Big news comes to North American Lost Ark servers on April 21st as the first new class and zone is released. This is content that was promised by Amazon Games and Smilegate in their April and May Developer’s roadmap and it is good to see they are following up on their release promises. Along with these content releases, players were also excited to receive the ‘Ark Pass’ and the ‘Super Express Character pass’ events.
Now, to break down each part of the content, let’s with start with the new class, the Glaivier (aka Lance Master). This female Martial Artists sub-class wields both lance and spear within her kit and players will find the most damage by utilizing the correct weapon at the right moment. Upon her release, players who had already beaten the Feiton content (Second part of Tier 2, ilvl 960+) also got the Feiton powerpass which boosts one character of the player’s choosing to 960 ilvl with all the story missions up to that point complete.
The release of South Vern however, was what players were more excited for; a new zone with new story missions, rewards and bosses… The excitement was quashed before the patch even hit by Amazon games as they announced hours before the patch that the world boss and Chaos gate for the zone would not be released with the zone. To reach this content, players had to have a character at 1340 ilvl or above, something anyone who has played for a couple weeks should have. For players who may not have reached that yet or want to get their alt characters there, the ‘Ark Pass’ and ‘Super Express Character pass’ are going to be your focus.
The ‘Ark Pass’ is effectively like a season pass like there are in so many other games from the MMO and genre, but even more prolific in other genres like Battle Royale games like Fortnite and Apex Legends. Players play the game and get experience towards their ‘Pass’ and at certain threshold, receive rewards. In the case of the ‘Ark Pass’ players doing their normal daily routine like chaos dungeons and Una’s tasks with grant this experience as well as special quests like use potions in a guardian raid or life skilling. A lot of material for honing and silver can be gained from this ‘Ark pass’ for free, but there is a paid aspect of it where players can pay USD to gain even more rewards from the ‘Ark pass.’
The final piece of content that came out on April 21st is the ‘Super Express Character pass.’ This pass is completely free but is only available to one character of a players choosing. It is recommended to use it on a Tier 1 character as it gives materials for that, but many players are choosing to use Feiton Powerpass then use the ‘Super Express Character pass’ on the powerpassed character to get their character to tier 3 extra fast. This pass also has the player’s chosen character do normal daily things like chaos dungeons, abyssal dungeons, and guardian raids to earn the rewards.
Moving on from the good news, there is some bad news that seems to come with every weekly maintenance and the larger the patch, the larger the problem. In the past, players have experienced not being able to log on certain characters, load into instances, or go to certain zones of the map. The April 21st patch may have brought the biggest problem though, random game and server crashes. While isolated game crashes to a few players is not a huge deal here and there, server crashes, putting the whole player base in a region out of the game, that is a larger problem. Both the player and server crashes have been occurring in the 48 hours after the path in the West Coast servers. To address this problem, Lost Ark Developers have taken down some of the West Coast servers from the better part of Saturday April 23rd (10+ hours). While there is generally some sort of in game compensation for this, these types of problems are concerning for the future of the game in the US.
