New World: The Best Leveling Build and Tips for Leveling Up Fast

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I have loved video games before I even knew what they were. I also love writing (am working on becoming a successful fantasy author), anime, tablet... Read more

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Alright, I’m going to level with you. Well… no, I’m not literally going to. But I am going to help you put together the best leveling build in New World to quickly reach max level! And that counts for something… right?

In most RPGs, whether they are single player games or MMOs, the only thing you have to level is your character. You start out at level one, and as you play, your level goes up. You get bonuses, continue to solve problems, get enough EXP to level up again – rinse and repeat.

However, anyone who has played the MMO New World knows that this game in particular functions a bit differently. There are many different things you level while playing the game. In fact, the first New World article I ever wrote was a guide to all the different ways you could level in game.

For this guide though, I want to zoom in and look specifically at increasing your character’s level. We’ll go over the benefits of leveling, the fastest ways to level up, and our recommended leveling build! Let’s get into it, shall we?

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The Benefits of Leveling Up in New World

When you level up in most MMOs, you gain HP, stats, new skills/abilities, mana, and other benefits. But this process may seem comparatively lackluster in New World.

When you level up in this game, you get three points to divide between your five core attributes. As you reach higher levels, you get more attribute points per level up. Oddly enough, there’s an inverse relationship in regards to your health.

How high your constitution score is when you level up determines how much additional HP you get. Initially, you get 25 HP per point of constitution per level up. However, that number decreases slowly until you only get 21 HP per constitution point on level up. Still useful, but a bit odd.

Leveling up also gives you access to higher level quests. Certain quests, especially main story quests (which will be important later on in this article), will be restricted from you until you reach a certain level.

Finally, when you reach certain level milestones, you will unlock specific rewards. These are things like a new bag slot or a better Azoth Staff.

Bonuses to XP Gain

There’s a couple tricks to maximize the XP you gain from questing, fighting, and other activities in New World. Try to make sure the following are always active to level up even more quickly!

Territory Standing Gain

The first thing I want to highlight about leveling up is that where you do your leveling matters. One of the unique systems that New World uses is territory standing.

As you perform your acts of gathering or murdering within a specific territory in the game, you will increase your standing rating in that territory.

Each time you level up your standing, you get a special bonus while within that territory. These can range from reduced crafting/housing fees, to better mining speed, to (you guessed it) better XP gain. So if you get a very high standing within a specific territory, you can greatly increase the amount of XP you earn while within that territory.

The Rested XP Bonus

Whether single player or an MMO, many RPGs use a variation of this bonus, and New World is no exception. To put it simply, if you want to maximize your XP gains in the New World, you want to log out of the game from a settlement and not somewhere else in the overworld.

If you log out from a settlement, you will slowly accrue rested XP that can level you up while you aren’t even playing. Though it would certainly take a while if that was all you did for XP. Additionally, once you log back in, you will get a 100% increase to the XP you gain while playing.

Best Ways to Get XP and Level Up in New World

While there’s plenty of ways to get XP and level up in New World, we recommend using the following methods as the fastest options.

Main Story Quests

Unsurprisingly, one of the best methods for leveling up your character is to do main story quests. You can find them in most settlements (or at least nearby) in New World. These are the quests marked with a yellow star-like marker.

These quests not only give lots of XP per quest but also come in long chains, so you can rapidly level just by running through them. That being said, keep in mind that you might have to pause a main story quest chain, because eventually the XP from the quests will not level you up fast enough to meet the requirements for the next quest. If that happens, you can just switch to another main story quest chain in the interim.

Once you hit Level 14, you can find the fisherman Yonas near the Windsward capital of Corinth. He will start you out on the Soul Warden questline, which goes all the way to level 60 and is a great source of XP. While the quest chain is worth it for the XP grinding alone, the story is great with plenty of fun stuff to do along the way.

Faction Quests

Once you hit level 10 in New World, you will be given the chance to join one of the three in game factions. These are the Covenant, the Marauders, and the Syndicate respectively.

They have fun flavor, some cool items, and the like. You can also improve your rank within your chosen faction to earn cool titles and better faction rewards by doing faction missions. These missions will provide their own form of currency and faction XP, in addition to the normal XP you gain from completely them.

Each faction has specific quests that are recycled from within a specific pool. You have a list to pick from, and once you complete one you can grab a new one. This means you can spam certain faction quests (or types of quests), letting you get into an easy repeatable cycle. For example, go to this cave and kill this specific enemy, or go to that location and kill x number of enemies of a specific type.

While the faction quests themselves don’t provide huge amounts of XP, they’re still incredibly valuable for our quick leveling strategies. That’s because if you complete three faction quests or more each day, you get a large flat chunk of XP as a bonus – which is well worth the time commitment.

Level Up Your Trade Skills

I know, I know. I was only talking about leveling up your character, not your Weaponsmithing, Woodworking, etc. However, all of your trade skills are important as well to leveling up your character. This is because you can gain character XP in New World not just from killing enemies and turning in quests, but also from gathering, refining, and crafting as well.

Every time you harvest some hemp, make iron ingots, or craft a new weapon, you’ll gain character XP as well as XP for the specific skill you are using. If you happen to get materials in bulk and do a bunch of refining/crafting at once, you can gain a tremendous amount of XP in a short period of time.

Plus, if you wish, you can buy those bulk materials from a trade post, essentially allowing you to turn coins into XP. That being said, harvesting the martials yourself is ultimately a better use of your time and resources if you have the time in the first place. Given that you will want to level up all those skills anyway, it’s a win-win situation.

Best Builds for Leveling in New World

Now that we got all the preliminary stuff out of the way, let’s talk about the actual leveling build you should use while questing in New World. There are a couple ways to go about this.

The first is picking a strong build for solo play. The second is picking a DPS build that, while a bit riskier, will let you get through the quests quicker. There are multiple builds that fit each category, but I have written guides on my thoughts on the best solo build and the best DPS build, so I’ll summarize them below.

The Solo Build

My preferred choice for the solo build is a tank build, using the war hammer as the main weapon and the life staff as a back up for healing yourself when needed.

The Attributes

For this build there are two options. Either you just focus on strength and constitution, or you split your attributes between strength, constitution, and focus. This depends on how much you want to factor the life staff in as a weapon you use versus how much you want to leave it as a back up for when you need the occasional boost of healing.

The Equipment

For this build you will want to go full heavy armor. The idea is to hit hard, tank hard, and heal when needed. Heavy armor is ideal for this, as it lets you stay in close and keep hitting your enemies with less need to dodge and maneuver.

The Weapons

Here you use the war hammer on offense, using Armor Breaker and Mighty Gavel to dish out damage, with Shockwave for crowd control when swarmed by enemies.

You’ll break out the life staff in the event that your HP gets low. Utilize the three skills from the healer skill tree to give yourself the maximum options for healing, that way you can tailor it to your specific situation.

The DPS Build

This DPS build uses a combination of the musket and the rapier. Ideally, you’ll keep your enemies at a distance with the musket. If they manage to get in close, you can whip out the rapier for some quick damage before retreating.

The Attributes

For this build you want to focus as much as you can on dexterity to maximize your damage. You can add a bit of constitution if you don’t want to go all in on DPS, but general speaking, this build wants all the dexterity you are legally allowed to have.

The Equipment

For this build we care about maximizing our dodge and mobility. In order to keep a light dodge, we want to wear all light armor, except for the chest slot. There we can wear a medium coat, maximizing our armor while keeping our dodge light.

The Weapons

Our main weapon here is the musket. We want to do ranged DPS using Powder Burn, Shooter’s Stance, and Sticky Bomb. Ideally we can use our range and mobility to keep our enemies at a distance while we shoot them.

However if/when enemies do get in close, that is where we pull out the rapier. The main skills we care about here are Tondo and Evade. Tondo is quick, has a decent range for a melee skill, and does bleed damage. Once we hit them with that, we can use Evade to help us get back to range so we can return to shooting with our musket.

Join the High Ground

And with that you should be equipped with all the knowledge and the best build for leveling in New World. If you want to speed your way to that endgame content, these are some of the best methods for leveling to 60 as fast as possible.

Let us know what you think about our guide in the comments below! If you have a better build or other suggestions, we’d love to explore them and add them!

Happy grinding (if it’s possible for such a thing to exist…) out there explorer!