Weapons Leveling Rankings - A New World Tier List
While Amazon has done a great job giving each weapon a unique style and job, there are some weapons that are better a certain things than others. Leveling is extremely important in MMOs, and New World is no exception. Here we rank the different weapons based off of their relative power for leveling.
About this 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.
New World Leveling Tier List
In this section we present an overview, in list format, of the more detailed breakdown that we have further down the page.
S Tier
- Hatchet
A Tier
- Great Axe
- Bow
- Rapier
- Life Staff
B Tier
- Fire Staff
- Ice Gauntlet
- Sword and Shield
- War Hammer
- Spear
C Tier
- Musket
Full Leveling Weapon Rankings
S-Tier
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
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.
A-Tier
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.
Great Axe
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.
Bow
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.
Rapier
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.
Life Staff
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.
B Tier
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.
Fire Staff
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.
Ice Gauntlet
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.
Sword and Shield
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.
War Hammer
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.
Spear
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.
C Tier
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.
Musket
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.
Changelog
- 09 Oct. 2021: Guide added.
DonTheCrown is a professional Twitch broadcaster who has been streaming since 2017. His content has focused primarily on Path of Exile with over 9,000 hours in the game. He is excited about covering the release of New World, after having hundreds of hours in the testing stages of the game.
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