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The Crucible isLost Ark’s second part in the Paradise mode, which was developed specifically for the western audience. While theElysianportion puts you in a Chaos Dungeon-esque setting, killing mobs and obtaining various gear, Crucible is a very different type of gameplay experience. It’s easy content, having a difficult time dying, but the challenge comes in the form of competing against other players to get the best scores possible.
Lost Ark Paradise Guide: Elysian
A breath of fresh air, dive into Paradise for some weekly challenges.
What is Crucible?
After you’ve gotten some gear from the Elysian section of Paradise, you’ll immediately want to go into the first level of the Crucible. This is a 1v1 fight against familiar demonic boss fights you may have faced through your adventures in Arkesia. We’re not talking about Legion or Kazeros Commanders, but side bosses you may have seen in Abyssal Dungeons or Chaos Gates.
Definitely take note of the “Rec. Paradise Pow.” (Recommended Paradise Power) number because it will help you gauge the difficulty of the fight. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will need to be that power level to complete the content, as we definitely have been underpowered and were able to come out successful, but your ranking will be a little low in comparison to the rest of the players.
Preparing for a Fight
Very important to note that, similar to the rest of Paradise, you won’t have access to the various vertical and horizontal content. This means that things like cards, gems and your Ark Passive system have been disabled, so you’ll have to adjust to how you normally would play your class. For example, running Spec Energy Overflow Soulfist, going between the different stages of Hypes doesn’t reset cooldowns nor are you unable to cancel them.
When entering a Crucible fight, you will be met by the boss and a short 60-second timer. This is meant to be a very short fight, so you will need to either create an entirely new build for your class or at the very least make adjustments to how you approach things. You will need to burst it down almost immediately, while trying to get the shortest kill time possible. This is whyprioritizing skill cooldowns and crit rateon your equipment is key, as a buffed awakening can devastate a boss.
Leaderboards
The main attraction to Crucible is the ranking system. Unlike Elysian andHell, which offer different objectives, Crucible is all about climbing the leaderboards and getting the lowest kill times possible. It’s not too dissimilar to PvP, but instead of going head-to-head with a person on the battlefield, you are essentially doing Time Trials.
The leaderboards are a little different than you might expect, as instead of having an overall ranking, it’s based on the final available floor (in week 1 it’s level 3), and it’s based on the class instead of everyone as a whole. This means that you can place pretty high if you are running a rarely played class like Soulfist or Machinist.
As you might expect, the higher you get, the more rewards you are given. Depending on where you place at the end of the week, you will be granted a box with keys in it. These keys will specifically be used in Hell Mode, which has you going down various floors to see how far you can get. The further down you go, the better the rewards.
The tiers of rewards are fairly spread out, but so long as you finish the level at least once, you’ll be guaranteed to get three blue keys at the end of the week. The highest rewards can net you gold keys, which allow you to drop in Hell up to seven times instead of five, along with a title and a character banner, something new to the game.
On top of weekly rewards, there will be an overall ranking at the end of the season, which, for the first season, endsOctober 12, 2025. These have the same ranking tiers, but will instead give out character-bound Gold, banners, titles and Insignias.
Because this content is equalized, you can have a poorly built class go straight to the top so long as you know how to play it, or play the system.
Lost Ark Paradise Guide: Hell
The third and final part of Paradise, dive into the depths to collect some juicy rewards.
