Robust Spirit Soulfist Build Guide for Lost Ark

The Soulfist, while being a melee class similar to the other Martial Artists, also has access to a collection of ranged abilities in their arsenal. Utilizing effective combos and managing your hype meter are the core gameplay mechanics you will be focused on. In this build, you will be equipping the Robust Spirit engraving, which drastically changes how the Hype Meter functions and shifts towards much more of a burst damage playstyle.

Strengths

• Extremely mobile.
• Massive burst windows.
• Highest damage single ability in the game (World Decimation).

Weaknesses

• Long periods of low damage downtime.
• Awakening skill is difficult to hit.
• Very stat reliant (Specialization).

Investing in the Robust Spirit engraving shifts the playstyle quite drastically. Typically, you would gradually build your Hype Meter from Stage 1 to 2 and finally to 3, executing a nice burst of damage while in Stage 3. With this build, whenever you activate your Hype, you will instantly enter an empowered version of Stage 3, skipping 1 and 2 altogether.

This type of build heavily incentivizes both getting the most out of your Hype 3 while increasing the frequency in which you enter this stage. We can accomplish both of these things through some gearing decisions later on in the guide. One thing that stands out about this build compared to other classes is how much importance is placed on your Awakening ability. World Decimation has the highest damage potential of any single skill in the game, and thus this build is heavily centered around increasing this damage as much as humanly possible.

When facing a new boss, it is a good idea to at first take the time to figure out how the boss moves around. Some bosses stand still a lot and are easy to position around, but others move quite a bit. Due to World Decimation's incredibly long cast time, this is even more crucial for Soulfist players. So much of your damage is focused into this one ability, and it is soul-crushing when you miss. Do not miss. Unlike other MMOs, the amount of healing you can receive is extremely limited in Lost Ark, so it is important to do damage while taking as little in return as possible. In endgame content, even the number of healing potions that you can use is limited per encounter, so you cannot count on healing yourself with potions.

In this Soulfist build, you will not necessarily NEED any other supportive buffs in your group to function. However, you do HEAVILY benefit from more burst-oriented synergy buffs. Buffs with higher value but a short duration, for example, Red Dust from Berserkers, stand to provide more for Soulfists than more consistent high uptime/low value buffs.

Every class has a wide variety of skills to chose from with Tripods that can change how each skill performs. The Soulfist can select eight skills to be on their action bar alongside their Awakening skill. The Soulfist's Identity skill is the Hype meter. As mentioned earlier, in this build, activating the Hype meter will instantly put you into Hype 3 for its duration. This heightened state then has a cooldown before you are able to reenter. Below we will discuss our picks for skills for general purposes and single target fights.

For most content, you are going to want to bring massive area of effect damage to help you clear out groups of enemies, as well as good mobility to help move around quickly. Regardless of which class engraving you choose, Soulfists will use very similar builds for this content.

1. 256 Skill Point Tree;
2. 268 Skill Point Tree;
3. 284 Skill Point Tree;
4. 300 Skill Point Tree;
5. 328 Skill Point Tree.

If you encounter any skill breakpoints where you are off by just 1-3 points from getting your next big tripod, feel free to play with Flash Step with 0 points invested. The mobility this provides is still quite strong without the Excellent Mobility Tripod.

This build of Soulfist is fairly simple in purpose and design. Crippling Barrier does most of the heavy lifting with its massive range. Shadowbreaker and Palm Burst are your strong clearing abilities in between Crippling Barrier casts. Both have slightly less reach and coverage but plenty of damage to mow enemies down.

Tempest Blast and Energy Blast provide very high clearing if you can group mobs in a line. They also blast through any Elites or Bosses you encounter like they are nothing.

Your remaining three skills all serve some sort of utility or filler role. Pulverizing Palm is used to apply a very large personal buff before using a big skill with the Ready Attack tripod. This does fairly solid damage as well, albeit in a small area in front of you. Flash Step is a great mobility tool, being usable three times in a row in quick succession to cover much more ground than other skills of its type. And finally, Lightning Palm is a fairly high damage ability also equipped with a personal buff via the Prepared Attacker Tripod.

It is worth mentioning that you may want to carry some extra jewelry for this build. While the Robust Spirit engraving is great at outputting extremely high burst damage during Hype 3, its consistent damage is a little lacking because of the time you spend in Hype 0. The first option to consider swapping to is the other Soulfist specific engraving Energy Overflow. Both builds utilize the same skills for Chaos Dungeon and Cube, and we will have a future guide with more details.

Alternatively, there are a handful of engravings that are quite good for this content, even if they are a bit lacking for Bosses. Those include Cursed Doll, Adrenaline, Spirit Absorption Engraving, and even Premptive Strike Engraving, which gets overlooked too often but can be quite good for mobbing. Definitely take a look at your leftover jewelry here and there to see if you can put together a nice little offset for your daily Chaos clears.

For single target focused content such as Guardian Raids, you will want to bring a skill set that is focused on dealing the maximum damage to a boss. This is where the Robust Spirit really shines (assuming you can hit your World Decimation)!

1. 240 Skill Point Tree;
2. 256 Skill Point Tree;
3. 268 Skill Point Tree;
4. 284 Skill Point Tree;
5. 300 Skill Point Tree;
6. 328 Skill Point Tree;

In theory, this build has an incredibly simple playstyle. While in Hype 0, you just hang out and use your skills while waiting for your Hype meter to be available. Then activate Hype, instantly entering Hype 3, and toss out your burst combo (or World Decimation if it is available) before Hype 3 fades. Rinse and repeat. In practice, it is a bit trickier and certainly very punishing if you make a mistake or miss one of your high damage skills.

Energy Release and Pulverizing Palm are the primary skills you are playing around during your burst. Both of them have the Ready Attack Tripod, but this buff does not stack. Because of this, the goal is to space your buffs so that all your skills are covered by at least one self-buff. It ends up looking like this:

1. Activate Hype 3 (Make sure the following abilities will be off cooldown in time)
2. Energy Release
3. Merciless Pummel
4. Shadowbreaker
5. Force Orb: The 40% Ready Attack falls off around here
6. Pulverizing Palm to reapply Ready Attack at 25%
7. Celestial Palm
8. Lightning Palm

You want to have enough time to execute another combo inside your remaining Hype 3 buff, so just try to use what you can to take advantage of the damage buff before it fades.

If you have World Decimation available your combo is MUCH simpler (or is it?).

1. Activate Hype 3
2. Energy Release to gain your biggest Attack Power buff
3. World Decimation

You did it! Obviously, this is much less complex, but it can often be the harder combo to execute. World Decimation has a VERY long cast time and animation, and thus bosses are very liable to move out of it before it lands. If and when this happens, do your best to remain calm! The next one will hit for sure.

More information about obtaining skill points will be available in a future write-up.

For this build, the most important stat is Specialization, Specialization, and more Specialization. So much of your damage is coming from your Awakening skill in this build, and Specialization buffs the damage of that directly. Also, the more Specialization you have, the stronger the Hype 3 effect is AND the shorter the downtime before you can reenter the Hype state. This stat just has literally everything the build wants baked into one. On your necklace, which always has two unique stats, you are looking for Crit as the off-stat.

Engravings for this build are very, very simple. Your first goal is to snag Rank 1 of Robust Spirit to be able to jump right to Hype 3 on activation. From there, you want to build up to Rank 3 Awakening as soon as you can. This engraving reduces the cooldown of your Awakening skill by 10%/25%/50% and increases the charges available per encounter by 1/2/3 per rank. This is immensely important for making this build shine. The more World Decimation casts, the better! After achieving Rank 3 Awakening, try to ramp your Robust Spirit up to Rank 3 as well.

Beyond that, you have a few options for filling out your remaining Engravings. Grudge is a fairly obvious choice, and given its popularity for essentially every non-support class, you may already have this unlocked in your Engraving tab. If you can not quite get it to Rank 3, you should look at other options in the meantime. The negative effect at lower ranks is hard to stomach without the strong scaling at Rank 3. Cursed Doll, Adrenaline, Master of Ambush, or even Spirit Absorption Engraving will all do the trick.

Although it may be tempting to pick up a defensive Engraving like Heavy Armor or Fortitude, we highly recommend you avoid using them because Engravings are a large source of increased damage that you would be missing out on otherwise.

Pets can have stats that boost your character, and for this build, we recommend using a pet that boosts your Crit and Max life.

There are not any consumables that would be considered "best" for this build. Rather, there are a handful of consumables that are situationally very valuable. Major HP Potion & Panacea are commonly used to help survivability. While Clay Grenade (Stagger), Destruction Bomb (Weak Point), and Dark Grenade (Damage) are commonly used to help with their corresponding fight checks if you are having trouble meeting the requirements. Adrophine Potion can also be used for a flat damage increase, but at the cost of some health. Your choices will vary depending on what your specific party or raid needs.

Card Sets are a rather late-game part of Lost Ark and can require significant time and investment in order to reach the leveled-up benefits of any deck. This build does not require any particular deck to be effective but does benefit from any of the damaging increasing decks. Your end game goals for card sets should be either Lostwind Cliff (12) for the Crit Chance or Light of Salvation (12+) for the Holy damage conversion and buff. Unless you have the aforementioned decks, we recommend using anything that boosts your Max Health, such as World Bosses or Armory sets.