How to make the most of Life Skills in Lost Ark

If there is one thing that Lost Ark players probably figured out by now, it’s how much of a grind the game becomes after unlocking tier three gear. The immense decrease in gear score growth can often be a great source of discouragement. However, this is when life skills come in handy in Lost Ark.

Thus far, you have likely interacted with some features such as logging, mining, and gathering while following story quests. Instead of these, I will elaborate on the three specialized life skills: fishing, hunting, excavating.

Why bother with life skilling?

Pursuing life skills has many benefits in Lost Ark, which can be classified by profitability, utility and efficiency. Yields earned from life skilling can be sold on the market for gold, which has uses like converting to crystals to use for Mari’s Shop. The yields can also be used to make useful items like foods, Oreha fusion materials and life skill crafting materials. Lastly, life skills, in the end-game, are tertiary methods to support the gear upgrading process. As a result, it is better for them to be handled in the shortest time. These factors are what I will be using to identify the pros and cons of each life skill below.

Fishing

Fishing gives you materials for food and Oreha fusion. The advantages of fishing come from the fact that you cannot be contested by other players or interrupted by enemy attacks. In return for these advantages, fishing is the slowest of the three life skills when it comes to draining the life skill gauge. Furthermore, it is the worst out of the three in terms of profitability.

Hunting

Hunting is right in between Fishing and Excavating in multiple ways. Hunting gives you materials for food and Oreha fusion. Unlike fishing, there are different tiers of game you can hunt, giving you a higher chance to collect higher rarity meat. These rare meats are required for high-level cooking recipes, so they end up being really expensive in the market. This life skill really kicks in at level 30 when you get a chance to unlock secret maps to dungeons full of tier three game. You can quickly drain your life skill gauge in here and exit out with abundant bounty.

Excavating

Excavating is objectively the best life skill to pursue on paper. It gives you materials for Oreha fusion and life skill crafting. It drains the life skill gauge the fastest out of the three while having the highest yields for successfully passing the mini-game (it can give you up to eight times the original reward). This fact, however, is also the reason behind my hesitation in recommending excavation. It is extremely popular and you will constantly have to fight with other players to get the ruins. The contests becoming increasingly aggravated by the fact that it is imperative to focus on tier three areas to get the highest yields. Of course, there is always the technique of doing it during late hours at the cost of your healthy life routine.