Lost Ark Creators Address Concerns About Difficulty Changes

By Tanner Dedmon

Lost Ark players who've been grinding away at the game to get into late-game content may have found that some of those challenges were more difficult than expected, but that'll be changing soon. Developer Smilegate RPG announced this week its plans to lower the difficulties of select Guardian Raids and Abyss Dungeons based on feedback from players. This comes at the same time that Abyss Raids were announced as well, so if you still want a challenge and don't want things to be easier, you'll soon have something else to test your builds against.

The decision to lower the difficulties of some of the raids and dungeons was explained in a post shared on the Lost Ark site this week. The creators reiterated that they'd recently committed to adjusting difficulties of T1 and T2 content but acknowledged that some people had concerns about that.

To help alleviate some of those concerns, Smilegate provided some stats. Some raids and dungeons – the developer didn't say which ones, exactly – are "completed by less than 10% of players," so even if you view most or all of them as easy, others apparently don't. Smilegate said it's important to ensure new players still have fun while advancing instead of opting to give up instead.

"These adjustments are based off a collection of data and feedback, including game data that showed very low success rates for participants (with some raids and dungeons completed by less than 10% of players)," Smilegate said. "We understand that people can practice and improve at the game over time, but for early game content in particular we want to ensure that new players are having fun learning and advancing instead of getting frustrated and giving up."

The developer also clarified that this isn't an indicator of future content always being made easier and said it doesn't want to alter the "core experience" of T3 and endgame content. The list below was provided to show what all is being looked at now in terms of lowered difficulty.

Guardian Raids

  • Vertus
  • Nacrasena
  • Flame Fox Yoho
  • Tytalos
  • Achates
  • Alberhastic

Abyss Dungeons

  • Necromancer's Origin
  • Hall of the Twisted Warlord
  • Hildebrandt Palace
  • Sea of Indolence

Smilegate did not say in the post exactly when these difficulty adjustments would be implemented, but a more detailed explanation of the changes is coming in this week's patch notes.

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