Good Morning Friends! I thought I would give a bit of a progress update on my adventures on Themiscyra and the re-roll in New World. The server is still very much on lockdown from new players which is unfortunate, but it does mean that there appear to be zero problems actually getting in and playing. I crashed to the desktop around 9 pm last night and made it back into the server without any queue. Given that our peak last night was only around 2000 players, I fully expect the gates to open up at some point soon. I am accidentally level 36… and by that I mean I have mostly been focused on gathering and crafting and the levels have just sorta happened without me really intending them.
I did focus a bit on questing last night because I wanted to go ahead and choose a faction. Previously you could sort of rush the faction choice and get there by around level 8. That is no longer the case and you will not encounter factions at all until you are in the second zone which is Everfall. Since we went with Greysky Expedition previously, I chose the tried and true Greysky Armada for our re-roll adventures and once again went with Syndicate. Firstly team Science is better than team Religion or team Military as far as themes go, and purple is a pretty damned solid color. The huge benefit is that pretty much everything you get from Twitch drops… matches the faction theme. While green is my favorite color… in my experience since launch Marauder players tend to be the crudest of the New World community.
All of my efforts have been on pushing Armoring and Weaponsmithing up. I hit level 100 yesterday on Armoring and should be able to easily hit 100 on Weaponsmithing today. Similarly, I have reached the 100s on all of my gathering professions except Lumbering… which just means I need to grind that one out as it seems to take longer due to the resources being more plentiful. Nothing is better honestly than chopping down trees while watching a movie, series, or even a YouTube video. Gathering in this game is legitimately the best feeling version in any game, and I think that might be part of why I am so attached to the game.
The worst part about starting in Monarch’s Bluff is that it is weirdly horrible for all gathering professions. While there exist some harvest routes… none of them are terribly good and the zone is especially awful for hemp. It is at this point that I share my secret with you all, and the side benefit of having memorized so many resource spawns. Since the routes are in general awful… I suggest camping out at a location that has what you need. Outside Prydwen is a hut shown on the map above, and this one location has basically everything you are going to need just in small quantities. Along the ridge, there are three Iron nodes, surrounding the hut on either side are a half dozen hemp nodes, some herbs, and some carrots for harvesting, and then pathing around the hut in and out of the trees are low-level wolves. Essentially while I was working up my trades I lived here and would alternate between grabbing the resource spawns and hunting wolves for leather.
Eventually, as you need larger quantities of materials you will need to roam the world to find better spots. The area between Monarch’s Bluff and Windsward is notoriously good for hemp and has Bison that each harvest for a huge amount of leather. Similarly, there are better places for farming Iron and other resources that you might need, but that Hut will get you started on your tradeskill journey. I stumbled across a great sacrilege though yesterday, where someone was killing all of the Bison but not skinning a single body. So of course I followed along in their wake and raked in the benefit of all of that free leather. I guess there are folks out there who simply do not engage in trades at all… or else did not get the message the town board quests were no longer lucrative.
Things are about to slow down for me significantly now that I am fighting for heavily contested resource spawns. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fat stack of cash in order to bankroll my tradeskill leveling, so instead, I am going to have to rely on my knowledge of resource spawn locations to get what I need. This means that I need to migrate out of the starter zones and up into the higher areas to start farming nodes as they spawn. I have my trade secret and ideas about where I am heading next. I do know that I am going to still need so much iron in order to progress but that is at least something I can get trivially. Starmetal, Wyrdwood, and Silkweed are my next major targets, and while I know a ton of spawn locations… I figure the longer I wait the more contention there will be.
My long-term goal for this adventure is to get Armoring to 200 and Weaponsmithing to 200. If I can do that and then craft myself a new set of Voidbent armor, I will have felt like I have replaced the progress that I made on my original character. I am having a heck of a lot more fun on this adventure than I did tooling around on my “main” over on Valhalla. It feels good knowing I have so much of the game ahead of me and can do things right this time… as opposed to a lot of the mistakes I made the first time. It feels like everything is so much easier to do as well, and while I know I have a grind ahead of me… it is so much less of a grind than I have already been through getting armoring to 200 the first time. That said other professions seem much worse to level like Cooking and Arcana because the easy “hacks” which involved gathering a ton of very cheap materials no longer seem to make a dent.
I get that it probably seems like nonsense that I am sitting at 36 already, given that the patch dropped late Tuesday afternoon. I think instead it is just a testament to how much faster the early game goes than it did previously. If you are interested in joining in this nonsense, you might watch my twitter as I will be announcing when the server opens again.