Choose My Adventure: New World’s flail and void gauntlet go together like peanut butter and jelly

Honestly, that headline really condenses my entire feelings about my time through New World for this week’s adventure for Choose My Adventure. I suppose I should have been more clever about it, but that’s how I feel. I am absolutely in love with this combination of weapons.

Of course, I’ll elaborate more on why I feel this way as well as explain what I did as I traveled along Aeternum, but it really can’t be stressed enough: The flail and void gauntlet weapon mesh so well together and they mesh with my playstyle. I adore this setup.

For those who are deep enough in New World to know, I’m following the decay skill tree on the gauntlet and the cleric skill tree for flail, with most of my attribute points poured into focus sprinkled in with some constitution. This has so far turned me into an interesting combination of soak tank and debuff attacker, as most of my alpha strike is spent on hitting a debuff or two and then switching over the flail for some standard or heavy strikes.

This setup does have a couple of disadvantages that I’ve had to work through, primarily because I have to swap weapons pretty frequently, which can make the rotation feel a bit sweaty from a button press per minute angle. Still, I’m slowly improving on my muscle memory and working through this problem, so it’s less like an obstacle and more like a wrinkle that I think I can smooth out. I am pondering remapping a couple of key presses in order to make it easier, but I also think I can tough it out because I’m starting to develop that muscle memory.

I also find that this pairing sort of falls apart in protracted fights. The cooldown for a lot of the abilities I’m using are pretty scattershot, meaning that after the alpha strike that I’ve got set up lands, I’m sort of on my own with what abilities to best use next. Again, though, I think I can work through this, and even though I feel like I was playing sub-optimally in a few situations, I was also managing to power my way through the few harder encounters I faced as I walked along towards Everfall. I haven’t gone into the Amrine excavation just yet, but there have been a couple of mini-boss level encounters that saw me pound through big health pools before and survive without too much issue.

That’s probably what makes this combination feel the best overall to me. It’s both busy enough that I have to think ahead and focus while also resilient enough to sort of allow me to get a bit sloppy in a couple of occasions. One-on-one, this pairing melts, and I’m slowly appreciating how to best use my skills when I’m facing more than one enemy. A lot of what I’m doing is about debuffing, applying steady self-heals, and just winning out through attrition than ripping fat chunks out of enemy health. And that’s always been my favorite archetypal sort of build anyway: the sort that sees me win through attrition.

Honestly, I’m kind of worried about how much fun I’m having with the void flail. This game still really wants to be a PvP game and service its PvP playerbase, so I keep on having this concern that these weapons are going to be nerfed into the aboslute dirt in the interest of Maintaining PvP Balance and Appeasing the Shrieking PvP Harpies. Ideally I’m overthinking this, but something tells me I’m not, whether it’s prior experience with other MMOs or this general sensation that these weapons are too much fun and by gosh we can’t possibly have that.

I truly hope I’m overthinking this, though.

Coming back to the subject of attrition, I’ve managed to get through some of the more dull story portions of the early game. I have to admit that a lot of the narrative beats are still not really striking any chords for me, but it definitely felt less interesting until I got to Everfall. It was at this point that I got a reprieve from saving a tinier burg, where I got to see a whole lot more people running about, and where I started really feeling like the build I have was coming together.

I still have to suffer through the Soulwarden/Azoth staff quest, of course, but swings and roundabouts.

Another benefit of being in Everfall is the fact that, since I’ve got Angry Earth and the right level, I got myself my first horse. I have to say that this mount system doesn’t seem particularly incredible compared to using mounts in other MMOs, but then I also wasn’t really expecting there to be too much depth either. I do appreciate some of the extra progression layers that seem to be piled on to having a mount, but I also harbor a concern that they’re all arbitrary – a sort of shoehorned skill system in order to make it seem greater than it is. It’s still very early days, though, and I though the game’s instrument system was going to be dumb and I adore that, so we’ll see.

Finally, arriving to Everfall means that a couple more systems are opening up to me, such as the selection of a faction. So that’s precisely what I’m looking to get done next, and I need your help in deciding. Help me pick a side that I ultimately don’t really care about but would like to get done because I don’t like seeing three different quests cluttering up my compass. Help me, please. The visual noise is too much. You’re my only hope.

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I do have one other poll question to ask, and this might kind of seem a bit odd, but I bring it up purely out of curiosity. As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t entered the Amrine expedition yet, but I’m now at the level requirement for it (and possibly the item level too), so I’m curious if I can actually experience some dungeon diving with others. On the other hand, I don’t really have any latent taunting abilities to be an effective tank, there’s no group finder in the traditional sense, and I’m not sure I have the confidence to play this build with others yet. But on the other other hand, I tend to learn by doing even if it’s initially uncomfortable. So help me out, won’t you?

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As usual, polls will close up at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, October 13th. For the time being, I think I’ll at least progress a bit further in the overall story. As well as feed my horse more food.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.