Lost Ark’s New Arcanist Class Arrives With Today’s Spells And Spades Update

Lost Ark debuts its newest class as the card-throwing Arcanist steps foot in Arkesia with today’s Spells in Spades update. The Arcanist is the third advanced class for the Mage and has the ability to imbue playing cards with Magick and use them to devastating effect.

The Arcanist’s skills are built around building stacks on enemies before blasting them with a Ruin skill for maximum damage. Landing normal attacks also fills up a Specialty Meter which, when filled, will allow her to draw a random card with powerful effects from the Card Deck. These cards include the Ghost Card, which allows her to phase through enemies and grants increased movement speed and 50% damage reduction, and the Mayhem Card, which buffs her attack speed every time she uses a skill.

To give new Arcanist users a leg up, the Spells in Spades update also gives players access to a Powerpass that will instantly boost a chosen character to Item Level 1302, bypassing the Punika questline. The option is only available to players who’ve already completed the Punika narrative with at least one other character. The update also kicks off a Hyper Express Event that will allow players to enroll one character which will be able to take on various missions to help them hit Item Level 1370 that much faster.

Item Level 1370 is when players can start taking on Tier 3 endgame content, although they’ll still need to work on reaching at least Item Level 1415 to take on the tougher Legion Raids. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Spells and Spades update also unlocks the Inferno difficulty for the Valtan Legion Raid which requires a minimum Item Level of at least 1445. Unlike the Hard version, Inferno difficulty disables progression gates. This means that players won’t be able to pick up their progress from the last “save point” when they die or decide to take a break. Valtan’s Inferno version also doesn’t count against the Legion Raid weekly limit so they can try to complete the entire run as often as they like for a chance to score new titles, achievements, stronghold structures, and of course, bragging rights.

The servers are now down for maintenance while the update is being deployed and should be up in about four hours at around 4 a.m. PDT. You can check out the full Spells and Spades patch notes on the Lost Ark official site.