New World's mini event, Year of the Dragon, has been active for a bit. It is a light weight event with light weight rewards to go with it.
Burning down the Year of the Dragon with my flamethrower!
The good thing about the event is it is quick to participate in each day. The bad thing about the event is that there is no challenge to it; even if you are doing the world event solo. I don't mind that there is easy content, but this is too easy. A little more challenge would have been welcome.
As far as rewards AGS continues to trend of event rewards being 675 GS which effectively makes them worthless as 675+ GS gear is easy to come by. The skins are not even all that special so there isn't a transmog driver.
The event does introduce a new consumable, the Spicy Hotpot, that grants bonus faction token gain for an hour. You can only get one per day so it is a premium consumable and lots of folks are willing to pay a good price for yours if you are open to selling (I sold mine the first day for 1500; now averaging about 800 per day).
Over all a forgettable event but one I don't mind hitting daily for the minimal rewards.
We don't have the 2024 road map from the New World developers, but we did get news on some other exciting changes coming over the next few months. The team has rewritten the code for the combat engine, are launching a new 10-man trial, and are bringing back some seasonal events. Watch the update below and read on for my thoughts.
First, the roadmap update has been pushed out to June. It sounded like something "major" internally is causing the delay. With controller support coming soon there is a lot of assumptions about a console release and a big update to go with it.
A new 10-man trial was announced. It was specifically mentioned to be targeted at pick up groups so difficulty level is expected to be "easy". I feel this is a miss. There is no shortage of "easy" content in this game (Mutation level 3 and the Sandwurm 20-man raid being the only real challenging content). The game needs new harder content and the 10-man trial could have been that (or at least bring a mutator system to it).
Phoenix? Broken?
We will also get a slew of new artifacts. The one causing alarm is Phoenix; an amulet that grants a two second invulnerability period upon reaching zero life. This is the same as the original "defy death" on the hatchet which was too strong and nerfed so I am not sure how the team thinks adding it back on an amulet makes sense. I foresee a lot of complaints if this makes it live as shown in the video (screenshot at right).
As alluded to up front controller support is coming with this update. I do own a Steam controller but not sure I will be interested in giving it a try. The little bit they showed off did not seem like it'd be much fun to have to use (they showed a cursor being moved around by controller like it was a mouse instead of a more controller native interface where you press left/right/up/down to move through items). It will also bring "aim assist" and "target lock on" which was stated as PvE only. This is concerning if in any way it makes it into PvP.
The main story quest redesign for 1-60 will now be complete. Personally, as I've shared before, I think this was a waste of time. I don't like the new narrative as it dramatically differs from the original concept of New World. Instead of mysterious island in the age of discovery we have morphed into King Arthur and rehashed fantasy.
Cooking is getting an overhaul. I am looking forward to this as most of the cooking recipes are pointless. Consolidation and simplification of recipes will go a long way to improving the profession. I am also hopeful recipes will use a wider range of ingredients vs some of the most useful recipes being very strict on ingredients (and thus one ingredient is disproportionately more valuable than others of the same tier/effort to gather).
Mounts will be allowed in Outpost Rush. Finally.
Most exciting in the news is the combat engine overhaul. This is not a change to skills or balancing, but a code rewrite. The developers noted that this will allow them to better isolate and troubleshoot problematic areas like desync where the server and client don't match up to what a player sees. The revamp should also give better performance over all, but it was noted it may take a couple releases to realize that improvement. I suspect this took a massive effort on the developers part so I am keen to see what this does and while not targeting balance it likely will influence build choices that may have performed poorly before but now are more reliable to play.
Another exciting change was related to Magnify. Players will now be able to determine the attribute it applies to. This will make it easier to use pieces with Magnify. While not ideal in my view the reality is that Magnify was everywhere and needed a better way to manage it. Personally I've felt they should dial magnify way back to only few items; had they done this then the current system would of been fine. I am also worried this new approach will eliminate "tricking" Magnify to split across two attributes which is the cornerstone of my current build.
We are also getting repeat events. Rabbit's Revenge where we kill lots and lots of rabbits. Then Springtime Bloom returns.
All of this is expected during Season 5 which will kick off on March 12th (TBD exact changes we get on that patch vs later patches).
With the 4.0.4 patch in New World the Frigid Dawn armor became craftable in the gypsum kiln and I was able to finish out the gear set I've been wanting to try for a while with my heavy armor firestaff + sword and shield (FS/SnS) build.
Build summary: high defense with high damage (relative to heavy armor builds) focused on the use of Flamethrower to pressure opponents. High CON combined with lifesteal, improved potion healing, and fortify.
How I play it:
PvE: flamethrower on. Repeat. It's that simple.
PvP: the key to success with the build is understanding how your opponent feels pressure. Stacking up 5x burn stacks + landing a big fireball at point blank range can make folks panic. Burn out and leaping strike let's you close in for the kills. However, getting to the point where you can stack that pressure takes some practice.
This build is not going to net a ton of solo 1v1 kills unless you have a stubborn opponent that sticks around. This build however will win a surprising number of 1vX situations because enemies often have a level of comfort in having you outnumbered but flamethrower and fireball let you hit multiple targets. I've had multiple fights in Outpost Rush (OPR) where it started 1v1 and I could not close the kill out only to have it turn into a 1v2 and get both kills because players stop trying to run away until its too late.
However, solo is not where this build shines. It works best in group play; whether just 3v3 or in war or OPR. The best strategy is to follow close behind other heavy players; especially those that lay down a lot of crowd control, stuns, or disruption. You don't want to be directly in the clumps but just on the edge flamethrowing in.
Another strength of this build due to it's defense and high health pool is pushing through frontlines into backlines. In OPR fights emerge on the roads often and can stalemate if no one pushes the other sides backline. Unlike light ranged builds that tend to skirt the sides to get at the backline the heavy flamethrower can burn out through the frontline right into the backline. This will end in death if your team doesn't follow but many times the initial burn out damage is enough to get backline players to scatter like cock roaches.
With firestaff remember that Inferno does extra damage up close so while its enticing to lob that fireball at a distance to start a fight it is much better to save that fireball to get a quick burst of damage up close. Many of my kills come from turning off flamethrower and sticking a fireball in their face. Fireball is also great for getting folks running away at low health.
Since we have lifesteal and divine to improve it you can "race" other flamethrowers. Heavy, medium, and light flamethrowers are all over the place and nothing is more satisfying than winning that race. Flamethrower enjoyers are a stubborn lot; we always assume we're going to win the flame race.
Don't underestimate the sword either. A well timed leaping strike can change a fight or get you out of a sticky situation; just keep in mind it will track to the nearest enemy and not always just leap where you expect it to. Leading off with a shield rush and three light attacks can stack debuffs in your opponent before pulling out the flamethrower. A rended target from the light attack chain can be cleaned up quick with a big ole' fireball and some flamethrower action.
The bane of the build is anything that has multiple interrupts. If you can't keep flamethrower going you are at a disadvantage. In group combat you have to be aware of disrupt builds which will shut you down. If you are expecting to get disrupted make sure to end flamethrower so you don't get interrupted with it active and suffer the cooldown. You can end flamethrower by dodging or other actions and then turn it back on. It takes practice; the transition to on/off with flamethrower is not as smooth as other abilities in the game.
Attributes: 300 INT / 300 CON - due to so many magnify pieces this is the only stat split possible.
Gear (see screenshot for full details)
Armor
Void Darkplate chest (artifact)
Frigid Dawn for head, legs, hands, and feet
Key armor perks
Critical Retribution
Accelerating Flamethrower
Fortifying Burnout
Weapons
Inferno (firestaff artifact)
Upgraded perk is Flame Attunement; may try a full Lifesteal build in the future with leeching on it
Sword / Shield
Empowering leaping strike
Ruby conversion gem (otherwise damage is super low)
CON or INT depending on other pieces
Jewelry
Amulet perks: Divine and Health are key
I opt for Fortified to maximize fortify duration from the rest of the build. Fortify goes a long way in this game.
Ring perks: Fire damage
The rest is open to your playstyle; I prefer the leeching for the extra health back. Invigorated Punishment I am not sold on but I spent A LOT of gold on this ring so I'm using it!
Earring: Endless Thirst (artifact) with Regenerating upgrade
Hallelujah! Frigid Dawn armor is now craftable in the Gypsum Kiln in New World as of the 4.0.4 patch today (2/7/2024)! It costs 3500 dense mutator materia per piece. Enjoy!
I have not had a payout from Google Adsense since 2014. That is because I stopped running ads on the blog all those years ago. Out of curiosity after hearing about what others were making with similar traffic I wanted to test the waters again. Here are the results from a month-ish of auto ads!
First, I want to apologize to any visitors that felt the ads were over the top. I did opt to use Google's "auto ads" that, to be honest, pukes ads all over the page. I did verify with my own ad blockers that this was not skirting common ad blocks so if you block ads you were seeing the nice clean site that existed before. If you didn't block ads... well... sorry.
For context of how much traffic the blog sees; the blog enjoys about 600-1000 visitors a day. New posts usually hit anywhere from 50 to 100 views in the first day. My top performing search areas from Google and Bing are around the game New World. For the month (and a couple days) the auto ads were on we hit 30,000 visits. A normal month of traffic.
Before we get to the "how much did I earn" let's look at some things I learned
Auto ads ruins page experience. It causes longer loading times and increased bounce rate (i.e. visitors exiting the site as soon as it opens).
It may have reduced visits to new posts. I can't prove this conclusively but new posts FEEL LIKE they had fewer visits their first day than I am used to.
Even with ads spamming the page my visitors don't click on them. There were only a few clicks over the entire month across hundreds of thousands of ad impressions.
So the real question: how much did I make? The answer: $1. I rounded down because does it really matter it was $1.47 and not just $1? For the level of invasion the ads had it was simply not worth it. I will also not see that dollar anytime soon because the minimum payout is $100.
What's next? I am actually going to keep ads on but use static placement in areas that are not obtrusive. I will re-evaluate after a month.
I've beat up on past updates from Ashes for lacking in showing a cohesive game experience. The updates were often lacking UI and failed to show complete game loops. With this update, which was titled "the PvP update", we got to see a lot more than PvP. We saw complete game loops with the back drop of players battling it out.
What impressed me the most was actually the caravan and I'd argue this update was better in regards to caravans than the prior caravan update. We got to see a caravan get ambushed and stolen. The team showed off how caravans can be converted to barges and floated down river. All of it worked with no issues (at least nothing obvious).
My favorite part was watching the caravan convert into a barge. The system seemed well thought out and featured complex visual stages for this early in the game's development. The players had to defend the barge while it was converting and there was a sense of excitement as it pushed off just as the attackers pushed in.
At the end of the event the caravan was back in town and stolen goods were taken care of. I like that towns will have variety based on how they are "leveled up"; in the case of this video with a black market dealer. This should hopefully lead to opportunities to make a niche for a town. Hopefully there is a "if you take this; you can't take that" balance to it so towns don't become "everything".
What I think this developer update lacked the most was the actual PvP. We saw players slinging spells and arrows at each other but we really didn't get into the nuance of PvP. The combat looked smooth and there was a variety of actions being taken, but no details on anything. We saw stealth players ambushing and melee players leaping into the fight. One poor soul was insta-gibbed.
I'd like to have seen more around the nuance of combat; especially with PvP hot topics such as crow control, stealth, and ranged vs melee balance. Also with the system as a whole there is going to be A LOT of questions about how griefing and exploitation will be addressed. It was mentioned that spying on an opposing caravan's plans was a legitimate tactic they expected players to take.
Spying which is likely to occur outside the game... which brings into the question how are developers balancing that? What happens its the result of a hacked account? Or a hacked Discord server? Or if real life money exchanges hands for the info? I forsee this being a huge sticking point for this game with it's desires to have PvP as a countering force in the world against other player's activities.
The video did somewhat show that numbers will be a key aspect as well which is going to upset a lot of the PvP tryhards. Bigger forces (i.e. zergs) will smash smaller forces. I don't see anyway around that yet in a PvP experience that is built around anyone being able to show up at any time. Ashes is going to have to start answering these questions or it's going to be trial by fire and getting screwed over on something like this is 100% something players will quit a game over.
While there are long standing questions on open world PvP that will need answering this update still showed a lot of promise. Its cool to see where the game is at and where it is headed. I did not buy into the Alpha 2 packages but I can see why players would have bought in to get early hands on with this type of gameplay. The game is still a ways out but my interest continues to grow.
