Lost Ark Online

Well technically, if you're NA, you can get somewhat of a lead if you no life the first few days. Not like massively important, but the daily resets are at 1AM local time but the game launches globally at the same time so in the US(west coast especially) you can play all day on tuesday before the reset. EU gets kinda shafted since the game ends up launching in the evening, with the reset shortly after, so first day is basically "wasted". Past that, the weekly reset is on thursday. So you can get some of the weekly stuff done before the reset if you play right away. On EU, you basically only have ~30hours before the weekly so it's not that much time but on NA you end up with closer to 40 so that's more time to get stuff done.

Realistically though it's still a short amount of time and between the leveling and upgrading you need to do, you'll likely only be able to get a few of the weeklies done before the reset. PvP una weekly and Abyssal dungeons(the 340 ones) is likely all you can fit? Maybe a ghost ship if there's one that spawns at the right time? Although I'm not sure what gear you need for that. More Una weeklies too if they're doable, I'm not 100% sure on how they work, I think the Guardian Soul one needs at least 3 days of Guardians, but the Chaos Dungeon one might be doable if it counts Chaos Dungeons past the 2 daily runs? Grinding Chaos dungeons or PvP would also let you buy the weekly capped materials from that as much as possible.

All in all, it's a very minor advantage but there's at least a little bit of an advantage to the headstart. Past that though and for example assuming you wouldn't have time to no life leveling+grinding before the reset anyway, you basically lose nothing. The game's all about long term grinds and getting 3 days ahead won't amount to shit.

I don't know anything about this game but dropped in to see what it was about. 2nd post i read outlines the importance of dailies and weeklies. Back down to 0% interest.

Mr Creed said:

But not like we're "working through" a WoW update for an entire year until a new patch, right? Each tier here is significant and actually takes that much time to be done with?

Click to expand...

Kinda. T3 is the only "big" tier, T1 and T2 are just relics of the past updates at this point. T3 will last a while just because there's nothing else to do besides that for now, since KR doesn't have T4 and we're starting late anyway. So T3 will last, but you can consider T3 as a WoW expansion. It has several patches with several gear upgrades and new raid and story content added, but eventually it'll be phased out when they release a new "expansion", which will be T4 and gear will just reset where you start doing the new MSQ, then run 2 chaos dungeon and get blue gear that's like 150-200ilvl higher than your super raid gear, and you'll have to refarm a bunch of shit(T2 gems work at 50% efficiency in T3 gear for example, so likely T3 gems will work the same in T4 gear and such).

So in a way, this is like playing at the end of BFA or Legion or Shadowlands when that releases, there's a lot of progression content to go through. There's some form of catchup, but not as clear cut as wow does usually, so you still have to progress through the previous "wow patches" instead of doing 4 world quests and getting gear that's better than what dropped at the start of the expansion. Because of this, you have several months worth of "content" to progress through. Plus our version actually has none of the "real" endgame content available and will be released over time so it'll be a true progression.

But yeah you can expect to have a year or more to spend in T3, and once you're in T3 everything you do will count towards that progression, unlike wow where they do mini gear wipes inside a given expansion, so the rush isn't particularily important.

Besides that, there's also a lot of long time grinds that improve your character on an account wide level instead, and those are arguably even more important than just the traditional gear threadmill. They offer large amounts of character power, like 40-50% increases, similar to wow borrowed power shit, only it's permanent(so far). I'm talking about stuff like getting skill potions, stats from legacy level(account level), cards and engravings. These basically carry over between tiers, and are long term investments that benefit all characters on your account while taking a long time to progress. Most of these are obtained in direct ways via quests and drops but also from long overall grinds such as Adventure tome completion(completing all objectives for every "continent"), collectibles(island hearts/giant hearts/ignea tokens/omnium stars and to a lesser extent the other stuff) and farming daily/weekly capped various content like Una quests, world bosses, coop events. All of these are interconnected and connect with other grind systems like Rapport and basically offer a lot of long term avenues to progress your account as a whole, without even actually doing raid content and such. Almost everything you do to progress something in the game will actually improve your account overall, including leveling content(obviously not everything is equal, you're not gonna get +10% dmg by farming a low lvl dungeon, but leveling content helps with adventure tome progression, which offer good rewards).

BDO had similar concepts, with stuff like setting up your empire of workers to generate ressources over time, setting up your farm, getting a cook to turn in boxes and all that so that even passively playing the game you'd make money that would let you progress your character. Although in BDO, most of the progress is via the gear, and the gear itself is a bitch to upgrade, while Lost Ark gear feels at least a little less bad to upgrade(you don't downgrade gear for example, so you don't have to gamble on your shit or have a replacement to try an upgrade, you just get mats, press the button, if it works nice, if it's doesn't well try again next day).

Voldeth said:

This is really not accurate at all. The producer has already stated that they feel that the gear 'reset' that occurred at T3 was a mistake which caused frustration.

Click to expand...

Right I probably shouldn't have said that the way I did in terms of full expansion reset like wow does, but I still believe they will do some sort of reset at some point.

DFO does that too, even though it takes months/years to gear up, they still do "gear resets" when they upgrade the level cap, but over the years instead of doing the harsh stupid resets they used to, they give plenty of advantages for old players, such as the ability to transfer gear upgrades to new gear(so your +15 raid gear enhancement can be transferred to new higher cap gear to get +15 directly once you have enough mats, this already exists in LA but only within the same tier I believe) and the ability to convert old epic gear into a new epic gear set that's not the best but still stronger. The old raid gear is still the best until the new raid gear too, so having raided the previous tier allows people to farm the new content faster and easier but the difference between them and a new player using the new gear(after they took the time to farm it, it takes usually months) is small.

The gear resets allow them to remove older systems they feel don't work well anymore, and facilitate the catchup mechanics for new players by just having a standard leveling progression instead of a convoluted "you progress through raid tiers as they were released".

We'll see how Lost Ark does it however, they might do it differently and never actually reset but instead keep adding catch up mechanics, which would work too.