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.