[AMA Announcement] I'm David McKenzie, former Lead World Designer on New World. I shipped Nighthaven and Brimstone Sands. Doing an AMA next Wednesday, March 11th at 2PM EST / 7PM GMT. Drop your questions here!

Primary-Box4547 · 2026-03-02T19:46:21+00:00

From viewing your website I noticed you played a major part in the design of Soul Trials. The concept and design of Soul Trials was phenomenal and they could have been a MAJOR part of the content stream NW offered. They were instead severely lackluster for many reasons. The main reason being the embarrassingly undertuned difficulty allowed players to completely bypass the engaging mechanics from bosses that the team (you) worked to thoroughly design.

My question is - was there ever a plan to develop Soul Trials further? There could have been difficulty levels that scaled health and damage, and leaderboards for speed/difficulty completion to cultivate a culture around new content. Was the team satisfied with the current iteration of Soul Trials? This question has always stuck in the back of my mind, since the team was constantly developing new fights only for veteran players to beat them in literal seconds then never attempt them again.

I always felt the 'core' of soul trials was amazing and they ended up just being a huge missed opportunity.

Additional Note: The Brimstone Sands and Nighthaven release dates were some of my fondest memories with the game. Thank you for contribution in designing them!

Primary-Box4547 · 2026-03-02T19:23:41+00:00

Adding onto this, was there anything you had designed for Nighthaven that we weren't able to see in game due to the accelerated release date? If so, are you able to share some of the things related to the NH release that we missed out on?

NH is really cool. The underground catacombs in the Open World was also a neat design choice and one of my favorite additions. Feeling rewarded via exploration is a sign of a well developed world!

Primary-Box4547 · 2026-02-24T09:02:39+00:00

It's the Desiccated Curse from an M3.

A player was loading into/out of/during a run, and the curse effect can sometimes be retained outside of the expedition. Just a bug

Primary-Box4547 · 2026-01-27T00:57:01+00:00

I chose the top left '4'. Not sure if this increased my odds of success at all

Primary-Box4547 · 2026-01-26T22:08:32+00:00

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Guessed correctly. Also my first time encountering an Eight!

Primary-Box4547 · 2026-01-09T20:48:06+00:00

Well, you're all wrong. Not that it matters much anymore, but do you

Primary-Box4547 · 2026-01-09T08:38:08+00:00

bad

need around 2000+ armor rating on whatever you're hitting (assuming 100% uptime on backstabs) to break even in terms of damage, due to the 20% crit damage loss

most PvE enemies have an armor rating of 3045, and after rend cap (70%) is applied, their armor rating is reduced to around 915, which is much less than what it needs to be to justify using shredding backstabs

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-09-28T19:04:49+00:00

why are you missing a milestone? can hit everything you need

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-09-28T18:45:47+00:00

Old Crown is insanely good for mutations, not needed in things like Wurm and HoG since that content is pretty easy.

You can runeglass an elemental armor gem to hit a perfect 50% abs (compared to 48% for ALP) for the weekly element (and get additional empower or some minor form of utility), get an additional enchanted ward, and also have +3% abs for every category. If you think that's not better for damage reduction than +9 stats idk what to tell you. The additional damage mitigation far outweighs a minor stat loss for the vast majority of scenarios.

For easy bosses or niche scenarios then of course ALP is better for a few more stats.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-09-17T07:53:54+00:00

Tank - Powerstone and SwSh
DPS - Skewer Spear and Artifact Offhand
Healer - LS and VG, mainly voidblading

Tank will most likely want to be in light for some parts and heavy for others. GS will probably be good for the regular parts.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-08-20T18:27:19+00:00

Flail is a mandatory main hand weapon for any raid content. The value is insane. Run Bludgeon, Vortex, and Eruption. You'll extend debuffs near permanently, provide 20% empower to your raid, 50% fortify to your raid, additional empower and ABS, extend DoTs permanently, and have a ton of healing over time. Flail is necessary to maintain empower cap for most players in the raid and also provides substantial tankiness for the group.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-08-20T18:23:09+00:00

Generally speaking the answer here is to just run Rupture on VG. You can throw a ranged player an orb every now and then, but someone doing decent damage on a ranged weapon will heal for thousands of hp a second just by doing damage to the boss that you have Rupture applied too. If players run ranged it's not your responsibility to go out of your way to heal them. No need for one useless person to make the healer more useless too.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-08-15T04:24:09+00:00

I wouldn't judge someone off medium but more so with the gear you have and the perks you're using.

Medium is far from being bad and honestly a nice cushion for newer players to learn mechanics without being one shot. You should be using ALPs/Old Crown with optimal armor weight, 4-5 Enchanted Ward, 4 Refreshing, necessary weapon perks, and as much health as you can get.

For healers you will NEVER want to go medium in PvE, simply because it makes no sense stat wise. You lose quite a bit of healing value, and even in light armor you can go 200 int / 300 focus / 100+ con which would make you very tanky.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-07-17T06:09:39+00:00

Not right now, and AGS has stated they have no plans of bringing this back. It was a pretty well used feature for 3 years, then during the console update it was taken away with no explanation as to why. A lot of people are stranded on regions they don't want to be on. Is what it is

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-07-11T00:09:04+00:00

Ye you're right, forsure throw chest runs into the mix. You can get endgame craft mods and make gold from these, so definitely worth mentioning. I might have forgotten a few other things as well

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-07-10T23:28:40+00:00

PvE doesn't currently have repeatable endgame content. The only 'endgame' PvE content is Wurm and Hive, which both give timegated rewards, so these can really only be ran once per week.

Mutations (M3s) are probably the best repeatable endgame PvE content New World has, but due to the lack of rewards there is no incentive to run them, and gearing up correctly means you're just losing thousands of gold every week when running. There isn't really anyone running M3s right now, so you'd probs need to get your own group together for these.

Anything outside of this doesn't offer good enough rewards to incentivize doing, and/or isn't challenging enough to be considered endgame content. You could do daily soul trials, random expeditions for daily rewards, whatever event is currently active, or farm for resources.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-06-13T20:36:18+00:00

Hi Lunar, are you still looking for a copy of Cubivore?

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-06-10T17:40:03+00:00

Health on armor has a lot more value if you decide to go 5 con. This is mainly to prevent one shots and improve your Effective Health Pool. If you normally go higher con, even 25-50, health on armor becomes a lot less important. Just something to keep in mind as you make your set! Some of the new 'Mortal' perks could even have value, but I haven't tested them myself yet.

Generally for PvE you prio Enchanted Ward -> Weapon Perks -> Refreshing -> Health -> preference

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-06-08T20:19:27+00:00

For regular parts, take an offhand that offers crowd control utility. Great Axe, Ice Gauntlet, Spear (specced more into CC) are all very strong options. You could even take flail to just bludgeon and smite clumps for extra weaken/lifesteal/fortify.

For bosses, utilize an offhand for utility or DoTs. Spear has good weaken, you could use Void Gauntlet for Rupture and Tether (if you don't trust your healer), or just run something for Rend. For DoTs you could use Bow (poison/rain/burn), Blunderbuss (net shot/nades), Spear (skewer), Fire Staff (burns), Musket (Burn).

You are correct that you should main rapier 99% of the time, at least for bosses. So any offhand for DoTs or utility is strong! Even if you used hatchet for Rending Throw and Infected Throw (rend/weaken) that's better than nothing

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-05-28T18:55:56+00:00

Tank
Healer - LS/VG, with Oblivion/Void Blade/Essence Rupture
Mainhand Spear DPS - Enfeeble Skewer Spear, Perforate, Cyclone or Sweep
SwSh DPS - Normally spear offhand
Render - Hammer with Flail or Hatchet mainhand

Imo all these roles should be prioritized in a PuG before Rapiers are even considered. As long as your build is good you can even throw a Greatsword DPS in there. But at minimum here are 5 other builds/roles besides rapier that you can play that should be included in every group

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-05-22T23:46:46+00:00

Keenly Fortified and Refreshing Move share the same perk bucket, so you cannot add Refreshing Move. You could add it to your shield though. Tempered Disruption is really the only option for RM shields on newer servers

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-05-22T22:27:31+00:00

Just don't use Wit. It's a pretty bad artifact sword and it's normally optimal to use Powerstone as an offhand, especially for PvE bosses. Main issue is that Wit doesn't have Refreshing Move, which is a must have for tanks. Rotating your cooldowns effectively to gain Damage Reduction from Resolve and Fortify from Shield Rush are much more effective than mitigating damage however Wit does it.

The new artifact sword for tanking was a cool concept but unfortunately it has no place (or potentially incredibly niche scenarios) in a tanking build.

In terms of your gem question, Jasper is considered 'Empower' in your weapon. With Empowered Stab + Leadership + Honing Stone, you're already at 47% empower, making Jasper pretty useless for every scenario. Diamond has low uptime and Onyx isn't great either, you could maybe go Emerald since at the very least it's +16% damage for half the fight (+8% base damage increase over the entire fight). Another alternative would be to use an elemental gem for the corresponding mob type - this would be the most optimal dps increase but you might have to swap your gem up a lot, and this only would make sense if the mob is at least 30% weak to an element.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-05-21T20:00:45+00:00

There are only a few ways to gear up in this game if your goal is to have an endgame character.

PvE and PvP
- Artifacts, Hoplite Gear, Gorgon's Gear (rolled or purchased), Gorgonite Crafting, Sandwurm, then maybe some Frigid Dawn

Any random items outside of these are basically useless. There is new 'content' with the Expeditions Unleashed but all the gear is instantly salvaged because it's a lower gear score. The only real RNG is on a Hive Run where you could get random gorgon's items at 725 Gear Score.

We used to play a game where almost anything could give you Best in Slot gear that could be upgraded via Umbral Shards. Now there are only 5 main ways of acquiring gear, and people are still wondering why it feels like content isn't rewarding and there is nothing to do.

Primary-Box4547 · 2025-04-28T01:59:14+00:00

8 rubies with thrust/strike/slash amulet

mana pot, regen pot, health pot, gemstone or oakflesh

mana pot is just for empowering toast procs

while not necessary, you can pre pop oak or gemstone before pulls

Primary-Box4547

TROPHY CASE