Good Morning Friends! The Winter Convergence is upon us and all of Aeternum is feeling the chill of the Winter Warrior… or whatever this storyline actually is. Like much of New World’s story the winter event has the most loosely strung together of themes where basically two Yeti are duking it out… one wants to freeze the entire world and the other wants to protect us from this fate. What it means for the players is one of the most detailed events that take place in the game and features activities that everyone can participate in. This is the second time we have seen the Winter Convergence event and a number of things have been added to improve things. They seemingly have learned a lot from the recent Halloween event and carried forward some improvements.
Daily Presents
In the center of every town that can be held by a faction, you will find the Winter Convergence tree, as well as the entire town decked out in holiday-themed kitsch. One of the key benefits of this event is that you can go up to every tree in every settlement and collect a package each day. The first three packages will include bonus rewards that are effectively the same as the turkey bags that we just had from the Thanksgiving event. Essentially you are going to get some cash, Winter Tokens, and a chance for the various crafting patterns to drop. This is also how you are going to get your Diamond Gypsum for those who are level 60.
Town Board Quests
Every town has new projects that involve upgrading the tree through doing seasonal activities like crafting ornaments or baking cookies. As the town upgrades its tree, the daily rewards will keep getting better with higher token drops and a better chance at patterns. If nothing else they are a very easy way of getting some bonus town reputation each day.
Lost Presents
Scattered around Aeternum along its many roads will be piles of lost presents. You can reclaim these for faction with the Winter Wanderer, and then redeem them for Winter Tokens at the Winter Villages located in Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. Each package nets you 5 faction points so it isn’t a great way to complete the event, but it is the sort of thing you casually collect as you are roaming around and doing other activities.
Floating Packages
I remember when I first encountered a floating package last year I thought it was a bugged spawn. Essentially you will see a glowing pile of packages rotating in the air and if you shoot these down you get a whopping 250 faction with the Winter Wanderer. I am sorry that it is super hard to see in the screenshot, but keep your eyes on the skies and be watching for these. Well worth your time and worth me breaking out a crappy green bow I had in my inventory to shoot them down.
Gleamite Meteors
I’ve not seen one of these this year, but given that I see the ability to trade these in on the Winter Village shops I assume they still exist. Essentially if you hang out in lower-level zones at night time and watch the skies it is possible to see a meteor streaking across the sky. I found this video from last year showing what it looks like so you will know what to watch out for. Essentially when the meteor lands it destroys everything surrounding the impact crater and spawns a number of Gleamite nodes that can be mined for resources you can turn in at the Winter Village as well as some faction with the Winter Wanderer.
Winter Village and the Winter Wanderer
As I said above there are four Winter Villages that you can find spread throughout the world Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. They all for the most part function the same with a few carts in the town that let you trade lost presents and other doodads associated with the holiday event into friendly Yeti helpers in order to gain winter tokens. The Winter Wanderer himself will have a few quests for you. I believe since I did the original series in 2021 I don’t have access to those in order to do them again. However listening to a friend of mine talking about the event, makes me think they are still available. This year he has a new quest to hunt down the Winter Warrior and stop him in his tracks, which is a big boss fight that hops from zone to zone and is marked on your map similar to how the Halloween Boss and Turkulon were.
Winter Convergence Shop
Doing things associated with this holiday gives you a reputation with the Winter Wanderer aka a faction called the Holiday Regent. This works similarly to leveling your other factions, and there are various breakpoints, each unlocking different tiers of items available. At the highest tier which I reached last night, you have a number of somewhat ugly holiday-themed skins as well as a bunch of item-level 600 crafting patterns for every gear slot. You can also get a number of other skins like a replacement for our boring tent, and some extremely festive musical instruments.
Crafting Patterns
One of the really cool things from this year is a number of item-level 600 patterns for pretty much every slot. The huge benefit of this style of the pattern just like the ones that came from the Halloween event is that they can be crafted by anyone without a base skill requirement. The negative is that the materials required for these patterns are going to be extremely costly if you can’t craft them yourself. Each item tends to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-300 coins each so the Great Axe that I crafted yesterday would have cost me around 10,000 coins worth of materials if I was not already capable of making them myself. The benefit with these patterns however is since you crafted them… they operate much like a named item and do not suffer any expertise drain for not having leveled your expertise to 600. A huge boon over the Halloween-themed patterns is it seems like you can choose your primary stat, so you can tailor the item to fit your specific build needs. If you can afford it, this is a fast way to catch up on your gear at level 60.
The Winter Warrior
As I said before the Winter Warrior now spawns in various locations around the world and is marked on your map. This is a large raid encounter and requires a significant number of players in order to take it down. There seems to be some sort of a breakpoint on these each day where the first handful of them reward you 5 Warrior’s Hailspikes and the subsequent kills only reward you 2. At least that seemed to be the case for me… it could simply be RNG. Each one of these can be handed in at the cart in the Winter Village for 10 Winter Tokens, so this becomes the most efficient way to not only farm reputation for the holiday event but also rewards.
Join the Zerg
It is almost guaranteed that your server will have some sort of semi-organized zerg going on while this event is active. Getting everything is going to require copious amounts of farming and as a result, I think this is going to be the case for the majority of the event. Essentially look in your recruitment channel for discussion of WB or World Boss and what zone they are heading towards. Once you are running with the train stay on the sequence as long as you like. Word of warning, however, the Winter Warrior can spawn in multiple locations in every zone in the game, so it is going to pay off significantly if you already have all teleports unlocked. I did not have any of the ones in Brimstone Sands since I had not ventured out there yet, so I took a bit last night and unlocked all of them to make the farming more efficient.
Ice Caves
I guess one last thing I will mention in case the 2021 quests are in fact available. There are a number of Yeti Ice Caves that have spawned around Aeternum and these stay up year-round and were brought into the game after the first Winter Convergence. These are marked on the map with the silhouette of a Yeti, but one of the easiest ones to get to is in Windsward due east along the coast. The lower-level quest will involve going around and killing the Yetis guarding these caves and I believe they are all somewhere in the 25-35 level range. I believe you can farm these caves for reputation but since I capped mine last night I was not able to test this theory.
All told it is a fun event with a lot of stuff going on, and some pretty tasty rewards that can be had if you are diligent in farming over the next few weeks. In theory, this map link should provide you with the locations of all of the Yeti Caves, Winter Villages, and possible Gleamite meteor spawn locations. For me, I am mostly planning on farming the Winter Warrior whenever it suits my fancy and trying to get most of the permanent rewards from the event. Even though the cosmetics are fairly ugly… I am very likely to spend time trying to farm them.
Hopefully, this guide helps players who are unfamiliar with the event get started. If you have any direct questions feel free to drop me a line below or reach out over social media.
The post Winter Convergence 2022 Guide appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I logged in this morning and it appears that the merger has been completed. I am now on Heliopolis instead of Themiscyra and our old server is no more. Because we were not the server being merged into, it means that none of the companies that held territory on our server kept it. I fully expect the next few weeks to be a time of strife as far as faction conflicts go as the companies from three servers ultimately settle into a pecking order. Sadly I had made quite a few friends in the group that previously controlled Everfall, which is where my tier 4 home is located. Positive however is it seems that Everfall is just as well taken care of on Heliopolis with all but one of the crafting machines sitting at Tier 5.
The map on Heliopolis is seemingly more competitive whereas on Themiscyra it seemed like the heavy hitters were all Marauder or Covenant after the biggest Syndicate company transferred off the server. In truth, I don’t much care about who holds a territory so long as they are not being slumlords and doing nothing to maintain the crafting machines. Sadly on Themiscyra we had reached a point where Everfall and Windsward were the only two territories that seemed to put any effort and pride into maintaining them. My hope as well is that with more players there will be more activity happening in the various open world farms since that seems to be the side of the game that I really enjoy doing.
Speaking of farms, I went back out to the camp with Pit Lord Daeshi and have now picked up all of the gear drops off that loot table. It seems like folks are regularly farming this camp because it is where the legendary corrupted trophy material drops, which is heavily needed for invasions. In fact, at two different times out there I was with groups from major companies on the previous server trying to far trophies. Of those drops the one I was seeking out the most of course was the tanking sword… or at least I am turning it into a tanking sword. I figured with two different life-stealing traits on it and a base constitution stat, that screamed sustain and tanking. It does not hurt that it also looks really cool.
Other than farming gear, I spent part of my last night on Themiscyra doing another invasion. It was doomed from the start but we fought valiantly. We had even less than we had the night before and I think we made it to wave 5 before a boss type made it into the base… which caused everyone to collapse in to deal with it… which caused the other gates to fall. Essentially this is sort of what seems to happen as a cascade failure any time you need to call an all-hands-on-point type scenario. Invasions are very much a “manage everything all at once” type thing but once the plates stop spinning and fall down… everything goes south really fast.
Now to sort of bury the lede… I have been up to some shenanigans or at least I am supporting an initiative that is. A handful of my friends have been working on a brand new Mastodon instance that is gaming-focused, given that this seemed to be a niche that wasn’t really well served. Elekk.xyz is a fine server but it is deeply sequestered from the rest of the Fediverse, and really didn’t seem to be all that gaming-focused in the first place. It is nowhere near ready for sign-ups yet, but those of us who are going to be helping with the day-to-day stuff on the instance now have our accounts. Expect more updates as I have them as to when this is going to be launching. I think for the time being I am probably going to keep my Masto.ai account at least in the short run until we have worked out all of the kinks and have federation relays spinning. At some point in the not-too-distant future however I expect to migrate my account once again, but hopefully for the very last time. I have a lot of faith in this team and it will be nice to have a place to suggest where I very directly know everyone involved.
I’ve known about the possibility of this happening for a while but did not want to say anything until it was actually “for seriously” happening.
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Sometimes my brain latches onto something and just won’t let it go… until I have obsessed my way through completing it. For this particular obsession, I am going to blame my friend PlayerVsHobbies. When she joined New World not too long ago… she sorta made a beeline straight for the fishing system and as a result, ended up in some areas of the game that her level range was not quite prepared for. I know Vernie at one point helped her I think with a run through some dangerous areas and the other day I happened to be on when she was attempting to sneak to a fishing hole in Shattered Mountain. For those unfamiliar with this game, Shattered Mountain is a deeply scary place with monsters well above the maximum level cap of players… so if you are not well geared and max level, you are probably going to struggle out there. So I played guard duty as we made our way to the fishing hole and then farmed Dryad Wolves for Wyrdwood while she managed to get the fish that was required for that step in the chain.
This all planted in my head that I too have been on this quest chain for a while, and never actually completed it on my original server Valhalla. I’ve admittedly never spent that much time fishing in New World, though of my limited experience of MMO fishing systems it seemed to be about the best. So for whatever reason, this flipped some bits in my brain and made it so that this became my all-consuming mission in life… to complete the fishing chain and walk away with a shiny legendary fishing pole. So other than farming my daily Gypsum, this has been the task I set forth in front of myself… and I have to say it was relaxing as hell. There is something extremely chill about fishing in these beautiful locations for the amount of time needed to complete the quest. I’ve never been most of a fisherman in other games, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.
Another huge benefit of this quest chain is that you pretty much walk away with a full set of Tier 4 and Tier 5 fishing gear, which only serves to help you out as the requests get a bit rare. The only time that I had to rely on bait was when trying to catch fish over 30 lbs, but thankfully what I needed was cheap enough to stock up before heading out into the field. I had always just chucked bait into the bank and in truth, I had quite a good stockpile of various sorts which I now am carrying around on me at all times. I guess I have been bit by the bug because I have found myself flipping over to my fishing set, hitting F3, and doing this while waiting on things to spawn.
I completed the quest chain and you get a random box that includes a level 600 Legendary Fishing Pole. I think PvH got one that was Angry-Earth-themed, and the one I pulled was Ancient-themed. It appears that the stats are largely randomized, which means that in truth… I think the one I crafted and happened to pull 4 tier 3 stats on is maybe a bit better as a daily driver. I know I will be spending a lot more time crafting fishing poles as that seems to be my best option for leveling Engineering, so I might even pull an even better quad/three in my next flurry of crafting. I think if I manage to get geared up enough to start crafting for item level 600 fishing poles, there is the rare chance that I could make my own version of a 5-stat.
What I found somewhat weird though… is that the quest chain only required me to get to level 100 in Fishing, and not 200 which is the maximum before you start getting into aptitude levels. So I also now have the title “Fishing Legend” which I don’t feel like is really something I should equip until I ultimately cap out that skill. It is a fun and relaxing way to pass the time, especially while watching a YouTube video or something like that. So I guess I am thankful to my good friend PvH for getting me started down this path. I wonder what other enjoyable grinds are out there that I have been avoiding.
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Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a very excellent Thanksgiving weekend for those in the United States. For those elsewhere, I hope it was just an amazing weekend. Last week I wrapped up a series of gear guides, and over the weekend I spent some time formatting that information and adding it to the New World Tools page so that you can find items for specific gear slots. When I started the project the entire intent was for me to be able to find a 590-named weapon for every weapon type so that I could use those for leveling purposes. It morphed however along the way into me documenting every camp I knew about and making sure the weapons shown on the loot tables were actually dropping. I had no clue it would take anywhere near as long as it did, but at least now I have a good series of guides as a result.
The problem with a series spanning three weeks is that there were a lot of other things that took place while that was going on. For example, I accomplished one of the goals that I set out for myself before re-rolling and that was to max out my armorsmithing and craft a full set of item level 600 Void Bent armor. While this isn’t the best set of armor by any means, it is sort of universally good enough for almost any mod of play in the game. The fact that I crafted it myself means that I get to take advantage of the entire item level without experiencing any drain due to my lower expertise. The benefit of the armor has been very noticeable and I can survive the higher-level areas of the game significantly better than I could before.
Out of all of the Greatswords that I saw dropped, I decided that Bloodsucker’s Sword best fit what I want out of a tanking weapon with lifestealing and leeching crosscut on it. Similarly, I happened to luck into a nice sword drop from Rafflebones called Jupiter’s Favor that has Mortal Lifesteal which will give me back a little life each time a mob that I have damaged has been killed. At some point, I would like to replace it with Deeproot, but that would require some more coordinated group farming to get. The shield I crafted from a pattern that came from the Halloween event. I honestly wish I had started farming those items sooner so that I could have collected an entire set of the item level 600 crafting patterns. Other than that I spent time upgrading my bags and crafting a full set of tier 5 tools. Last night while bulk crafting to level engineering I even lucked into a quad tier 3 fishing pole.
My immediate goal has been to continue pushing up my trade skills. At the moment I have been alternating between working on getting Engineering and Cooking up to level 200. I find Cooking way less enjoyable as it just requires large quantities of materials, but if I ignore it for a while I end up gathering up so many materials in the process of just playing the game. Engineering I can focus grind a bit better because right now I need so much Wyrdwood and Ironwood, but the lower level materials are essentially free. I’ve set up a base for this phase in Everfall and I can get enough low-level leather and cloth in order to keep the fishing pole farm sustainable pending I acquire the rarer Ironwood planks. At some point, I will probably end up focusing on other professions. I got furnishing high enough to make a set of trophies but it seems generally awful to level still.
I finally pushed the Everfall faction up to level 30, which unlocked access to a Tier 4 house. I purchased the one in the main town square across from the Inn and Trading Post. I contemplated where exactly I wanted my first home to be, and since I have had my inn bound at Everfall almost this entire time… I decided that was as good of an option as any. Right now my plan is to build back up my gold and then focus on getting a house in Mourningdale and a house in Cutlass Keys since I also spend a lot of my time in those two zones. At some point, I need to actually make my way over to Brimstone Sands, because for all I know I might fall in love with that zone. I am still chipping away at quests in Shattered Mountain because I am weird and obsess over doing things sequentially… I have yet to start on any of the new content.
In another time and another mindset… I would be preparing for the launch of Dragonflight today. I am not however and there isn’t any big reason why. I played quite a bit of the Alpha and Beta and thought the game was pretty solid, but I am just not drawn to the World of Warcraft style of gameplay anywhere near as much as I used to be. However, for all of my friends who are amped to be playing it, I hope you all have an amazing launch that goes smoothly and that the game reignites those fires of joy inside of you. For now, I am still finding myself enjoying my time in Aeternum. I still have hopes that we end up with a group of people at max level and can roam around and do some of the fun open-world stuff. However for the time being I might have to wade out into the broader community and start making some groups happen on my own.
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