Lost Ark Tips and Tricks: The DOs and DONTs for Beginners (2023)

New to Lost Ark? Looking for helpful information to aid you with progression and learn game features fast? This is the guide for you!

Lost Ark often doesn’t give you all the information you need to manage everything it throws at you. There are a lot of things that get hidden away or often overlooked that can help with everything from Combat to Inventory Management. This guide brings all of that information to one convenient place.

How to level up quickly

Unlike most other MMOs, Monster XP is extremely low in Lost Ark. So even when you need to defeat monsters for quests it’s best to group them up and use AoE skills to get through them quickly. If it’s not quest-related, you should avoid slaying monsters as much as possible.

However, the one thing I’ve personally made an exception for to help with the Welcome Tasks and Adventurer’s Tome, is to defeat any Elite Monsters.

They add a small amount of progress which can get you helpful items and resources like Silver. These can be identified by an Orange outline, or an Icon above their head

Speaking of the Welcome Challenges, these are a good way to keep track of your progress overall while they exist. You should be completing these tasks as they come up. It’s not necessary to do all of them, but it is quick Silver and other materials.

Don’t worry about getting 100% of collectibles as you go, unless you really want to. You never lose access to most of these collectibles, outside of a few specific Mokoko Seeds later into the game. Everything else can be done at any time.

Accessories, unlike your armor and weapons, come with Combat Stats. What stats these roll can give you a slight boost while leveling, and generally help you clear monsters out faster. When you get accessories, keep a lookout for Crit, Swiftness, and Specialization. These three stats help the most with quickly clearing enemies. Crit Increases your Critical Rate; Swiftness boosts your Attack Speed, Move Speed, and Skill Cooldown; and Specialization helps increase your Specialty meter gain, which helps most classes power through enemies faster.

If you’re familiar with MMORPGs, or even if you’re not, Lost Ark allows you to run dungeons solo. MSQ Dungeons are often faster to complete solo, rather than in a group. The only advantage you get with a group is being able to run them on Hard and get slightly better rewards.

Which quests to do for best efficiency

For the most part, the only quests you should ever care about or follow are your Main Story Quests (MSQ). The MSQ alone almost give you enough XP to get to Level 50, or the level required for endgame content. Once you pass the Luterra Region and are tasked to visit other continents, the blue World Quests become your replacement MSQs.

Outside of the MSQ, you should also always complete Guides Quests. These typically introduce features of the game, as well as give rewards tied to those features. They aren’t necessary to do right away, but they do provide helpful items.

The most important ones to get get ASAP are the Pet Guide, which gives you a pet bunny; and the Ability Stone Faceting Guide, which gives you a few Ability Stones you can facet to help get Engravings later on. Pets are helpful companions that loot for you, speeding your progression up a ton.

If you want to learn more, check out the in-depth Guide to Engravings in Lost Ark. We break down the Engravings System and teach you everything you need to know about it.

Most Sidequests should be skipped, as they often only give small amounts of Silver or Rapport currency. While Rapport currency can be useful later, it’s not immediately useful and there are far better sources of Rapport items. However, there are some Sidequests that give really good rewards, like Engraving Book Chests.

Finally, there are Chain Quests, which are multi-step Sidequests. Unlike most Sidequests, Chain Quests are almost always worth doing. They also tend to give rewards that are super useful, like Engraving Book Chests. You can always come back for these later, much like Sidequests, but it’s often easier to do them as you find them, so you dont have to remmeber where they are later.

Inventory Management Tips

Using Ctrl or Alt alongside Left or Right Click will do different things to help with Inventory management. Below is a quick list of what each combo does.

Ctrl + Right Click – Opens Option Menu
This menu allows you to many of the other options listed here, just with extra steps.

Alt + Right Click – Open/Use Multiple
This is helpful for when you have a stack of items, say Phoenix Plumes, that you want to use all at one.

Ctrl + Left Click – Move to Pet Inventory
This allows you to quickly move items to your pet inventory.

Alt + Left Click – Applies/removes Sort Lock
Sort Lock prevents items from being shifted away from their current location by the Sorting function.

If you have a Pet as well as Crystalline Aura, your pet can be used to quickly access Your Mail, and Your Storage. You can quickly open the pet menu with Alt + P, and access these from the Pet Function Section in the lower right.

There is an Auto-Dismantle feature in the game. To access it, you need to press the Dismantle option in your Inventory. Once in the Dismantle Screen, select the Auto-Dismantle Settings button on the lower left.

I highly recommend setting this to dismantle Normal Items Only, While Leveling. White Items aren’t too common in this game, but they pop up occasionally. You will however see plenty of Uncommon and Rare Gear, which can help keep your gear at a decently high item level. This will help you keep the basic stats at expected levels

Combat Tips

Always read the information on your abilities. These will help you with identifying which skills can be used to handle certain boss mechanics and get the most out of them. These are your mechanics like Stagger, Back Attack, Weak Point, etc. We also have an Advanced Combat Mechanics Guide that covers them in a bit more depth.

If you’re struggling to fight a boss, slow down and learn their attacks. There’s no need to rush, and often time you may need to hold certain Stagger skills or Weak Point Skills for certain mechanics. This won’t be too common early on but will be important as you get later into the game or when fighting World Bosses.

Speaking of World Bosses, pay attention to call-outs for World Boss spawns as you level. These are a good way to get decent items, and typically only take a few minutes to take down if there’s a crowd of people. It may slow your leveling a bit, but you get a lot of useful things ranging from accessories that can speed up your current section of leveling, to cards that can be used for account-wide bonuses. It also gives you more experience fighting enemies that don’t just immediately get crushed, which you’ll typically only get from Dungeon Bosses otherwise.

There are a number of options you can choose from to tweak your UI to gain an advantage with your gameplay in Lost Ark! I suggest you take a look at that guide if you are new to MMOs or feel confused with the many available settings the game throws at you.

We have a collection of Lost Ark Beginner Guides for you to check out. They will help you get a nice and smooth start with the game, save precious time and learn the basics easily and progress more efficiently.

If you want to save up some time, we have a complete Progression Guide for Lost Ark. It will help you get from level 10 and Tier 1 all the way into the EndGame stages and Tier 3.