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.
I have literaly the opposite problem. I am constantly hitting the cap for tokens (and azoth and every other damn thing that has a cap) because what do you need any of it for? I am also literally buying things I don’t want and crafting things I don’t need and porting to places I’d normally run to just to reduce the amount of capped resources I have so I can actually receive the next lot! It’s ridiculous.
Levelling is so easy (not fast but easy) and combat so straightforward, I can’t see any point in buying gear, either on the TP or from the faction vendor. I can already kill stuff six levels above me wearing the crap I’m wearing, some of which I haven’t changed for ten levels. I’m doing the faction quests (and the town quests) purely for the Standing, which is the main motivator for me but I get all the other stuff as well.
If that does slow down later, I’ll be very happy because right now my biggest gripe is those ridiculous caps and the lack of anything to use the resources on that I really need.
That faction grind is legit even in the low levels — on the new character I made 2 days ago on Minda I started more or less just grinding out the faction missions at level 11 and actively avoided a lot of harvesting so as to not level up too fast and… I was level 17 before I was able to afford that last piece for the set. And since then, I’ve been mostly just doing the faction missions when I’m not grinding weapon xp at “my spot” in Monarch Falls. I was actually able to afford 4 of the 5 pieces before I hit 25, but was 25 before I was able to get the last piece.
I always buy my weapons from the TP, though — the faction weapons are super-expensive and also have a much lower gear score than the armor.
Still and all…. if I’m not gonna be making bags, I’m not sure what else I’d use the faction tokens for, so since the cap is 10K token but the next level’s stuff will eat that up in 1 or 2 pieces (and I think I need to be 35 to even attempt the faction rank up) so there doesn’t seem to be much need to for me to touch faction missions again for a while, other than maybe the 3 bonused one each day.