Worst Abilities in ARC Raiders

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In ARC Raiders, the skill tree is key to how you play – it affects everything from how you move and explore to how you fight. While many skills are useful, offering benefits like better resource gathering or smoother movement, some aren’t worth investing in, especially when you’re first starting out. Because you only have a limited number of skill points, even at the maximum level you won’t be able to unlock everything, so you’ll have to carefully choose which skills are most important to your playstyle.

Not all skills are equally useful. Some offer only minor improvements that don’t significantly impact how you play. Others appear powerful, but prove ineffective during challenging raids, acting merely as prerequisites for better skills. Careful planning is crucial when selecting skills, especially since the most valuable ones require considerable investment. To maximize progress and unlock key features quickly, players should prioritize skills that offer substantial benefits and avoid wasting points on weaker options.

Heroic Leap

Worse Than It Sounds

Details:

  • Negligible distance gained, if any
  • Skills like stamina regen become more valuable

The Heroic Leap ability seems appealing at first, offering increased movement that would be useful in any game and across large maps. However, it doesn’t actually add much distance in practice – the extra reach is so minimal it’s barely noticeable, amounting to less than a single directional input.

The mobility tree generally offers skills that aren’t particularly strong. While some sound helpful, they often don’t make a big difference. The last two skills – one that eliminates stamina cost for vaulting and another that lets you chain vaults to leaps – are genuinely useful, and luckily, you don’t need to fully upgrade Heroic Leap to unlock them. A small increase in movement distance from certain skills can add up during a match, but overall, the difference between having these skills and not isn’t significant.

Effortless Roll

Not A Big Enough Difference To Matter

Details:

  • One extra roll at max level while walking
  • No meaningful benefit, even at five points

Effortless Roll is one of those skills that seems really useful in theory, but doesn’t quite live up to the hype. While the idea of rolling more often or having stamina left over sounds good, many players have been disappointed. The stamina reduction it provides is so small, especially during challenging Raids, that it barely makes a difference.

Players who are walking at tier 3 or higher get an additional dice roll, but sprinting doesn’t offer any noticeable benefit. Even with fully upgraded stamina and movement skills, the bonus from sprinting seems to be missing, leaving players to speculate if it’s a bug or a deliberate design choice to maintain game balance.

Crawl Before You Walk

Simply Better Choices Out There

Details:

  • Only beneficial when downed
  • Minor increase in speed that doesn’t affect survivability a whole lot

Going down in ARC Raiders is tough. If you’re playing solo, you’ll likely bleed out and lose your equipment unless another player happens to have a defibrillator. While a faster crawl can be really helpful in a team, it still depends on someone being able to revive you after you’ve reached safety. Importantly, crawling actually makes you bleed faster, so while it might help you get to cover, it won’t save time – you’ll still bleed out at the same rate.

While rare, this ability can be surprisingly useful when playing alone. The Looting Mk 3 upgrade lets players recover health even when knocked down, potentially letting them survive indefinitely. Paired with the crawl ability, this creates another way to escape danger, if they can get away from their attacker. However, even in this situation, another player is likely to quickly finish them off, negating any benefit from using the skill.

Turtle Crawl

Not A Hard Enough Shell

Details:

  • Virtually useless in a lot of cases
  • Fringe chances of saving the player, but not worth it overall

The developers at Embark seem to enjoy skills that only activate when a player is downed, and Turtle Crawl is a prime example. While it’s a funny idea – imagining yourself crawling around like a tougher turtle – it’s almost never useful in actual gameplay. There’s really no situation where being slightly more durable while downed would give a player an advantage.

The ‘Downed But Determined’ skill extends the bleed-out time, which could give teammates a chance to revive you. However, making it harder to kill while crawling doesn’t really help, because whether an enemy uses one or two extra bullets, you’re still likely to die. While a little more health could be useful in some long-range fights, most of the time you’re either exposed and will die quickly, or safely hidden and can be revived anyway, making the extra health irrelevant.

Blast-Born

Won’t Save You From Tinnitus

Details:

  • Minimal impact in the majority of games
  • Early skill that should never be rushed

In ARC Raiders, sound is crucial for successfully completing raids. Knowing the location of other players and enemies is key, and the game aims to improve clarity during intense firefights. The ‘Blast-born’ feature attempts to minimize ringing and distracting noise from explosions, allowing players to hear subtle movements. However, even with this feature, loud explosions can still mask the sounds of footsteps and gunfire, making it difficult to pinpoint enemy locations even for skilled players.

If this skill significantly lessened the impact of explosions, it could be useful in close-range player-versus-player combat, particularly around explosive areas. However, as it stands, it only slightly reduces the sound, leaving players still disoriented and with ringing in their ears – and it doesn’t protect against the explosion’s damage. While accessible early in the skill tree and usable as a stepping stone to more valuable skills like Survivor’s Stamina, players generally shouldn’t invest more than one point in it.

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2025-12-20 11:35