Best Arc Raiders Skills To Unlock First
In the unforgiving world of Arc Raiders, skill points are a precious commodity, parceled out sparingly with each level up. With only one skill point awarded per level, maximizing their impact from the outset is paramount to your survival and success against the formidable ARC and the ever-present threat of rival Raiders. While the skill tree in Arc Raiders offers a breadth of options, and few choices can be definitively labeled as “wrong,” certain skills stand out as providing substantial improvements to your mobility, looting efficiency, and crafting capabilities. As you delve deeper into the game, exploring other utility options will certainly become a strategic consideration, but our expert analysis identifies the eight best skills that we believe you should prioritize unlocking first to establish a strong foundation for your Arc Raiders expeditions.
Mastering Mobility: The Cornerstone of Raider Survival
The intricate dance of survival in Arc Raiders hinges significantly on your ability to traverse the hostile environments with speed, agility, and an astute management of your physical exertion. The Mobility tree offers a suite of skills that directly address these crucial aspects, transforming you from a vulnerable target into an elusive and formidable force. Investing in these skills early on will not only enhance your combat effectiveness but also streamline your exploration and resource acquisition.
Marathon Runner: Extending Your Reach and Evasion
One of the most immediate and impactful skills to unlock is Marathon Runner. The demanding nature of combat and traversal in Arc Raiders means your stamina drains quickly during fundamental actions like running, vaulting, jumping, or dodging. The Marathon Runner skill directly combats this limitation by reducing how much stamina is drained by your movement. This seemingly simple reduction translates into significant advantages. Imagine being able to outrun a barrage of enemy fire, perform a series of evasive maneuvers without immediately becoming winded, or close the distance to a fallen comrade or critical objective. This enhanced stamina efficiency is foundational, allowing for more prolonged engagements, quicker repositioning, and a generally more fluid and responsive player experience. Without sufficient stamina, your ability to react, escape, or initiate becomes severely hampered, making Marathon Runner an indispensable early unlock.
The Strategic Advantage of Sustained Movement
The ability to sustain movement for longer periods offers a multifaceted strategic advantage. In offensive scenarios, it allows you to flank enemies more effectively, maintain pressure, or execute hit-and-run tactics with greater impunity. Defensively, it grants you the crucial seconds needed to retreat to cover, reposition yourself for a more advantageous firing line, or disengage from an unfavorable encounter. The reduction in stamina drain also indirectly benefits your shooting accuracy and ability to aim down sights for extended periods, as you’ll be less likely to suffer from the debilitating effects of stamina depletion that can lead to unsteady aim.
Youthful Lungs: Expanding Your Stamina Pool
Building upon the foundation laid by Marathon Runner, the Youthful Lungs skill represents a significant leap forward in your stamina management. This skill vastly improves how much stamina you have, effectively increasing your overall stamina pool. This exponential increase in stamina is critical. It means the difference between a quick burst of speed to reach cover during a heated firefight and being tragically caught in the open, losing valuable loot and progress. A larger stamina pool allows for more consecutive sprints, longer periods of sustained movement, and more opportunities to utilize your dodging and evasive abilities without immediately finding yourself depleted.
The Critical Buffer in Combat Encounters
Having a larger stamina pool provides a crucial buffer in the chaotic and often unpredictable combat encounters that define Arc Raiders. It offers more flexibility in decision-making under pressure. You can afford to make a slight miscalculation in your movement, knowing you still have ample stamina to recover. This translates into fewer instances of being caught vulnerable and more opportunities to turn the tide of a battle through superior positioning and sustained aggression or defense.
Sturdy Ankles: Mitigating Fall Damage for Tactical Freedom
While stamina is paramount, your ability to navigate the verticality of the maps in Arc Raiders is also key. The Sturdy Ankles skill addresses this by reducing how much damage you take from non-lethal falls. This might seem like a niche benefit, but in a game where strategic positioning often involves utilizing elevated terrain or dropping down to escape danger, it becomes incredibly valuable. With Sturdy Ankles, you can drop down to areas below you with less fear of losing a significant chunk of your health. This grants you greater freedom of movement and allows for more aggressive or unconventional traversal routes without the penalty of incurring substantial damage.
Unlocking New Traversal Pathways
The ability to descend from heights with reduced risk opens up a wealth of tactical possibilities. You can more readily reposition to flank enemies, create new sightlines, or escape pursuit by dropping through openings or down ledges that would otherwise be too dangerous. This skill encourages a more dynamic and multi-layered approach to map traversal, allowing you to think vertically and exploit the environment to your advantage.
Calming Stroll: Near-Instant Stamina Regeneration
The pinnacle of early Mobility tree investment, Calming Stroll is a large node that offers a dramatic improvement to your stamina regeneration. With this skill, you regenerate stamina at the same pace as standing still, even when you’re walking. This is a game-changer. No longer are you forced to completely stop and remain stationary to begin the process of replenishing your stamina. This allows for near-continuous movement, enabling you to cover long distances efficiently, escape dangerous situations with much greater ease, and maintain an offensive presence without lengthy periods of vulnerability.
The Power of Constant Readiness
The implications of Calming Stroll are profound. It drastically reduces downtime, allowing you to spend more time actively engaging with the game’s challenges rather than waiting for your stamina to recover. This constant readiness significantly enhances your ability to react to evolving threats, pursue fleeing enemies, or simply explore the map with unparalleled fluidity. When combined with the other mobility-based skills, you’ll find yourself moving across the battlefield with an agility and speed that few can match.
Streamlining Your Looting and Crafting for Maximum Efficiency
Beyond pure combat prowess, Arc Raiders rewards players who can efficiently gather resources and adapt their loadouts on the fly. The Looting and Crafting trees offer skills that directly enhance these vital aspects of gameplay, ensuring you’re well-equipped and resourceful throughout your expeditions.
Looter’s Instincts: Accelerating Your Resource Acquisition
Arc Raiders is fundamentally an experience about stocking up on loot as efficiently as possible and then making a safe extraction. The Looter’s Instincts skill directly supports this core loop by speeding up the pace at which items populate within the looting menu while you’re searching. This seemingly minor tweak can have a significant impact, especially during high-pressure moments. It’s especially helpful when you need to loot something very quickly before an enemy spots you, or when you’re in direct competition for valuable items with other players, often referred to affectionately (or not so affectionately) as “loot goblins.”
The Urgency of Rapid Looting
In the heat of battle or when a threat is imminent, every second counts. Looter’s Instincts allows you to grab the essential supplies you need – ammo, health packs, crafting materials – with greater speed, minimizing your exposure to danger. It also provides a competitive edge when scavenging, ensuring you can acquire valuable resources before your adversaries do. This skill makes the often mundane act of looting a more dynamic and crucial part of your tactical approach.
Revitalizing Squat: Enhancing Stamina Recovery While Crouched
Combat encounters in Arc Raiders can quickly become chaotic, forcing you to sprint from cover to cover to avoid being knocked out by gunfire or explosions. The Revitalizing Squat skill directly addresses the need for rapid stamina recovery during these critical moments. This skill improves your stamina recovery while squatting. The strategic implication is clear: you can squat behind cover to regenerate stamina quickly before sprinting somewhere new. This provides a safe and efficient way to rebuild your stamina reserves without being completely exposed, allowing for more sustained combat effectiveness.
Strategic Recovery in the Midst of Chaos
The ability to quickly recover stamina while in a defensive posture is invaluable. It allows you to maintain pressure on enemies, engage in prolonged firefights, or prepare for subsequent movements without long periods of vulnerability. By utilizing cover effectively with Revitalizing Squat, you can ensure you’re always ready to move, fight, or escape.
In-Round Crafting: Empowering On-the-Fly Resourcefulness
Even with thorough preparation for a raid, unforeseen circumstances such as intense shootouts or unfortunate mishaps can leave you critically low on essential resources. The In-Round Crafting skill offers a powerful solution by allowing you to open a crafting menu and use any materials you’ve amassed in your current run to create useful items. This means you’re not entirely reliant on finding pre-made items; you can actively create what you need when you need it.
Adaptability Through On-Demand Creation
The ability to craft items like healing resources or grenades during a run provides a significant layer of adaptability. If you run out of medkits, you can craft more. If you need an extra grenade for a tough encounter, you can create one. This skill empowers you to make the most of the materials you gather, ensuring you’re not caught unprepared and can tailor your equipment to the evolving challenges of the mission.
The Pinnacle of Survival: Advanced Stamina Management
While many skills contribute to your overall prowess, some require a greater investment but yield profoundly impactful results, particularly in the realm of stamina management.
Three Deep Breaths: The Ultimate Stamina Recharge
Circling back to the vital resource of stamina, the Survival tree contains one of the most significant improvements to this core mechanic: Three Deep Breaths. This skill requires a good chunk of skill points to reach, signaling its importance and the reward for your dedication. Three Deep Breaths helps you recover stamina more quickly after performing actions that deplete it. This is the culmination of your stamina-focused progression.
Unparalleled Agility and Endurance
Combined with the Mobility tree’s various stamina-based upgrades like Marathon Runner and Youthful Lungs, Three Deep Breaths elevates your traversal and combat capabilities to an extraordinary level. You’ll be able to sprint and slide around the map like the raider you were born to be, with significantly reduced downtime and enhanced responsiveness. This skill allows for near-constant, high-intensity engagement, providing a decisive edge in all aspects of gameplay. The ability to rapidly replenish stamina after exertion means you can consistently push the envelope, maintain aggressive stances, and execute complex maneuvers without the crippling limitations of stamina depletion. This ultimately leads to a more enjoyable and successful experience in Arc Raiders, where mastery of movement and resourcefulness are key to overcoming the game’s formidable challenges. Prioritizing these eight best skills will set you on the path to becoming a truly elite Arc Raider.