'New World' War Hammer Build For Exploration And Expeditions

The two-handed War Hammer is one of the options that melee-inclined players in “New World” can pick. Despite being slow and heavy, hammers can inflict massive damage and lock enemies in place with crowd control effects.

War Hammers are excellent in all game modes since they are versatile enough to handle all kinds of enemies with relative ease. Both hammer skill trees have access to some form of crowd control effect while simultaneously dealing high bursts of damage to any target they hit.

As far as PvE is concerned, this weapon type works best in the hands of a tank player. Not only will the hammer’s crowd control skills keep enemy mobs away from party members, the weapon’s high damage output will also help the tank keep aggro on them for longer. Here are some PvE War Hammer builds to consider.

New World is set in Aeternum, a mysterious land ripe with resources, magic, treasure and many hostile monsters Photo: Amazon Game Studios

“New World” War Hammer PvE Builds

This build is optimized for both open-world exploration and dungeon crawling, so that players won’t have to constantly reset their weapon’s skill trees every time they finish an Expedition run.

• Active Skills
  • Armor Breaker
  • Shockwave
  • Path of Destiny
• Priority Passives
  • Meteoric Crater
  • Stimulated Reduction
  • I Can Do This All Day
• Recommended Passives
  • Prevailing Spirit
  • Concussive Impact
  • Epitome of Bonk
  • Hammer Time

The active abilities for this build are focused on pulling plenty of enemies with Path of Destiny before nuking them with Armor Breaker and Shockwave.

Armor Breaker is preferred over Clear Out as the latter knocks enemies away from the player, preventing any follow-up damage.

As for passives, focus on getting all the nodes under Shockwave and Path of Destiny first since they provide the most value. Next, grab Concussive Impact from the Crowd Crusher tree and Hammer Time from Juggernaut to gain a significant DPS increase against targets hit by crowd control effects.

The I Can Do This All Day perk from the Crowd Crusher tree is preferred over Outnumbered for players, especially tanks, because completely avoiding damage is better than taking any at all.

Tanks should always be blocking enemy attacks anyway, and Shockwave’s stun and Frailty passive are more than enough to reduce the damage that players take from enemies in PvE.

Pair this build with either a Great Axe for AoE damage or a Sword and Shield for extra defensive prowess.