Starting with your brand new character I’ve put together a cheat sheet that you can use for both builds that get used for each of the class Engravings and it includes tripods gems runes Engravings and the sets that you’ll use for those builds like Maxroll lost ark.
Now to keep this content organized we’ll go over the class identity which is easily the most involved in the entire game so it will require some Explanation we’ll do a general overview of the class and then we’ll get right into builds first let’s start with the overview.
The Arcanist or Arcana
The Arcanist or Arcana in other regions is a mage she is under the subclass of Mage but she plays more like an assassin so you’ll find her being very high Mobility and big burst damage regardless of which build you choose and she does play very close to melee range with a lot of rotation in Maxroll lost ark.
Depending on what build you’re running you may either Be running more of a non-directional hit master or be looking for some high swiftness Dominion based uh cooldown resetting rotation-based builds with Emperor.
She generally has short cooldowns so you’ll have high payment especially if you go Emperor with swiftness so she’ll be using her abilities quite a lot she does have strict stacked management with the empress build specifically and that you’re managing your Stacks.
As optimally As possible can this is a class that I will warn you now is not easy to play it has a lot of depth so if you’re up for the challenge of playing either of the builds for this class uh then definitely dive in.
But I’ll tell you now this class is not going to be for everyone for Synergy she has a crit chance Synergy just like the Gunslinger and the Dead Eye she has three types of abilities yellow blue and red the yellow abilities generally just build meter and Have various effects.
Build stacks
The blue ones will build stacks on the target so you can see after hitting uh poor humorous here I got two stacks up on the target every time you use the blue ability you’ll be able to get stacks and you can see that denoted next to your character.
Then you guess it using a red ability will detonate these Stacks uh having various effects depending on what your build is and what you’re equipped with and all of that yellow and blue abilities will fill Your deck gauge your meter.
So as you attack with yellow and blue it’ll fill up the meter and once the meter is full you will draw a car which you can see down in the bottom middle you have two slots your Z and your X and you activate the card in that slot by pressing that respective button.
If I wanted to use the culling card I would press Z it would activate the culling card and give me that buff a lot of the gameplay for Arcana is managing your meter grabbing Cards and deciding whether you want to keep the card using the card for the buff and lining up certain Buffs to be as effective as you possibly can anytime you want to read the cards.
You can go down to the card deck listed under your identity gauge down here on the bottom you click this it will open up and it will show you all the cards that you have in your deck there are 12 default cards in your deck and the class engraving Emperor’s edict gives you in The 13th.
Which gives you just a big dump that does a bunch of damage on it so it’s quickly at a high level run through all these cards I know it’s a lot you’ll learn more as you play and you’ll get used to recognizing the icon they all are positive effects they just vary in their strength.
A lot of strength or a minor amount of strength
So you can’t pull a card that’s gonna hurt you, uh it’ll just have either a lot of strength or a minor amount of strength depending on what card it is the first card in the deck is the Hydra code hard put simply you basic attack normally you activate the Hydra card.
Now you basic attack more so it splits it’ll do extra stacking it gives you a lot of extra damage this is generally very good for chaos Dungeons and a little bit extra damage and does build stacks nicely specifically for the empress build next is the madness card.
This will build a stacking attack speed on it with a maximum of 15 when you activate it has a buff duration of 30 Seconds and as you attack you’ll build up a stacking attack speed buff that lasts four seconds Twisted Fate will give you a random skill damage increase either zero through forty percent.
So it can give you nothing but it can also give you 40 skill damage which is pretty sweet corrosion gives you a debuff on the target when you hit them which reduces their armor it’s an armor shred which is super cool the ghost card gives you movement speed.
Which was which does Scale with raid Captain uh specifically for the emperor build and it allows you to move through minor enemies without Collision the death card is one of your big bands when you activate this all skills have a guaranteed crit chance of a hundred percent.
Crit damage
It will increase your crit damage as well while the balance card is active you increase the number of cards you apply with every hit of ability by ones you can stack a lot faster judgment card gives you a four Second window.
Where anytime you use an ability it will treat that ability as if the target you hit had four stacks on them completely the big win condition for Arcana, especially in the empress build is that you run judgment and death.
If you get death and judgment together and you activate them together all of your crits for the next four seconds are guaranteed crits with extra crit damage and you treat all of your detonations as if the target had four Stacks uh I’ll put it simply that with judgment and death active.
The Arcanist is easily the highest burst damage class in the entire game downside is that the likelihood of you having both judgment and death in your deck on every pool and ready to go is almost done these cards are random.
When you draw them and judgment and death take a while to pull they’re a little bit rarer than the others so obviously if you can get these both together you know the dnj combo for Arcanist is absolutely nuts Bonkers.
But it does take some RNG to get there to line it up Moon card regenerates your mana and lowers cooldowns for active skills Star card instantly fills your mana and lowers any cool Downs that are currently on cooldown right now.
Whereas the moon card actually just reduces cooldowns overall the royal card will fill empty slots with a new card including the slot that has the royal card in it so you always want to use Royal when you have no card in the other slot.
So you get two royal cards when you use it will not replace a card you already have in your slot so you don’t want to waste that free card.
So make sure you clear your slots then use Royal to get two free cards lastly the normal deck is the wheel of fate when you activate this the next skill you use will have its cool down refunded after the skill is done and what’s cool about this is it applies to your Awakening.
Activate your Awakening
So If you use the wheel of fate and then you activate your Awakening that will be refunded and then you’ll be able to use your Awakening against there are situations where there are Arcanists who can use the ultimate multiple times in a row.
If you keep drawing wheel of faith and lastly is the card the emperor card that you’ll get from the emperor’s edict class engraving which is just a big uh it’s great for clearing chaos Dungeons and for the emperor build it’s a big massive chunk of damage.
It’s part of the rotation of the build which we’ll get into in a minute if you’re wondering about PVP she has a close-range harasser that has a long-range engage and she plays kind of like the Gunslinger if she was a little bit up close uh she does have a very instant stagger into a stun.
So she’s pretty annoying to go against just because she is so reactive and she can start fights She’s a great initiator and she can poke and harass with several skills in her kit next to a quick overview of the two classes Engravings.
Arc Arcanist
The builds that go with them help you decide if you are someone who is gonna try out Arc Arcanist especially if it’s going to be an ALT I would one thousand percent suggest going with empress’s Grace this is by far the more popular build.
It is a lot easier to play and a lot easier to pick up and for most people is a lot more fun because it’s not as stationary as the emperor’s edict build this is a rare uh play style it takes a lot of time in practice to get right and it requires you to stand still and get everything perfect in order to get the Damage Done.
Generally, as it stands right now without any major balance changes most uh arcanists in Korea will run Empress Grace for uh bosses and then run Emperor’s edict or chaos dungeons because it’s excellent for clearing Trash for that big explosion so I’d recommend going empress’s Grace.
The way this works is it just makes your detonations bigger and more awesome so increases Brewing damage by four Stacks by 30 and recover 30 of Mana consumes you get Mana back and increases the power of your detonations by debiting cards with your red abilities and that’s just the play style.
So it’s a lot more fluid you build the stacks you can play hit master with it because the Explosion is non-directional it doesn’t have a back attack or front attack.
Emperor’s edict
So you’re good to go and then Emperor’s edict is kind of the opposite it’s more about uh building your drawing cards as fast as possible going through your as fast as possible drawing as many Emperors as you possibly can and detonating them as fast as you can without being interrupted and it is not quite as flexible as the emperor’s Grace is built.
So I’ll place on screen the Cheat sheet that I’ve created for Arcanist that has both the empress build and the emperor build on it and the big difference here as you can see with the emperor’s build since you’re focused more on the red detonation skills to detonate the stacks.
You’re going to run two or three of them the builds listed are assuming you have high skill points and you have you know good runes and you have Engravings you’ll have to make adjustments.
If you’re you know fresh Into tier three or you have an account that’s not as progressed for the empress build you can remove either Serendipity or Secret Garden and add in the stream of edge as a fourth blue skill because you may not be able to detonate as often as you normally would with good gems and tripods and things like that.
But you’re going to run Celestial rain Serendipity Secret Garden as your detonation skills your best damage dealer is Celestial rain uh Serendipity has RNG elements to It it can increase crit damage by a ridiculous amount it’s like 500 percent per hit.
Bonkers huge explosion
So you can end up having this just Bonkers huge explosion from Serendipity or if it doesn’t proc RNG it can be really lackluster so Serendipity is kind of that wild card ability it sometimes will blow you out of the water um and sometimes not Secret Gardens a little bit in the middle.
It’s not as strong as Celestial rain but it’s a great way to detonate Stacks so Generally with Empress build you’re using your call of Destiny return spiral Edge scratch dealer and Quadra accelerate to build stacks on the target.
So you’re gonna come in dump your Quadra accelerates uh to get Stacks in the Target you can build this up here I forgot to put my Engravings on in the test realm so I can’t even see what’s going on here uh but here’s the extra little bit and then once you have the four uh card Stacks.
Here you can Detonate with either Serendipity Celestial rain or Secret Garden uh and then you can see that when that hits it has an additional hit for the detonation based on what build you’re running and for the empress build you’ll usually be running the death car.
The card of death the fate of death ultimate uh what this does is it summons a car and right in front of you a Reaper will slice and this does interact with your Stacks increasing the damage of the ultimate.
So It works great uh with the empress build and then for Engravings you want to run empress’s Grace level one most uh Arcanist builds we’ll only use level one in the class Engravings because they don’t scale that well.
But you still want the effect and then for Empress build you’re running Grudge cursed doll and hit Master are your damage output and then on top of that is a barricade.
Arcanist Empress 98
So barricade requires a little bit of an explanation Um Arcanist Empress 98 of your damage is going to come from your card stack detonation so your red skills and every other skill is there just to support lower cooldowns add Stacks movie around you know have a part break things like that.
So it’s very easy to get some easy damage with barricade all you have to do is put protection runes on your three red skills which means that when you activate those skills you’ll apply a shield to yourself which Activates barricade.
It gives you free damage and not many classes use barricades so it’s a pretty cheap engraving to get on your accessories to fill up to level three and start using for that damage bonus and again as we mentioned hit master triggers with the detonation of the card Stacks.
Because the directional on the red abilities is front or back but the explosion of the detonation of the stacks is non-directional so it still benefits From hit master and anytime you’re running a level one engraving.
It’s great to fill that in with adrenaline is super efficient at any level you’ll get 10 crits and some attack power on top for your sets you want crit rate from Argos at 13cm 70 and then when you move into the legion sets you’ll want to go nightmare.
Which is the Mana recovery plus bonus damage on Mana spend uh Legion set so that one works great for Arcana because she’s very Mana Hungry and Mana starved with low cooldowns and constant spamming.
The nightmare
So run uh the nightmare set with the empress build and lastly for stats for Empress you’re gonna be running a Max spec because it does increase your detonation damage and the draw which is nice and then you’ll run crit secondary to make those detonations.
Even more consistently huge next on to the emperor build the rare build that you’ll see in the game this one revolves more around building Your deck and spending your cards as quickly as possible and taking advantage of the newly added Emperor card in your deck.
Which by the way you can actually apply gems to so you will be running a damage gem on the emperor card you’ll see it listed in your gem list and then for the rest of it you’ll run basically a cooldown and damage gem on your four Big Spenders dark Resurrection Checkmate evoke and Celestial rain for gravy to run Emperor’s edict level one.
It doesn’t Scale very well just like the other engraving so you don’t really need to put more effort into making it stronger you’ll want Grudge because Grudge is just free damage essentially and then raid Captain works with the stats for stats you’re gonna run Max swiftness on the emperor build with a crit secondary.
You’re just kind of keeping that swiftness High rotating your abilities and running through your deck as fast as you can uh you’re running an Out attack which is a channeled ability bonus or literally only one skill and that is your Checkmate ability which is a channeled ability.
Conclusion
The thing about Arcanist is the damaged windows are pretty small for Emperor most of your damaged windows are going to be around four seconds in length.
So you really need that extra channel of speed to make sure you complete Checkmate and you can get to your other abilities uh before that window closes based on the Buffs.
You have the target’s positioning and all that and as you get higher up in eye level and you have more Engravings available you can run Mass increase for attack power you can also alternatively run cursed doll the extra attack power is super nice,
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