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fortnite save the world weapon calculatorLast Updated:
Updated October 26 2021. We have updated the New World Tier List to reflect the current heavy armor, shield and life staff tank builds that are dominating the end game PvP meta. It appears many beefcakes are running the new Voidbent armor and are absorbing plenty of crit damage while gemming into reduced elemental and physical damage taken. We will update the tier list once again when we know if there is a meta switch up. TL;DR: the Sword and Shield, Heavy Armor, and Life Staff are S+ Tier.
Updated October 1 2021. Hey again, now that New World has well and truly been released, many players are back in the game. It appears not much has changed, especially with the recent New World launch day patch. Here is our tier list, updated to fit the current metagame, especially while players are currently leveling.
Updated September 9 2021. The New World Weapons Tier List has been updated for the New World Open Beta. You will find that not much has changed. Until we get our hands on some of the bugged weapons ourselves, we will reserve judgement. However, some weapons are slightly weaker, especially the Great Axe with its stagger nerf. Also, some weapons have lost their overpowered Fortify buff. However, that only greatly affected weapon is the Great Axe, so we have knocked it down a tier based on that. We will keep an eye on all the New World weapon as the open beta progresses, so stay tuned!
If you have managed to try the New World Closed Beta, you will have noticed some weapons feel much stronger than others. Due to the competitive nature of PvP games, we have decided to make a New World weapon tier list. While the game is only in beta, it does seem like some weapons stand out much better than others. Here are the best New World weapons based on the beta’s trends for both PvE and PvP. If you don’t want to scroll through all our lovingly-crafted worlds, a summary of the best weapons are below:
Best New World Weapons
| Weapon Tier | Best New World Weapons for PvE | Best New World Weapons for PvP |
| S+ Tier | One-Handed Sword and Shield, Life Staff. | |
| S Tier | Bow, Fire Staff, Hatchet, One-Handed Sword and Shield, Warhammer, Life Staff. | Hatchet, Great Axe, Ice Gauntlet, Rapier. |
| A Tier | Musket, Rapier, Spear. | Bow, Fire Staff, Spear, Warhammer. |
| B Tier | Ice Gauntlet. | Musket. |
| C Tier | Great Axe. |
Tier List Methodology
Before heading deeper into the article, please take our New World weapon tier list with a pinch of salt. At any moment, Amazon Games could come out and fix or balance any weapons they see fit. Also, the player base is only getting bigger, so there’s more room for innovation that we at Gaming Verdict may not anticipate. After New World launches on August 31, we will update the article to make it more relevant to its day one patch and beyond.
Ranking Method
- S+ Tier: Meta defining and feel pretty giga broken right now due to a small factors affeting the player meta game.
- S Tier – The S Tier picks dominate the New World weapon tier list because of their sheer power, utility or overall usefulness.
- A Tier – The A Tier has very good weapons that work fine. However, they appear to have a clear weakness that stops them from being at the top. Unless, of course, those weaknesses are managed properly.
- B Tier – B Tier weapons are completely average. They are perfectly viable to use and can work really well with particular builds.
- C Tier – Slightly below average weapons that probably want a buff, or the player base hasn’t quite figured them out just yet.
- D Tier – Completely useless.
If you need a quick rundown on what New World weapons do, check out our New World weapons guide.
Please note, this article was originally published while the beta was active. Since the beta has ended, we have updated the New World weapon tier list based on mainly community reception and balance affairs at the end of the beta. If there were any standout factors from the Beta, we have mentioned them in the appropriate sections.
Best New World Weapons for PvE
| Tier | Best New World PvE Weapons |
| S Tier | Bow, Fire Staff, Hatchet, One-Handed Sword and Shield, Warhammer, Life Staff. |
| A Tier | Musket, Rapier, Spear. |
| B Tier | Ice Gauntlet. |
| C Tier | Great Axe. |
The reason for the above rankings is largely due to the importance of tanks for some of New World’s most difficult content. The One-Handed Sword is the best tanking weapon in the game, as it is the only weapon that benefits from a dedicated shield. Moreso, a shield’s defensive and crowd control (CC) capabilities make it perfect for controlling the pace of a fight. Not to mention some skills have a radius that makes it great for handling enemy NPCs in the open world.
After New World confirmed that healers are necessary for expeditions, ranking the Life Staff high up the New World weapons tier list makes sense. The reason why is simple. It is the only weapon in New World that can consistently heal allies.
Read More: New World tank build. New World healer build.
Best PvE DPS Weapons
As for out-and-out damage weapons, the Bow, Warhammer and Firestaff are the three best PvE DPS weapons.
Bow Builds
Bows offer a lot of versatility with their upgradable skills. The Bow’s skirmisher spec has access to two AOE abilities with Rain of Arrows and Poison Shot, along with evasive techniques and an ultimate that slows enemies by shooting them in the leg. However, if you want to nuke bosses, then the Hunter specialization offers two single-target skills and an ultimate passive that rewards headshots. Either way, a bow build is useful in a variety of situations. If you’re a fan of the Rapier, you can even use a Bow and spec into the Bleed passive for Rain of Arrows.
The Best Warhammer Build for PvE
The Warhammer is by far the best of the two-handed weapons. While it is slow to use, this doesn’t matter in PvE. With your left-click attacks, you get to hit hard, devastating the battlefield with your ground and pound abilities. The Juggernaut spec offers the player skills that scale well with weapon damage while applying debuffs through Armor Breaker. The rest of your points should go into Crowd Crusher for the debuffs and the Shockwave skill and its improvements. You can see an example of a Warhammer build here.
The Hatchet
The Hatchet’s damage comes from light attacks and the occasional skill, especially while Berserk is active. It is really good for solo content, with a passive health regen and a solid movement speed increase. Once you get at least 8 points into Berskerker for the upgraded Berserk and Raging Torrent, you’ll start noticing your damage going off. As for the Throwing specialization, it is more a “fire-and-forget” option due to the cooldowns. Just left-click your enemies to death and sustain from all the damage.
New World Fire Staff build for PvE
Like the Bow, the Fire Staff offers a deadly combination of AOE and single-target damage. Furthermore, the PvE aspect of New World makes several of the Fire Staff’s skills viable. Take Meteor, for example. The ability is relatively useless in PvP; however, when playing with a tank, you can coordinate the whole barrage, dealing a total of 960% weapon damage. If you combine this with Fireball, it leaves behind a lingering scorched earth effect, dealing additional DPS for as long as enemies remain in its embers.
Read More: New World mage / Fire Staff build.
The A Team
The A tier of this New World weapon tier list consists of the Bleed-focused dexterity builds. If you combine the Rapier’s Blood specialization with the Spear’s Impaler specs and passive, then you can create nasty debuff enhancement builds. The key to them is to use your Rapier to stack up to three bleeds on your target. Once done, use Flourish and Finish to consume all the remaining damage on your bleeds, hitting for a chunk of damage.
The Rapier is also augmented by the Spear’s Impaler build. You’ll want to use Skewer for an extra bleed, along with Perforate to apply the Rend (which increases damage taken) debuff to the target. Perforate is a key part of the build, as it improves the damage of the bleeds and skills from the Rapier while Rend remains active. In addition, the Spear applies bonus damage based on the number of debuffs on the target. Rend, a Rapier’s bleed, and a Spear’s bleed count as three, with an optional slow for a fourth debuff. Rotating between both weapons is a sure way to do plenty of damage. If you’re curious about the build, you can see how it functions here.
Others
The Musket
You may be slightly surprised at seeing the Musket as an A tier weapon. The reason for this is down to a few factors. The weapon type is almost useless in the open world. Sure, it does damage, but you have very little breathing room once hostile NPCs catch up. Moreso, the weapon has a slight delay when reloading, which creates a bit of undue pressure that you can probably do without. The other annoying part is you need lots of ammo, meaning you have to go out of your way to craft the ammunition.
Annoyances aside, the Musekt has the Sniper Stance skill that allows you to do incredible damage. This is the key to performing high DPS in PvE, making it great for expeditions, especially when there’ melee players body blocking each other. Overall, Muskets are not that great for everyday use but are a powerhouse in coordinated groups.
The Ice Gauntlet
This is a fine weapon by itself, but it usually needs to fit around another weapon to work well. The Builder is by far the best spec for the Ice Gauntlet, as it offers a defensive cooldown for casters, mana regeneration through passives, the Entomb skill, and finally CC skills. However, it isn’t necessarily that great for open-world combat or as a primary damage source, with the Fire Staff taking the lead.
Last on the list is the Great Axe. This is one of the best CC weapons in the game. However, it does lack significant damage in PvE. Execute is a powerful skill on targets below 50% HP, but it doesn’t make up for the Axe’s lack of viability in PvE. All that said, the Great Axe makes a good off-tank weapon for expeditions with the tanking gem.
Best New World Weapons for PvP
| Tier | Best New World PvP Weapons |
| S Tier | Hatchet, Ice Gauntlet, Rapier, Life Staff. |
| A Tier | Bow, Fire Staff, Great Axe, One-Handed Sword and Shield, Spear, Warhammer. |
| B Tier | Musket. |
Ice Gauntlet – The best PvP weapon?
As you can see, there are quite a few differences between the PvE and PvP rankings in the New World weapon tier list. The most notable is the Ice Gauntlet. The reason is that the CC, defensive and mana regeneration abilities are important for PvP battles. The Builder specialization, in particular, is a beautiful secondary weapon option for Fire Staff and Life Staff users. Both can deplete its wielder’s mana very quickly. Taking the mana regeneration passives and Entombing to channel more mana is just too valuable to ignore. Not to mention the value of placing yourself in a block of ice when you become a kill target.
The Ice Gauntlet is also a powerful weapon for two-handed melee weapon users. Use the power of the Ice Shower to deny enemies the opportunity to dodge your attacks. It is excellent for the Warhammer because it has the slowest attacks in the game, but boasts the largest base light attack damage. Furthermore, the Ice Gauntlet’s ability to keep enemies slowed, combining with the Warhammer’s Shockwave stun and improved defensive passives, implies any battle mage-style build can be mighty. Oh, and the Heavy armor bonus improves the CC effects by 20%. It’s a build that has what it takes to dominate Aeternum. Although, it isn’t necessary as Ice Storm inflicts a large slow in a rather wide radius anyway. You can see an example from the Reddit ambush clip below.
Tank and Healing weapons
The Life Staff and One-Handed Sword and Shield are solid choices in our New World weapon tier list section. Serious guilds (Free Companies) will require Life Staff wielders for their PvP strategies. Not too mention many duelist PvP builds use a healing staff to ensure they never die, such as Hatchet users. Meanwhile, the Shield’s Defender spec provides damage mitigation with Final Stand, including CC via the Shield Rush and Shield Bash. It is ideal for any player who needs dedicated defense and is unable to benefit from the Ice Gauntlet.
Rapier PvP
The Rapier is a potent weapon in PvP. It essentially follows the same principle of whittling down your opposition as with the Blood spec. However, the Grace spec is an incredibly useful alternative, with Riposte able to straight-up stun an opponent. Evade six-second cooldown is also incredibly useful. Ideally, you should take one of these skills while keeping your other two skill slots open for Tondo, and Flourish and Finish. Even the Rapier’s lunge can outplay the Hatchet and Great Axe abusers from beta. If the Great Axe and Hatchet are nerfed come launch, then the Rapier will stand out above all other melee weapons in PvP.
Special notes
Musket PvP
On a final note, I want to give the Musket a shout out. In organized combat and events, Muskets shine so brightly. Finding a good position, range, and angle on opponents is critical to its success. In some of the open-world PvP in the beta, the Musket often rules until its user retreats. If in addition, they have skilful aim, Musket players will always be a welcome addition to many guilds.
Great Axe PvP
A special mention also to the Great Axe. It’s one of those weapons that can cause chaos, with its incredibly generous 10m charge and an 8-meter grapple. The added magnetization on its heavy attacks ensures no one can get away. However, the Great Axe’s slow swing speed makes it vulnerable to dodges. If the Grapple ability is not up, then there’s room to outplay the Great Axe. It also appears the Great Axe bug is fixed with the new open beta patch notes, and the weapon has a significant nerf to its Fortify defensive buff. So, we think it’s a comfortable A tier weapon for now.
The Hatchet PvP
The Hatchet is really good for PvP once you can get into combat. The Sprint Attack skill is a decent gap closer, which gets you on top of an enemy. From then on, the Berserk and Raging Torrent combo can burst down any armor. Moreso, the Berseker can get traits that prevent stagger, meaning the Berserker has an almost uncounterable window of damage. That player will be nigh unkillable, and if the cheat death passive is up and you’re running a Life Staff in your second weapon slot, then it is rather unfair. Perhaps some rebalancing so that it doesn’t feel mediocre one minute and completely unstoppable in the Bersker window? I don’t want to outright call the Hatchet OP just yet, as there could be some team synergy or counter we have yet to figure out, but it is clear that is an S Tier weapon when it really shouldn’t be.
New World Best Weapon Combos
Since we have mentioned that some weapons are very broken, we figured it’s worth mentioning the most OP New World weapon combos too. To start, the most obvious one is the Hatchet Berseker build, combined with a Life staff. The reason why is because the Berserker Hatchet build loves cheating death and healing from attacks. Add in the Life staff, regardless of the specialization, and you have a rather unkillable build.
One other really overpowered New World weapons combo is the Firestaff, and Ice Gauntlet Mage build. The Firestaff is major crit damage dealing weapon, but its weapon skills drain mana like there is no tomorrow. The Ice Gauntlet steps in to grant additional mana under certain conditions, along with the CC you need to escape any maniacs with a hatchet or Warhammer coming your way.
The final suggestion we have for New World best weapon combos is the Rapier and Spear build. The Rapier’s Blood specialization enjoys stacking bleeds enemies, while the Spear adds extra debuffs to enemies. You’ll find a build that does lots of damage the more your ramp your damage, and deals huge burst by expending those bleed stacks for pure burst.
Please note that these New World best weapon combos are a mixture of PvP and PvE best weapon combos. You may find one of these best weapon combos don’t necessarily fit your playstyle.
This concludes our New World Weapon Tier List. How do you think the weapons in New World are fairing up? Perhaps you know of some awesome PvP builds worth mentioning. Let us know in the comments below.