Well friends… I have officially dinged level 60 in New World and with it opens up all of the early phases of the endgame. I had heard a whole number of things that were rumored to happen in the end game, some of which are partially true and others are complete nonsense. The first thing that I had heard is that enemies dropped coin more often and this so far is universally false. Encounters have always had a random chance of dropping some coin and thusfar it seems like my experience has not really changed much and when I do see coin drop it is usually in the range of 6 to 9 coins at a time. What has changed is that I am killing more stuff and by reference seeing more coin drops on average. However the killing more stuff comes from the other big change that I had heard rumored.

Another thing that I had heard is that when you hit level 60, your weapon experience gains are the same across the board and killing a level 5 mob rewards the same as killing a level 60 mob. This is also completely false, but there is some nugget of truth in the concept. When you ding 60, your weapon experience gains are increased wildly but there are still wide variations to that experience. So I can run around and kill level 5 wolves for around 18 weapon experience per pop and make pretty significant progress especially if I can find an area with fast enough respawns that allow me to get a bonus multiplier for killing something before the previous experience notification fades. Killing silver elites tends to reward something in the neighborhood of 60 weapon experience and killing gold elites more in the neighborhood of 120 weapon experience each.

What this means in practice is I am running around and killing everything in my path because it all is granting what FEELS like good weapon experience. I put on two levels of Great Axe last night for example and I think ultimately I am going to try and find some location that still has that near instant spawn rate and pour through some of the weapon levels. Ultimately I want to have Hatchet, Warhammer and Great Axe leveled to 20 seeing as that is more than likely going to be the trio of secondary weapons that I swap between. Thankfully Sword has been capped for a very long time so it gives me one fully built out weapon for when things start to get dicey.

Speaking of things getting dicey… those highest level areas of the game hurt a lot. I had been leveling with what was a pretty even split between Strength and Constitution giving me around 3 pips in each of them. This was fine and it was tanky enough to be able to handle most things… but I also knew if I was going to become an endgame tank I needed to go with a full constitution build. Essentially I have learned that I should have done this ages ago because there isn’t a lot of difference in damage between half strength/half constitution and full constitution. Before the respec I was hitting Wolves in Brightwood for 838 damage per hit. After the respec I was hitting those same Wolves in Brightwood for 738 damage per hit, which means I lost 100 damage by dropping all of that strength. However I gained over 3000 hit points in the transition which tells me that Constitution gives you way more hit points than Strength gives you damage.

My goal right now is to complete the faction upgrade quest and start purchasing the faction token armor to begin rounding out my gear set. My goal tonight is to finish the Trial of the Alchemist and start buying my first pieces of gear, likely beginning with the chestpiece and working out from there. The quest will reward 12k faction tokens, which means I am going to need to spend down to give myself a buffer so that I don’t lose tokens. While the cap while the cap will be raised… if you were capped going into the quest it means you will just lose those 12k tokens. It works that way for each of the faction quests so I highly suggest spending down your tokens just ahead of any turn ins. If you need something to buy material convertors are always helpful especially now that the windfall of resources has been nerfed a bit. I did pick up a handful of items from the market and ended up spending around 800 gold total in upgrades to make myself a little bit more viable going forward.

I am really not sure how much further I am going to make it progression wise before the rest of the crew catches up to me. I still need to run The Depths, because I am stalled out in the story until I reach that point. I am hoping that we get to run this over the weekend and if not I am just going to pug the remaining spots to get through it. I know there will be later dungeons that I need to do in order to get caught up with the story, so while working on faction tokens my hope is to work my way through the zones. I’ve gotten a few 500 item level drops, which means my snapshotting process begins in earnest. I started a spreadsheet so I could keep track of the highest item level I have received for each slot. I may have hit my head on something… but I am even considering signing up to be part of a territory defense or doing some of the PVP faction questing to help flip zones.

First off I need to open this post with an apology. Apparently yesterday’s post gave folks the impression that I was shopping for another server. I am not at all. I am very much committed to staying on Minda, and as a result I have branched out and started to make contacts within other Syndicate guilds on the server. Yesterday’s post was basically that there are problems with this server, but I think that there are problems with every server and that greener pastures don’t really exist elsewhere. Sometimes I am part of a server that I am wholeheartedly recommend without any reservations like Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. Minda is a server that I still recommend but that comes with some reservations namely that there are some not great people here. However that said my friends list is filling up daily with awesome people that I happen to meet along the way.

That said last night server transfers opened and we had a few people transfer over to Minda from elsewhere. If we are friends, then you are absolutely welcome to join us. We have around thirty players and I expect in the coming weeks as folks transfer to the server that number will grow. I think there are a number of folks who will wind up on Minda as the dust settles. In fact last night a group of players that Zelibeli had been leading started transferring in as well… though I believe they plan on staying team Covenant. Since we are largely PVE players, that means we have more folks to run dungeons and such with. I wish the social systems were a bit stronger, but at least now the Mute/Block sections seem to stay collapsed allowing me to shuffle the bad actors down into the dregs of my list never to be seen again.

Since the last thing anyone needed was a whole new server just for one game, we instead opted to build out a New World section of the Super Dungeon Friends discord. Once you land on the server head over to the Role-Assignment section and choose New World and your faction in order to get specific channels for those. I am currently working on overhauling the discord to make it easier to support additional games in the future. So for the moment it is fairly FFXIV centric, but I am working on carving up segments for each new game since the general mission of having Low Pressure grouping friends should be able to easily expand to almost any game.

Last night Minda became actively better for Syndicate players because our territory expanded. Mourningdale in the northeast corner of the map had been held by Jade, the single territory holding Covenant company. However Jade was not well loved by their own faction, or the rest of the server for that matter and was the perfect example of a group that allowed a territory to rot. The machinery in town had downgraded and no active projects had been running there for the better part of a week. Last night Cozy Cafe made a bid for taking over the territory and it seems like Jade just threw the match. I know for certain that a large number of level 60 Covenant and Marauder players signed up to defend the territory, but instead Jade (which is also the name of the leader as well as the guild) packed the roster with level 20-30 players that had no chance of defending. If you are curious at all the War was streamed by one of the leaders of Cozy Cafe and it was a bloodbath.

So in the end that gives us cheap teleports as Syndicate players to seven zones around the map with six banks connected allowing transfers of material between them. Right now there are wars coming up against Everfall and First Light. The best and brightest on the server will defend Everfall because if there is such a thing as the Syndicate Capital… it is absolutely that town. Now that we have Mourning Dale I could almost see allowing First Light to go to Green. The second company of the Spartan Legion is the one planning to take that territory, and I gotta say I would largely be fine with that. Spartan Legion has held Windsward the entire time I have lived there and have for the most part been good Stewards of the territory. Sure I would love to see the entire map be purple so that I could cheaply teleport anywhere and have ALL the banks connected, but I don’t think that is ever going to happen really.

As it stands I am four bubbles into 59, and really need to spend the rest of this level capping out my faction so that I can do the next upgrade mission shortly after dinging. I really want to focus on working on getting the full 525 faction gear set, which will serve as a good starter place for the endgame. Over the last few days I have rocketed ahead in level and quite honestly it is shocking just how brain dead and simple it was. Since the beginning of the game I have heard from so many players how good the experience from Town Board quests are, and the fact that I was 54 on the 19th is proof of this. It truly is complete nonsense how fast the progress has gone and I could very easily push up to 60 if I really wanted to, but instead really need to eek out a bit more faction before doing so.

Ultimately for those who are not familiar with these, I am talking about the board full of quests near the town hall in a given territory. Ultimately what I was focusing on were the various smithing related or material turn in quests. What I did at the beginning of this entire roller coaster was gather up a bunch of Iron Ore, Hemp Fibers, Rawhide, and Green Wood and carry it around with me. I would then convert those materials into whatever was needed by a specific quest or for example in the case of Stone Blocks above I would harvest the resources near town. By the time I finished gathering things up to knock out some of the easier quests the next batch would be available after I did a turn in… and the process could start all over again. Essentially I would clean out as many easy crafting quests as I could, pick up as many kill X animals quest and then move on to the next town.

Specifically I avoided the following:

• Potion quests unless I just happened to have enough of a given potion on me. Potions require too many reagents to make this quick and easy.
• Cooking quests unless I just happened to have enough material on me. Most cooking requires a lot of ingredients which slows you down.
• Fishing quests are a huge trap. Saying you need to catch 3 Large Salmon seems easy enough… until you actually sit down to try and do it. Fishing is slow and trying to catch specific fish is even slower.
• High Level Materials. I was fine with turning in Iron Bars or Steel Bars… but Starmetal or Orichalcum bars while a massive hit in XP just takes too much time and resources.

Ultimately I rotated between Weavers Fen, Brightwood, Everfall, Windsward, and Cutlass Keys because those are all territories that were active. I checked Monarch’s Buff and First Light a few times but the companies that controlled those territories were not maintaining the Town Boards very well and keeping a supply of fresh quests. However rotating through five territories gave me a constantly flow of easy to complete quests and has rocketed me through five high levels in three days. I have so many world quests still left out there, but right now I have gotten to a point where I just want to push across the line so I can start building a more permanent set of items. I will happily mop up all of those quests when I hit sixty.

However once again I want to leave you with a final statement. We are staying on Minda and if you are looking for a permanent home in New World we would love to have you. Server transfers are now available through the in game shop, and when you join the server look up Belghast and I will get you invited to the company. We are all Syndicate so of course before you can join the company you will need to be team purple given that guilds in this game don’t span factional boundaries. We can however still do content with the other factions. I’ve run a few dungeons with mixed teams and it worked just fine. However given how much territory purple holds, if you are a purely PVE player then the only logical choice is to join the purple empire.

It seems we are staring down the barrel of server transfers in New World and I have to admit I have a lot of concerns surrounding them. For those who have not been keeping up with this topic you can check out the Q&A thread that Amazon posted on the forums or the 1.0.3 Patch notes from the patch that was seemingly applied last night at 10 pm PDT. Essentially when the system opens up it will be limited to servers that are not currently flagged as “Full” and when it goes live you will be limited to only servers in your region. The first part isn’t really a big deal because at the time of writing this not a single New World server is currently showing as “Full”. The second part is a little more frustrating because we have a small contingency of players that rolled on a US West server when the rest of us are US East, and there is no real ETA on when we can join up together.

As it stands Minda the server that we are on has not been “Full” for quite some time and seems to run around 1400-1600 players during peak hours. So it seems to me that there is still plenty of room to soak transfers without returning us to a land of queues. However I have to admit that the worst part about the New World player experience for me personally has been the community. The problem that I have is that I have zero faith that the grass will be any greener on the other side of a transfer. This is a game that has attracted all of the hyper competitive super abrasive PVP players and brought them to the forefront of the game since so much of the systems revolve around winnings wars and taking territory. While there are plenty of great folks playing on Minda, Global chat is full of human trash-fires.

The problem is I have no real faith that any other server environment is going to be better, so I am not sure if trying to transplant everyone to more favorable shores is reasonable. Ultimately you are going to need an active server to survive in the endgame, and thus far we seem to have a fairly thriving ecosystem of territories that are active. However that said we are already experiencing issues with the less traveled territories are falling into disrepair. So many of the territories on the outskirts of the central core no longer have town board projects active, and the company that holds the territory is no longer trying to upgrade anything which means they are either stagnating or worse actively downgrading through failed invasions or missed upkeep payments. I knew holding a territory cost a lot of money, but it wasn’t until the YouTuber Demone Kim went over the costs that I fully began to understand it.

This morning I could not find the specific video, but Demone spent some time going over just how much it costs for his guild Trinity to hold a territory. We all know that the initial territory buy in is around 200,000 gold which is pretty wild for a company of 100 players to rapidly come up with. However even if you got your territory through combat you start needing to pay an upkeep cost every seven days that is based on the quality of the upgrades to your territory. These include any defensive upgrades that you have made to your fort and any crafting machine upgrades. He stated that the higher end town board projects cost the company holding the territory around 15,000 gold to start not counting any contribution from players completing the quests. He showed his companies upkeep screen and for a town that had mostly Tier 4 crafting machines it was around 45,000 gold every seven days.

The harsh reality is that any town that is not Everfall or Windsward is not viably self sustaining without having outrageous taxes. If you crank up those taxes however you drive players out of the town entirely and cause them to find someplace cheaper to live or do business. Each time an invasion rolls through a territory since they are currently bugged it downgrades four items in that territory spread between crafting machines and defensive upgrades. So if they are 15k gold each, that means a single failed invasion can cost upwards of 60k in gold to get the town back to the state it was before that invasion. Failing to meet that upkeep payment which for his guild was 45k gold, means that it has a similar impact of downgrading facilities and making the territory less attractive to players. This gold burden is being then spread out among only 100 players mind you… and a total maximum server population of around 3000 active players maybe?

Ultimately all of this means that most servers are not going to be viable once you level up your crafting past a certain point. So much of what I am seeing from folks arriving at the end game is going to revolve heavily around tier 5 crafting to gather up resources and craft your own legendary items. Most of the towns I am frequenting right now on our server that is pretty bustling… can’t support Tier 5 crafting. Even Everfall and Windsward struggle to keep a full compliment of Tier 4 crafting machines. Those towns are being supported by the most active PVP guilds on the server so the hard truth is that we need those sorts of folks to make sure that territory is held and kept updated. While the PVE players make the backbone of the commerce… someone has to foot the bill to keep everything maintained for us.

So while it might be extremely appealing to think about traveling to some backwater server that is quiet and friendly… I am already at a point where that just isn’t viable. I am now mining Orichalcum and I am not even sure what town I am going to need to travel to just to be able to refine it. I know without a doubt that Windsward the town I spend most of my time in, does not have the facilities to do this. I know Everfall is in a similar situation… and that is from a server with active towns. I’ve heard stories from friends who rolled on lower pop servers that maybe only have one or two territories held at all. Basically I don’t love Minda and its community, but I am deeply concerned about leaving and trying some other server where we might be stranded without the resources needed to progress.

As of last night I am 57 and am likely to hit 58 today, which means I am starting to enter that final crawl to proper endgame levels. In my 40s however I started encountering issues of not being able to find the right kind of crafting machines in order to craft the items I needed to craft. One of the core problems with New World is the fact that you only have two character slots period, which makes it extremely hard to shop around for a potential better server to land on. For the foreseeable future we are going to be getting a single server transfer token, which makes that a fairly scarce commodity and as such a pretty serious choice. We’ve already had a few people bail out of the company in preparation for server transfers, but I am deeply hesitant to act immediately. For the time being I still feel like the best call is to stay where we are and see what the transfer climate looks like.

I don’t know of a better server currently. Everyone that I have talked with says many of the same things about their server as I do about ours. I’ve spent plenty of time reporting bad actors and at least one of them has spontaneously disappeared from the server. I can only hope that maybe just maybe the reports actually worked. I am concerned that anything smaller than the server we are playing on currently won’t be able to support players when they get into their 50s and hit 60. I am already running into some minor issues in that department and I can only imagine that a smaller and lesser progressed server is going to have more of those issues. Say what you will about Minda, it has a fairly thriving community when it comes to defending territories. So far we have at least two companies on the Green faction and two on the Purple faction that have been pretty great Stewards of the territories that they hold.

Essentially I have reached a place where I am willing to swallow down the absolute awful names and quietly report the flagrant abuse… because I sincerely doubt that this game is going to attract the sort of players I am used to playing with in enough concentration to have a phenomenal server like Cactuar somewhere out there. If you find a magical greener pasture out there let me know. If there is a fabled land where all the crafting machines are Tier 5 and every single territory is held by Purple… that would probably trigger me to transfer. For the moment however I am not sure it is worth gambling to try and find a better server. That said I am absolutely open to suggestions, but for the very moment staying where we are seems the most stable.