This New World build guide features the Great Axe and Warhammer. The “Warring Bruiser” Build focuses on Damage-dealing in PvP as its primary playstyle!
The Guide is up-to-date for Patch 1.9.2
Table of contents
These weapon pairings are building off our other Weapon Guides, so if you’re not entirely sure why we are or aren’t recommending a certain passive, be sure to give those a look as they give a lot of context to the decisions made for these builds.
“Warring Bruiser” Build Playstyle
The Warring Bruiser is a PvP-focused build that’s centered around primarily wars but will work in all PvP content. It’s an incredibly fun build once you get things set up, and can deal tons of damage
This build is a highly popular and staple PvP build for Wars, which unfortunately means that getting BiS gear will often not be cheap. However, achieving such a setup can make the build absolutely devastating to your foes, in addition to your in-game coffers.
Great Axe
The Great Axe is the bread and butter of many variations of a Bruiser build, highly regarded for its damage potential and lockdown capabilities. Between the three skills used for this build and your basic attacks, the Great Axe is the go-to PvP weapon for Wars for the devastating impact it can have.
This makes it the primary weapon of the build and the one that will deal most of your damage. It’ll do so through the use of Charge, Maelstrom, and of course Gravity Well.
Charge is primarily used as a disengage tool, being a mobility skill that’s difficult to interrupt and allows you to make a quick exit when your health gets critical. Maelstrom is your AoE Burst skill, allowing you to take down multiple foes at the same time when used well. Gravity Well is the opener skill that pulls your foes into tight groups giving you the most benefit from both Maelstrom and Shockwave from your War Hammer.
The passive tree for the Great Axe is built around dealing the most amount of damage while still getting some additional defenses to keep you up. This allows this Bruiser build to deal incredible damage while still being very durable.
Passives like Crowded Protection, Enduring Strike, Critical Gains, Feed, and Mauler’s Resolve take advantage of the playstyle of the build to both bolster your defenses and get a bit of extra sustain. While passives like Center of Attention, Mauler’s Fury, Greed, Keen Edge, and Critical Condition take advantage of similar conditions for offensive damage boosts.
Among the offensive passives, Mauler’s Fury is notable as it provides an insanely strong damage boost, which is why we opt for it in the build. Since our focus is grouping up opponents and beating them down, it’ll be hard to not be at a high or even max stack of this passive.
Among the defensive passives, Enduring Strikes is notable for the 12% damage reduction during Grit. While we don’t use heavy attacks, all of our attacks will carry Grit due to having 300 Constitution, meaning while we’re attacking Enduring Strikes is active. Mauler’s Resolve is also a notable bonus as the Stamina it provides can get you out of a sticky situation, giving you a boost of stamina that can be used for additional dodges.
For more information regarding the Great Axe, you can refer to our Great Axe Weapon Guide. This guide covers all the skills and passives in-depth and suggests build options for leveling with.
War Hammer
The War Hammer is known for the consistent crowd control it can apply. In this bruiser build it becomes quite disruptive due to the looming threat of using Shockwave to follow up on a Gravity well from the Great Axe.
The War Hammer is your secondary weapon for this build. It’ll primarily be used as your tool for applying plenty of crowd control and AoE damage. As such, it’ll use Armor Breaker, Shockwave, and Path of Destiny.
For this build, Shockwave is the star ability, giving you means to follow up on Gravity Well from the Great Axe and stun foes making them unable to escape the Gravity Well at all. It also doubles as a defensive cooldown, stunning anyone that tries to jump you and giving you time to create some distance.
Path of Destiny covers a huge area, which will stagger foes while dealing damage that also can recover large portions of our health via Prevailing Spirit. Armor Breaker serves as a decent filler ability, should we stun an opponent and not have Maelstrom ready on our Great Axe.
This Skill Tree looks to maximize the capabilities of the War Hammer by combining a multitude of debuffs with the AoE capabilities of the weapon. It does so by combining Aftershock with Exhaustive Attacks to apply an additional Slow and Exhaust on top of any Stuns or Staggers.
Much like the Great Axe, it utilizes passives like Concussive Impact, Power Through Pain, and Epitome of Bonk to boost its damage potential. While passives like Prevailing Spirit, Hardened Steel, and Outnumbered work to bolster its defensive power.
For the offensive passives, Power Through Pain adds a huge boost of damage to our AoE abilities, allowing for strong AoE damage combined with the additional crowd control. Concussive Impact adds to this by giving a further damage boost against debuffed enemies.
Of the defensive passives, Prevailing Spirit allows our AoE attacks to leech health as those AoE bursts go out. Combined with Hardened Steel boosting our defenses when we have grit Active and Outnumbered when there are at least two enemies nearby, it will make us fairly resilient to damage.
For more information on the War Hammer, check out our War Hammer Weapon Guide. This guide coverall all the skills and passives in-depth, and suggests some builds for leveling.
Stats and Gearing
This section will go into detail on how to set up this build. We’ll be talking about armor, gems, and attributes here.
Armor Choices
This build uses Medium Armor. As a Damage focused PvP build, Medium gives us the best mix of offensive power and mobility. Light armor makes the build far too frail defensively, and Heavy armor sacrifices a bit too much damage.
The Build can still be run in Heavy Armor for Wars, but often times you’ll be relegated to taking and holding the objectives, due to your lower mobility. You won’t be able to keep up with the main roaming or “zerg” group as well in terms of damage.
Attribute Points
The ideal stat spread for this build is 300 Constitution and 200 Strength. In most cases, this means eating STR attribute food for the final 40 STR. Alternatively, you can use the CON/STR food with 276 CON and 184 STR for the same stat balance.
Most importantly, this gives us Grit for all our attacks, which we take advantage of through multiple passives for both damage and defense.
Gems
Gems for this setup are very precisely tuned and tested for War by some of the top companies in EU. we’ll be covering two setups here as one is extremely expensive and the other is a bit cheaper.
The first setup is a Void-focused bruiser that uses six Abyssal Runeglass Gems that get used in your Great Axe and Armor. Your Great Axe gets an Abyssal Amethyst, converting a large portion of the damage it deals to Void, while adding an additional Void DoT effect. The Armor can be filled by Abyssal Runeglass variants of the defensive gems listed below.
Our War Hammer will be slotted with an Arboreal Malachite. This allows us to stack another DoT effect during our rotation and boost its damage thanks to being able to consistently apply the crowd control effects that trigger the Malachite bonus. It uses Arobreal Runeglass, as very few people, if any will build defensively against nature damage
Our armor and accessories use a mix of defensive gems, consisting of 4 Pristine Onyx, 3 Pristine Opals, and a Pristine Moonstone. This gives us a balanced set of defensive stats, with an extra bit of Slash protection, which is the most common damage type in Wars.
This results in a final spread of 12% resistance to Slash, 8% to Thrust and Strike, and 7.5% to all elements when using Runeglass gems, which also comes with an additional 10% Void Damage or 5% Melee Damage. This can vary slightly based on which gems are in your accessories and which are using the Runeglass form, as the Runeglass makes the base effect slightly weaker.
If not using Runeglass, these values become 15% to Slash, 10% to Thrust and Strike, and 7.5% to all elements. You can opt to swap an Onyx out for an additional Opal, giving you 12.5% resistance to Slash, 7.5% to Thrust and Strike, and 10% to all elements, which results in a pretty even balance, that forgoes the less common physical types in favor of increased elemental resistance.
For the cheaper setup, the Armor Gems get swapped to Punishing Runeglass, which tends to be less expensive overall. The Great Axe gets swapped to your choice of Elemental DoT Effect with an Opal.
To learn more about Runeglass gems, refer to our Runeglass Gem Guide. This guide covers everything you need to know to craft and use Runeglass Gems.
Perk Options
Perks are a big part of the weapons in New World, they take some of the more unimpressive skills and make them into much bigger threats. Which perks you take and where you place them can alter how a skill gets used.
There is also some rarer named gear that can be found in New World that can have perk combinations that makes them stronger than any gear you could craft, or at the very least give you an alternative way to get a great gear piece. These notable items will be listed in their respective sections after the general perk layout is covered.
Weapons
For our Great Axe, we’ll primarily want to use a Scarab-crafted Great Axe that has Refreshing Move and Thwarting Strikes. These tend to be fairly common and relatively cheap to have crafted or to craft yourself. Refreshing Move helps to recover our cooldowns quicker, while Thwarting Strike boosts the damage of all of our attacks since we have the 300 Strength bonus.
For the third perk, Abyssal Attunement is going to be your BiS for the Void Bruiser type of setup, as it will scale up with the Abyssal Runeglass. If you’re not going for the Void Setup, you’re better off with any Chain Element perk for additional AoE, or Enfeebling Maelstrom to boost its power.
Our War Hammer is focused similarly focused on damage with its main two perks being Sundering Shockwave and Thwarting Strikes. This works fine as a 2-perk item, but an ideal 3rd perk for it is any variation of Elemental Attunement to boost damage or Elemental Chain for additional AoE.
Notable Weapons
With Thwarting Strikes and Refreshing Move both being key parts of the build for the Great Axe, it’s better to craft weapons or find someone that can craft the weapon for you. This is because this perk combination doesn’t appear on any named weapons.
For a decent 2 perk War Hammer, you can opt for Batheqet’s Cudgel. This War Hammer carries our two main perks in Sundering Shockwave and Thwarting Strikes, with Ancient Bane as a 3rd. While it’s not a perfect PvP item, it cna be a decent placeholder until you find better.
Batheqet’s Cudgel drops from “Batheqet of the Cudgel”, found in Heliopolis located in the Brimstone Sands.
Accessories
For our Amulet, the BiS perks are Stamina Recovery, Health, and Slash protection. This bolsters our defenses more against opposing bruisers and other slash weapons. Stamina Recovery acts like a second copy of Mauler’s Resolve, restoring a ton of stamina during critical moments and allowing for additional dodges. If you can only manage to get any combination of two perks, Stamina Recovery and Health are the best ones to get as a priority.
For our Earring, we’ll mainly be looking to get Regenerating and Refreshing, with most other perks being decent options. The extra sustain and shorter cooldowns are the best things we can get from an Earring.
For our Ring, the BiS perks are Invigorated Punishment, Slash Damage and Leeching. Invigorating Punishment and Slash damage are the two big ones, as they add a ton of extra damage
Notable Accessories
As far as Accessories go, there’s only one note-worthy item, the Doom’s Chance Earring. This comes with Regenerating and Refreshing, our two best perks here, and what is arguably the best remaining perk, Refreshing Toast, which lowers potion cooldown for even more sustain options.
This Item comes as a drop from “Alluvium Marl, the Caretaker” from the Garden of Genesis Expedition.
While not completely BiS, The Champion’s Ring and Champion’s Amulet from PvP rewards can be decent placeholders until you’re able to acquire better gear. However, being in the PvP rewards also means it can mean a lot of grinding to get these.
The Champion’s Ring has Invigorating Punishment (when it’s GS 600+), alongside Hearty and Keen Awareness. Invigorating Punishment is the main thing we care about since Crits aren’t nearly as impactful if you’re hitting a target that’s stacked up on Resilient. The extra Stamina from Hearty can be nice, allowing for an extra emergency dodge in some situations.
The Champion’s Amulet has two of our ideal perks in Stamina Recover and Health. When it becomes Legendary it also gains Shirking Empower which isn’t perfect but can be a nice bonus to have until we can get better.
Armor
For Armor, we’ll be looking to achieve the following perks as a baseline across all our armor: 4 stacks of Resilient, 4 Shirking Fortification, and Insatiable Gravity Well. Resilient is great for mitigating critical hits, which can quickly destroy your health without the perk. Shirking Fortification adds a good chunk of defensive power.
When going for BiS gear, the ideal perks are 5 stacks of Resilient, 5 stacks of Shirking Fortification, 3 stacks of Freedom, Insatiable Gravity Well, and Enfeebling Maelstrom. Having capped stacks for both Resilient and Shirking Fortification grants a lot of extra defense that makes the build extremely durable. Enfeebling Maelstrom works in a similar way, by debuffing the opponents with Enfeeble, lowering their damage output.
In the case you have Enfeebling Maelstrom as a third perk on your Great Axe, you can instead opt for Leeching Path of Destiny, to get extra sustain from it. Or if you don’t have Sundering Shockwave on your War Hammer, it can also be slotted here.
Notable Armor
The named lower armor, Regular Pants, is a phenomenal PvP gear piece, despite being light armor. The benefit to this, however, is that it carries a set of great perks for PvP, with a combination of Resilient, Shirking Fortification, and Refreshing. They also have Consitution on them as a set, which is one of the two stats the build uses.
Regular Pants can be gotten as a drop from Heka of the Crossroads, found at the Heka’s Cauldron Point of Interest in Brimstone Sands.
Skill Rotations and Combos
Combo
This build doesn’t feature any major combos, instead looking to perform either the full rotation below, or simply use basic Light attacks.
Rotations
Dodge (if using Opal instead of Amethyst in Great Axe)- Gravity Well
- Shockwave
- Dodge (if using Opal instead of Amethyst in Great Axe)
- Maelstrom
Dodge (if using Opal instead of Amethyst in Great Axe)
Gravity Well
Shockwave
MaelstromThe goal of this skill rotation is to maximize the amount of burst damage you can get on to as many targets as possible.
We open with Gravity Well to group and clump opponents up. We then switch to the War Hammer and use Shockwave to not only stuns foes but applies Sundering Shockwave to boost the damage of the Maelstrom that follows.
If we’re running an Opal in our Great Axe instead of an Amethyst, we’ll want to dodge before we toss out the Gravity well to trigger the Gambit effect of the Opal, increasing damage while our Stamina is not full. We then do this again before using Maelstrom to maximize its damage potential.
Special Thanks
This guide was created in collaboration with vRiddler. vRiddler is an experienced PvPer in New World, having played since launch and taken part in every meta on the EU Servers. Some information is sourced by vRiddler from other experienced PvP players and company members that have been part of the top companies on the EU servers.
This is the end of this very in-depth build guide for New World. From the stat breakdown to skill choices and the provided combos, you have everything you need to make this build work. We hope you enjoy trying this unique weapon pairing.
Here at VULKK.com we have a ton of useful New World Guides and more and more are being published regularly. We also have all of the news and updates covered to keep you up-to-date with all things New World!
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