I hit 60 in New World in early January and spent some time experiencing the endgame.

One thing I wanted to do was jump into Outpost Rush, the instanced PVP mode. I found that I died really quickly and couldn’t really kill anyone. OPR uses a scoreboard, and you have to score enough points to get a reward at the end. At first, I was struggling to get enough points. Sometimes I could meet that minimum score, but it was a struggle. Later I bought a bunch of a gear at a higher gear score, and that helped in OPR tremendously. You can also defeat PVE enemies, which contributes to your score. The best way to guarantee rewards if you’re not great at PVP is to defeat some PVE enemies until you get enough points. Now I’ll team fight at the start of the match, and if the match is looking good, I don’t need to focus on PVE. If I’m doing terribly, I’ll go get my points from PVE and then go back to PVP once I guarantee a reward.

Enjoy the video above of the summoned bear who is supposed to help defend us. His butt was too big and he clogged up the doorway!

I was also super excited to try an invasion. Invasions are PVE instanced content in which players defend an outpost from waves of corrupted enemies. It was pretty fun, including the 8 minutes or so we spent crawling in a line around the outpost before it began!

This video shows some my usual obsidian and topaz gypsum routes.

I should take a moment to discuss the gear score and expertise system. In short, gear score is the number that represents the relative power of a particular item. Expertise is max level progression for gear. Max level gear will drop around your expertise, and you need to raise your expertise to get better gear. It’s complicated, so I’ve marked off the section so you can skip it.

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This is a summary and simplification. Gear score is per item and is like ilvl in WoW. Expertise is per slot or weapon type. When you get a drop or random reward, the max gear score it can be is slightly over your current expertise in that slot, but if you do get a drop above your current expertise, your expertise is set to that gear score. So if your helm is gear score 510 and your helm slot’s expertise is 500, helms will drop around gear score 500. Traded or bought items don’t increase your expertise, so you have to grind it out. If you want to get gear score 600 helms to drop, there’s no “jumping”. You’ll have to incrementally increase that expertise. There was a recent patch that made it so purchased gear would become the average of their gear score and your expertise, but anything bought before that patch would be the listed gear score. That’s why I bought a bunch of gear before the patch. It might not raise my expertise, but at least I’d have some decent gear.

Gypsum is a system to raise your expertise without just grinding drops (although it still involves grinding). Different types of activities give different types of gypsum. When you get enough gypsum of a particular type (the amount depends on the type), you can craft them into a gypsum orb. The ones I focus on are ruby gypsum from Outpost Rush (2 per orb), topaz from level 55+ enemies while under the effects of an attunement potion (10 per orb), and obsidian from 60+ named enemies (3 per orb). Once you craft an orb, you can use the orb to craft a gypsum cast for a particular armor slot or weapon type, and it gives you a box with a random item of that type that will raise your expertise.

What’s confusing is the timers. Once per day you can craft the topaz attunement potion. There is a 20 hour cooldown on that, and the potion’s buff lasts an hour. Gypsum themselves have an 18 hour CD (or was it 20?) on dropping. Then you craft the gypsum into a gypsum orb – there was a 22 hour CD per gypsum type, but this has been removed. And then you use the gypsum orb on a gypsum cast to raise the expertise of that slot or weapon type, again with a 22 hour CD.

Consider topaz gypsum.

1. You collect materials for the attunement potion, either farmed yourself or from the trading post.
2. You craft the attunement potion. There’s a 20 hour CD, tracked by the UI luckily.
3. You head off to where you will be farming and use the potion. You now have the buff for 1 hour.
4. Now you hope you collect the 10 topaz gypsum you need from 55+ enemies. You can collect a total of 10 that day and then would have to wait 18 hours from the first drop to get more. But again, for topaz, you don’t have all day – you have as long as you have the attunement buff. Note that if you have multiple potions, you could use another, but you’d have to stockpile them since they have a CD on crafting and are bound on pickup.
5. Have your 10 topaz gypsum? Great, now you craft them into gypsum orb.
6. Now if I want to raise my helm expertise, I craft the helm cast to get a box with a new helm that is guaranteed to raise my expertise.

It’s interesting because it lets you control what slot to increase and lets you play in multiple ways. But it can certainly seem complicated at first!

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Back from that tangent? Anyways, grinding gypsum was a lot of what I did at level 60. Ruby was easy enough to understand and earn, especially once I bought better gear. When I first went after obsidian from level 60+ named enemies, I asked someone near me who appeared to be working on the same thing if I was in the right place. He explained some things to me and asked if I knew how topaz worked. I said that I thought I did, but I hadn’t farmed mats for the potion yet because I was new to max level and focusing on one thing at a time. He gave me all the mats for my first topaz attunement potion so I could start working on that too! Shout out to Benemyjosh for the help!

Next up, more expeditions when the rest of my group is ready!