Punisher Slayer Guide for Lost Ark

Strengths

• Incredibly strong burst DPS class
• Simple to learn, "Build-Spend" gameplay loop
• Damage numbers as big as her boobs

Weaknesses

• Punishing for bad skill uptime, losing out on meter gen
• Relies on Back Attacks to do considerable damage
• Pretty poor scaling in the early game but spikes massively after Relic gear

Slayer has a very interesting Chaos Dungeon build, in the sense that it is only one button. Guillotine having Transformed Strike gives cooldown reduction upon kill & has increased damage on lower rank enemies. Given Chaos Dungeon can also reduces your cooldowns further, you essentially only spam this and your Awakening to clear rooms with ease!

Punisher is a burst DPS, Entropy build class, focused on a constant "build-spend" gameplay loop with her Burst Mode. As a Specialization class, it scales tremendously in the damage department with flexible stat breakpoints to allow for various rotations as well. When playing as Punisher your focus is putting as many skills within Burst Mode as possible & entering the state as many times as you can. Not only does this put emphasis on your meter combos and Burst windows, but which one you want to use depends on gear/stats and tripod level(s) available to you.

A common build is called "1.5 Cycle" or ("4/3") with a goal to have a synced rotation and packing as many skills within Burst Mode as possible. This has minor variants at different Specialization values, ranging from 1500 ~ +1760. Each taking a different skill with minor rotation differences. The leniency outside of Burst Mode accounts for missing a skill or being able to use auto attacks while waiting for things to sync up for your Burst window. However, your Burst Mode is much stricter than your filler windows and doesn't give the wiggle room as before. Given moves have longer animations or limited cancel windows, there's basically no time to reposition which makes this more difficult to pull off in a real scenario given you also want to be landing Back Attacks.

Optional skills taken from lower to higher Spec builds are Ground Smash, Flash Blade & Punishing Draw. As a baseline for these variants to work, we'll need Level 4 gauge tripods and x1 Wealth, x1 Wealth & x2 Wealth. Regardless of which skill you take, all are used in the filler part of the rotation to build meter. Your Burst window may have slight changes but still follows a loose priority of ensuring Bloodlust, Brutal Impact, Volcanic Eruption & Guillotine all are within Burst.

• If you take Ground Smash, you'll have Furious Claw as a backup filler skill that can be placed within Burst Mode if not used outside of it.
• If you take Flash Blade, you'll use it on cooldown to provide 100% uptime on your Synergy.
• If you take Punishing Draw, you'll have an on-demand Counter option and use it roughly once per filler cycle.
• There's no strict rotation and your skills will line up decently provided you have same if not similar level cooldown gems equipped. Spam things on cooldown as they come up!

Another build is the "1 Cycle" (or "5/3") build focuses on entering Burst Mode as frequently as possible. Requiring very high stats, tripod levels and skill runes to even be remotely efficient. The upside is a very comfortable filler phase where you have the time to ensure attacks land or to dodge patterns. On top of the steep gear requirements, the build is not so forgiving if you are making big mistakes within your filler phase. Skill interruptions and whiffing skills forces you to have to wait for them to come back up, delaying your damage cycle.