TYFP

***The information in the article leaves out more current information applicable to weapon and skill builds***

Introduction

I participated in the last two alpha tests, and the closed beta test for New World. I was selected after requesting access to multiple alpha tests and only got the last two, and the last alpha I was a late arrival and ended up missing out on many of the later features, such as the end game level tests. I was granted access to the closed beta as a result of my preorder of the game. In all three I leveled pretty slowly and tried out different builds, spent time in solo play, joined a Company, participated in open world PvE and PvP, as well as instanced PvE and PvP. I spent a fair amount of time struggling and failing, as well as with groups who provided a wealth of knowledge and who helped me experience much of the world of Aeternum that I would have missed out on without their help. I was an active participant in the forums, and was able to see what other people had found, especially in terms of PvP, experience exploits, and Faction politics.

I am by no means a master of the systems or content in the game, however, given my experience in game and in the closed forums I feel like I have gathered enough to help people learn what not to do, how to develop their characters for what they want to do in game, and what to avoid to prevent feeling left out or left behind.

As with all my other articles about game help, if you have conflicting information, additional information, or additional insight, I welcome it warmly; please put it in a message to me or in a comment below. Thanks in advance.

There will not be any spoilers below, so if you want to explore the lore and enjoy the quests as they come worry not friend.

Starting Out

Upon finalizing your character customization you will be immediately put through a short cutscene. You will very quickly be given a sword and shield, a small amount of food, and receive a very brief and to the point combat and motion tutorial. After finishing this up, you’ll be given full control over your destiny. You’ll start out in one of 4 randomly selected starting zones, and if you’re playing with friends, it can be frustrating to start in a separate area from them, but within an hour you and your crew will be able to choose what starting area you all want to work in together.

Your first quests will take place at the nearest watchtower, and a helpful NPC guide will give them to you, and this will guide you through the very basics of navigation, crafting, allocating weapon mastery points for abilities, and equipping gear. You’ll also be sent into your first open world dungeon to face an elite enemy, which will give you a very small test of your grasp of combat in terms of blocking, dodging, and timing your attacks. As you progress through these you’ll get loot dropped from enemies as well as from boxes and chests.

These quests will lead you to the first settlement you can complete quests in. You’ll receive quests that guide you toward the town board; and at level 8, the factions available for you to join. There are three factions (The Syndicate, the Marauders, and the Covenant) and aside from aesthetics and lore, there is no benefit to choosing one over another. Your company will be locked into a faction, so keep this in mind when playing with others. After selecting a faction, you will be able to flag for PvP which will give you a 5% net gain on experience points for everything.

It’s about at this point you can get together with your friends and decide which settlement you want to focus on. Once your main story questline shifts from a local leader and notifies you that the next available quest will be available at level 12, the NPC Yonas will be your guide through main story quests, so feel free to start questing in a different settlement now if your buddies are somewhere else.

Also at this point you should have a few different pieces of armor and various weapons. Developing a sense of what you want to build can be time consuming, as you have to level up individual weapon mastery to unlock the weapon’s available abilities. Below I will outline some guidance on how to build your character.

Character Builds ***OUTDATED INFORMATION***

You will get 3 attribute points to allocate every time you level up. Avoid the urge to spread these out, you’ll want to focus on building up the skill you need most. In the main menu the skills will show you what weapons scale from that stat and the weapons on the left are the weapons that scale with that state primarily. Some weapons scale with a secondary statistic to a lesser agree.

Weapons

Weapon skill is called mastery, and levels up with your use of the weapon. Each level of mastery grants you a talent point and you select the abilities, active or passive, on talent trees. You gain mastery points relative to the experience points you gain from combat, and you can swap weapons in combat to split the points. You can equip two weapons at once, and can swap between them at will. Swapping from a weapon granting you a status buff will cancel that effect. In addition to this, shields can only be used with a sword. The stats of the shield will disappear if you equip a shield with a weapon other than a sword, making it nothing more than extra weight on your back.

Armor

Your armor has 1 of 3 classes; light, medium, and heavy. These will affect your overall armor class (if you have all light pieces except for one or two light pieces, your classification will be light). Having a light armor class allows you to roll when you dodge, and this will be a faster, farther dodge in any direction. You will also have a weakness to incoming damage modifier, and a 20% bonus to outgoing DPS. Medium armor will give you moderate distance leap for your dodge, a 10% boost to your DPS, as well as a 10% boost to your crowd control abilities. Heavy armor reduces your dodge to a quickstep, offers no bonus to damage, but grants a 20% to your crowd control abilities.

BAD NEWS ALERT

Builds are uneven and imbalanced, especially in terms of PvP. I have included the optimal build information below so that in case it isn’t fixed before release you can read about it and decide how you want to deal with this information.

Tank Builds

If you want to be a tank, you will want to forgo the option of building up strength. You will want to allocate all your points into constitution, and wear heavy armor. In PvE the best weapons to use are Sword & Shield, life staff, or great axe and hatchet. In PvP you will want to master great axe and hatchet. This combo will give you the ability control your enemy by splitting the skill tree from the great axe, and the ability to self sustain and chase down fleeing enemies from the hatchet. The hatchet can also give you the ability to clear away debuffs placed on you. Selecting other weapons than great axe & hatchet will severely hamper your ability in PvP, and will leave you very frustrated. Switching out the great axe will allow enemies to kite you, switching away from hatchet will lower your self sustain and allow enemies to escape you or kite you. The great axe abilities Reap (extends your melee range and pulls your enemies inward to you), Storms Reach (extends melee range and pulls enemies in to you), and Gravity Well ( a ranged throw that forms a point of gravity that sucks enemies in to it) are almost impossible escape. In addition to this the great axe’s often strikes an opponent twice in a single swing. This will likely be fixed prior to release, however the damage output quickly out scales other weapons, even against heavily armored foes.

Healer Builds

As a healer in PvE or PvP your primary focus will be focus. Focus empowers your life staff, which is the only healer weapon in the game. You will likely want to choose heavy armor for this build as well, especially when you can find heavy armor that grants boosts to focus. You can take ice guantlet as your secondary weapon, which will give you crowd control options to help protect yourself, sustain your mana, and control enemies in both PvE and PvP. Using a spear or musket traps will let you snare or stun enemies, and using a hatchet or rapier will give you speed boosts to escape if needed.

DPS Builds

DPS builds offer the widest variety of viable options, however, your effectiveness in PvP will vary greatly on your personal skill level and mastery over the game’s controls and systems. In PvE you allocate your skill points into strength, dexterity, or intelligence depending on the weapons you wish to use, and all are viable in dungeons and instances. In PvP, you will find yourself frustrated if you are not heavily invested in a build and have high mastery points in your chosen weapon. You will not be able to do significant damage with ranged options such as the bow, musket, fire staff or ice gauntlet using its basic or charged attacks. If you choose to be an indirect combatant in large scale PvP you will be ineffective with these option, excepting the damage output of the fire staff, but only from it’s actual spells and status effects. The ice gauntlet will help you control capture points in the 50 v 50 wars, but you will be doing so mostly to allow your melee teammates the opportunity to get the kills. The bow and musket will give you minimal options in debuffing enemies, and occasionally steeper damage if you are lucky enough to catch critical head shots. Landing headshots becomes increasingly difficult in PvP, however, due to server ping, chaotic movements, and lack of a steady hand.

Melee weapons will give you the power to do significant damage, however you must be in the mess of the melee combat, which almost always includes incoming crowd control and AOE skills. When fighting at a control point in war you will very likely be spending a significant amount of time in ice gauntlet storms, and large damaging fire spells. If you decide to be a melee fighter you will likely benefit more from being a tank build and focusing on constitution and using the great axe & hatchet. You can swap the great axe for the hammer, however you will not be able to chase enemies as effectively and will be mostly effective fighting in the capture point.

If you decide to prioritize dexterity and weild a spear or rapier you will not last long in direct combat. If you find yourself wanting to play a more agile character using these weapons, or using light or medium armor, you will be force to pick and chose when to step in and out of combat, with less utility for your allies, and likely more deaths.

It is highly recommended that if you want to be active in PvP as a melee build to focus on constitution, wear heavy armor, and weild the great axe and hatchet combo. It is unfortunate that this meta has evolved, however, due to the chase ability, self sustain, and resiliency it is commonly what you will be fighting against.

This will likely change as systems are updated, if they have not been changed significantly in the delayed time before release.

Leveling and Progressing

Very quickly you will find exp gained from defeated enemies diminishing, and the enemies that give significant chunks of exp vastly outlevel you. By far, the most efficient way to gain levels is to complete quests for your main story, side story quests, from the local town project board, and from your chosen faction.

The main story quest line is highly recommended to be your number one priority, as it is how you unlock many features later in the game. It is an unreliable means of gaining levels however, since there are large gaps between the quests and their level requirements. The side quests offer some features (such as upgrading campsites from the survivalist quests), and some exp, but early in the game they are not worth your time unless they are on the same path as your other objectives. Your faction offers 3 PvE and 3 PvP quests at a time. The faction will give you a massive boost to the first three PvE quests you complete, and then the exp becomes rather low for your effort. Just do the first 3 and move on. The town project board offers a much larger wealth of exp, especially for certain crafting quests. By spamming town board quests you can net large amounts of exp for minimal effort. This is the fastest way to bridge the gap between your main story quests with Yonas.

Speaking of Yonas, you will want to stay on top of his quests to become a soul warden and unlock your azoth staff. The staff allows you to begin accessing instanced dungeons, and to participate in breaches.

Travel

On your first day you will spend a lot of your time running on foot from objective to objective. There are no mounts in this game, and many argue that there should not be. In fact, if mounts are to be included, a significant amount of balancing work will need to be done to weapons to ensure that mounts do not interfere with PvP. But aside from that argument, travel is predominantly on foot. You will soon learn to either complain, or to prioritize and plan your outings. You will waste precious time running for 10 minutes to a quest objective only to complete the quest and run back for 10 more minutes. You will want to load up on quests in bunches of areas in the same area, plan a loop, and make the most of your time. After some exploring the world, you will eventually be led to, or find on your own, shrines. By using azoth, you can fast travel between settlements and shrines you’ve visited, however, which greatly speeds up your progress. Initially, you can store up to 1000 azoth.

Azoth can be gathered from some enemies at random, as a quest reward, or sometimes from certain items called azoth containers. If you have an azoth container in your inventory, you can use it and it will provide you with a decent amount, which varies depending on the item.

PvE Combat Content

Breaches are the large red clouds in the open world. These will sometimes have waves of enemies, sometimes a powerful boss, but they will always offer a good deal of exp, treasure, and azoth, a very valuable currency.

The instanced dungeons, called expeditions, pit your party against puzzles and hordes of enemies, including some powerful minibosses and a final boss. The mechanics are relatively simple in every encounter. Expeditions offer a chance at loot from powerful sets.

Invasions are PvE events where the Corrupted, an enemy NPC faction, attempts to conquer a settlement. This is unfortunaly locked behind level 50 to participate. Invasions are sped up by unsealed breaches in the territory. You can sign up for an invasion at the affected settlement, and the governor of the territory gets to select 10 members, the other 40 members are selected at random to participate in the defense. The defenders must defend a fort against 8 waves of enemies of varying strength and ability, and will have access to different weapons and boosts available to them to buy for battle tokens. At the end of the invasion, players are rewarded with exp, gold, and loot depending on performance; and should the invasion destroy the fort claim, the local settlement will lose upgrades like crafting station tiers. Some enemies will focus on players, some are large beasts that will attempt to damage the fort. There will also be bosses that can have varied tactics. It should be noted that some enemies may initially appear to be brutes focused on fortifications, but if they are properly annoyed they will turn and focus on players. Some enemies are also suicide bombers that will charge groups of players or fortifications in an attempt to destroy them. If you are caught in the blast you will die. They can be destroyed before they reach their target, however they will still explode and anyone near them will suffer the consequences. There are also ranged attackers that will attempt to kill players staying on ramparts or hanging back.

PvE content gives you decent options for leveling, as well as access to armor sets and unlocking new features, but the best way to upgrade weapon mastery is open world PvP. You get a decent amount of exp for killing another player, however not enough to warrant ignoring quests. However, these massive spikes of combat earned exp also give massive amounts of mastery points, which you do not get from quest turn ins. Given this, it is strongly encouraged you remain flagged for PvP when running around gathering or doing repetitive quests near by town. Dying only has two punishments: gear damage, and it will auto fail faction PvP quests. The best strategy by far is to join questing groups of your faction or company members, and murder enemy players at every chance, as simply helping score a kill with net your the mastery. Finding yourself at a high level with few weapon abilities available to you is unenviable; as not only will you have fewer spells or abilities, but you miss out on many passives. Some of these are significantly crippling to not have, such as speed boosts or debuff heals granted by hatchet mastery, or crowd control abilities offered by the ice gauntlet.

PvE Content: Crafting, Gathering and Settlements

Crafting and gathering in New World is relatively simple. Click the harvest point for the item on the ground, after a period of time, you gain items. Click the item from the list at the crafting station to make the item.

You will level multiple gathering skills in your time in Aeternum. The first few are rocks on the ground, bushes, and trees. You’ll gain flint, stone, and green wood. If you kill a beast and have a skinning knife equipped, you’ll skin the enemy for skins and meat.

For the non killing items, it starts with simple rocks and trees. You’ll also find tall hemp bushes. As you level your skill you’ll level the skill up and gain access to gathering new items, including elemental plants and mining nodes.

As you kill tougher wildlife and skin them you’ll level up your skinning and tracking.

As you level up either you’ll also be able to track these items and they will automatically begin to show up on your navigation compass at the top of your screen, giving you an easier time finding the items you want.

You can speed up your gathering rate with reputation bonuses as well as better gathering equipment. A steel hunting knife is better than a flint knife, you know.

When crafting, your skill will grow as you make more items. Head and shoulders above the other crafting skills, cooking and alchemy are the best and should be the skills you spend the most time building up. Food offers a small amount of immediate healing, followed by a heal over time. Potions made in alchemy offer a bigger chunk of health and can have different boosts associated with them, such a heal over time, defense against corrupted, or more.

By leveling your metal working you can also craft honing stones that give you a temporary buff to weapon damage.

When crafting gear you can infuse the standard recipe with azoth and special items found in the world to incorporate different benefits to the gear, such as improved damage or defense against beast or enemy faction types like the corrupted or ancients.

It is important to know that crafted gear is usually of a lower quality than dungeon gear or quest reward gear of a similar level until you are crafting at a very high level.

An important function of lower quality gear, whether crafter or earned, is salvaging. You cannot sell items to any NPCs in game. The only method of selling items is the player auction house, and you’ll find that low quality items or common items do not sell, and will waste your money in fees trying to sell them. By salvaging items, you gain repair items to fix your damaged equipment, as well as other crafting materials. If you are not salavaging items you will quickly run out of materials to repair your worn gear.

PvP Content

Generally speaking, the most important aspects of engaging in PvP are your weapon mastery, personal skill in dodging and blocking, your stock in recovery items like food and potions, and your tactical experience in the game’s combat mechanics and familiarity with weapon strike patterns and tells. There are some general tips for success in PvP however, that will give you a good start in engaging in combat with others.

Due to the PvP scaling in the game, you have no worry of meeting a person 20 levels higher than you only for them to one-shot you. Incoming damage will be lessened and your ability to damage them will be magnified to even the playing field. This was a topic of argument in the official forums between people that recognized that its a necessary and welcome system in a game revolving around PvP and territory control, and those who wanted to be able to no-life their game and then go back and squash low level players. This being said, higher level players do have some advantages: they have higher weapon mastery which gives them more abilities and passives, they have more equipment slots and equipment bonuses, and they have higher powered and more recovery options such as better food and potions. That being said, with careful play and use of groups you have a decent chance against high leveled players in combat.

As a member of a company and faction, you have access to the War feature at any level. If you are lower level, your likelihood of being picked by the war leaders is significantly lower, but you can still be picked to help with indirect combat such as manning weapons and using horns. During war, you will either be an attacker attempting to take control of the enemy fortress, or defending it. In between the invader camp and the fort are 3 capture points. Standing in the the capture point affects its control. If too many invaders are active in the circle around the point the capture meter will begin to shift. Defenders will have to chase them out or kill them and stand in the ring themselves. The meter can fluctuate back and forth until it is captured. Once an invading army captures a point, it cannot be taken back by defenders and invaders can respawn there. This means there are a few tactics that are used to maintain or control these points.

Tank builds attempt to maintain a presence in the ring, crowd control and ranged DPS attempt to deal damage from outside the AOE frenzy, healers and casters attempt to flood the ring with their might to tip the balance in the favor of their allied tanks. War commanders utilize discord to move their forces between these points, to ensure that enough healers and enough damage are at rings under attack to maintain supremacy. The plan will usually be discussed in advance, but to ensure success and your best performance, maintain communication with your leaders. You and your allies will want to stagger crowd control abilities like AOE stuns from hammers, AOE knockdowns by spears, ice storms, and healing auras. The battle in the ring is hectic, and your life meter will rise and fall dramatically rapidly. You are expected to maintain your position, use your potions, food, abilities, and trust your healers. Running from a ring defense as a heavy melee build is viewed as cowardly, and can have severe adverse effects on your war effort. Maintaining yourself in a ring is far easier than rejoining the combat from outside should you lose your position, as you will be outside of healing abilities and defensive boosts. You will be open to turrets and ranged attacks moving rapidly around the far fringes of the combat, making you weak when rejoining the fray.

If you are a designated healer or support, you are expected to remain mobile and flexible. You will need to effectively cast long range while moving to avoid enemy fire, and you will be counted on to rapidly move from ring to ring to support the groups there in depending on how the battle is unfolding. This is far more difficult for attacking support and healers, as you have a much more shallow area to move around in, keeping you vulnerable to enemy ranged attack while moving between objectives. You may also be expected to place and operate siege or defense weapons including turrets like repeaters or cannons. To aid in this it is recommended you utilize the haste potions available at your base.

Various items can be purchased at your fort or camp to aid you in the battle. You can buy potions, ammunition, explosives, turrets, etc. The currency you use are battle tokens, and you get battle tokens from getting assists and kills in combat. By far the best are the haste potions, which give you massive boosts to your run speed; and the gun placements. The gun placements put down by your team can only be accessed by your team, so you do not need to worry about enemy forces taking them and turning them against you, and they have high armor so enemies must put in a lot of work to destroy them. The downside is that while using them you are extremely vulnerable, as incoming damage is dealt directly to you.

If you are the defenders, your job is simply to maintain the fort and control points for the 30 minute time limit. Losing a control point allows enemies more breathing room and options to respawn. If you are the attackers, clearing the points is only the first step. Upon beating back the defenders, the final objective is to take the fortress. A final control point awaits inside.

Last Little Bit

By using these builds, and being efficient in your quest planning, and spamming the right quests at the right time you will outlevel and outperform most others on your server. However, as with any video game; make sure you are enjoying yourself. If you want to spend your time finding lost journal pages to flesh out the stories of the local families or how the corruption destroyed villages, then do it. If you enjoy fishing, which in this game is an excellent minigame in its own right, then do it. During the last beta test one of high ranking officers in my company leveled to the 40’s by only gathering and crafting. It took him a while and he had lower weapon mastery for it, but he was playing the way he enjoyed playing. He kept members in supply of potions, food, ammunition, and gear. During PvP wars he manned turrets and horns to provide assistance. And even though he was non combatant he was a well respected member of the team and valued leader.

Once again, if you have additional tips that will be useful to new players please message me or leave it in comments below. Thanks a million!