Lost Ark: How To Beat Alaric's Sanctuary Abyssal Dungeon Raid

Separated Arenas

Let's talk about how this fight separates the 8-person party into two groups of four, with one group against Belloc and one against Sarahiel. This simultaneous battle concept between two smaller teams becomes more common in the far reaches of Lost Ark's endgame, especially with something like Argos. Players who are fighting Belloc really just need to focus on survival and DPS while keeping their O2 Meter topped off since many of Belloc's attacks drain O2 or prevent players from getting more oxygen. In comparison, players who are up against Sarahiel are also just focusing on DPS and surviving, while also keeping an eye on their Debuffs for Sarahiel's Infection mechanic.

Golden Cloud Wipe Mechanic

At about 15 HP Bars remaining, the Witch of Enchantment kicks off this mechanic by teleporting to the Belloc arena and starting to charge her Wipe Attack. While this is happening, the party remaining in Sarahiel's arena will notice that a bunch of inky-black clouds have spawned. Ignore these clouds and look for the Gold-colored one specifically. Once any player locates the Golden Cloud, ping it immediately and try and break it as fast as possible while avoiding breaking the inky Clouds (as they inflict the Darkness Debuff on the party). The player that last-hits the Golden Cloud then immediately gets a circular Golden Aura that will save everyone from the Sarahiel's upcoming Wipe Attack. Once the Golden Cloud is broken, a portal to the Belloc arena also spawns near the bottom of the map. Go through this portal ASAP. Upon arrival in the Belloc arena, the person with the Golden Aura either needs to stand completely still so everyone can run into their Aura, or they need to move to a pre-assigned position the party agreed upon before starting the fight. Once all eight people are in this Gold Aura, they're entirely safe from any and all damage until Sarahiel's Wipe Attack (visualised as this wave of Poison energy) is over. Anyone who didn't make it to the Aura in time is obviously insta-killed as well. After this is over, continue the fight as normal. Belloc will start using his Body Slam and Shockwave attack on repeat, essentially forcing players to defeat Sarahiel first. After she's gone, Belloc comes back down and starts up this Golden Cloud mechanic again. Thankfully, this time all eight players can chase the Gold Cloud, and there's no need to take a teleporter. Stand in the Golden Aura again, wait for Belloc to finish his Wipe Attack (visualised as a watery torrent), and get to the end of this arduous Boss battle.

Sarahiel's Infection

Once Sarahiel is down to her last 10 HP Bars, she'll force an Infection onto a random player. While this is active on someone, they'll have a purple icon between their HP and O2, a Debuff above their Quick Bar, and they'll start losing a percentage of their health every second. After 10 seconds, this Infection is passed to another random ally, or it's canceled entirely if the player with the Infection currently active stands in any of Sarahiel's Poison Hazards.

Sarahiel

Poison Hazards

Sarahiel creates poison arena hazards on the ground all throughout her fight that deal constant damage as well as remove the Infected Debuff.

Sarahiel

Water Blast

Without creating any sort of telegraph, Sarahiel lets out a blast of water in a cone in front of her, dealing low damage and stagger to those hit.

Sarahiel

Poison Spines

Sarahiel quickly creates and sends out them out in a fan-pattern in front.

Sarahiel

Water Orb Summons

Sarahiel summons four watery orbs that fly in all four diagnal directions, sending out Poison Spines randomly as they fly.

Belloc

Body Slam & Shockwave

Belloc jumps off-screen and creates a red telegraph on the ground where he'll impact. On impact, Belloc's attack creates a larger yellow telegraph circle, with the safe zones being outside the circle or inside where Belloc landed. After filling, the yellow telegraph creates a watery shockwave that drains O2

Belloc

Slam & Four-Part Shockwave

Like the Body Slam, Belloc swims upward (but not off-screen this time), flounders a bit, then slams back down onto a created red telegraph. Then, four quickly-filling yellow telegraphs are both summoned and explode in a cross-formation around his impact point.

Belloc

Forward Swipes

Belloc does a general forward swipe with either arm, can sometimes combo into a Body Slam move or multiple swipes.

Pillar Destruction

Clearing this mechanic is the only real way to get through the fight with Alaric's Wrath. Failing to destroy one of the four Pillars in the arena at any point leads to an immediate Wipe, so players need to know how this works. To put it in simple terms:

• Alaric's Wrath typically triggers this system for every four or so HP Bars lost.
• When activated, all players get a red Aura around their feet. Seven of the eight players get a large red circle that damages and knocks up anyone who enters its range, while one player gets a Red Arrow over their head and a smaller more compressed aura around their feet.
• The Red Arrow player is the lynchpin of this mechanic. As soon as they can tell they're the Red Arrow player, they need to run and stand on top of one of the four Pillars in the arena ASAP.
• Shortly after, Alaric's Wrath will attack that player, dealing a sizable chunk of damage to them but also destroying the Pillar they were standing in.
• Once this is done, Alaric's Wrath is Staggered for a good amount of time before continuing the fight.

The only thing players need to be careful of during the four times (maximum) this mechanic occurs is to stay out of the Red Arrow player's way. Typically, the rest of the players with larger red circles immediately move to the outer edges of the arena between the pillars, leaving enough walking room within the inner edge of the circle for the Red Arrow to traverse freely. Even if two larger aura players have to overlap and hurt each other so that the Red Arrow makes it to the Pillar, it's more than worth it. As the Pillars get destroyed, the party needs to all make sure and focus on the side of Alaric's Wrath facing the remaining Pillars so that when it's triggered again, they can get to their positions as quickly as possible.

Freezing Debuff

A very easy mechanic to ignore, but one that helps players to understand some of Alaric's attacks as well. After dropping below 10 Bars of HP, Alaric's Wrath starts applying the Freeze Debuff on-hit. At five stacks of this Debuff, players create an aura around them that quickly pops, freezing nearby party members and leaving them open to massive damage. Remember how inconvenient this is, as it'll become important in the final fight.

Hand Slam & Spin

The Boss slams both hands down, one on each side of the arena. Then, it spins its arms while they're on the ground, dealing high damage to anyone hit and pushing them along with it. Players can get hit by this multiple times, so it's better to just follow the arms clockwise to avoid them, similar to Najjar's Blood Beams in the Road of Lament.

Tornado Summons

Alaric's Wrath summons a circle of underwater Tornadoes around it that knock up and hit multiple times if players are caught in them. After a short delay, the tornadoes move outward to the edges of the arena before disappearing. There's a small amount of space between each one, but more than enough for a player character to fit through.

Chest Beam

This is likely the attack players who have been participating in the Naruni Race Event are the most familiar with. Essentially, the Boss builds up energy in its chest quickly before shooting out a "laser" of high-pressure water and spinning around the arena. If hit, players take a sizable amount of damage and are knocked up as well. Thankfully, it does show where the laser will hit in red telegraphs beforehand, so just make sure to stand within the safe zones.

General Swipes & Slams

Last up, Alaric's Wrath has a whole host of hard-to-distinguish attacks that all basically amount to "hand slams" and "swipes".

Up Arrow Wipe Attack

This is the "core" Wipe Attack that Alaric uses (seemingly every 90 seconds or so). The other one is just a fail-state of its Stagger Check, but both have very similar startup animations. To tell the difference between the leadup to these two attacks, if Alaric sends its Trident flying around itself with a golden trail of light, that's the Wipe Attack. If it spins the Trident a bunch before slamming it into the ground, that's the Stagger Check. In any case, this Wipe Mechanic is all about knowing where the assigned safe zones are, and this needs to be discussed or established before going into the fight. Because the fight against Alaric takes place directly after Alaric's Wrath with no break, most players either assign these spots before the second mob-clearing section or they immediately vote to restart when Alaric starts in order to set this up. After it starts, Alaric will summon eight safe zones around the entire arena. Each safe zone has a very small area in which it can spawn, but in general the eight "areas" roughly make the shape of an "Up Arrow". Five of the safe zones take up the top half of the "Up Arrow", while three of them make up the vertical line lower half. To relate it to a clock as an alternative, there are safe zones at what would be 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, 3 o'clock, two at 6 o'clock (one directly above the other), with the final one being somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the Boss in center stage (aka where the two "hands" of the clock would originate from). Whoever feels like leading the assignment of positions in the Battle Workshop before the fight, just use the Battle Workshop "circle" as a makeshop model of the arena, and ping all eight spots where the safe zones will appear. The rest of the Raid Group should then pick one of these pings and stand on them, declaring that this is where they'll go when the Wipe Atttack occurs.

Stagger Check & Orb Destruction

This is the other mechanic that can happen when Alaric teleports to the middle of the arena. Thankfully, this is more reliable to see coming, as Alaric always does it at its 28th and 12th HP Bars. After teleporting to the center and spinning its Trident around with a glowing red trail of energy, Alaric slams its weapon into the ground, summons an ice aura in a large circle around itself, blood effects pop up on the sides of the screen, and a Stagger Bar appears underneath it. To pass this Stagger Check completely, players actually have two jobs:

1. They need to drain Alaric's Stagger Bar as quickly as possible. It's a tougher one, so save all those Stagger Skills in advance.
2. As soon as the Stagger Bar is empty, the party needs to run around outside the icy Aura and break all the Golden Orbs moving slowly toward the center. For every Orb that touches the icy Aura, more of the screen is obscured with the blood effects. If the blood effects just about reach the center of the screen, it's most likely a Wipe.

Parties tend to use the same general area they were assigned for their safe zone for the Up Arrow Wipe Attack as their "zone" for clearing out Golden Orbs, and it usually works pretty well. One thing to note though, is that there are two different types of Golden Orbs, ones that are entirely Gold, and slightly larger ones that have a white "Core":

• Full Gold Orbs: Break in a couple hits and move faster than the White Core Orbs.
• White Core Orbs: Don't break at all, but rather they have their own invisible Stagger Bars that make them sink into the ground once depleted. Sleep Bombs can be used as a substitute if they're too difficult to Stagger.

Freezing Orbs

After Alaric is below 20 HP Bars remaining, it'll start summoning these Freezing Orbs at random intervals for the remainder of the fight. Visually, the Orbs are a slightly lighter blue than the other Orbs, but they're most easily seen by the gigantic icy Aura around them. This Aura freezes anyone inside if the Orb explodes naturally, but it's entirely nullified if a party member bites the bullet by running into the Orb voluntarily. The key here is that the Freezing Orb is always at the dead center of the Icy Aura, making it easy to locate. And, luckily, if a player uses their Combat Skill (AKA their Dash, Roll, etc) to run into the Freezing Orb, it'll completely nullify the downside of it freezing them for a short duration.

Freezing Debuff

This works almost exactly the same way as it did in the fight against Alaric's Wrath. A large portion of Alaric's attacks apply this Freeze Debuff, and once a player reaches five stacks, they'll see this filled-in icy aura around themselves. This aura pops after a second or two, freezing any allies caught inside for a large chunk of time. So, any ally that notices this aura around them, run to the edge of the arena away from everyone else until the aura pops, then rejoin the fight.

Exploding Orb Summons

Less of an attack and more of a constant effect, Alaric randomly summons these blue orbs throughout the fight that only it can damage. If they're broken by Alaric, the orbs quickly explode, dealing high damage to anyone caught in them.

Imprisoning Waves

Alaric lifts its Trident above its head and spins it before releasing two watery shockwaves in short sequence. Neither of these deal any damage, but two random party members are imprisoned after the second wave. Then, the Boss starts a long windup to throw its Tident at one of the imprisoned allies. Party members should work on attacking these allies as fast as possible to free them, as the Trident Throw can easily 1-hit KO some less-tanky Classes.

Trident Lightning

The Boss spins its Trident directly in front of it before shooting multiple bolts of lightning out from the spinning Trident that deal moderate damage per hit. Thankfully, this attack is easy to avoid and has a long animation, so players can wail on the Boss while it's using this attack.

Triple Jump

Alaric does a jumping stab attack with its Trident three times, each time targeting a different player. This attack is fast, deals high damage, and is hard to read, so be ready to dodge away at any moment.

General Swipes & Slashes

Like Alaric's Wrath, Alaric has a whole host of different attacks that all boil down to basic swipes with its Trident, stabs, or slashing attacks. All of these deal low damage and usually only stagger on-hit.