With the hype around Rise of the Angry Earth, a lot of players are starting or restarting their journey in New World. In my two years of play, I’ve noticed a lot of common mistakes or misunderstandings new players tend to fall prey to, some of which even tripped me back in the day.
Today, I’d like to offer some of my top tips for new players to avoid New World‘s potential pitfalls and start the game on the best footing.
Don’t spam weapon swap
In most MMOs, we’re used to set DPS rotations, where you need to be constantly using abilities to avoid losing damage. Coming into New World with that mentality, you might expect that the optimal way to play is to blow all your abilities, swap to your second weapon, hit all its abilities, and repeat ad nauseam. But constantly switching weapons like this is often unnecessary, and perhaps even harmful.
The optimal way to play is going to vary a lot based on your choice of build and what content you’re doing, but by large the following generalizations hold true.
Firstly, active abilities in New World often aren’t that big a DPS boost over just performing light and heavy attacks. They hit harder, but they also tend to have longer animations, so it balances out. Usually abilities are as much about utility or applying buffs and debuffs than they are raw damage.
Secondly, swapping weapons does have a delay during which you can’t attack or block. It’s short, but in a close battle every moment counts. Especially in solo play, I’ve found the delay from weapon-swapping can be deadly, and not for your opponent.
Third, in a lot of builds you’ll eventually have so much cooldown reduction that you’ll be able to spam the abilities of a single weapon with little or no waiting.
For all these reasons, constantly switching weapons is unlikely to yield a major gain in DPS. There’s more intangible downsides, too. A lot of New World‘s combat comes down to precise timing of attacks and blocks, and constantly switching weapons can make it harder to build the necessary muscle memory.
This is a generalization, but the “correct” way to play New World is to have one primary weapon, with the second weapon used mainly for situational utility or to fill a niche your main weapon doesn’t cover. Having one weapon for single-target damage and one for AoE is an example of one possible strategy.
Choose weapons that scale from the same attribute
New World advertises itself as a classless game, but as I’ve said before, that’s not exactly true. Because different weapons scale their damage off different core attributes, those attributes effectively serve as soft classes, with weapon choice being analogous to subclass.
Now, there is a lot of nuance here. Some people use off-stat weapons purely for utility, some artifacts scale differently than weapons of their type usually would, and split-stat builds can be optimal for weapons that scale off more than one stat.
But it’s very easy to be led astray in this system. I’ve seen new players stumble into very sub-optimal builds by just combining two weapons they think are cool without giving thought to what attributes they scale from. I wish the game supported that kind of play, but it doesn’t, and you can seriously hamper your performance by not respecting attribute scaling.
If you’re just starting out, I strongly recommend picking one attribute to focus on and choosing two weapons that both scale from it. That will allow you to avoid a lot of potential trap builds. If you want to know what scales from what, just open your attribute panel and hover over the weapon icons above each stat.
Constitution is the odd duck here, as no weapons scale from it. Most builds should aim to eventually have at least 50-100 points in Constitution, but it should never be your highest stat unless you plan to tank. Speaking of which…
Use carnelians wisely
Carnelian gems are key to the threat mechanics of New World. Socketing a carnelian your weapon will increase the threat you generate and activate taunt effects from any ability whose tooltip includes the phrase “taunt gem compatible.”
If you plan to tank, you need a carnelian in your weapon, full stop. It is not optional; you absolutely cannot tank without one. And you should never put one in your weapon if you’re not a tank.
Conversely, however, carnelians socketed into armour and jewelry reduce your threat, so you should absolutely avoid putting them in your armour as a tank. Whether they’re worth it as a DPS or healer is debatable. A lot of people prefer gems with damage reduction effects, but if you’re pulling aggro a lot, socketing a few carnelians in your armour might be worth considering.
Crafting isn’t casual content…
Another assumption one can come into New World with if you’ve played other MMOs is that crafting is easy, low stress content for the casual player. You might even have ambitions of getting all your gear via crafting as you level up — that was certainly my plan.
“Low stress” depends on your taste, but crafting in New World is certainly anything but casual. The grind of leveling just one skill, let alone several, is massive, and you’ll need to spend dozens of hours grinding, spend thousands of gold, or get a lot of help from other players if you want to be a master crafter.
If plan on getting all your gear from crafting as you level, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. Considering how slow it is to level crafting, how fast character leveling is now, and the XP you get from gathering and crafting, I’m not even sure it’s even mathematically possible to keep your craft skills on par with your character level. Likely they will lag far behind, and you won’t be able to make meaningful crafting progress until level cap.
That’s not to say that crafting can’t be useful or that you should never do it, but you should know what you’re getting into. It’s a big commitment.
Gathering, however, is a bit more casual-friendly. It’s still pretty slow to level, but there’s always something to gather no matter where you are, and even if you aren’t crafting, you can sell what you collect.
…But invasions are
This is a bit less of a “beginner” tip since Corrupted invasions are endgame content, but considering how fast leveling is and the fact this is one of the bigger mistakes I made in my New World career, I think it’s worth mentioning.
For the longest time, I thought invasions were “srs bzns” content that only the most elite players could do. I mean, “50-person instanced endgame content” doesn’t sound very casual-friendly, does it?
But in practice invasions are easy content that anyone at endgame can do. The guild that owns the territory being invaded can pick only 10 people to join the invasion themselves, and the other 40 are chosen at random from anyone who signs up. There’s a chance you won’t win the lottery to get picked, but I get in far more often than I don’t, so it’s not particularly exclusive.
Despite being instanced, invasions remind me most of Guild Wars 2‘s larger open world events. They’re barely controlled chaos in which the actions of any individual player have minimal impact, leaving very little pressure on one’s performance. The controlling company will usually give some basic instructions on who goes where, while their members perform more essential tasks, and beyond that you can just sit back and enjoy the turkey shoot as the Corrupted waves break against the fort’s defences.
In the early days of the game, invasions were difficult, and failure was common, but now that people are geared, failure is very rare. Personally I’ve never lost an invasion, and I’ve come close only once.
So if you’ve been intimidated by Corrupted invasions, don’t be. They’re one of the most relaxed forms of endgame content in New World.
New World’s Aeternum is a land of many secrets. In MassivelyOP’s Vitae Aeternum, our writers delve those secrets to provide you with in-depth coverage of all things New World through launch and beyond.
