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| Zero challenge, no skill, and mostly AFK gear farming. |
It's been a week since the Season 10 Nighthaven patch landed in New World Aeternum. I've completed the new story quest line, leveled up to 70, upgraded some gear, and I have some thoughts to share.
The big elephant in the New World community is the new gear system and understanding what gear is good so you can be confident in investing resources into upgrading items to the new 800 GS max. The conversation breaks down into a few different aspects: perk charms, artifacts, loot sources/drops, and bugs.
First, lets hit the major bug with crafted armor, weapons, and jewelry. The crafting recipes were allowing players to add an old perk mod to the new items. This allowed players, for example, to stack Enchanted Ward (old perk) with Enchanted Ward II (new perk) which was not intended. This gear has been fixed and a slot replaced the old perk. This fix is still fresh so I haven't been able to assess crafted gear with the fix in place.
The addition of perk charms feels promising for the game. Gear now can have perk charm slots and the charms can be changed, for free, at anytime. Slotting a new charm replaces the old charm (which is destroyed in the process). The promise is more variety in builds and the ability to change key perks on an item without having to replace the entire item.
The only main issue I see with the system is that the slots that are available on gear is completely random. Whether crafted or dropped (open world or chest) the slot types are randomly applied to the gear. That means you can end up with a weapon drop that doesn't have a gem slot or a skill slot for weapon perks (weapon perks are stronger when on the weapon). Or a piece of armor with all offense slots and no defense slots.
There are also only so many charm slots on gear depending on the content it was dropped in. Mutations drop gear with up to 4 slots while open world drops have 3 slots (note: I need to check in on what is in crafting now with the patch). The rest of the perk slots are filled in by fixed perks that are static and can't be changed. The fixed perks also roll randomly so now not only do you need to luck into the right charm slots but you also have luck into the right fixed perks.
Artifacts avoid this as the slots and fixed perks are static to the artifacts. Unfortunately many artifacts were changed and the general consensus is many of them are now worse than new gear that can be obtained. Some artifacts are still strong because of their unique ability, but most have had a downside added to offset their bonus. Worst of all is many weapon artifacts lost their gem slot. A slotted gem is universally agreed to be better than any other perk being in the slot.
With these changes the gear system is now centered around randomness. There is no longer a deterministic way to obtain the exact gear you want which is a complete turnaround from the previous state of the game and puts us right back where we were at launch of the game. It felt like for three years the New World developers slowly worked towards a system where we could either wait to get lucky for specific gear or we could invest a large number of resources into exactly what we wanted (either crafting or upgrading named gear).
I am on the fence whether I like the old or new system. The old system had the drawback that it was much easier to get the gear you wanted and thus any content lost it's draw as far as rewards go. The new system offers a lottery where every item is a chance to be a winning ticket so you are constantly looking to do more content to get more drops. The old system kept the maximum value of an item capped because anyone could always craft an exact copy for X gold. The new system has no cap as a perfect item, as it stands now, can only be obtained via luck. We are already seeing items selling for a million gold!
One issue is pushing me towards wanting the old system back though and that is the braindead gear farming that is possible in the open world. Certain enemies drop a legendary 730 GS item every time they are killed and with the spawn rates ratcheted up (assumed for the player spike for the update) the enemies spawn every few seconds. If you can get into a raid killing these enemies you can go AFK and come back to your computer every few minutes to pick up the loot bags. The loot will have the random mix of slots and fixed perks and at the current rates you can get hundreds, if not thousands, per day.
This behavior and "AFK farming" irritates me more than it should. I'm the type of player that embraces the grind and I was known to spend hours grinding for named drops I never used in the old system. But this AFK farming just has zero interest for me. Rarely in the old system were there more than one or two of us farming a named drop. In the new farming there are often hundreds of players at each location. There is zero challenge to it and I personally feel there are detrimental impacts to the game.
Since the gear system is entirely random, regardless of whether an item is crafted or dropped, the key to getting the right gear is volume of random drops that can be achieved. Thus the AFK farming is the fastest way to the most drops. This means other great content in the game that offers less drops for time spent feels less rewarding. Why spend 30 minutes in a mutation or the new catacombs to walk away with a couple lottery tickets when 30 minutes AFK farming nets 50 lottery tickets? The AFK farming in the open world is making actual end game content feel "meh".
Then there is the impact of this much gear being dropped and mostly salvaged (as it is all bind on pickup). Gold is being pumped into the playerbase and prices are inflating because of it. Items like infused scraps, from salvaging, are plummeting in price and value.
Worst of all, for me, is that this model gives the game a bad look. While us longtime New World players are excited to have a system to invest our time into there are many players returning from the launch of the game that are finding the same confusing random reward end game in place. All of the goodness we've seen over the last few years in making the end game loop better vanished overnight.
It is a recoverable situation for the developers. They need to reduce the spawn rates of the enemies so these farming methods go from seconds per spawn to minutes per spawn. There is plenty of old content that didn't get updated to drop the new items; for example the FFA PvP zone in Cutlass Keys and it's Well of Fortune has not been updated. PvP mode caches are still dropping a lot of old gear. The developers can spread this new random loot drop to more areas and thus avoid clumping players into braindead, dumbest I've ever seen in 30 years of online gaming, AFK farming.
Most important is the developers absolutely have to get crafting back to a deterministic path. It is fine to have "gamble crafting" where you take a chance, with fewer resources, at a lucky outcome. But there needs to be that deterministic path where I can invest time and resources to a specific end goal. It doesn't need to produce the end game gear with set bonuses but crafting should let us get to a baseline item with, for example, 3 fixed perks of our choice and 2 slots of our choice.
Over all I am happy with the Nighthaven and Season 10 update. I'm excited at working towards my new gear and getting back into PvP with friends who have returned for the game. There is content like the new raid (and old raids for that matter) that I am interested in. Catacombs, which I've not posted about yet, are an amazing system and have huge potential. But, and this is a big but, they have to sort this random gear system out or it will be a problem for the game.
