In ARC Raiders, you get XP for almost every action topside: breaching, looting, and defeating enemies. Every time you level up, you get skill points to spend on new skills, from improving your stamina and breaching speed to unlocking new features.
Here’s everything you need to know about skills in ARC Raiders and which ones you should unlock first.
Table of contents
All skill trees in ARC Raiders
ARC Raiders has three skill trees, each focusing on a specific area. Every tree has 15 nodes, and you can invest up to five points in each node, increasing its potency.
Here are the skill trees and what they focus on:
- Conditioning: Improves breaching and stamina.
- Mobility: Improves rolling and stamina.
- Survival: Improves looting and crafting.
The most useful skill tree by far is Mobility, because it improves everything related to stamina, allowing you to stay mobile in a gunfight and explore the map quicker. There are also a couple of skills in other trees you should look out for when leveling up.
Best skills to unlock first in ARC Raiders
Unlocking all the skills takes a significant amount of time, and while it may be hard to tell this early which skills to focus on, here’s the list of skills I’ll prioritize unlocking and investing points in as I level up and go from early to mid, and eventually late-game:
- In-Round Crafting (Survival): Unlocks the ability to field-craft items while topside.
- Gentle Pressure (Conditioning): You make less noise when breaching.
- Carry the Momentum (Mobility): After a Sprint Dodge Roll, sprinting does not consume stamina for a short time. Has cooldowns between uses.
- Calming Stroll (Mobility): While walking, your stamina regenerates as if you were standing still.
- Broad Shoulders (Survival): Increases the maximum weight you can carry.
- Security Breach (Survival): Lets you breach Security Lockers.
In-Round Crafting unlocks the ability to craft basic items, like Bandages and Shield Rechargers, on the go. If you have a couple of basic materials, you can greatly improve your survivability, especially when using free loadouts.
Next is the Gentle Pressure and also Proficient Pryer to make breaching faster and quieter. Overall, there doesn’t seem to be many useful perks in the Conditioning tree. Most of them are for when you’re critically wounded or downed. They may come in handy when playing in a squad, but others offer a more universal benefit.
In Mobility, both first major perks look decent. Carry the Momentum can be handy to stay mobile in gunfights. Calming Stroll also improves stamina regeneration when walking, which is a nice quality-of-life buff. You need to invest 15 points in Mobility first to unlock these skills, and I plan to put most of them into Marathon Runner and Youthful Lungs.
Towards the later stages of the game, I plan to invest as much into Survival as possible to unlock Security Breach. It lets you breach Security Lockers found in secret rooms, and while I’m not sure what kind of loot they hold, it has to be something worthy if it requires investing 36 points in Survival. There are also a couple more useful skills, like Broad Shoulders and Looter’s Luck, that you can unlock on the way.
