Revisiting New World

Good Morning Friends. I regret to inform you that there is no Mixtape Monday this week because I have not felt like fiddling with them over the weekend. I have two that are in progress but neither of them is really ready for primetime. I am playing the “is it allergies or is it covid” game right now as I had to attend high school graduation on Friday and just based on the statistics, more than one person in that crowd was a carrier. However, at the same time, the cottonwood is in full bloom which I am deathly allergic to, so more than likely… it is just allergies given a “general awful feeling” and “lethargy” are my only real symptoms so far. Aligning to my already strange mental state, I apparently booted up New World over the weekend and spent a little bit of time roaming around it.

My Character now apparently lives on Valhalla and I am not sure how many merges have taken place between our origins on Minda and the first merge with Frislandia. Whatever the case it appears that team purple is outgunned, though last night they did manage to take Everfall. In truth, a sequence of changes has more or less made it that I no longer give a shit about the faction balance. At some point the costs of teleports were reduced significantly, and also no longer take your inventory into account so if you are so inclined you can bop around the map at will. The other significant quality of life improvement that I noticed was the fact that there is now “peaceful regeneration” which turns on quick life recovery any time you are out of combat. I would say MOST of the food that I went through was trying to regenerate my health so I could get back into the action, and now there is just a buff that does that for me.

As far as combat in general, as heavy armor, sword, and shield tank… I feel much sturdier than I was previously. I need to do some more tests here but I spent a bit of time running around in Edengrove and fared far better than previously against everything there. I was also able to easily take single pull elites in Shattered Mountain and even managed a few two pulls. Like I said I need to get out into the world and try a few of my haunts that I was clearing regularly when the hatchet bug was in place, to determine just how viable open-world farming is again. If nothing else it was fun to do a good number of the lower level towers in Edengrove for materials.

I made a quick visit to Adjorjan and he still appears to be dropping decent stuff, though I am not sure what level of watermark he is capable of dropping. I only stuck around for a single kill but I got a purple bow around 550, but also did not get a watermark upgrade from him because there is now an animation that plays when that happens. As far as watermarking there seem to be a few reasonable ways to get daily progress namely in the way of bags that drop containing diamond gypsum. The other big change I noticed is that the bottom has fallen out in some of the rare materials. When I last played Void Ore which is a rare drop from Orichalcum, was selling in the neighborhood of 10k gold each. I just bought five of them on buy orders for 150 gold each. Unfortunately, I am nowhere near the skill level required to make a full set of Voidbent armor, but I had contemplated trying to convert my cash stockpiles into armoring levels.

The community seems to be hopping in spite of being MUCH smaller than it was and seemingly gone is the era of the “2k buy in” for a group. I am not entirely certain what quality of life changes lead to this but so far the game seems to be much more playable than it was when I last left. I doubt I will be spending a ton of time in the game, and the crafting system in its current state still feels awful… but maybe just maybe it has found its niche and can slowly start moving the needle in the positive direction. New World was a really fun game up until the point it abruptly stopped being fun, so a few tweaks here or there might be enough to save it. I will of course let you know if I continue to play from time to time and how that process is going.