Weapons Leveling Rankings - A New World Tier List

The purpose of this list is to rank the different weapons available in New World by their power level for leveling. It is important to note that just because a weapon is low in the tier list, this does not mean that you cannot play it. Each weapon has its own unique playstyle and build options, and often it is better to play what you enjoy than to play what is considered the best.

In this section we present an overview, in list format, of the more detailed breakdown that we have further down the page.

• Hatchet

• Great Axe
• Bow
• Rapier
• Life Staff

• Fire Staff
• Ice Gauntlet
• Sword and Shield
• War Hammer
• Spear

• Musket

This tier is for weapons that are so strong that you do not even need to scale their Attributes to make them a powerful option as a secondary weapon, or weapons that can handle the game easily without assistance from your other weapon.

Hatchet's Berserk is the strongest utility Ability in the game because it provides self-healing, damage, Grit, and movement speed. When leveling, the less downtime the better, and the Hatchet does a great job keeping your health topped off and keeping you moving quickly across the map.

While many weapons have self-healing based on damage done, the Hatchet heals based off the user's maximum health. This allows you to heal up in and out of combat by activating the Ability. The Hatchet does solid melee DPS that scales with both Strength or Dexterity, making it a good option as a secondary damage weapon for most of the game's weapons. It even brings a ranged damage option to the table in Aimed Throw to help melee builds hit distant foes.

Feral Rush can stop a foe in their tracks with a strong root provided from Crippling Strikes, and Rending Throw can provide easy access to the powerful Rend debuff. Even if you do not scale the damage of the Hatchet, it is still extremely strong for the utility it can provide.

This tier is for weapons that can easily handle the leveling experience with little to no help from their other weapon. Weapons that are extremely strong secondary options if scaled are also in this tier.

Swinging into A-tier, the Great Axe can cleave down foes while providing good self-healing. Blood Lust is incredible for chasing down foes in PvP and PvE, while Gravity Well forces those hit by it to either use a movement Ability or be stuck. Gravity Well only gets stronger with the Insatiable Gravity Well perk that effectively doubles its damage and makes you heal for a large amount of health. Its use in leveling allows you to control large groups of foes that you can then cleave down with wide hitting basic attacks.

Charge is a great movement skill not only for its range, but because it is nearly instant, making it hard for you to be stopped. Feed, Critical Gains, and Hunger provide lots of self-healing as long as you are dealing damage.

Pelting foes with arrows, the Bow is a great leveling weapon. The ability to reliably put massive amounts of damage onto a foe before they can close the gap to you is incredibly strong. Between Evasive Tactics, Long Range, Aim True, Opening Strike, and Surprise Attack the bow can start fights with extremely strong heavy attacks.

The Bow can also travel quickly around the map with Archer's Speed and Dodge and Weave, providing consistent movement speed. The Bow has several area-of-effect abilities such as Poison Shot, Rain of Arrows, and Penetrating Shot, which can help clear out large groups of foes at the same time.

Slashing and stabbing down foes, where other melee weapons need self-healing to recover lost health the Rapier avoids taking damage in the first place. Evade with Crescendo allows for insanely short cooldown damage immunity and damage boosts.

Riposte stops incoming damage from almost everything in the game, including some things that do not make sense, like Thorpe's laser beam skill in The Depths. Fleche is a solid movement skill that goes through foes, so you are not able to be body blocked. Flurry provides insane burst damage that can quickly be reset with Fleeting Strikes and Red Curtains. Lastly, the Rapier is one of the best-traveling weapons due to Breathe In restoring Stamina when you use Evade, which allows you to get more dodge rolls in.

While in some MMOs it might be hard to be a healer, in New World they are incredibly strong. The Life Staff has extremely potent healing that can be paired with a wide variety of weapons to help kill foes. Sacred Ground and Beacon are both incredibly potent heals that persist through weapon swap, which allows you to throw these down and DPS with a melee weapon and stay healthy.

If you use an Amber gem you can partially convert any weapon to scale partially with Focus, the main stat for Life Staff. Also, there are several points in the Main Story questline that require you to complete Expeditions and a healer is always in demand, making it much easier for you to find groups. Healers are just incredibly durable, so even though your damage output might be lower, you can easily solo content that would stop others.

This tier is for weapons that can handle leveling, but which require some assistance from their secondary weapon to feel great, or which require extra effort to play to their full potential.

Slinging Fireballs and launching Pillar of Fire for massive damage, the Fire Staff can put out a lot of damage. This weapon would score higher but until you have both Spell Focus and Flare, you are going to suffer on Mana. This means you most likely will have to wait until this point to pickup your Burn Out, since it is from the other tree.

Hitting the 200-Intelligence breakpoint also helps with Mana, but until then you will be either chugging Mana potions, using a non-magical weapon to regen, or switching to Ice Gauntlet to use Entombed. Even then, aiming Pillar of Fire can be extremely tricky and without any good control crowd or self-healing the Fire Staff is a weaker leveling option. Paired with the Ice Gauntlet, Musket, or Great Axe for crowd control and this weapon performs much better than on its own.

Although the Ice Gauntlet boasts good damage with Ice Storm and solid Mana regeneration with Entombed it takes awhile for the full build to really feel like it comes online. Once you can acquire Ultimate Chill and hit the 200-Intelligence breakpoint, this weapon starts to feel like it does good damage and you can use your Entomb offensively as opposed to a Mana recovery tool.

Ice Shower is a really strong crowd control Ability, but sadly provides zero damage and the other Abilities all have some sort of weakness. Wind Chill forces you to be close to foes and does not always prevent them from hurting you, Ice Spikes can be difficult to aim and time, and Ice Pylon generally does not provide a ton of damage. Pairing it with the Fire Staff or Rapier allows the player to benefit from the crowd control the Ice Gauntlet can provide.

As the primary tanking weapon in New World, the Sword and Shield is a rather durable weapon. Unfortunately that durability does come with the downside of not having the best damage output. Defiant Stance's Restoration does provide a solid self-heal that can be help keep you healthy and the damage reduction is not bad either. While finding a group for Expeditions will be significantly easier as a Tank, there is not much reason to level up as Sword and Shield outside of tanking situations. Also, your taunts are only active with a socketed Carnelian gem, so your weapon upgrades are limited to those with a socket if you want to tank.

The War Hammer, this solid hunk of metal does a great job knocking foes down and back with its crowd control options. Unfortunately, it does not do a great job of not taking damage while dishing it out. With slow basic attacks, it is rather difficult to avoid taking hit while playing this weapon.

Prevailing Spirit certainly helps out with recovery, but there is a reason that this weapon has Power Through Pain as a Mastery. This weapon feels great when it has its cooldowns up and ready to crowd control your foes and feels weak when they are down. The War Hammer also does not have any sort of movement skill, so it is rather slow when moving across the map.

The Spear is currently in somewhat of an odd spot as a weapon, due to the fact that it can either do decent damage or decent crowd control, but never both. Sweep and Vault Kick are decent crowd control skills that can help you set up for a heavy attack, but the crowd control breaks on hit. This makes pairing it with Perforate, which does good damage and applies the maximum Rend against high health targets, a difficult proposition, because once you start the Perforate animation you cannot change the direction you go until it is over.

All of the Spear's attacks and Abilities have somewhat long animations that cannot be canceled with a dodge roll. Pair this with the fact that the Spear does not have almost any self-healing and its clear to see why this weapon needs a good secondary like the Hatchet in order to feel good while leveling.

This tier is reserved for Weapons that under-perform the average power of other weapons and require high Mastery or Attribute levels to begin to feel good.

The Musket only truly excels after acquiring most of its Mastery Points. The 2-second reload per shot feels extremely long, especially considering that dodge rolling forces you to restart the animation. Hustle helps with traveling across long distances by providing a consistent speed buff.

The main reason that Musket is rated so low is that it just does not do much damage compared to other weapons without landing consistent headshots, and it has almost no area-of-effect damage. Sticky Bomb's 3-second delay feels so long that it is hard to anticipate when to use it correctly. Also, Shooter's Stance is great for rapid fire shots but forces you to remain stationary for the entirety of the Ability.