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How to get the best Lost Ark engravings

The best engravings and how to get engraving points using accessories, ability stones, and auras in Lost Ark

A Lost Ark character holding an elaborate, powerful bow

Looking for a guide to Lost Ark engravings? You may encounter engravings as you level up in Lost Ark, but there’s no need to worry about them too much at first. However, when you reach level 50 and open up the wonderful world of the Lost Ark endgame, you can use engravings to refine your build in order to take on the most difficult content in the game.

Engravings are just one of the many ways to boost your character’s performance, but they’re a little complex if you’re new to the system. Any mistakes you make may prove to be very expensive, as the process involves consuming sought-after materials and carefully calculating your stat bonuses.

Fortunately, we’re here to help by explaining everything you need to know about the Lost Ark engraving system, including how to use engravings and ability stones and how to get the best engravings for your character. There’s quite a substantial time investment involved in leveling up your engravings, so our guide will set you on the right path and signpost what you need to look out for.

Lost Ark engraving basics

Engravings are passive abilities that influence various attributes, such as skill cooldown time and damage. You can view the status of your current engravings in the engraving tab of your character profile.

There are blue engravings that provide buffs (though some of them provide both buffs and impediments) and red engravings that provide debuffs to your character – as you’d expect, you don’t really want these to be active.

You can determine the active level of your engraving by looking at the number of crystals, or engraving points, that are filled out underneath. You need five engraving points to activate the engraving at level 1, ten to activate it at level 2, and 15 for level 3. If you have less than five, there is no effect as the engraving is not active. Similarly, if you have more than fifteen, there is no additional bonus.

There are battle engravings, which are general – any class can use them – and class-specific engravings. You can only use one class-specific engraving at once, but they’re very strong, so we recommend investing in one.

How to activate engravings

There are a few ways to activate engraving points and upgrade your engravings.

Accessories

Your accessories – a necklace, two earrings, and two rings – are a major source of engraving points and of regular stats. They only drop from endgame content such as dungeons, and have lots of possible formulations so it can be a real task to get your hands on accessories that suit your build optimally. The item information indicates which engravings an accessory boosts and by how much; the vast majority of accessories boost one engraving by three points and the other by three, four, or five points.

Ability Stone

Ability stones are equippable items that drop as loot. Each ability stone has three random engravings; two positive, one negative. However, ability stones don’t actually provide any engraving points until you take the stone to an ability stone cutter NPC and have it faceted. Non-faceted ability stones can be traded, so you should sell any that you don’t need and keep an eye out for ones that provide the right engravings for your character.

The faceting process determines how many engraving points you can get from each ability stone – for a full explanation, see our Lost Ark ability stone guide. If your faceting doesn’t go well, you can disenchant the stone and retrieve some materials you can use to obtain fresh ability stones.

Engraving Aura

Equipped engravings provide an extra boost to the points in that specific engraving. Your character has two slots where you can equip engravings to provide an engraving aura; you can equip two of the same engraving at once if you drag it over to both slots.

In order to equip an engraving for its aura, you need to unlock the first level of the aura by consuming engraving books. Subsequent levels can be unlocked by consuming rarer books. These books can be found in raids and dungeons, and through daily and island quests.

  • Level 1: 20 uncommon (green) engraving books
  • Level 2: 20 rare (blue) engraving books
  • Level 3: 20 epic (purple) engraving books
  • Level 4: 20 legendary (yellow) engraving books

Each level provides three engraving points, so with all levels unlocked, you can obtain up to 12 engraving points in one engraving. You need class engraving books to level up class engravings, and battle engraving books to level up battle engravings.

Forging an ability stone to provide Lost Ark engraving points

Lost Ark engraving tips

As explained above, there are plenty of ways to get engraving points. However, because you must meet certain engraving point thresholds in order to activate your engravings, simply throwing as many points as you can into your chosen engravings isn’t the way to go. Having four, nine, or 14 points in a positive engraving is just a waste, especially considering the hours you’ll spend earning those points. Similarly, you can also avoid activating certain negative engraving levels if you’re smart about it.

You’re probably going to need to get the spreadsheets out on this one and create an individual calculation sheet for your character, as optimising your engravings wholly depends on the points you have access to.

Ideally, to run the very best T3 endgame content, parties are looking for five engravings at level three. What these engravings should be will depend on your class – we’ll explain further below.

Once you’ve chosen your target engravings, start with getting the best ability stone, as getting a specific one to suit your needs after you sort out the other bits is a guaranteed headache. But once you know which engravings your ability stone boosts, you can proceed accordingly.

Your engraving aura can provide a large boost (12 points) to your engraving points, but only for two specific engravings at most. Therefore, we recommend you use the aura to upgrade two engravings to 12 (not the ones affected by your ability stone). Then, you can top up the remaining points with accessories.

One final tip is to be sure to sell the accessories or books that don’t fit your needs, as they may well be massively valuable to someone else and help you fund your engraving habit, too.

Best Lost Ark engravings

The best Lost Ark engravings for your character depend on the stat you choose to focus on and the class engraving you choose. You should always level up your class engraving to maximum. A more thorough engraving priority list for each class can be found here courtesy of Choseph0027 on Reddit, but for general purposes, the best Lost Ark engravings are:

  • Grudge: Increases the damage you deal to boss or higher level enemies by +4/+10/+20%, while also increasing the damage you take from them by 20%. Therefore, this tradeoff is only worth it at engraving level 3, but it’s so powerful once fully unlocked that it is a must for most DPS characters taking on the very hardest T3 endgame content. However, it’s not worth investing in until you’re at this point.
  • Cursed Doll: Increases your attack power percentage by +3/+8/+16%, while also decreasing your healing by -25%. Similar to Grudge, this tradeoff is only worth making at engraving level 3.
  • Keen Blunt Weapon: +10/25/50% crit damage, but a 10% chance for your attacks to deal -20% damage. Again, it’s best used at level 3. Whether this is an efficient tradeoff depends on your character’s crit chance and damage.
  • Adrenaline: When using skills that are not mobile or basic attacks, increases attack power by 0.3/0.6/1% for six seconds and stacks up to six times. At max stacks, critical hit rate increases by 5/10/15%.
  • Master of Ambush: Increases successful back attack damage by 5/12/25%. This is a fundamental engraving for any Lost Ark class that uses back attacks, like Deathblade or Wardancer.

That’s everything you need to know about Lost Ark engravings – phew. If it’s all a bit too complicated, fortunately you don’t need to worry about this stuff in Lost Ark PvP, but if you are at the endgame, you may want to know how to get Lost Ark Pirate Coins, how to find all the Lost Ark mokoko seeds, and the Lost Ark reset time for daily and weekly quests.