Last night I dinged level 50 in New World, which means I have ten more levels to go before the “endgame”. I am honestly finding myself looking forward to reaching the end game in part because it will allow me to start finally working on my “forever gear”. One of the problems that I have had with New World is how fast I am leveling, not necessarily in time scale but in content scale. With New World all of your experience gain matters, which means those 10 points that you get for harvesting a node or for crafting an item all add up over time. Since I am crafting, gathering, and also questing it means that I am perpetually behind the curve when it comes to actually completing content in a given zone. Last night I spent time wrapping up some things in Cutlass Keys… a zone that is supposed to be level 35, and that means I am not actually seeing any drops that I can use in the least as upgrades.

This becomes a problem when one of the early praises that I had for the game was how generally approachable the gear from your faction was… ultimately stops being reasonable. I have managed to stay caught up with the faction quests so that I am always unlocking the next tier of gear around the level that I could start using it. The problem is the rewards you get for running faction missions don’t come close to giving you enough tokens to be able to afford a set of gear. Take the chestpiece for example, it is 24,000 faction tokens and currently in Ebonscale Reach, the highest zone that I can realistically quest in… I am earning 900 tokens per faction quest. That means in order to get a single piece of gear I would need to grind out 27 faction missions. If my pocket math is correct… in order to grind out a full set of this gear I would need to run roughly 90 faction missions, and that would not even include my chosen pair of weapons. Essentially this source of gear stops being viable until you reach level 60, when it offers up a good entry into the endgame and is worth grinding out… given that you aren’t going to simply out level its usefulness.

The additional challenge is that because my gear is lagging… I can’t really jump successfully to Ebonscale Reach and just start questing there without hitting the market board and buying some upgrades. Which gets us into the territory of folks assuming that just because something is blue or purple that it immediately has value. I’m not finding near the number of cheap upgrades on the board right now than I was before. So ultimately I think I might spend some time chasing portals and hoping that those chests offer some sort of meaningful upgrade path. I am in that annoying phase of being so close to being able to earn lasting and meaningful gear upgrades… but so far away. Ultimately I could probably easily push through to 60 just on the scraps that I have left hanging in the zones I have already leveled through. Still having a lot of fun with the game, but it is starting to get frustrating seeing a cavalcade of drops that I can’t really use for much of anything.

What is nice however is seeing the changes that were made yesterday. We spent last night running through elite camps and finishing up some quests there which was a freaking blast. This was prompted by the fact that a confusion patch note that I called out yesterday… turned out to be phenomenal.

Fixed an issue reducing variety and potential quantity of loot obtained from game modes and chests within the world.

What this means in practice is that apparently all of those supply chests and the like that we have been looting… have not been rewarding near as many crafting resources as intended. So instantly over night boxes that would reward a couple of sandpaper started giving us ten or twenty of them. This also means that it is going to single-handedly kill the highway robbery that was happening as folks who were not crafting would charge over a gold for a single sand flux. I think I talked about going through around 800 sandpaper in a single day… and in one night I think I have farmed most of that back. So while I am struggling to find the drops I need… I might just be able to afford to level up my professions to a point where I can just create my own upgrades. That is were it not for the fact that the act of me crafting that much is going to go ahead and push me to level sixty in the process.

Given the pace at which I have been going through levels… it is highly unlikely that I am going to be stuck in these doldrums long enough to really matter much. By this time next week I am very likely going to be at the level cap and toiling away at my starter set of endgame gear from the faction vendors. A whole world of options is going to open up in front of me because I still have yet to scratch any of the true “endgame” zones out there. Seeing Ebonscale Reach however has only served to cement my desire to have a house there. This might be the town that I actually save up and buy a proper tier 4 house in because it is really gorgeous. It FEELS like an endgame zone, and quite honestly its layout somewhat reminds me of the temples in Pandaria with everything terraced out of the face of a mountainside. Key difference being this feels more like an actual place and less like a contrived outpost with convenient resources.

At some point this weekend I am hoping to be able to run the depths, but as it stands now we are going to need to recruit a healer and a dps to make it happen. Waren, Vernie, and I have outpaced the rest of the folks in the guild. Seeing that Depths is a level 45 dungeon, and reportedly one of the more challenging ones… we should probably make sure everyone is at that level. I do have a friend on the server that is a healer, so I might pester her to come heal me. On a closing note… I got my first legendary item today. It was a crafting resource however… but I am certain this will be useful when it comes to crafting Legendary gear at some point.

Good Morning Friends! I had a pretty great night of gaming but first, we are going to talk about the most sought-after resource in New World… Iron. I’ve found a rather tasty new Iron route that seems to be relatively unknown, at least on my server. Yesterday morning before work I spent about 20 minutes doing a double loop and gathered around 3000 Iron ore with nary a sign of anyone else aware that this was even a thing. As such I am only going to show you a brief glimmer of the glory that I have uncovered… which includes these four spawns of 1 large, 2 medium, and 1 small iron node in a fairly tight cluster. Is this not the most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your life?

Since I hear you all telling me what a struggle you are having finding Iron, I thought I would at least help out a bit and share my old route with you. This is one that I have been running for quite some time, and after posting a picture of this route on Twitter yesterday I decided to run it real quick just to see what sort of a haul I could get from it. In a single pass, I found 1414 Iron Ore and 183 Oil, and passed up some silver along the way since I have yet to start Jewelcrafting in earnest and mostly consider that a trash metal. The only problem with this route is that it is very well known and has been since beta, and as a result, you are going to encounter quite a lot of competition along the route. Essentially it starts at Windsward, dips down into Last Light, and crosses over to Cutlass Keys featuring a truly staggering number of potential Iron Ore spawns. However, you are likely going to have someone either right ahead of you or right behind you… so make sure you always grab the big node first.

There were a couple of big highlights for yesterday. The first being that I managed to finish up my faction promotion mission in Mourningdale. This is a big zone that is a pain in the butt to traverse given that there are some big changes in elevation and mountain ranges in the way. Visually it reminds me an awful lot of Arathi Highlands in World of Warcraft or maybe the Plains biome from Valheim. For the most part, all of the camps needed for the quest were pretty easy to deal with except one. It featured a named elite that would drop the spinning Diablo 3 style turrets and just straight wreck me. I had to wait for a party in order to take that boss down and claim my prize. Unfortunately…. the quest will allow you to use the items more than once… so I had to actually complete this circuit of camps twice because I got to the final node and didn’t have an item left to use on it.

Eliyon got to the point of needing Starstone Barrows, the second dungeon in New World and as a result, we gathered a group to venture forth. This seemed like a smaller map than Amrine, but it involves retreading over certain areas multiple times in dealing with the ever-present pink lasers of death. Mechanically the dungeon was a lot of fun, but it is super easy to get lost, and if you fail at playing limbo with the aforementioned beams… it is instant death. This would not be that big of a deal but it is seemingly impossible to resurrect players that died to mechanics because they stand up… hit the beam and die again. The final boss was an awful lot of fun and I feel like I am starting to get the swing of how to tank in New World because it is wildly different than tanking in any other game. I will probably go into this more in another discussion once I feel I have mastered the basics.

Lastly, after the dungeon, we roamed over to Brightwood and knocked out some quests for the elite area there. I had already done this but was more than happy to venture forth because even at 49… it is a shockingly good experience. Our little jaunt was worth segments on my XP bar, and I picked up a not insignificant number of resources from the assorted chests. I really need to drag everyone over to the level 40 elite area in Weavers Fen because I have a number of quests that lead there. Since I needed to tank I didn’t get much in the way of weapon skill given that I have already maxed out the sword. However, the others were flying through the levels because it seems like elite farming is the way to go there.

Finally, we need to offer up a moment of silence for Boarsholm. We all knew this would eventually get patched, and the very public spotlight that was shone on just how rewarding this camp was guaranteed it would be high on the bug fixes list. Overnight Amazon released the patch notes for update 1.0.2 that is being applied this morning, and sure enough both the Boar spawns and Bear cave spawns have been updated to more appropriate levels. So here is hoping that you managed to get your skinning maxed to 200 before this went away because it was a truly glorious ride. On the positive, it means that folks will actually be able to complete this quest without having to fight for kills. There is one note that confuses me a bit.

Fixed an issue reducing variety and potential quantity of loot obtained from game modes and chests within the world.

So was there a bug that was reducing variety and quantity… and they fixed that, or did they reduce the variety and quantity to fix a bug where chests were too rewarding? The wording is extremely confusing here, but I am hoping it is the former rather than the latter. It seems like we are falling into a pattern of patch day is Wednesday morning, and the servers are reported to be down for roughly five hours. Here is hoping that the update also brings us closer to server transfers for those folks who are still waiting for them.

Some days back I said that if I were you, and had not bought into New World that I suggested folks wait. I also said that I would give the all-clear when conditions were favorable for new players to start the game. So you might be asking yourself if the server queues are gone, why have I not told everyone to open the flood gates. Truth be told my general hesitancy as it is, is due to the fact that the server transfers have yet to happen. I am uncertain what state the servers will be in after that occurs. Right now Minda is great with a relatively stable population that allows a trickle of new players to roll on the server. However, I am not sure how that population is going to look after transfers open because it is equally likely that the server gains population as loses it once the great shuffling occurs. I honor the trust you have in me, and while I think mostly it is fine to start playing the game fresh if you were waiting in the wings, I am not entirely certain so I have not proclaimed that publicly in a post.

What have I been doing the last few days? Grinding up furnishing and oh god is it significantly worse than any other profession so far saves maybe jewel craft. The problem with furnishing is it lives in this unique place where you have very few patterns available to you from the start, and most of the ones that you might want to craft are found as world drops. Then when you do get a pattern it takes copious amounts of resources in order to actually craft it. Then there is the problem that in general the patterns only returning wood on salvage… when in truth the hard component to get is always going to be the metal bits. Quite honestly the game could seriously do with an overhaul of the salvage system, either that or allow for monster dropped items to return more than just repair parts. I’ve battled my way up to level 85, which means that I can craft all of the first housing trophies and the second round of storage chests.

Housing trophies make a HUGE difference when it comes to gathering. For example with a single skinning trophy, I was getting 19 rawhide off one of the random level 5 wolves outside of Windsward. The effects are reportedly cumulative, so last night I made the decision to pick up my second home. I’ve developed a certain kinship with Weavers Fen and quite honestly once you get past the swampy climate… it is fairly unique located to be convenient travel to Brightwood, Mourningdale, and Restless Shore. My second hovel is a little sad because currently, it has nothing but a set of the five gathering trophies and a tier 1 chest. Over time I am certain I will bring over some furnishing as I craft them so it feels a little bit homier.

It did make me think a little bit about my general housing strategy. You can buy three homes in the game and my initial home is in Windsward where I still do most of my crafting. Currently speaking my Inn is set to Everfall because I also spent a lot of time in that zone. However, I am thinking that I might be better served to move my Inn southwards to Cutlass Keys given that it is a bit of an annoying run. So that makes me think that I should probably place my third home in Ebonscale Reach to give me rapid travel into that region of the world. It is expected that when the next zone opens it will be a desert zone on the far side of Ebonscale Reach. The idea is to create a network of cheap housing travel points that allows me to move around the map pretty quickly and efficiently without having to worry too much about carrying weight.

At this point, I am just shy of 48 and still need to run the second and third dungeon. Still not really trying to level but the levels keep coming. I need to spend some time in Mourningdale knocking out the faction quest that will let me unlock the Cabalist rank. I need to double-check the number of faction tokens that you get from doing the quest so that I can spend down to where I am not overflowing my token cap. Ultimately I will probably just buy either rune of holding for the second-tier housing storage boxes, or some more material converters since both are always useful. I have to admit I am starting to look forward to reaching level 60 so I can start getting some more permanent gear and beginning the various weapon quests.