Slayer Guide for Lost Ark

If you're looking for a versatile, tanky melee class, look no further. Slayer comes jam-packed with high dps, a versatile skill kit, and higher than average mobility making her an obvious choice for any player to add to their repetoire of characters. Slayer is the female version of Berserker, but comes with her own unique playstyle that removes some of the clunkiness players have complained about with the Berserker class.

Unlike Berserker, Slayer is not bound by Red Dust usage, and therefore has a bit more freedom when it comes to how she performs her burst windows. Neither of Slayer's class engravings force her to forsake hit points in exchange for damage, instead opting to utilize her identity gauge in new and unique ways, which we'll describe below.

Slayer's gameplay revolves around her Identity gauge. Similar to Berserker, this gauge throws Slayer into her burst state, increasing her damage considerably (specifically, a boost of 30% Crit Rate, 20% Attack Speed, and 20% Movement Speed, as well as giving Slayer access to a skill called Bloodlust) for the duration the resource lasts. The difference here is Slayer is much more susceptible to downtime. You'll find yourself in and out of your burst states much more often compared to the Slayer's male counterpart, due to the fact Slayer's scaling on Specialization only increases her damage dealt and does not increase the time spent inside of her burst state.

Slayer is very much considered an easy to learn class, but due to her reliance on positionals as an Earth's Entropy gearset user, her ceiling is much higher than most other classes. Pair this information with the fact one of her engravings thrives from playing as greedy as you possibly can, while the other has long charge-ups on skills, and you end up with a class that's full of skill expression and will always have room for the player to increase the damage they do in an encounter.

The Predator class engraving is the build you'll want to pick if you enjoy playing Swiftness-type classes. The Predator engraving increases the player's Crit Damage while in the burst state, as well as replenishing 3% of Slayer's mana and 10% of the Identity meter every time you land an attack on a 1-second cooldown. To balance this out, Slayer will gain stacks of Fatigue while in burst state, which increases the amount of Identity meter burned while it's being used. Eventually, this means you won't be able to keep up with the consumption of gauge, regardless of how fast you can attack. Without a single stack of Fatigue, Slayer would need to wait 30 seconds to enter back into her burst state. The Fatigue debuff actually reduces the timer on this cooldown phase by 1 second for every stack. This gives Predator it's greedy-style of gameplay, since the more you attack, the less downtime you'll be dealing with and the faster you can get back to dealing damage. You need not worry about replenishing your Identity meter; Once the cooldown timer runs out, the gauge will be restored back to 100% and can be activated again.

Punisher Slayer is your typical build/spend style of gameplay. Simply put, you'll fill your Identity meter, enter burst state, and use all of your high-damage skills in a 30 second window before the burst state runs out and Slayer enters into their cooldown phase, also lasting 30 seconds. At this point the cycle will repeat until either you or the enemy dies. The Punisher kit relies more on slow charge skills and builds entirely from the Specialization substat. Punisher is more likely to perform well across a wide range of encounters in the game compared to the alternative, since burst windows are much more deliberate and Punisher does not rely on full uptime and a greedy playstyle to perform well.