Choose My Adventure: Returning, remembering, and relearning in New World

Once again for this week’s Choose My Adventure, I’ve found myself coming back to a game I haven’t touched in a while – New World – and being up to my eyeballs in some slight confusion, which is likely to get worse as I know there’s a new season launching the same day this article goes live.

I don’t think I’ve touched this game in months despite not having it removed from my disk drive – I didn’t hate things enough to want to expunge it from my PC, apparently – so naturally that meant that a lot of my time in the game for this month’s column was dedicated to recalling just where I was, what it was I was trying to do, and wondering what past me was thinking with regards to his build.

I am being a little bit dramatic on that last point, I should clarify. I do know that I was kind of thinking that maybe I was going to build a tank. Time away from the game has sort of cleared a lot of that delusion, however, especially because I was getting my face rocked when I was trying to recall my abilities.

I’m happy to say that not all of my muscle memory faded, as I managed to recall the rotation that I had come up with when using the void gauntlet and flail combination, which mostly involved throwing out a pair of the gauntlet’s debuff abilities before switching over to my flail for at least one more debuff and some basic swinging attacks. And for the most part that game plan still was working out. However, being in the mid to upper-40s in terms of level, I also wasn’t able to be quite as gung-ho with my swings as I thought. I had to raise my shield a few times.

Unfortunately remembering to press the right mouse button now and again wasn’t quite the way to full victory. I was still kind of getting roughed up and in a couple of cases I was being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. While there’s not too much that I could do about the latter, the former still kind of felt like a failing of my buildcraft, and so I decided to take a few hours to explore some options.

My first thought was to perhaps switch the void gauntlet from the debuffing ranged spells to the melee-minded void blade tree. This seemed to have some synergy with what I was thinking because there were a few skills and passives in that tree that suggested that tanking with the weapon was kind of possible. Most of what I was considering involved a couple of the skills that debuffed enemies and granted me a bit of fortify. In the end, however, I wasn’t really able to figure out a way to weave from one weapon to the other in the way I was doing previously. Especially considering the void blade skill had a much longer cooldown than I wanted.

Another bit of experimentation was centered around the warhammer weapon that dropped into my lap as I was running around. Here again seemed to be some tanking potential, but after several fights, I sort of was reminded how bad the warhammer feels to use. Perhaps there’s something there, but I just hate the way the warhammer animates. The fact that my points are primarily dumped into the focus stat wasn’t really doing me any favors there either.

Finally, I decided to return from void blade to void gauntlet, though I spent my points a little bit differently this time around. I also managed to find a little bit more skill discipline, relying on a different set of debuffs, some careful attention to cooldowns for weapon swapping needs, and much more measured combat pace overall. I was winning fights reliably once again for the most part after this tweak. I suppose practice makes perfect. I also suppose having a flail drop into my pocket that worked perfectly into my build (and was an upgrade on top of that) played a factor as well.

So overall I have kind of rewired myself to think of my character less like a tank and more like… well, a kind of angry cleric. A healer that whomps on things in the process. Or to put it another way, a soak tank instead of a traditional highly defensive one.

Despite this playtesting and relearning of things, I kind of didn’t really bother to get too stuck into my activities. Partly because I was a bit bored, partly because the storyline quest was a couple of levels above me at this point, but primarily because the game’s next update was looming on the horizon, meaning that the quests that I’m on are going to change. I think, anyway. I could be wrong.

All I really know for sure is that things are apparently going to change, and I kind of suspect I should perhaps consider changing along with them. Or should I? On one hand, a refresh without having to start from the very beginning (please no, I don’t want to re-roll in this game) could be in order, and I have lots and lots of azoth to burn on respecs if I so choose. On the other hand, perhaps I’m building in the right direction from both a skill selection and mental standpoint. But then again, if I really did want to make a flail tank, perhaps I should just switch out to a different weapon altogether and follow more learned advice?

As you can tell, I’m a little bit indifferent. Thus I turn to you fine folks to click your favored radial button and tell me what you think I should do.

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As always, polls will be closing at 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, April 5th. For now, I’ll once again be putting this one on the shelf and staring at the polls to see which direction things will be going from here. Change can be good, even if it’s a little scary, and I’m intrigued to see what happens next, whether it’s in regard to the poll options or to the game overall.

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.