on the game and sold none of that. It's all skins for my entertainment. PvP is normalized so who cares about swiping there. If I didn't have such terrible luck I would easily be pushing 1350 or 1360.

If you're still reading you're probably wondering why I am still playing this game? It's quite simple. The game is amazing. Above is almost all of my complaints about the game. The rest of the game is fantastic. You have hours upon hours of content to play through as a free-to-play player. There is tons of side content as well. The horizontal progression in this game is a lot of your character power. Skill points don't only come from leveling up your character. You can get them from a lot of the side content.

The combat is top-notch. I was lucky enough to be able to start with my main the Sorc. I'm currently working on a Scrapper and a Deathblade.  All three are super fun to me, and I enjoy playing them every day. They each fill their own nitch that I enjoy. You really should try different classes to see what you enjoy.

Abyssal Dungeons are super fun. Same with Guardian Raids. Seriously you should jump in and have some fun! You really should look up some mechanics or ask the group before starting a boss. There are some raid wipes that will kill everyone if you mess up. Be honest and speak up! People will be more friendly than you think. Almost every Abyssal dungeon I do I am teaching others how to do it as well.

The PvP is top-notch. I generally only play this with a full group of 3. So this may skew the results for me, but man is it fun. It's been a long time since I get sweaty from doing some PvP. It gets intent and a lot of the fights are so close that it comes down to the last 10 seconds and someone dies. There are even different modes that you can do.

The game has some ups and downs, but you should just keep an open mind. Lots of the P2W arguments in my opinion are dumb. The game is free to play so just try it out and see if you enjoy it.