New World: How To Increase Your Gear Score
Table of Contents
Learn about Gear Score, watermarking, and the best strategies to reach Gear Score 600.
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Table Of Contents
- What Is Gear Score?
- How To Increase Your Gear Score
- Watermarks Explained
- The Fastest Ways To Increase Your Gear Score
- Elite Farming
- Expedition Farming
- Obtain Your Legendary Weapon And Faction Gear
- Buy Or Craft Your Items
The leveling process in New World is separated into three parts: character level, trade skill levels, and your Gear Score. As important as character leveling is, Gear Score becomes much more important once you reach the level cap of 60.
Gear Score dictates the strength of your gear and overall power level in endgame content. Increasing your Gear Score is incredibly important if you want to experience everything New World has to offer. In this guide, we’ll give a brief overview of what Gear Score is, how to increase it, what “watermarks” are, and some great strategies for increasing your Gear Score and watermarks.
What Is Gear Score?
Gear Score is a numerical value tied to every item in New World, determining the item’s base stats and effectiveness in endgame content. As you obtain items during leveling, you’ll find that your character’s overall Gear Score will increase, allowing you to tackle tougher content.
These Gear Score increases start to slow down once you reach Gear Score 500, which occurs when you reach level 60. The Gear Score cap in New World is 600 as of launch. Increasing this score is required for Legendary variants of Expedition and arena gear to drop.
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How To Increase Your Gear Score
Any item you obtain in New World has a chance to drop at a higher Gear Score than what you currently own. The Gear Score jump you experience will vary on a multitude of factors, ranging from your level to the content you’re farming. Gear Score jumps in the early game are fairly large, while Gear Score jumps post level 60 are quite slow. Elite enemies, elite chests found in endgame zones, and Expeditions seem to give the largest Gear Score increases.
Unlike most loot-based games, Gear Score increases are based on your highest Gear Score in that slot, not your highest average Gear Score. Weapons and jewelry behave a little differently, but generally, this is how Gear Score is handled. This mechanic is known by the community as “watermarks.”
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Does Luck Increase Gear Score Drops?
It doesn’t appear to. Further testing is needed to reach a conclusive answer, but as of writing, it seems that stacking the Luck trait has no impact on the magnitude of Gear Score upgrades.
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Watermarks Explained
You might have heard some members of the New World community talk about a concept called “Gear Score watermarking.” Watermarks refer to the highest Gear Score rating in a specific slot. Whenever you receive a new piece of gear, New World will check if its Gear Score is the highest you own for that slot. If it is, it’ll “watermark” that number and give all future gear in that slot a chance to drop with a higher value—even if you aren’t currently using that item.
You can only increase a gear slot’s watermark in small increments—typically around 1-2 score bumps. This means leveling from Gear Score 500 to 600 in every slot takes a considerable amount of time.
That concept might sound extremely confusing on paper, so let’s give an example:
- Your average Gear Score is 500.
- Your lowest piece is a 400 Gear Score helmet.
- Your helmet “watermark” is 400.
- An enemy drops a helmet.
- Let’s say it’s a +2 drop.
- You receive a 402 Gear Score helmet.
- Your helmet “watermark” is now 402.
- Your average Gear Score stays the same at 500.
- Your new helmet didn’t get a large enough boost to raise your average Gear Score.
- Your lowest piece is a 400 Gear Score helmet.
- Let’s say it’s a +2 drop.
- Your new helmet didn’t get a large enough boost to raise your average Gear Score.
As you can see, despite your average Gear Score being 100 higher than your helmet’s watermark, the helmet upgrade you receive is quite small. Your Gear Score average has no impact on the magnitude of a slot’s watermark upgrade. In other words, you want to focus on the Gear Score of your individual gear slots, not how high your average Gear Score is.
One other thing worth knowing is Gear Score watermark increases appear to be deterministic. Whenever you receive an item that isn’t a Gear Score increase, the next item of the same type/slot you receive will have a higher chance of being an upgrade. This effect resets once you receive an item with a Gear Score increase. The magnitude of the increase will still be around +1 or +2 each time this happens.
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Weapon And Jewelry Watermarks
New World treats weapons and jewelry watermarks a little bit differently. Weapon watermarks are weapon-specific, not slot-specific. Since you can place any weapon in any weapon slot in New World, the game tracks your weapon watermarks on a per-weapon basis. This means that by the time you reach level 60, you’ll want to stick with the same two weapons to reach the Gear Score cap of 600 as fast as possible.
Increasing your jewelry watermark is practically impossible due to how New World handles jewelry Gear Score. Almost every piece of jewelry in New World is named or crafted, meaning it doesn’t impact your jewelry slot watermark whatsoever. Because of this, you want to farm elites that can drop named jewelry with a high Gear Score or craft them yourself. Obtaining 600 Gear Score jewelry will require endgame crafting techniques or farming elites that are level 65+.
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Does Crafting Affect My Gear Score Watermark?
No, it doesn’t. The following reward sources do not affect your watermark:
- Crafted items
- Faction items
- Named items
- Those with a pre-determined Gear Score and stats
- Items purchased from the Trading Post
- Those with a pre-determined Gear Score and stats
These reward sources will increase your Gear Score average, however, allowing you to fight tougher enemies in level 60+ endgame PvE content like the Garden of Genesis Expedition. You can then farm these activities to obtain gear that increases your watermark.
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The Fastest Ways To Increase Your Gear Score
We’ll be giving a few methods for increasing your Gear Score average and watermark. The first two strategies are focused more on increasing your slot watermarks to enhance the Gear Score of items you receive. If you just care about your average Gear Score to tackle endgame PvE Expeditions or PvP wars, consult the last two strategies.
Strategy #1: Elite Farming
Your best source of Gear Score increases is going to be level 60+ elite enemies. They can be found throughout the top three zones in Aeternum—Edengrove, Great Cleave, and Shattered Mountain. Some are also present in Reakwater and Ebonscale Reach. You’re looking for zones that either have a ton of elites or one elite that repeatedly spawns. Here are a few level 60+ elite zones you can farm:
Out of every zone listed, Myrkgard is the best if you can get one or even two groups together. This zone is extremely hard, but it contains dozens of elites that are level 65. If you can’t tackle Myrkgard, the other three options listed above are great alternatives. Regardless of the zone you choose to farm, you’ll want to kill as many elites as possible. They each have a high chance of dropping items that will increase your average Gear Score and watermarks.
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Strategy #2: Expedition Farming
Another great source of Gear Score is endgame Expeditions. These missions contain tons of enemies—some of which are elites—and chests that can give you gear upgrades. There are two endgame Expeditions currently:
- Garden of Genesis: Located at Edengrove
- Lazarus Instrumentality: Located at Reekwater
Both of these Expeditions are level 60 and have a ton of enemies for your party to kill. As good as the loot drops are, we don’t recommend you do this strategy right after you hit level 60. Each Expedition listed requires a rather expensive Tuning Orb and has a high Gear Score watermark band of around 580. Get some Gear Score from elites first.
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Strategy #3: Obtain Your Legendary Weapon And Faction Gear
If you need a Gear Score kickstart before you start farming elites or Expeditions, you’ll want to purchase gear from your faction and complete your endgame weapon quest. At level 60, you’ll be able to reach the maximum rank with your current faction, allowing you to purchase armor with a Gear Score around 520-540. More information about leveling factions can be found in our New World factions guide.
As for weapons, there is a guaranteed 580 Gear Score weapon of your choice that is obtained by completing a quest chain post level 60. The first quest in this chain is called “Shadows Cast By A Final Salute.” The final quest in this chain is called “Madaki’s Stratagem,” where the reward is a 570 jewelry piece and the ability to create a 580 weapon of your choice. If you hear anyone in the community refer to a “Legendary weapon quest,” this is what they’re referring to. Despite the name, every weapon you can craft (excluding the Ice Gauntlet) is Epic rarity when you finish this quest chain.
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Strategy #4: Buy Or Craft Your Items
We saved the most straightforward strategy for last. If you have the coin, you can theoretically reach 600 Gear Score solely through crafting or buying items. This strategy will depend highly on the server you’re on and how long the game’s been out. In essence, you’re going to look through the Trading Post for any 600 Gear Score items you can use. Equip these items, then use strategy #1 or 2 above to increase your Gear Score watermark.
Crafting is also an option here, although the effort required to make Gear Score 600 items is absurd. You’ll need:
- All refining and crafting trade skills at 200.
- Three crafting Trophies.
- Not needed but recommended to reduce the GS band of crafted gear.
- Armor and jewelry that enhances the Gear Score of items you craft.
- Food that enhances the Gear Score of items you craft.
- A settlement that has a crafting-related Improved Lifestyle active
- Read our Town Projects guide for more information.
- The necessary T4 and T5 items needed to craft these items.
- Not needed but recommended to reduce the GS band of crafted gear.
- Read our Town Projects guide for more information.
Unless the game has been out for months or years, crafting likely isn’t going to be your fastest way of obtaining items with a high Gear Score. But if you’ve spent most of your time leveling trade skills and can obtain these things easily, then this is a fairly straightforward way of making Gear Score 600 items.
If crafting endgame items sounds interesting to you, give our complete crafting guide a look where we cover the specifics of crafting in New World.
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Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/new-world-how-to-reach-max-gear-score-quickly/