Publisher Amazon Games and developer Smilegate RPG announced the Lost Ark endgame nerfs have been detailed, and they’re not as bad as players expected.
The new update went live last night and focuses on rebalancing various tier 1 and tier 2 endgame activities – with numerous Abyssal Dungeons and Guardian Raids getting nerfed. As with any online MMO game, more hardcore players will presumably be frustrated end game content is being made easier.
“In other regions, players had to stay in Tier 1 and 2 for a considerable duration, as Tier 3 had not yet been released,” the update reads. “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.”
The western release for Lost Ark released with all three tiers of endgame content, with the first two meant to be an introduction and prep for the final third tier – but that’s not apparently what happened.
“With the different purpose of Tier 1 and Tier 2 in our regions, there were some overly difficult Guardians and Abyssal Dungeon encounters left behind,” the developer said.
They added, “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.”
It’s worth reiterating the update is changing up damage from specific attacks and/or changing up attack patterns, and not so much a massive and broad nerf like players feared.
The Lost Ark endgame nerfs have been detailed ahead of the western release of the game’s first big update – which is due out sometime later this month.
In related news, we did a report on the rampant censorship and “localization” found only in the western version of Lost Ark – namely female characters being covered up, lots of NPCs given much darker skin tones for seemingly no reason, and more. Read up on that in our other report here.
Lost Ark was released in the west on February 11th, 2022 on Windows PC (via Steam). The free-to-play online action RPG was originally launched in Asia back in 2018. In case you missed it, you can find our review on the game here.
