Players in New World, the fresh MMO project from Amazon Studios, might be inclined to steer clear of ranged weapons due to having to maintain or even craft your ammo supplies. This contrasts with MMO titles like World of Warcraft and now Destiny 2, where you don’t have to worry about the ammo reserves of your primary ranged weapons.
But don’t let the extra effort dissuade you. The bow in New World is an extremely viable option as either a primary or secondary weapon. The bow lets you deal quality damage from a distance while providing some skills to give your offense some variety.
If becoming Aeternum’s best bowman is of interest to you, then you’ll need to properly distribute your attributes, equip the essential armor and secondary weapon, and put your mastery points in their proper place. Here’s everything you need to know about creating the best bow build in New World.
Personal attributes
Your primary attribute to focus on for bows is Dexterity. You should primarily be putting all your attribute points into Dexterity every time you level up, while putting an occasional point or two into Constitution to keep your health hearty in addition to your secondary weapon’s primary stat.
Once Dexterity is completely maxed out, then you should start putting more points into Constitution and your secondary weapon’s main stat.
Secondary weapons and armor
Speaking of the secondary weapon, you of course should go with a melee weapon as your second choice for close combat scenarios. With most of your points going to Dexterity, your best options would be either the rapier or the spear. Like the bow, the rapier has skill trees that can let you focus on damage or evasion, but the spear has more crowd control options.
The 20-percent damage bonus from the Light armor weight should be your go-to option for bows. But the Medium armor weight isn’t a bad option either if you’re more inclined to use the bow’s crowd control abilities. The Medium weight gives you a 10-percent damage boost and 10-percent lengthier crowd control debuffs like stagger, stun, or knockdown.
Bow weapon mastery
Now comes the most important part of any weapon build: the mastery trees. The bow has two options, Skirmisher and Hunter. The Skirmisher tree is focused on dealing damage over time, using AoE abilities, and slowing down your enemies, while the Hunter tree is raw damage output.
Your goal should be to maximize the basic damage of your arrows, inflict as much damage over time, and keep your enemies at a distance. With that in mind, your core active abilities should be Rapid Shot from the Hunter tree, and both Rain of Arrows and Poison Shot from the Skirmisher tree.
Rapid Shot has the greatest damage output potential of any active ability in the Hunter tree, especially when it’s fully upgraded. It also has a knockback effect. Both Rain of Arrow and Poison Shot have great damage-over-time effects, with upgraded Rain of Arrows causing bleeding and slow, while Poison Shot deals massive damage via point blank shots when upgraded.
