Lost Ark Online

Nia is a bit of a longterm goal. You can get 2 stars super easily for the first skill potion, by just doing the quest after the main story and buying the 2nd one for 8000sun coins(hope you've been saving chests). The quest takes a while but basically an hour after you finish Punika you can be done with 2omnium stars for 6skill points. The 2nd skill point requires all 6 omnium stars, and one of them drops off Moake, which is the world boss in punika but requires 1430 gear to kill, which realistically isn't happening for a few weeks at the very least, and likely a month or two, unless there's an easy way to kill him I don't know about(you can zerg one of the T3 boss that spawns on a small island as you respawn right next to the boss when you die, but the other stuff not so much). You do get a legendary Wealth rune at 5 omnium stars though which is nice if you play any class that builds ressources, so I'm still working on Nia somewhat but yeah shouldn't be a big priority, and likely you'll want to skip most of her rapport by doing a big gift at once, since she also has high virtue stats reqs(330 wisdom/kindness once you get past friendly), so you only really need enough to get to the part that sucks.

Personally I've just been saving gifts for now but for my daily stuff, I've been completing the easy charisma pot ones, Elia in East Luterra, Azena in Rohendel(only need first reward, not the whole thing) and working on Yuul atm, as Charisma is the hardest stat to come by in my experience(I'm almost 100 behind the others on charisma even though I've farmed these and Una rep specifically). I'm also doing Beatrice since she has both a charisma pot and a giant's heart but that one takes a while. For the rest, atm I'm working on Blackfang for the Astray eventually. I do 2/2 on Beatrice, 2/2 on Blackfang, 1/1 on Yuul and 1/1 on Nia. I also did Seria before(10days for Rethramis adventure tome food), worked on Thunder for a bit(30days for Yudia tome food, but stopped working on her atm as I'm not gonna be doing adventurer tome anytime soon anyway was just a filler), Ryeon's Ghost(10days for courage pot, was fast and easy when I was leveling/early).

As mentionned, Sasha/Calvasus/Beatrice/Nineveh are solid picks since they give giant hearts, but they all take a long time, Beatrice being a bit shorter since the heart is a reward earlier for her. If you get all the other hearts, you only need 2 of them to get 12 hearts though, so you should do Beatrice manually and gift one of the others once you have 11 hearts(many other hearts are also time gated, Tooki boss una task for 30days, Azure wind island una task for 15 days, shadowmarket una for 5days). If you P2W you can brute force them all, and I guess if you buy gifts constantly for blue crystals on mari's shop you might also be able to do it even without P2W. Personally I'm just waiting for tooki task to be done before I really look into 12 hearts, although 10 is easy enough.

If you want gold, the shit in Feitan and Punika reward stupid amounts really fast. There's a squirrel in Punika that rewards 1000g in like 10days of just doing the emotes/songs. I haven't looked into the conversion but pretty sure on most of them you gain money if you buy blue crystals, buy Mari's shop gift boxes, then gift these guys.

On skill points, also look up the guide on maxroll, a few are time gated after various stories. Rohendel needs you to do 7 days of Una Tasks there to get the potion, Feiton takes 4 or 5 days of doing daily quests in there(just normal quests that pop every day, post story kind of thing), same for Punika 5 days of post story quests. Punika also has 21 days of una task for a skill pot, while Whispering Island has a skill pot for 10days of una task. The earlier you start these the better, skill points are great(although technically there's breakpoints so it doesn't feel very rewarding inbetween those).

Voldeth said:

Not trying to disagree as most of your post is accurate and good advice but you're underestimating how much you gain from the rapport items. I've not bought an item from Mari's shop to assist with rapport or anything like that. I have gotten Beatrice's & Sasha's hearts, as well as capped out Nia until I raise to 320 (still have 25+ gifts). The amount we were given for packs is silly and it's not that difficult to raise -- I've completed my 10 giant heart's and it wasn't really a focus or anything I spent extra on.

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I've just been stockpiling them and haven't opened any, but yeah, I meant brute force for 12 hearts, 10 is rather easy. 12 basically you either need to do the slow una grinds or get all the rapport hearts which is quite a lot of rapport items. If you do azurewind(15days), then you can skip one rapport, and if you do tooki(30days), then you can skip 2.

Did you do islands with rapport gifts though? I feel I don't have THAT many boxes, only 20 legendaries, 1 relic and 80ish epic. Sasha needs like 80k to max, and legendary boxes are only 2k, purple boxes 450 at best if you can select(30 of the ones I have are rng gifts which are only 300ish rep instead).

Zindan said:

Hm, I've not seen an Epic give more than 330 to any NPC yet. I've wasted quite a few boxes though, I think. Didn't know that each NPC would have a different amount of Rapport required to hit Trusted, which sucks now I guess since I only have the Heart from Beatrice, and Sasha only at lvl1 Friendly. I'd like to get both Sasha and Ealyn at Affectionate though.

Edit: What is the restriction on Rapport interactions? Can I use 1 character to go around to 10 NPC's and do their Emotes / Songs / Gift(s) each day, if I wanted too?

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You only get 5 songs and 5 emotes a day per account(well per roster if you're crazy and play multiple servers). +1 if you have crystalline aura. You can do it on any char though, for example to do Blackfang I use my char that had a bifrost there for the una task, to do Nia I use my main since the others can't and to do the rest I usually use my bard.

Crone said:

So if islands weren't a thing for materials, you'd hit 50, and sit in Vern spamming Chaos Dungeons, Abyssal raids, and Guardian raids just slogging your ilvl up into the next tier? Feels a little like WOD expansion for WoW where no one had to leave their Garrison ever.

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You could still do islands for like skill points, engravings, una tasks, procyon compass field bosses/islands/chaos gates and such. But yeah the progression would largely be in town. If they had launched without islands rewards they probably would have had the RU/KR boosted progression instead, where every upgrade until T3 is 100% success rate and you get 2 upgrades per craft until +12.

Crone said:

To be honest, I kind of like it. It turns the game largely into an "arena" based game where you can play in short chunks of time and be ok. Or you can spend 4 hours farming materials on Islands, and progressing in other ways.

Just did my first Guardian Raid, and while of course very simple, was still fun to see a new "boss".

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Yeah the bear is kinda meh, but I really like the guardians, they kinda captured that Monster Hunter vibe decently well with the tells, the patterns and the variants(and I guess the flares but tbh the flares could suck a dick, or they could have them as free rewards for doing the guardian una weekly, I hate having to recraft these every now and then). I do wish they hadn't buffed the hp as it makes some of them too tedious though(like the ones that change areas every stagger, with the current hp that means they'll switch 4 or 5 times unless you have someone way overgeared and it makes it a real pita).

Crone said:

So I just had my first Guardian Raid where everyone quit out? Why is this? There were some deaths, and typical MMO retards think it's going to fail or they don't want to deal with it because it wasn't dead within 30 seconds?

Also, had my first Honing failure... And so it begins... haha

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Hmm you get a penalty if you leave so that's weird, although I've had a party do that earlier cause one guy was afk. Weird luck with afk ppl today, had some cunt try to afk cube too, but then he came back, either cause it was just a quick afk or cause he noticed we had 2 supports and it was going to be hard to clear shit otherwise. I was checking if the paladin was a support or not and people rushed the entrance before I could switch my spec.

Crone said:

Also, I got something on my Berserker that gave me like 50k harmony shards, and then now on my Alt I'm struggling to even get enough Harmony shards for honing? I need that 50k pack on all my guys!!

Sharpshooter plays so differently than Berserker. It's interesting I think how they've been able to somehow make the Berserker abilities feel "heavy", and the Sharpshooter feels light and airy. It's pretty sweet and makes the 2 styles of combat fun to play and not feel like I'm just doing the same thing on each character.

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Well the Welcome Challenge gives a bunch of free stuff, that or island rewards. For alts though you can do tower(assuming you cleared it before), you get a lot of mats for doing tower on clears after first(people even play it on their alt first so their main can get the mats, but need a strong alt for that). Also once your main is in the next tier, you can research at your stronghold some stuff that reduces the shard costs of honing by 20% and increase the success rate by 20%, which makes upgrading alts a lot easier. But it doesn't unlock until you've reached the next tier so it can be shit at first.