Lost Ark: Gunslinger Class Guide

Gunslinger swaps between three weapons: two pistols, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle. These are rotated via the character’s identity gauge and the fundamentals of the class rely on rotating these weapons depending on cooldowns and the type of engagement you’re in. Here’s a rough overview of what each of the weapons offers.

• Pistols – Your main utility weapon with Gunslinger, offering buffs, debuffs, and essential movement abilities.
• Shotgun – Close range damage, the staple of your burst damage
• Sniper – Ranged damage (the attacks on this thing feel amazing)

Your playstyle on the Gunslinger is dependent on your choice of class Engraving: Peacemaker or Time To Hunt. We will cover these in more depth below, but just as a quick preface, Time To Hunt is barely used as it totally removes your ability to use the Shotgun. Most builds make use of all three of the Gunslinger’s weapons, both for damage and for providing buffs/debuffs to you and your party.

In short, the Gunslinger is a pretty enjoyable class to play, especially in regard to the mobility and utility awarded from using her Pistols. She does take a bit of practice to master, however, as you need to focus on a lot of moving parts – knowing when to swap weapons, monitoring debuffs (as they won’t stack on top of each other), and navigating through your cooldowns.

A lot of players have a hard time choosing between the Deadeye and the Gunslinger. This overview is designed to give you a better idea of what you’re getting into when you choose the Gunslinger as a main. Keep in mind that both the Deadeye and Gunslinger classes are not easy to master. Both classes have been recently buffed/nerfed and tweaked on the KR servers, which means they’re clearly not quite in the right spot yet.

Pros

• Feels really fluid to play with a bit of practice
• Lots of mobility
• Plenty of damage
• Compared to Deadeye, the Gunslinger has extra range and more positional play – this means you should get hit less than the close-range gameplay of the DE
• Less reliance on back attacks than other DPS classes, including Deadeye

Cons

• Quite squishy
• Difficult to play, you have to master the cooldowns, debuffs, and what’s going on in the fight and rotate as necessary

Best Gunslinger Engravings

Your playstyle with the Gunslinger is totally determined by the choice of class Engraving. Here’s a closer look at two of them.

Time To Hunt	Peacemaker
At level 3, increases your Crit Rate for the Handgun and Rifle skills by 30 percent. You are unable to use the Shotgun stance.	At level 3, you get 16 percent attack speed in Handgun Stance, 25 percent crit rate in Shotgun Stance, and 10 percent damage boost + 30 percent extra damage boost to enemies with 50 percent or lower HP while in Rifle Stance.

As you can see, these two already don’t seem that balanced – and in truth, they aren’t. The Peacemaker Engraving is by far the most popular Engraving for the Gunslinger. Time To Hunt just straight up removes one of the archetypes of the class, not only making it less fun to play but making it a bit less versatile, too. You will, owing to the flexibility in Lost Ark’s class system, find plenty of builds that make use of both Engravings, though.

Other Recommended Engravings For The Gunslinger

Here are some of the recommended endgame Engravings for Tier 1 (the first part of content when you hit max level.)

Grudge	At level 3, Grudge adds a 20 percent damage bonus to Boss level or above monsters, as well as reducing incoming damage from the same monsters. Pretty standard Tier 1 Raiding Engraving.
Cursed Doll	At level 3, Cursed Doll provides an extra 16 percent attack power bonus while reducing all incoming healing by 25 percent. This is popular at Tier 1 but drops off at very late game Tier 3 content due to its downside.
Adrenaline	At level 3, increases attack power over time and improves crit rate by 15 percent.
Keen Blunt Weapon	At level 3, your attacks deal 50 percent extra crit damage but have a chance to deal 20 percent less regular damage.

There’s a big focus on crit when using the Gunslinger, as you can see from Adrenaline and Keen Blunt Weapon finding their way into the most-used Engravings on the class.

Best Gunslinger Skills

Below is a sample endgame skillset for the Gunslinger, based on roughly 268 skill points in total. We will cover the best Gunslinger builds in our more advanced class guides. This is just to give you an overview of what to expect when you play the class.

Ability	Tripod One	Tripod Two	Tripod Three
Spiral Tracker A spinning handgun ranged attack that deals damage to every enemy it hits	Weakness Exposure (Max) Party buff to critical damage for 10 percent (over 6 seconds)	N/A	N/A
Quick Step Mobility ability (back attack) with a damage-dealing move	Excellent Mobility (Max) Increases overall move distance	N/A	N/A
Equilibrium Large AoE back attack	Weakness Exposure (Max) Party buff to critical damage for 10 percent (over 6 seconds)	N/A	N/A
Dexterous Shot Mobility ability, firing while you move, can use twice in a row	Weakness Exposure (Max) Party buff to critical damage for 10 percent (over 6 seconds)	N/A	N/A
Peacekeeper Combo attack with multiple damage sources, you can move while activating it	Excellent Mobility (Max) Increases overall move distance	N/A	N/A
Shotgun Rapid Fire Fires the shotgun three times for substantial damage	In A Tight Spot This attack is no longer a back attack, increases damage and crit rate chance	Enhanced Shot Increases outgoing damage	Special Bullet Damage increased to Push-Immune enemies
Last Request Large AoE attack	Quick Prep Reduces cooldown	Execution Increases attack speed, moves forward slightly when firing, and improves damage to staggered foes	N/A
Sharpshooter Shotgun skill that deals AoE damage, changes with Stance switch	Special Bullet Damage increased to Push-Immune enemies	In A Tight Spot This attack is no longer a back attack, increases damage and crit rate chance	N/A
Perfect Shot High damage attack (charged, hit the perfect zone for extra damage)	Stable Stance When using this skill you are immune to Paralysis	Kill Confirmation When you land a perfect zone hit with this ability you deal extra damage to enemies with low health	Enhanced Shot When you land a perfect zone hit, you deal a chunk of extra percentage damage

As you can see, the skillset for the Gunslinger is pretty easy to set up and really focused on mobility/crit damage. This skillset is designed around the Peacemaker Engraving, but there are a variety of builds out there that also use Time To Hunt. We will cover some of these in our complete Gunslinger build guide.

Gunslinger Awakening Skills

Here’s a closer look at the Gunslinger’s two Awakening skills.

• Eye Of Twilight – Applies a debuff, reducing Move Speed and Attack speed for a short period. Deals damage and inflicts Stagger and Weak. These debuffs disappear once the ability ends.
• High-Caliber HE Bullet – High stagger AoE attack with a backwards leap. Deals significant damage to any enemies caught in the blast.