Outriders Worldslayer Expansion: what you should know

We’ll be breaking down all the additional content and systems of the Outriders Worldslayer Expansion and giving you an idea of what to expect from it.

Outriders’ Worldslayer Expansion is a pretty hefty update for the game. It adds everything from New Gear and New Mods to a whole new storyline and additional endgame content and progression. So let’s dive in a talk about everything this update has to offer.

What are Ascension Levels

Ascension levels are where all Character XP gained after level 30 will go. This progression system allows for some fine-tuning of builds and can be reallocated at any time, like your other passive bonuses and trees.

You can gain a maximum of 200 Ascension Levels, allowing you to completely max out all of the available bonuses. This means your early points will be important, but once you max out, there’s no reason to reallocate them ever.

Outriders Worldslayer - Ascension Levels

There’s a total of 20 different stats you can allocate across four branches within the system. These branches are split into Anomaly, Brutality, Prowess, and Endurance ; each offering a set of bonuses. The Ascension system allows you to gain a 10% increase to each of these stats, and below is a full list of the available stats.

Anomaly
- Anomaly Power
- Resistance Piercing
- Skill Leech
- Status Power
- Anomaly Damage
Brutality
- Armor Piercing
- Close Range Damage
- Long Range Damage
- Weapon Damage
- Weapon Leech
Endurance
- Health
- Armor
- Healing Received
- Elite Damage Mitigation
- Resistance
Prowess
- Cooldown Reduction
- Critical Hit Chance
- Critical Hit Damage
- Bonus Elite Damage
- Magazine Size

What are Apocalypse Tiers

Apocalypse Tiers replace Challenge Tiers, and offer one huge advantage, leveling regardless of the content you do. Each Increase in Apocalyse Tier not only increases the rate at which you’ll see rarer items, but also the rate at which Apocalypse Items will drop.

Outriders Worldslayer - Apocalypse Tiers

Apocalypse Tiers also offer added challenges to the much higher tiers, which apply penalties and bonuses, with penalties starting at Apocalyse Tier 15 and scaling up until Apocalypse Tier 40. These penalties can end up making unoptimized builds be a huge problem. Below is a list of Bonuses and penalties as well as their ranges.

Enemy Bonuses
- Enemy Level (+0 – 45)
- Enemy Health (+0 – 375%)
- Enemy Damage Multiplier (+0 – 150%)
- Enemy Skill/Weapon Leech Resistance (+0 – 50%)
- Elite Weapon Leech (+0 – 10%)
- Enemy Critical Damage Reduction (+0 – 25%)
- Enemy Weapon Accuracy (+0 – 105%)
- Random Critical Chance (-5% – 0%)
- Status Power Penalty (+0 -100%)
Endurance
- Health Regeneration Threshold (30 – 35.55%)
- Healing Effect Reduction (+0 – 50%)
- Cooldown Reduction Penalty (+0 – 100%)
- Revive Speed Duration (+0 – 200%)
Empowerment
- Item Level Bonus (+0 – 45)
- Apocalyptic Item Chance (+0 – 25%)
- Ascension XP Multiplier (+0 – 33012%)
- Loot Rarity Bonus (+0 – 1200%)
- Max Health Bonus (+0 – 1160)
- Weapon Leech Bonus (+0 – 12%)
- Skill Leech Bonus (+0 – 3%)
- Cooldown Reduction Bonus (+0 – 5%)
- Status Power Bonus (+0 – 8%)
- Healing Recieved Bonus (+0 – 12%)

A lot of these penalties and Stat bonuses seemed to be aimed at making more stats viable or even needed to some degree. Though, brute force will likely still work to the same effect it always has, just a bit riskier.

New Item Tiers: Apocalypse Items

Apocalypse Items are Upgraded Epic and Legendary Items. These updated items come with a third mod, which has its own exclusive pool of mods which is both more limited and has unique offerings for some gear pieces. Some of these mods are very powerful and can be worth searching for.

Outriders Worldslayer - Apocalypse Items

With a new “rarity” of items, comes a matching resource, Anomaly Extract. Anomaly Extract is used when crafting (leveling up) Apocalypse Items. Similar to Titanium, it can drop from select enemies, like Expedition Bosses, or be collected from dismantling Apocalyse items.

Worldslayer Campaign

The Worldslayer Expansion adds a brand new storyline, that continues from the end of the original campaign. As a quick but spoiler-free summary, this new campaign has you trying to survive the expanding Anomaly, and discovering many new things about the world including new foes and additional collectibles. It also has a ton of amazing scenery to look at, which alone can be worth it for some players.

While the Campaign isn’t super long, being able to be completed in just a handful hours , completing it does open up a new Progression system, Pax Points; as well as the new endgame content, Trial of Tarya Gratar.

New Progression System: Pax Points

Pax Points are a new Progression system that really allow you to refine your build and make them incredibly strong. Throughout the Worldslayer Campaign and the Trial of Tarya Gratar, you’ll gain a max of five Pax Points to be spent in the Pax Tree for your Class.

While you may think you won’t gain much from just 5 passive bonuses, these bonuses are all quite strong and offer a lot of power to various builds. As a quick example of such, Pyromancers are able to get multiple bonuses to Cooldown Reduction, including a lot of potential to reset cooldowns entirely.

To learn more, check out the Pax Skills and Pax Points Guide for Outriders Worldslayer.

New Expedition: Trial of Tarya Gratar

The Trial of Tarya Gratar is a lengthy, “Choose-your-own-adventure” type of Expedition. It consists of a static layout of several rooms, that features multiple unique bosses, randomized enemy factions for some areas, targeted loot chests, and High Ascension XP Gain.

Similar to other Expedition content, you’ll get 3 attempts to clear the Trial of Tarya Gratar. Upon failing an encounter, you’ll only be sent back to the previous Room or Crossroad, allowing you to re-attempt the same room or choose a different path instead of starting from the beginning.

Each path has its own rewards, with each room having a loot chest at the end, with some side paths that contain Troves or Chests that have a higher chance of dropping specific gear slots over others, which allow for more targeted farming.

A full run of the Trial of Tarya Gratar can take a fair bit of time for a less optimized build, but will generally take around an hour or so for a quick clear and up to 2 hours for a full-loot clear. This makes it very time-consuming, but very rewarding if you can open all the troves and take on all the bosses.

Full Outriders: Worldslayer Patch Notes

Changes to the Base Game

The release of Worldslayer will require a game update for all players, regardless of whether you have purchased Worldslayer or not. Key changes that this update will introduce to the base game are:

Implementation of Apocalypse Tiers up to Tier 15.
- These replace Challenge Tiers, but can be applied to the story campaign (instead of applying World Tiers to the story campaign). This will allow you to play through the story campaign on difficulty tiers that can match your current progression.
- You will likely notice some changes in the difficulty of expeditions as well, as Apocalypse Tiers are slightly different to their equivalent Challenge Tiers during these levels.
Balancing changes for gear and mods.
- These are explained more in depth in the “Worldslayer Balancing” thread, but you will be playing with the same balancing data tables as Worldslayer players. Upgrading to Worldslayer will not change your balancing, but it will grant you access to all new Worldslayer gear and mods, including Apocalypse Gear.
Various bug fixes.
Performance and networking optimizations.

New Campaign, New Enemies, New Environments

Outriders Worldslayer introduces a brand new, standalone story campaign that you can jump into even if you haven’t played the original story.
The new campaign will focus on the Outrider facing up against Ereshkigal (phonetically: “EH-RESH-KE-GAL”), the commander of a new human faction called the Insurgents against the backdrop of Enoch’s climate undergoing cataclysmic changes.
- Ereshkigal may well be considered “The First Altered”.
Throughout Worldslayer you will of course also be travelling to new locations. You can see footage from the Glacier’s Edge and Driftwater environments in press coverage this week. Both are environments from relatively early on in the campaign.
Worldslayer will introduce new enemy variants as well as some entirely new adversaries and bosses. You may have spotted some of them in our Spotlight already and we do plan on showcasing more of them in future via our social channels.

New Gear

Outriders Worldslayer will of course introduce a host of new gear, both in terms of weaponry and armour.
Each class will be getting dedicated new 5-piece Legendary Armour Sets.
Worldslayer does also introduce a few new 3-piece Legendary Armour Sets, which will be universally equipable by all classes. These will have their own set bonuses as well.
- Note: Some of the previous Legendary Armour Sets and Mods will also be reworked as part of the Worldslayer launch! We’ll talk more about these at or shortly before launch.
Each new Legendary Gear piece introduced in Worldslayer also comes with a new Mod.
We’re planning to show off some of the special Gear you can obtain in Worldslayer on our social channels between now and launch – make sure to follow us there if you’re interested!

New PAX Class Trees

Outriders Worldslayer introduces a new class tree: The PAX tree.
The PAX tree is a separate class tree from the existing three branches you’re familiar with and it requires it’s own PAX points to activate nodes within it.
PAX points are acquired at certain points in Worldslayer that are based on general progress rather than a specific level grind.
The PAX tree itself is comprised of 2 branches for each class, though similar to the main skill tree, these are interlinked.
Each node in the PAX tree is equivalent to the major nodes in the original class trees, so every choice you make in the PAX tree will be impactful to the performance of your Outrider.
Just like the main skill tree, the PAX tree can be freely respec’d.
The idea behind the PAX tree is to allow players to either specialise further into a specific direction or to better enable hybrid builds.
The branches of each PAX tree are called:
- Pyromancer
  - Gunblazer
  - Pyromaniac
- Technomancer
  - Desolator
  - Overseer
- Devastator
  - Wrecker
  - Tectonic Shifter
- Trickster
  - Spectre
  - Exploiter
The PAX tree will unlock at level 30 after you start playing the Worldslayer campaign.

New Ascension System

Outriders Worldslayer introduces a new longterm progression system called Ascension.
The idea of Ascension is to give your continued play an ongoing “next level” to work towards alongside regular play.
Continued Ascension by itself does not unlock or gate better gear or content. It is purely designed to make you stronger.
The Ascension system is currently balanced so that it would take you hundred+ hours to fully complete it.
Leveling up Ascension is done by collecting exp from killing enemies. It is only available from Character Level 30 onwards and with Worldslayer installed.
XP earned after Level 30 will go towards Ascension Levels which in turn provide you with Ascension Points.
You will be able to invest your Ascension Points into any of the four Ascension categories: Brutality, Endurance, Prowess or Anomaly.
Each of these categories have five options in which to invest.
- For example, you could invest your points to reduce your cooldowns, increase your life or resistances or output more damage.
Each option in each category can have up to 10 Ascension Points invested into it.
You can reach level 200 Ascension in Worldslayer, for a total of 200 Ascension Points. At 200 Ascension Points, you will have completely filled out each option in each category.
You can mix and match where you invest your points and you can always freely respec your Ascension Point distribution.
Like the newly introduced PAX Tree, Ascension is intended to allow players to either supercharge a specific build or to better create a hybrid build that works across multiple playstyles.

Introducing the Apocalypse System and Third Mod Slot

As a reminder, the Tiers systems in Outriders allow each player to fine-tune the difficulty of the game to their own needs. Higher Tiers mean higher difficulty but also improved rewards and the ability to equip higher level gear.
Outriders Worldslayer introduces a new Apocalypse system that heavily impacts your Max Gear Equip level, the Difficulty Tiers system and, most importantly, Loot.
Challenge Tiers are being replaced by Apocalypse Tiers.
- This change will affect all versions of Outriders, even if you do not have Worldslayer installed.
Apocalypse Tiers will determine not just the difficulty and reward scaling of Expeditions but also of all Worldslayer content (campaign and endgame).
Apocalypse Tiers will go up to Tier 40 and will act as a natural extension of World Tiers which do still remain in place for the original Outriders campaign. The original Outriders campaign can, however, be played using Apocalypse Tiers instead, should you have Worldslayer installed.
- The max Apocalypse Tier you can unlock by completing Expeditions content in the base game (without Worldslayer installed) is 15.
- With Worldslayer installed, you can still play Expeditions to continue unlocking higher Apocalypse Tiers above Tier 15.
- At Apocalypse Tier 15, your Max Gear Equip Level will still be Level 50, as it currently is.
- At Apocalypse Tier 40, your Max Gear Equip Level will be Level 75, which is the new gear level cap.
When playing above a certain Apocalypse Tier, there will be a chance for Apocalypse Gear to drop.
- Apocalypse Gear pieces are special variants of Epic and Legendary Gear pieces in the game.
- Apocalypse Gear pieces have three mod slots.
- Apocalypse Gear can currently only be obtained through drops, it cannot be crafted.
- You can identify Apocalypse Gear by a special icon when hovering over it.

Worldslayer Balancing

Worldslayer will be introducing a host of new features and systems, while also changing and expanding upon some of the things you will already be familiar with. These are changes that have been in the works since the New Horizon update last November, with hundreds of entities within the game being affected in some way. Bearing that in mind, listing out minute changes line by line would be both overwhelming AND it would still leave you without the context of Worldslayer balancing that can only be understood by playing Worldslayer. However, as we are always keen to share with you what we’ve been up to, we will use this post to share the overall directions and balancing philosophies that have underpinned the upcoming changes. Understanding these should give you an early insight into the changes you can expect when launching Worldslayer next week. Most of these changes were tested during the Worldslayer Beta’s earlier this year (Thank you again to all Beta testers!) and they seemed to land well with players, so we’re excited to roll them out to everyone else next week.

What follows will hopefully give you a bit of insight into what is coming and will also point out how much we have tried to focus on improving the player experience and buffing aspects of underperforming content. This should give you the trust that should we ever need to address something, we will do our best to do so in a positive way and that a nerf would only be implemented if we are unable to resolve the associated problems in any other way in a reasonable timeframe.

General state of combat and difficulty

To kick things off, let’s take a quick look on how the original game’s combat shaped out to be in the endgame. At launch, Outriders’ combat was extremely volatile, pun not intended. Some of you will likely remember some of the spikes in difficulty when trying to progress through expeditions. For some players, these spikes were like hitting a brick wall – something they felt they simply could not overcome. Our pre-launch vision for Outriders was that progress through Challenge Tiers would take time and that it would take a great deal of experience, knowledge, and build-optimization to push through those spikes. While some players appreciated the challenge, we do understand that many others were frustrated, thus spawning the “Carry-Culture” where some players wanted to be carried especially through Challenge Tiers 9 and 10.

With Worldslayer, it is our aim to bring a more streamlined and stable environment for all players. With the introduction of Apocalypse Tiers (which replace Challenge Tiers, even in the base game) we were able to look into the enemy damage curves and make them less steep. Additionally, we further reduced the spike threshold and adjusted the amount of damage events occurring within a second. You may remember the spike threshold/damage events within one second discussion from when especially glass cannon players suffered from what was thought to be one-shot deaths. The changes introduced in Worldslayer will decompress the difficulty curve across Tiers. In essence, playing through the Worldslayer campaign on low and mid Tiers should provide a much more pleasant experience as opposed to climbing Challenge Tiers. The difficulty will then ramp up on higher Tiers, compounding into an endgame challenge, which those players aiming for the most difficult of challenges will still appreciate.

Note that we are keeping a close eye on difficulty and progression in Worldslayer, specifically the speed at which players progress through Apocalypse Tiers and when or if they get stuck somewhere. We may adjust this progression in future, depending on player feedback and our data. We’ll keep an eye on whether players are progressing into Tiers faster than their gear can keep up (which can lead to difficulty spikes) and whether progression into higher Tiers remains fun.

Builds, Sets & Mods – Over & underperformers

Over the past year, despite our best efforts, there was a visible gap between certain sets or builds. Reasons for this may vary between either set bonuses or keystone mods, but the net result was that there was a pool of builds that were simply not competitive enough to sit comfortably along (or even around) the “meta” builds. Examples of those meta builds include the Borealis Technomancer, Acari Pyromancer, Seismic Commander Devastator and (post New Horizon) Trespasser Trickster.

Unfortunately, balancing patches can only go so far, and we weren’t able to fully bridge the canyon caused by the differences in output between these builds and others. Despite our intentions to end the “time-trial” meta by removing timers from expeditions and thus allowing players to take as long as they wanted with the content, we still observed that many players continued to gravitate towards the meta builds mentioned above. While it was absolutely possible to complete CT15 Expeditions with other builds or sets, the natural inclination to pick these meta-defining builds over others remained. This was quite sobering to observe, as it took away from the core Outriders drive – to have fun wreaking havoc with whatever build one’s mind could come up with. And while we acknowledge that the “burden of optimal play” is more often than not the deciding factor in choosing what to play, we stand by the philosophy that players should be able to forge fun in their own way, instead of being railroaded away from specific builds just because they deal less damage. A preferred playstyle should not be sacrificed for the sake of performance. Likewise, killing enemies fast should not be the only determining factor whether a build in Outriders is viable or not across the entire spectrum of skill.

Furthermore, we found that a majority of players were using a certain mods or builds in unexpected ways, perhaps because these elements did not fit the community vision of the respective build. Rather than attempt to force through their original design, we have tried to bend those things in a way so as to better fit what the community was trying to do with them.

We also know that some base game sets and mods did not offer any real, effective combat value (or had fundamental hindrances) and were subsequently perceived as lackluster. We gave them an extreme makeover and we implemented balancing changes so that such sets and builds could offer unique playstyles, instead of just copying what the top-tier meta ones did.

What Worldslayer also allowed us to do was make complex changes beyond simple numerical tweaks. With all this in mind, we rebalanced the top performers to bring them in line with other build options while at the same time buffing the underdogs to level the playing field. Examples:

The Torturer set has become a dedicated hypercleave set, sharing a portion of the main target’s damage with all enemies affected by its aura.
The Plague Sower will now not just provide a defensive benefit but will also add offensive boosts against enemies suffering from Toxic.

Earlier on we mentioned fundamental hindrances: We had a look into why certain sets were able to perform to some degree but were ultimately never really able to spread their wings. The Marshal’s set is such an example:

For the Marshal’s set we removed the target limitation, which will allow players to more readily capitalize on grouping multiple enemies with Endless Mass.

Then, there are Mods…

We had an extensive look at which mods are “must haves”, which were consistently underperforming and which simply did not support their own dedicated playstyle. We reworked those too – quick example:

The “Asunder” mod for Earthquake now reduces Resistance instead of Armor, which means that it will directly increase the damage of Anomaly Power Devastators who would be relying on the skill.

There are of course many more such tweaks, many of which are aimed at providing improved cohesion and synergies with their associated builds.

Weapons’ balance

The state of the weapons meta was another big topic of discussion, both within the community and internally. We saw the over-reliance on Tactical variant Assault rifles which proved to be very powerful all-rounders. Instead of simply nerfing the Tactical variant, we took a broader look at all weapon variants to see how we could increase the fun and viability of other weapons and variants. While nerfing Tac AR would likely have been the easier and faster solution, it would probably not have solved the underlying problem that the underplayed types had in the first place.

To use a metaphor of a 200m sprint: It would be like untying the laces of one contestant while the others still are still running barefooted. Sticking with the metaphor for a moment, we chose to provide footwear for everyone else.

We looked at which weapon types struggled in what way, and we aimed to provide precision buffs in places where we had the capacity to do so. Most commonly you will see tweaks to Damage and Range for many variants, as well as changes to Accuracy, Stability, RPM or Critical Multipliers in others.

These changes were tested during the most recent Worldslayer Beta and seemed to have a big positive impact on how players felt about weapons balance overall.

It is our hope that Worldslayer brings a breath of fresh air to the weapons pool and that players will finally be able to run with the gun and variant they prefer instead of the one they feel…shoehorned into.

Amplifier Builds – Long live the King

Have you done your math homework? We have, for Worldslayer.

During the course of the base game’s lifecycle we observed the unchallenged dominance of percentage (%) damage multipliers as primary build components, which enabled hyperscaling of the highest order.

The best performing builds were mainly comprised of passive % amplifiers gated behind simple conditions, leaving very little room for personal preference or unique gameplay ideas. The notorious pre-New Horizon Fortress is a good such example, as it provided a flat but huge % increase to damage with no skill or gameplay required.

A more current example would be a common weapon-based Borealis Monarch Technomancer build. This build stacks Freezing Boost, Shatter, Radical Therapy, Euthaniser, Dark Sacrifice, Purge nodes, Long Range Damage and a few other such amplifiers. This relentless stacking of high value amplifiers led players multiplying their damage nearly 5 times over, all for the single unique cost of… being able to calculate it all. Which could be easily done even outside the game itself.

In Worldslayer we have carefully considered our stance on such builds and we feel that if build pieces that require very little “active gameplay effort” remain as potent as they are, other builds or ideas will never get close enough in output to match them. Again, the Fortress rework we implemented last year is a good preview of that philosophy, as we as much as possible tried to maintain its overall strength but added gameplay requirements to triggering it (e.g. landing and stacking successful shots).

One of the biggest balancing changes in Worldslayer that you will observe will be the reduction of % damage multipliers across the board. Our intent is to move those pieces of build progression from the “absolutely essential” category and make them fit in as more supplementary to builds.

With new content being released, rather than continuing to uphold gameplay elements that are in effect nothing more than higher numbers being displayed on screen with very little thought or concentration required, we wanted to actively engage players to be able to use and rely on their own player-skill.

However, this does not mean that amplifier builds will no longer be viable. There is still a place for them in the grand scheme of things, but they should ideally no longer hold the dominant and unchallenged top spot. This is one of the many steps we took in creating a more equal environment for different builds and playstyles.

Triggers

As part of our work to improve the overall balance in Worldslayer, we took an intensive look at the many triggers on both weapon and armor mods.

As always, we closely watched how different triggers behave in solo versus co-op environments and how reliable they tended to be. The biggest problem here were “On Kill” triggers, as there was an extreme swing in their reliability when comparing Single to Multiplayer play-sessions, especially when the peer-to-peer connection relied on a less than ideal host. Connectivity aside, in both solo and multiplayer, “On Kill” effect were also found to be unreliable as they would not trigger if an enemy was killed by damage over time (DOT) status effects or other factors.

There were also cases of very hard to fulfill triggers, such as the “Aura of Force” mod’s “Critical On-Kill” trigger providing Anomaly Power. In a realistic scenario, this trigger would be highly unlikely to occur for dedicated builds that were tuned to AP damage instead of FP output.

We approached these issues in two ways: We streamlined the hard-to-fulfill or unreliable triggers in order to make those mods more effective in the long haul. We also transitioned many of the “On-Kill” or “Critical Kill” triggers to “Successful Shot” or “Critical Shot”.

Additionally, by reworking triggers on weapon mods especially, we guaranteed that many defensive and utilitarian mods will now occur when their value is the highest in combat. A good example here would be “Dome of Protection” occurring on “Successful Shots”, which will allow the player to spawn it right at combat start when enemy pressure is the highest. Previously, this mod required players to kill a target with a bullet and that would often only occur when Dome of Protection’s effect was less required than at the start of combat.

Finally, we unified hereditary mods into the same triggers so there would be no dissonance when switching or upgrading from one to other, such as from Bone Shrapnel to Ultimate Bone Shrapnel. Previously, Bone Shrapnel had a “On-Kill” trigger, where as Ultimate Bone Shrapnel had a “Critical Shot” trigger.

Check out our full Outriders Guides and News coverage here on VULKK.com. In the game’s category, you will find a number of beginner-friendly guides as well as content that is more suitable for the more advanced players, the completionist, and the hard-core farmer as well!

Outriders Essential Beginners Guides

This list showcases some of our top Outriders Beginners Guides - instructional content to help you get into the game, learn the basics and get a nice smooth start with your adventures on Enoch.