New World PvE Armor & Perks

Armor & Perks in New World are divided into three weights: Light, Medium, and Heavy. Light armor suits mobile, high-DPS builds, Medium offers a balance between damage and survivability, and Heavy is ideal for tanking. Armor perks are largely universal across roles and weights, with adjustments for specific builds. Focus on securing mandatory perks first, then fill gaps with build-specific perks.

Head, hands, and feet armor pieces share the same weight, making them interchangeable.

Meta Armor Perks

The following are the mandatory perks you want to be looking for, early in your journey this will help you decide which pieces of armor to keep where later on you will have specific builds you are working towards

Enchanted Ward is the most important armor perk you want to be looking for on each of your armor pieces as it will offer the widest range of flat damage protection against all areas in Aeternum

Refreshing is an important armor perk for reducing your abilities cooldowns, refreshing has a maximum of 4 stacks.

Health works as it says and increases your health by a % based on your gear score, the higher your Constitution the more effective this perk is, this is a good option when you already have enchanted ward, refreshing cap and the armor perks your armor requires.

Conditioning can be a good perk in certain situations, there are a physical and elemental conditioning for each damage type, usually protects you better for consistent damage like a burn. This protection goes towards your abs cap which is in the same bucket as armor gems which is capped at 50% protection.

As a tank or solo open world slash conditioning can be nice as most trash mobs do slash damage.

New World Artifacts

There are many artifacts in New World but the following are the main ones you will be building your sets around.

Featherweight

Featherweight is good for pvp or for light tanking.

Attuned Leather Pants

Arguably the best artifact in the game giving you extra stats in all areas allowing you to have higher build diversity and higher over all dps / survivability

Nimble Coat

Arguably the best artifact for Rapier players & Healers due to its huge cooldown reduction.

Void Darkplate

One of the best options for all medium and heavy sets for those of you that want some extra protection :)

Noteable Armor Sets 700gs

There are many different armor sets to be found and used in new world, with that in mind below are some of the easiest / best options for you.

Azoth Crystal

This is one of the most diverse sets of armor as is comes in Light, Medium & Heavy, it comes base with 2 of the most useful perks and can have either a weapon perk , health or conditioning added to it as required.

Frigid Dawn

Frigid dawn pieces are some of the best heavy armor items in the game as it doubles up on enchanted ward and elemental protection, this can either be used in a featherweight light set or a full heavy set. This item is obtained from glacial tarn dungeon or crafting with Materia.

Goldcursed

This armor is a little bit RNG but can be gained from the well of fortune in cutlass keys with doubloons

TradePost

The Tradepost is going to be your best way to gear, look for cheap gear pver 680 gearscore with enchanted ward

Noteable Armor Sets 725gs

Gorgonite

If there is something specific you need that is not on a drop table or you want easily you can always craft gorgonite , this is very expensive but can be the only way to get true best in slot gear

Hoplite

Hoplite armor is from the new raid, this armor is going to be the best you can get without crafting, as you can see the perks meet our mandatory perks and the our improvement is the gear score and stat points.