Staying motivated in New World (Gear Reset)

 Making an audible for Blaugust 2023's "stay motivated" week and swapping from my original plan to cover my Steam backlog.  Instead I am going to talk about New World and how I am staying motivated in the face of the pending gear reset.  The developers have yet to detail that gear reset, but we are getting drips of information in each update.  Knowing it is coming and lacking the details to go with it makes it very hard to stay motivated to play currently.  What exactly are we working for if it will be made irrelevant in a month's time?

 For me the answer to the "what keeps you motivated in New World?" question is simple: completing stuff.  New World has some vertical progression with it's expertise, gear score, and upgrade system but that is all behind me at this point.  There are many horizontal progression paths for me to work on now.

Ultimate Trophies

 This is the big one.  There are 9 ultimate trophies in the game to get and each one requires copies of each major trophy in that category (crafting, gathering, and combat) and a crafting component that costs an arm and a leg (45,000 gold + 100,000 faction tokens).  I now have 8 out of 9 of them and I ran out of arms/legs a while ago.

 What fascinates me is that I don't even craft but here I am knocking out the ultimate crafting trophies.  Just. To. Have. Them. In case I do want to craft.  The major trophies are fine but require you to teleport to all of your houses to change out trophies for each craft you want to do.  Ultimate trophies combine them together and thus remove the need to zoom around changing out trophies.  Soon I'll never have to ever think about changing trophies around in my house.  I will have all the ultimate trophies and be done!

 I need approx 30k gold and 80k faction tokens which I hope to finish out this week.

Crafting Gear Sets

 Crafting trophies are great but in order to hit end game gear score (590+) items in crafting you must also have the crafting gear sets.  The gear pieces drop from various named enemies all over the world or can be bought on the market.  I set a threshold of 3,000 gold.  If it was cheaper than that then I bought it; otherwise it was off to farm.

 I actually enjoy farming in New World.  I am aided by ample time to AFK back and forth to kill the named spawns.  I probably wouldn't do it if I had less play time.

Heartrunes

 Lastly on the horizontal progression is getting all the heartrunes in the game.  I actually only have a few and only a couple of them upgraded.  This will be where I change my effort over to once I am done with ultimate trophies.  These are also perfect "grind" objectives (except you have to complete an expedition 3x to get basic heartrunes to start with).  For example the brutal grasping vines required me to get 3,000 thorny vines from briars.  That was fun (not).  

 But I embrace the grind. Some folks Netflix and chill; I grind and chill.

 Other Stuff

 Then there is other stuff.  

With transmog now released there is a ton of skins to go out and collect.

I still love playing Outpost Rush and PvP Arenas and they give great rewards so there is always a new build to be looking towards.  I am eyeing up a heavy sword n shield/spear build along or a BB/IG medium build.

Then there is the company I hang out with; lots of returning players to help out.

Also at some point I really need to clean up my houses; so much furniture dumped everywhere.