New World's latest update brings a new weapon, a new enemy faction, weapon balance changes, movement speed bonuses for using roads, and much more.

By Cameron Koch on November 18, 2021 at 9:26AM PST

New World's first major content update is here, and it's a doozy. Alongside additional content, including a new weapon, the update addresses a number of pain points players have had with the game since launch, making this the most significant update for Amazon's MMORPG yet.

Leading the charge is the introduction of the Void Gauntlet, a new Focus/Intelligence weapon that can serve a couple of different roles. Investing skill points into the Annihilation weapon mastery tree will make the Void Gauntlet a formidable close-range weapon, while focusing on the Decay tree puts the weapon into more of a support role, capable of debuffing enemies and bolstering allies.

The world of Aeternum does not have a particularly wide variety of enemies, but Amazon is beginning to remedy that situation with the introduction of a new enemy faction, the Varangian Knights. These warriors are invading the southeastern region of Aeternum for reasons unknown, but it's clear the enemy faction is up to no good. New enemy types for many of New World's existing enemy factions are coming with the update as well.

A number of changes are also coming to everything from the world itself to faction quests. Starter zones are being made more visually distinct, running on roads will grant players a 10% movement speed bonus, players engaging in PvP have a higher chance of finding rare items, and there are now additional faction PvP missions to participate in. Trading posts (New World's version of an auction house) are now linked between all settlements, finally eliminating the need to fast travel all around Aeternum and wasting Azoth just to purchase one particular item.

Many players have called for weapon balance updates, and this patch delivers that too. Every weapon in the game has been touched in some way, with Amazon looking to make some of the various lesser used weapon abilities more viable.

All of the above is, in many ways, just the tip of the iceberg. Fans will no doubt be happy that new content is arriving, but there's no changing the fact that it has been a rough past few weeks for New World. The game's player-driven economy was shut down on two separate occasions following the discovery of various item and coin duplication exploits, and an earlier invulnerability bug threatened to ruin the game's PvP. Amazon says it is working to improve its response time to such game-breaking incidents, and, in addition to punishing cheaters, is already making changes to prevent those kinds of exploits from happening in the future.

New World's Into the Void update is live now. Below are the full update patch notes.

The Void Gauntlet has manifested in Aeternum. Manipulate the powers of the Void to support your allies and debilitate your enemies with this magical damage/support hybrid weapon. It’s the first weapon to scale on both Intelligence and Focus, making it a great pairing with the Life Staff and other magical weapons. Adventurers will be able to progress through two weapon mastery trees, allowing the player to manipulate Void magic in different ways:

With its arsenal of buffs and debuffs, the Void Gauntlet is perfect for group combat and can significantly bolster your allies at the expense of your enemies.

The Varangians are a force of invading knights currently raiding Southeastern Aeternum. They are led by Lord Commander Attalus, a Gaul with a reputation for brutality and a twisted sense of humor. Commander Attalus and the Varangians are vassals to a powerful warlord named Varik “The Hammer” Iznov. They have been sent to Southeastern Aeternum in search of magical artifacts and arcane lore left behind by the Crimson Sorcerer. Their goal is to secure magical weapons that will help their lord in his conquests. The Varangians are fiercely competitive and will vie with one another to curry favor with Lord Commander Attalus.

Why these fearsome warriors have arrived is a question to all. Face off against multiple new types of enemies, including the Varangian Hewer, Varangian Scout, Varangian Knight, and Varangian Archer as you ascertain what they are chasing in Aeternum.

Our goal with with some of the changes below is to make the power of Juggernaut weapon mastery tree stand out a bit more from the Crowd Crusher tree, and funnel some of the power of Shockwave’s Rend to the Armor Breaker’s Rend.

The purpose of the Life Staff adjustments are to move some of the healing power into the light and medium equip loads while reducing some of the power of the tanky healing builds. We also want to make it easier to properly target and heal the correct group members.

We wanted to buff the Throwing Axe tree to make it more useful, buff the Infected Throw ability to make it more viable as an anti-healing ability, and improve the buffering for heavy attacks to make them more consistent to use. We also worked to resolve issues that resulted in missed hits.

Our main goal of the Sword/Shield updates were to make the Leaping Strike ability feel better and to improve the buffering for heavy attacks to make them more consistent.

We updated the Fire Staff to reduce some of the effectiveness of standard attacks due to how powerful they felt in comparison to certain abilities, and updated some abilities to feel more impactful.

Our goal was to buff and adjust some of the lesser-used abilities to make a wider selection of abilities feel viable.

Our goal with the Ice Gauntlet was to tone down the effectiveness of some of the maxed out combinations of abilities while still maintaining their individual usefulness.

Similar to the balance updates of other weapons, our goal was to buff and adjust some of the lesser-used abilities to make a wider selection of abilities feel viable.

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