What the new Legion Commander Raid means for Lost Ark

It may have taken the entirety of June, but Lost Ark finally released the major Covetous Legion Commander Raid update. There are a couple of major updates worth reviewing; these changes also bring some direct shifts in the meta, especially for PVE.

Change in PVE Meta

Valtan is widely considered the outlier in terms of difficulty in comparison to other Legion Commanders;  while there are multiple factors, the biggest is Valtan’s comparative lack of mobility. Valtan often stays in a single position for an extended period of time, enabling players to consistently pour DPS onto him without major interruptions. As a result, classes that could consistently dish out damage were rated higher than burst-based DPS classes that have downtimes between their damage cycles. Starting from Vykas, this will change drastically with the update; bosses will be far more mobile, and have longer, stronger attack patterns with smaller windows of opportunity. As a result, characters that can pour out large amounts of damage in those rare windows possess far higher value than ones with more spread-out DPS. You can expect classes like Striker and Soulfist to skyrocket up to A+ tiers while classes like Gunslinger and Wardancer take a dive.

Full Access to Relic Gear

The biggest release this patch cycle is the new Legion Commander Raid, featuring Vykas of the Covetous Legion. Clearing Vykas allows the players to craft the other half of the Relic level gear that was first introduced with Valtan. After three weeks of clearing Vykas, players will have enough materials to craft all six parts of a Relic set and unlock set effects that dramatically change certain classes’ playstyles and power-level. This is the true beginning of Lost Ark end game.

Assisting Alt Characters

Lastly, Smilegate enabled the honing enhancement feature all the way until 1415. This is a huge update, since players can level up their alts to participate in Valtan raids; each raid clear provides an incredible amount of gold. With this gold, players can buy Relic-level accessories and set up engravings for their alts without tanking their main character’s.