Musket and Spear

This is a great option if you'd like to do some PvP while leveling or if you simply like ganking unsuspecting players, unfortunate enough to find themselves on your way. Thanks to a combination of a bursty Musket and control-heavy Spear, this build is great at debuffing targets, applying potent Damage over Time effects, and generally controlling the flow of the engagement. Also, it is well-suited for all types of content; it works well in PvE and can be used to a good effect in PvP - it's the most versatile of three builds we feature in this New World Leveling Guide. 

Starting off with Spear Mastety Tree:

Spear is a deadly melee weapon that offers very high reach and a deadly mix of sustained damage, vicious damage over time effects, and annoying debuffs. For this build, we focus on the Impaler skill tree to maximize sustained damage by reducing cooldowns, maximizing debuffs' uptime, increasing critical strike chance, and boosting damage against wounded enemies. Your skill rotation should look like this: Dodge, Skewer, Perforate, Dodge and Vault Kick after that you either chain more skills or follow with light attacks for more cooldowns.
Dodge before hitting ability gives you additional cooldown reduction. Starting a fight with Skewer is an opportunity to guarantee a critical hit by striking from the back. This will result in empower for 10s which will most likely be enough to finish solo mobs. Following with Perforate, guarantees more buffs and debuffs that will favor our position even more. Vault kick will interrupt our enemy and reduce our cooldowns by 30% allowing to repeat the cycle.

Now speaking of Musket:

Musket is the polar opposite of Bow; slow-to-reload, heavy-hitting, and most effective while stationary. It is less reliable than the Bow as the main weapon, however, thanks to its burst damage it's great as a secondary. It works well in combination with a Spear, as both of them use Dexterity as their primary stat, and Musket's burst damage supplements Spear's kit quite exceptionally. 

Powder Burn is a very solid opening skill to apply a nasty burn DoT effect to the Target. After picking up Tactical Reload passive we can dodge to load another bullet immediately. Which can be Stopping Power that will knock back our enemy 5 meters and give us the opportunity to lay down our Traps rooting the enemy for 3s. Which when upgraded also provides a high damage boost and potent self-healing. A rooted enemy is an occasion to choose between making more distance or closing down on our enemy with the spear.

Both of the build's weapons scale with Dexterity, which makes it your primary stat. Boosting Constitution by a bit is not a bad idea either - remember that, with this build, you are primarily a melee fighter. Both our weapons deal physical damage so going for 100 Strenth after we cap Dexterity threshold bonuses is also a valid option. 

Hatchet and Bow

This great combination of weapons offers high mobility and great damage on any range that will allow you to level up with great speed - it's an amazing Power Leveling setup. The following build aims to deal as much damage as possible as quickly as possible while surviving the enemy retaliation, which enables you to farm mobs very efficiently.

For Skill Mastery Trees, we recommend the following: 

Focus mainly on the Berserker mastery tree, the bow will be a better option for ranged enemies than the throwing hatchets. Leveling Berserker will give you more and more melee damage, a cheat death mechanic, and turn you into a blood-crazed death machine. Moreover, thanks to Berserk's passives, you will become (almost) unstoppable - fully-upgraded Berserk makes you immune to interruptions and stagger effects, lets you move 20% faster and gains 5% lifesteal. Raging Torrent is best to use after quick heavy attack and upgraded Feral Rush can work as a finisher to target's below 30% hp.

For Bow Mastery Tree:

Bow is a fast-firing ranged weapon that offers a deadly mix of Single Target and AoE Damage, while also offering a nice boost to mobility (in the form of active abilities and passives). For this build, we recommend two skills from the Skirmisher's tree, mixed with one from the Hunter tree. As for passives, there are three Hunter passives that are simply mandatory (Long Range, Aim True and Finishing Shot) and one Skirmisher passive that's a must-have (Mark). While using bow you will learn that it's damage can be increased greatly if your gameplay will be trigerring passives we choose. Most importantly using dodges for every 5s of firing increases your base damage by +15% (Evasive Tactics), then applying status effects from your Poison Shot and Rain of Arrows turns into next +10% and plenty more in Hunter tree making your long-drawn shots burst through enemies. An important tip to keep in mind is that when the bow string starts to glow in golden color it means it is fully drawn and you should fire to keep dps high.

With this build, you should aim to spend most attribute points into Dexterity, then spread between Constitution and Strength is up to you. Decide if you need more strength to buff your Hatchet and bow with 100 point threshold giving flat +10% to physical damage or you want to increase your health pool and allow yourself to survive quite a lot of damage.  

Life staff and Hatchet

This amazing build offers an unparalleled combination of solid DPS and amazing survivability; Hatchet's Berserker Tree makes it almost unstoppable in hand-to-hand combat and Life Staff is our means to keep ourselves in the fight even when we are outnumbered. This is mostly a solo leveling build as you don't focus on a specific role but do it all by yourself. Using hatchet unmatched DPS capability with the healing of life staff, we can both tank and kill mobs that we will face during the main story. We should save some gold on health potions thanks to the fact we can easily heal ourselves. The very heart of this weapon combination is slotting Cut Pristine Amber into your hatchet, which will convert all those points we are spending into Focus to nature damage on your Hatchet. Getting one on the market should be the best way to get your hands on this gem in the early game. Keep in mind playing this build in light equip load will benefit both weapons greatly with a +15% damage increase and +30% healing increase. Medium equip load should work fine, however, I would advise against using heavy for this build.

Let's look at the Hatchet mastery tree first:

We will start off with the left side of the tree, picking Berserk, which works as long duration buff to our damage, with upgrades increases our movement speed, adds lifesteal and makes us uninterruptible. When leveled nothing will stop us from dealing tons of damage in melee combat. Keep in mind you should pick skills first therefore spending skill points for Rending Throw and Raging Torrent will be a must. After spending 10 points into Berserker side of the hatchet tree we will have the opportunity to pick up ultimate mastery which is Defy Death. It is a cheat-death mechanic that gives you a second chance in the event of your health bar reaching 0. Investing in passives on the Throwing side of the mastery tree, especially Aimed Throw, will enable us to throw hatchets while holding RMB. Which both feels amazing and is a great way to deal with archers.

Our Life Staff tree when playing solo, should look this way:

Divine Embrace and Sacred Ground is bread and butter for every healer, and that is what we should start with. Picking passives like Bend Light and Protector's Strength will enhance the potency of healing. So we should look to pick them right after maxing Sacred Ground together with the Orb of Protection. Those two are our healing over time spells which we should cast right before starting to deal damage, to focus on the enemies, being healed and buffed during the fight.

As for attributes priority with this build, first and foremost you should get Focus (~60% of your total bonus attributes). Spending some points to get to the 25 threshold gives us +5% more damage on light attacks, which is most of our damage output on high attack speed hatchet, which is a common practice. The rest of our attributes go to Constitution, making sure we have enough threshold to withstand incoming damage while fighting.

END NOTE

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