A Guide to New World Weapon Scaling

New World will employ a classless combat system meaning you won't have to spend hours at the beginning of the game choosing which combat style to commit to. The downside to this is something called weapon scaling.

This is the system that determines your proficiency with various weapons and it's a little more complicated than just throwing points into Strength to swing your sword harder.

What is Weapon Scaling in New World

Weapon Scaling is the idea that you can improve your proficiency with weapons by increasing your attribute points. The catch is that you can improve this proficiency by increasing a main and sub-attribute.

Take the humble sword as an example. Its primary attribute is Strength meaning that you can do more damage with a sword as you increase your Strength stat. Its sub-attribute is Dexterity meaning and you also increase the damage (at a much lower rate) by increasing your Dexterity.

As you can see in the above image, the sword is much brighter in the Strength category because this is the primary stat. Not every weapon has a sub-attribute, like the Bow, meaning you can only improve proficiency one way, through Dexterity.

Why does it matter?

Weapon Scaling matters because you will only have access to limited attribute points across each character you have in New World. You can earn 190 attribute points by leveling a character to the current max of 60.

This includes the 5 base points per attribute that you start with. Once you reach level 20, re-specing points start to cost coins meaning it's costly to make mistakes. You also have to take into account that you may need to improve attributes for reasons other than just combat. It's maintaining this thing balance that.

In the end, while you aren't committing to a class, you need to have a good idea of how you plan to proceed through the game. This way you can properly plan how to spend your attributes throughout the game.