Looking for help with Lost Ark ability stones? Ability stones are part of the engravings system in Lost Ark. For a full explanation of the mechanic, you can take a look at our Lost Ark engravings guide, but to summarise, engravings are passive effects that have three different tiers of potency. To activate each tier you must accumulate a particular number of engraving points – five for tier one, ten for tier two, and fifteen for tier three.
You encounter engravings as you level up in Lost Ark, but it’s not until the endgame – after level 50 – that they really come into play. This is when you can acquire items that earn you a significant amount of engraving points, including the Lost Ark ability stones, dropped from endgame raids and dungeons. They generate with two random combat engravings and one random negative, or ‘malus’, engraving.
However, ability stones don’t provide any engraving points until they are faceted. The faceting process is a little complicated and relies on luck, although you can maximise your chances of getting more engraving points if you’re smart about it. Here’s everything you need to know about faceting ability stones in Lost Ark.
The faceting process is, essentially, taking a raw stone with a certain amount of inherent potential, and attempting to get the best end result from it as possible by cutting it down and making it all shiny. However, because chipping away at things with a chisel is a fine art, there is a chance for things to go wrong in the process and for bits to break off or accidentally cause bad results instead of good ones.
It’s incredibly unlikely that everything will go perfectly in the faceting process, so you may well get through a stockpile of stones and silver before getting lucky with a good result. For T3 content, parties are generally looking for stones with +7 each on each positive engraving and fewer than five points on the negative engraving. For T2 content, +6 on each engraving is standard.
How to facet ability stones in Lost Ark
To facet an ability stone, take it to any ability stone worker NPC. On the left, you will see a list of all the ability stones you own and can facet. The main panel shows the engravings on the selected stone, with a number of empty diamonds under each engraving. These are potential engraving points that can be unlocked through the faceting process, but there is a great deal of luck involved, as each faceting attempt has a dynamic chance to succeed – unlocking an engraving point – or fail, greying out the empty slot and rendering it useless. Higher rarities of ability stone have more of these empty potential slots.
To the right of each engraving is a chisel button indicating the silver fee for each faceting attempt. Above this, there are success rate and chance of cracking percentage values that begin at 75%; every time you succeed, this percentage decreases, and likewise increases whenever you fail.
Remember that there are two positive and one negative engravings on each stone, so ideally, we want to succeed on our attempts to facet our positive engravings, and fail on our attempts to facet the negative one. Therefore, if you’ve got a low probability of succeeding on your next faceting, you should attempt to facet the negative engraving. Similarly, if you have a high probability of succeeding, you should attempt to facet one of your positive engravings. If there is one engraving you value higher than the other, you may want to save your highest probability and safest rolls for that one.
Ability stones also occasionally have bonus effects that may be applied if you achieve consecutive successful faceting attempts. When all the attempts are exhausted and every diamond either filled or greyed out, you can finally equip the ability stone.
If you end up with a dud, you can disenchant your stone and exchange the by-product with the stonecutter for more ability stones.
Now you’re ready to facet your own ability stones – for more Lost Ark tips, check out our guides to the best Lost Ark Bard build and best Lost Ark Paladin build, plus how to get Lost Ark Pirate Coins.