Amazon Games released the patch notes for New World Update 1.2 "Winter Convergence". Let's look at what's new, changed, and improved!

Much like other Monthly updates so far, this is a pretty massive update. The biggest addition with this patch is the Winter Convergence Festival Event. The patch includes a rework to some endgame Elite areas and endgame progression, with the reworked Expertise System (previously High Water Mark).

There’s even nice additions for deeply involved with Trade Skills of all kinds, including some new options for crafting. While there’s some direct and indirect changes to shake up the PvP Meta, most weapon changes are targeted at making combat more fluid.

Jumping right into the Highlights of the patch, let’s talk about the big changes briefly.

“The holiday of Winter Convergence is upon Aeternum! Marked by the appearance of increased snowfall and Northern Lights in the sky this is a time of dichotomy and duality as the Winter Wanderer and Winter Warrior come to the land. Icy winds and the Winter Wanderer bring with them new armors, weapons, furnishings, skins, consumables, and a delightful “present gifting” emote. Ice Caves are appearing all over Aeternum due to the Winter Warrior’s desire for a Forever Winter. The rest of Aeternum will look like these Ice Caves if the onslaught of the Warrior is not stopped. These caves will remain behind after the event as scars on the land, sources of wintry magic that refuse to melt even if the Warrior is defeated.“

Running from the day of the patch December 16th, all the way until January 11th; The Winter Convergence Festival Arrives with Patch 1.2, and is set to be one of the most involved and rewarding events so far in New World.

Being a four and a half week event makes it one of the longest so far in New World, which give you plenty of time to earn the Winter Tokens needed to get the most from the event.

If you’re looking for a guide covering the event and what to expect from it, as well as the best way to get everything you could want from the event; we got you covered. Check out our Winter Convergence Festival Event Guide, where we detail everything you could ever need to know about the event.

AGS renamed High Water Mark to Expertise and now display Expertise values in the UI.

“We’ve added a new resource called Gypsum that can be acquired each day by doing a variety of activities (open world named bosses, Expedition bosses, Outpost Rush, Arenas, Corrupted Breaches, etc.). Each activity rewards a different type of Gypsum that can be crafted into a Gypsum Orb. These Orbs can then be crafted into Gypsum Casts of any weapon, armor or trinket type. Opening a Gypsum Cast will guarantee an expertise bump and gear of that type.“

The developers also introduced a Kiln station in all end game zones that allows players to craft Gypsum Orbs from the various types of Gypsum. “Adjusted the potential range of an Expertise increase based on the Expertise level. In general, the ranges stay slightly wider for further up the progression range, which translates into less overall “increase moments” required to reach the cap (so on average most people will get there with fewer bumps required). Adjusted the way Expertise bumps work so there is a minimum, as well as a maximum. The minimum is set to 2, and maximum starts at 5 and ramps down to 2. Our goal is to average around 35 bumps required to get from min to max Expertise.“ Increased the rewards for Expeditions:

These changes overall are pretty decent, giving most players a bit smoother progression from GS 500 up to GS 600 items. The Gypsum System is a bit of an interesting addition, especially if you’re a player that wants to get the most out of their time, due to limited time to play but you can really only get the absolute most out of it when you have the chance to play for several hours in a day.

If you can manage to do them often enough, endgame Expeditions will prove to be the best way to get Expertise bumps. Though, until server mergers are finished, those stuck in low pop servers might have to make do without until merges happen.

Much Like the Winter Convergence Festival Event, we also have a recently released our how to Quickly Increase Expertise guide as well, where we go over the system in detail and give you a few clear paths to help you knockout any many Gypsum Orbs as possible in the quickest ways possible.

Two POIs got adjusted to become end-game content:

The devs made a number of adjustments in the end game difficulty to compensate for some accidental overtuning they did in the November patch.

“Our goal is to find a middle ground between the end game content being too easy before November and the overtuned HP sponges we had afterwards.”

These Changes tie heavily into the Expertise grind and are solid overall. They’re most stepping back some of the difficulty changes they made previously, while adjusting two more POIs to be Level 66. These changes help so you’re not forced to only fight Corrupted for high end loot, adding Angry Earth at similar levels.

Overall, I think these changes help a ton to balance out both endgame Elite POIs and even some earlier ones.

Timeless Shards are a brand new crafting ingredient that can be used to guarantee specific stats on weapons and armor.

The Trade Skill Aptitude is introduced as an attempt to encourage players to continue crafting for themselves.

“We want to continue rewarding the efforts you make to craft items for yourself, your friends, or to make some coin on the Trading Post, so we have introduced Trade Skill Aptitude.“

Overall these are great changes. Timeless Shards and Patterns both offer new ways to craft each with their own way of increasing the control over your crafted item. With Patterns (except those from the event shop) guaranteeing GS 600, and Timeless Shards letting you lock in both an Attribute and a Perk.

The Aptitude system is fairly rewarding, giving plenty of access to these new crafting options, while also giving you a fair number of Legendary Materials (except Void Ore) to craft with. Personally, the Gathering ones are super quick and easy ways to get a ton of the Legendary Materials and new mods very quickly.

A lot of these changes are aimed at making combat feel more fluid for most weapons, mostly changing recovery times. There’s also a lot of changes aimed at fixing War exploits.

With Great Axe taking hits to their overall damage, their Light Attack lunge range, and Bloodlust haste being reduced; as well as War Hammer losing hit stun on Path of Destiny, it really hits what these weapons are known to be strong for.

At the same time, other weapons have gotten some meaningful changes along with new perks to help counter other things these weapons are good at, like sustain. While new options for open up to all weapons, with Heavy Attack and Crit focused mods being added.

The new broader defensive perks are also incredibly good, even though they only offer protection against Light and Heavy attacks, this makes them really strong defensive options against most Melee Weapons and some Magic Weapons.

Based on feedback on the High Water Mark system and our desire to have a compelling and diverse end game, we’ve made some major changes to the end game in this update. For more details on our vision and future changes coming, please see the Expertise dev corner article on our official forums.

Due to an issue in our initial PvP damage formula that caused lower gear to be more beneficial in damage mitigation, we have updated our formula. We look forward to hearing your feedback on these changes.

We want to continue rewarding the efforts you make to craft items for yourself, your friends, or to make some coin on the Trading Post, so we have introduced Trade Skill Aptitude.

The following notes were added or changed as a direct result of internal testing efforts and players submitting feedback in the PTR. Thanks to all those who participated!

Thanks for your support! Stay tuned for some Winter Convergence presents from our team, and we’ll see you in Aeternum.

Patch Notes are sourced directly from New World’s official website.

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