This game does not reward skillful play as much as it should

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I will outline the reasons why this is the case below. Click the arrows to see more information.

Outpost rush summons are way too powerful, and can carry bad teams due to their chain CC and high damage. Particularly brutes, but Wraiths can also hit for 8k+ against light armor.

The current state of Outpost Rush summons are that they are so powerful (can permanently CC and kill a light armor player in one combo) that it is less advisable to PvP players directly, and instead try to farm up NPCs to carry your team for you.

Precision weapons (bow, rapier, spear, etc.) are not rewarded for the skill they require to use.

The current design of combat really just means that all large scale PvP devolves into the following:

  • Low effort, high reward melee weapons with massive cleave (no aim, no brain) such as the Great Axe, War Hammer, etc. just cluster together and spam light attacks/AoE stuns/Gravity Wells/etc. at eachother.
  • Low effort, high reward magic weapons with massive cleave (no aim, no brain) such as the Fire Staff and Ice Gauntlet just spam their attacks into a massive pile of enemies with no rhyme or reason.
  • Any amount of Life Staffs (the more the merrier) spam heals on the stack of melee players.

All of these are low effort, high reward strategies. The most effective way to play the game is to play either Life Staff, Fire/Ice, or Great Axe/War Hammer and just hope you have enough AoE spam to out-AoE spam the enemy team.

There is very little room for nuanced, individual gameplay.

My aim with the Bow is irrelevant in the face of a Fire Staff which fires large, fast projectiles that are borderline impossible to miss with, or Ice Gauntlets that can AoE CC and damage teams with a massive Ice Storm.

My ability to do 180 Fleche backstabs is irrelevant in the face of a Great Axe using Gravity Well and spamming m1, hitting 5+ players at the same time for comparable or greater damage to my Rapier.

My ability to CC and lockdown an individual opponent with the Spear is irrelevant in the face of the numerous AoE CC effects that are so large, they are impossible to miss with, and are far more effective/long duration (Gravity Well, Ice Storm, Ice Shower, any War Hammer ability).

Resilient as a stat is fundamentally flawed in a "skill based" action combat system.

If random crits were the only crits we had, this stat would make more sense.

Penalizing people for hitting headshots and backstabs is nonsensical, however.

It takes 5x the effort to hit a headshot than it does to hit a body shot, and in no sense should that effort EVER be mitigated by something as simple as stacking gear with one overpowered stat.

No amount of outplay can counter getting stuck in one of the two lowest effort abilities in the game.

Ice Shower and Gravity Well are devastatingly effective, and basically guarantee death if you end up in them.

However, the current meta dictates that amid the massive amount of AoE spam, you will inevitably get stuck in an innumerable amount of these abilities.

1vX in this game is basically dead because of how one brain dead player with an Ice Gauntlet can 100-0 you with Heavy Freeze if you happen to get caught in an Ice Shower.

Gravity Well is similar. It is absolutely disgusting that such a large, easy to use AoE disables your character almost completely. There is very little counterplay. Even if you use an ability to escape, you’re still unable to dodge for 5 entire seconds.

The recent patch has lowered TTK, and it has sucked the skill ceiling of the game into the abyss with it.

Skill ceiling scales with TTK. Lower TTK means that bad players will always eventually have an opportunity to get a kill.

You may see this as a positive thing, but it isn’t.

Low TTK is a race to the bottom. The longer fights take, the more room there is for nuance and counterplay. The lower the TTK, the more RNG and low effort CC abilities have the ability to dictate outcomes.

There is a reason that Call of Duty tends to lower its TTK with every new release, and there’s a reason games like Apex Legends are more exclusive to bad players. The reason for it is simply that your choices on a micro level add up over time, so over a longer period of time those micro choices end up swaying outcomes.

This is a difficult point to put into words, but I hope I conveyed it well

The TL;DR of all of this is that since the removal of stagger, the game has continued down the path of reducing the skill ceiling. The most recent patch lowered it by a lot.

I understand that a high skill ceiling can be more exclusive, but neutering all of the depth and skill out of your game is not a valid alternative.

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Thank you, and I apologize if some of the phrasing in this post seems salty. It’s because I am salty, as someone who almost exclusively uses Dexterity/Precision weapons.

This patch was a massive step forward for the game in general, but I am still very dissatisfied with the current overall meta in large scale PvP.

If I had it my way, this game would simply have less AoE abilities. Things would be much more single-target focused, and people would need to coordinate to burn individual targets.

Instead, it just feels like a fiesta of people flailing their arms at eachother hoping they kill someone before they get killed.

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Hmm. Well written.

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Metas will most likely always exist for min maxers, what’s important is to never have “trash tier” classes (weapons in this case). Keep their design true and reward them for doing what they are supposed to.

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I’d like to point you over to the Our Vision of Combat - What Happened 2.0 thread for a good rundown of what has happened during the development of New World’s combat system. You mentioned stagger, so you might have already seen it though. Although in context, the Great Axe (and spear) didn’t exist at the time, so obviously Gravity Well wasn’t a problem back then.

As to this thread, you might not like the lower TTK, but the reason it was lowered (the broken resilient trait and onyx gems) was absolutely necessary. You can’t balance a game when things were as broken as they were. There are still a few major exploits/bugs that need to be addressed before any proper balancing can occur. Although it looks like resilient is still “broken” as it can make critical hits actually less damaging than normal hits if you have enough of it since it reduces total critical hit damage and not the bonus critical damage excluslively

I’ll go one farther though, resilient shouldn’t really exist as a trait because luck based critical hits have no place in a skill based game. In a game where even a slight movement by your opponent can cause your arrow to go between their legs or just over their shoulder, being outplayed by a random number generator isn’t fun.

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I agree with everything you just said, and I personally have also posted that forum thread elsewhere. It is a fantastic breakdown.

Metas will always exist, but I think a meta where the lowest effort strategies also yield the highest rewards is extremely unhealthy for the game.

The highest skill ceiling weapons also being the weakest even with a highly skilled user is never a good thing.

Also, +1000 to the point about Resilient. I agree that random crits have no place in a game like this. Critical hits should exclusively be headshots and backstabs.

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I think that was precisely the plan, gaining market share by becoming more mainstream. I suspect this will continue.

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Is your concern with resilient before or after the bug patch?

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Where can i find how scaling works in duels vs open world vs opr? You cant really trust tool tips since there are so many bugs. Even with rubber banding and stuttering i still gave pvp a chance with bow and musket. I was hitting a void bent player for 550 with a 590 gs musket and me wearing light armor would take 2500 hits with full onyx gems. Lol…

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Resilient was terrible before, and it’s still terrible. It’s a fundamentally flawed idea, and it reduces the skill ceiling of the game.

Dexterity weapons are built around critical hits, and are the hardest to use weapons to begin with.

Precision weapons were actually BETTER relative to other weapons before this patch, because they weren’t being uniquely penalized.

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I definitely agree with this, especially since the bow really relies on head shot crits to put out sustainable and competitive damage. Of course, you mention the resiliant stat, and I agree this definitely seems counterintuitive to the bow’s forte of sustainable dps.

The bow is quite difficult to use and master, and I would certainly agree that the bow gameplay can be improved, but the resilient stat kind of nerfs them to the ground in PVP.

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I’m sort of parroting comments already made, but players with good movement are already a nightmare to land shots on with a bow thanks to the slow arrow velocity. Then you’ve got those hard to land headshots being punished by a passive armor perk. It’s like the goal is to get everyone to play unga bunga heavy armor melee.

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Ice Shower/Ice Gauntlet is actually bugged and doing way more damage than it should.

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Y’all doing me dirty like this.

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I’m sure you’re a meme in their offices by now.

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AoE will typically always performs better in group fight scenarios. Bows can still perform well but should target mages or light armor builds primarily.

Musket is going to be tough to balance as it will either be completely oppressive or a tickler weapon. Personally I think with its super high cooldowns it could use a damage buff or armor pen. They should probably give the musket the second trap back. If they don’t want it to have high spike damage then reduce its reload down time so it can fire more often.

Bow is great at dueling. For me I think it needs some improvement on its AoE animations to cast faster so it can combo and spit damage more consistently in group pvp.

There definitely is room for assassins and duelist to neuter makes fighting on the perimeter in Sieges but currently I’ve seen more players using Hammer and GA for this purpose rather than Spear, Rapier, Bow, Musket, Sword etc. Which are all underperformed in sieges before this last round of mitigation nerfs to Resilient. Could change now. I actually hope so. I’m a melee face mauler but I’d like to see more weapon variety in sieges. It feels a bit narrow atm for what is allowed in based on expected performance.

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The problem with the game is that the wealth of super powerful AoEs to begin with.

Some of the strongest single target abilities in the game (Ice Storm+Heavy Freeze, Ice Shower, Gravity Well) are also massive AoEs.

AoEs excelling in group fights is a no-brainer, but the issue is systemic. The game has too many AoEs, and what AoEs there are also happen to be some of the highest impact abilities.

It’s probably too late already to go back on this design philosophy, but Ice Storm/Ice Shower/Gravity Well are due for some massive nerfs.

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@Ligase48

I believe that if the masses are using weapon A,B,C in wars but are not using D,E,F, that it speaks volume to where things need attention.

Most wars are made up of what? Great Axe, Hammer, Hatchet, Ice Gauntlet, Fire Staff, and of course Life Staff.

The DPS contribution list at the end is all about DPS, might as well say IG/FS will mostly take those top of the charts list.

I know a sense of Meta will always exist, but I also like to fall on an old idiom of the baby that cries first gets the milk. Currently, its more like the baby that is consuming all the milk gets less milk, but the other baby gets to continue to cry about needing milk.

I speak to all the other weapons that just do not exactly have the same place value as the ones I mentioned. Eventually, it will just be, you cannot go to war unless you have the weapons mentioned and this is where players like myself will get turned off from enjoying such features. Hopefully, all weapons will eventually feel a sense of worth.

Note: I did not see anything in the patch notes about any of the less desirable weapons being used in wars.

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I would imagine ground target AOEs and lingering particle effects would cause more objects needing to render on the screen. This would likely lead to lag as it would require unnecessary objects to be drawn dynamically on the screen.

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I don’t use Ice Gauntlet atm but I thinks it’s pretty well designed outside of the server performance issues with Ice Storm in wars. It’s kit relies on the cc.

In the Betas I thought GA was op and Gravity Well should have been moved to a different weapon. But for single target G-wells value is its cc not damage. It does very little single target damage and overall isn’t a great ability for pve except in Invasions and some larger areas where you can group up mobs.

Single target just doesn’t have as much of a place in this type of game unless you can burst someone down and hold them in place to finish a kill and repeat frequently. Most of the content is group related and bow/musket/Spear aren’t needed to clear any expeditions.

A lot more AoE weapons will be introduced over time as this is a group fight game. Some assassin weapons as well. Prepare yourself.