Players in Lost Ark have access to various systems to enhance and personalize their characters’ skill sets and stats. Engravings are among these systems, offering powerful gear upgrades crucial to advanced gameplay.
Engravings in Lost Ark are special effects found on Accessories and Ability Stones. In addition to basic effects and combat stats, your accessories can also provide engraving levels, which provide additional passive effects to your characters.
First and foremost, there are two types of engravings in Lost Ark: Positive Engraving and Negative Engraving.
Negative Engraving inflicts passive penalties on your character. Negative Engraving includes Attack Power Decrease, Attack Speed Decrease, Movement Speed Decrease, and Defense Decrease.
All but Defense Reduction all Negative Engravings introduce a 2%/4%/6% penalty at each Level. Defense Reduction comes with a 5%/10%/15% penalty. This is not the same as a 5/10/15% increase in damage taken.
You can view your current engraving effects and levels by going to your Character Profile and selecting the Engraving tab.
To enable the Positive or Negative Engraving effects, you must gather sufficient engraving points to trigger Level 1, Level 2, or Level 3 effects. Level 1 activation requires 5 points, Level 2 requires 10 points, and Level 3 requires 15 points.
Take a look at the Heavy Armor engraving in the image above. Those 6th and 7th engraving points serve no purpose at the moment. It’s still a Level 1 heavy armor until I get 10 engraving points.
The number of Positive and Negative Engraving points depends largely on the rarity of your accessories, with Levels.
For T1 accessories, the Negative Engraving only goes to +1. For T2 accessories, the Negative Engraving can go to 1-2.
You can get your class engraving on the Necklace, Earrings, and Ring slots of your accessories. But you can’t get your class engraving on Ability Stone. Please also note that when dropping accessories in content like Chaos Dungeons or Guardian Raids, you can’t get class engravings from other classes, only your own.
To optimize your accessories, it is crucial to strike a careful balance that maximizes Positive Engraving effects while minimizing Negative ones. Even if the penalty for engraving seems insignificant, the equivalent amount of work required to negate that penalty can be very high, especially if it’s Attack Power Decrease.
Note that the game UI will warn you if you have too many points on a given engraving. There is no penalty for going over 15, and it’s only to let you know that you can probably trim a few points in some places and perhaps optimize for another engraving.
In addition to the engravings found innately on your accessories, you can also equip imprints. Equipping imprints allows you to gain 3, 6, 9, or 12 points of a specific engraving, up to 24 points in T3 with two Legendary engravings imprints.
You can earn each level of imprint by using Engraving Books from various contents. You must use 20 Books to unlock the engraving associated with them.
Some Engraving Book Sources Include:
*Several islands reward engraving book selection pouches after completing their story questlines.
* Several island merchants have weekly stocks of selected engraving books in their respective island currencies.
* 3x Uncommon Class Engraving book from Challenge/Trial Guardian Raid (weekly)
*20x Uncommon Class/Normal Engraving books from Chaos Dungeon (once per account).
*3x Rare Class Engraving books from Challenge /Trial Guardian Raid (weekly).
*20x Rare Class/Normal Engraving from Chaos Dungeon (once per account).
*2x Legendary Class Engraving from Anguish Isle (account sharing times).
*2x Legendary Normal Engraving from T 22nd floor of the T3 tower (once per account).
*1x Legendary Normal engraving from Midnight Rehearsal exchange vendor (Kakul-Saydon raid).
*1x Legendary Normal engraving from Brelshaza.
*1x Legendary Normal engraving from Rowen faction vendor.
*2x Legendary Normal engraving from Elgacia Abyssal Dungeon exchange.
All engravings require 20 books for each imprint stage.
Typically, the content will reward Seal Books in the form of either a selection or a random pouch or randomly give you a book in general. They will either give a selection or a random pouch for all normal engravings or a selection or a random pouch for all Class engravings. Therefore, specific engravings no longer come from specific content.
Once you learn an engraving, you can use it as many times as you want, and the learned imprints are shared on all characters you have on a server.
You can accrue a maximum of 74 (84 if T3 Relic, 89 if T3 Ancient) engraving Points.
30 from Necklace, Earrings, and Rings (40 if T3 Relic, 45 if T3 Ancient)
24 from engraving
20 from Ability Stone (extremely unlikely, though, usually 12-16 tops)
