Ability Stones are a vital part of your equipment build in Lost Ark’s end game. Once you have hit level 50 and started running Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids, you will receive Ability Stones as part of your loot. Once you have looted one, you will need to Reforge the Ability Stone to unlock its power. In the NA / EU build of the game, this the term is to Facet the Ability Stone.
Ability Stone Cutter NPC Location
The first thing you will need to do with your newly acquired Ability Stone is bring it to the Stonecutter NPC location. You can find this in any major city, by looking for the Blue Gem icon on the map.
Facet UI Layout
Once you have talked to him and navigated to the proper UI screen, you can begin the process. The Ability Stone will reveal two positive Engravings, and one malus (negative) engraving. Now is where the actual reforging comes into play.
There are several areas to the Ability Stone Reforging UI you should know about:
- Selecting the Stone [Left Side] – Select the stone you want to reforge.
- Positive Engraving Section [Blue Section] – Score table on upgrading positive engraving effects.
- Malus Engraving Section [Red Section] – Score table on increasing the Malus effect.
- Gem Slots [1] – Shows how many effects you have rolled in this section.
- Probability of Success [2] – Probability that upgrading a positive effect will succeed.
- Failure Rate [3]- Probability that upgrading a malus effect will fail.
So why would you possibly ever want to upgrade the red area that increases the negative Malus effect on your stone? Good question.
Facet Ability Stone System Explained
Your goal when reforging an ability stone is to get as many successes in the engravings [Blue Section] of the UI. Each time you get a success and earn a gem in the slot, it will count as 1 engraving point toward that engraving. In this example, we started at a 75% success rate, pretty decent.
Each time you click the hammer beside the engraving you want to upgrade, it will succeed of fail. If the upgrade on the blue engraving succeeds, the success rate will drop by 10%. So if you have 75% success rate shown, and your first upgrade succeeds and creates a blue gem, the next upgrade only have a 65% chance to succeed.
Your strategy is to alternate between upgrading your blue engraving points and red malus points. If you have several successful upgrades in a row for your engraving, your success rate may drop lower to 45% for example. This is when you want to upgrade your malus effect. A lot percentage of success rate is better used for the malus effect. If you fail at increasing the malus level, the 45% will gain 10% and become a 55% success rate again. You always want to fail the malus upgrade so that the success rate of your engraving upgrade will increase.
You must work to find the right balance between when to upgrade the blue section, until the success rates are low, then upgrade the malus effect.
Finding The Right Balance
As you go back and forth between the blue engravings and the red malus effects, you need to find the right balance. You can’t always go back and forth one for one, because there are 2x as many blue gems to fill. You also likely wouldn’t want to waste a malus upgrade if you have a high success rate currently.
In the example above, this Ability Stone is almost done reforging. All of the gems on the Specialist Engraving have been used up. 5 gems succeeded and 4 failed. This means this ability stone now has 5 engraving points for the Specialist Engraving.
The Broken Bone engraving has had 5 gems succeed, and 3 fail. There is still 1 slot left to forge. The current success rate in this example at this point is only 45%. We can also see that the malus effect has only been attempted once, and it failed. Failing the malus upgrade is good and it is what we want. If the malus upgrade fails, we increase our success rate and we also don’t get a malus debuff on our ability stone.
It is also important to remember as discussed in our Engravings Guide, that you need 5 engraving points for an engraving or malus effect to actually activate. So if you gain a few malus points here, as long as you don’t have this malus effect elsewhere, it won’t matter. As long as you keep the malus points for this effect at 4 or below, it will have no effect.
In this scenario you will want to upgrade your malus effect and hope that it continues to fail, so that your 45% chance to succeed can be increased. You may want to stop when it becomes a 55% chance because its greater than 50%… or you may want to really push your luck and keep upgrading your malus effect hoping it will continue to fail and you can get a 65% success rate for your final blue upgrade.
There is no wrong way to go about this upgrading, but certain strategies will definitely fair better in the long run. In the end, there is a lot of RNG in this system, but it is important to upgrade these careful to maximize your chances of scoring a great roll on your Ability Stone.