New World Endgame Guide: Expeditions, Trials, and Gearing Up

Once you hit level 65 in New World, the real game opens up. The main story is done, but expeditions, mutations, raid-style trials, and artifact farming are where you'll spend most of your time. The endgame can feel scattered at first because the game throws a lot of systems at you all at once, and very little of it is explained in order.

This is the map of how it all connects, what gear score to chase, and what to go after first. Gear score is the thread running through the whole thing. Most of what you do at max level is about climbing from 650 up toward the 725 cap, one piece at a time.

Expedition Mutation Difficulty and Weekly Rotation Explained

Mutated expeditions are the harder, endgame versions of the normal 5-player dungeons. Same layout, same bosses, but the enemies hit harder, have more health, and pick up an elemental twist. If you've cleared the normal version of a dungeon, the mutated version is the next step up.

The three tiers

There are three difficulty tiers, and people just call them M1, M2, and M3. Each one bumps the gear score you need and the punishment you take.

• M1 unlocks around 650 gear score. This is the gentle on-ramp and a fine place to learn a dungeon.
• M2 wants roughly 675. Sloppy play starts getting punished here.
• M3 is the top tier. You'll want 695 or better before you queue, because the damage gets mean and under-geared players get chunked.

These are not hard locks. You can queue under-geared if you really want to. The catch is that the dungeon scales your effectiveness down when you're below the band, so your hits turn soft and the enemies hit like trucks. Better to gear up first and actually do damage.

The four elemental flavors

The elemental part is what trips people up. Each week the featured dungeon gets one of four flavors, and the flavor changes how you gear for it.

• Overgrown is nature damage.
• Indomitable is ancient, and it's the mean one. Ancient enemies lifesteal and can throw up a phalanx wall that blocks projectiles, which ruins ranged groups.
• Desiccated is void.
• Promethean is fire.

The trick with the element is that it works both ways. The enemies get resistant to that element, and a chunk of their own damage converts to it. So you want two things every week. Gear up to resist that element, and stop dealing it.

For resistance, the standard loadout is eight cut elemental gems slotted across your armor plus a matching elemental amulet. Match the gem to the week's element. That pushes your absorption above the fortify cap and keeps you alive through the big hits. On offense, swap off any weapon or gem that deals the week's element. Running a fire build into a Promethean week feels awful, because everything you hit just shrugs it off.

How the weekly rotation works

The rotation runs weekly. The game picks a couple of dungeons, assigns each a mutation type, and the combo shifts at the Friday reset. It's not a perfectly predictable loop, which is good and bad. Good, because it keeps the dungeon pool fresh. Bad, because if you're chasing a specific named drop from one dungeon, you might wait weeks for it to come back into the mutation pool. There are trackers online that list the current week so you can plan around it.

There's also a weekly cap on how many mutated runs pay out rewards. You can't just grind one dungeon forever for loot, so it pays to spread your runs across the featured dungeons and use the cap wisely.

Best Gear Score Targets for Barnacles, Tempest's Heart, and Savage Divide

These three are your marquee level 65 expeditions. Each has a normal version and cycles into the mutation rotation. Here's what to aim for in each, and where the numbers come from.

Barnacles & Black Powder

Pirate-themed and full of Lost enemies, with Admiral Blackpowder and Neredid as the big bosses. Lost enemies are weak to strike and ice, so blunt weapons and ice builds chew through the trash packs pretty fast. For the normal run, around 650 gets you through fine. Once it rotates into mutations, treat it like any other dungeon. 650 for M1, 675 for M2, 695-plus for M3.

Tempest's Heart

This is the corrupted-themed finale with the Isabella fight at the end, and it hits hard even on normal. Most groups want 660 to 670 for a smooth clear, because the later bosses do a lot of burst damage and squishy players get one-shot. The corrupted theme means void and ancient damage flying around, so a balanced resist setup helps more than stacking one element. Mutations follow the same 650/675/695 ladder as everywhere else.

Savage Divide

Added with the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, this one is an elemental-chaos themed run with shifting damage types inside the dungeon. Because the damage types mix and match, a spread resist setup matters more than hyper-focusing on one element. Aim for 670-plus on normal before you pug it. Mutations, same ladder again.

The gear score ladder and the climb

The pattern worth remembering is that 650 unlocks M1, 675 unlocks M2, and 695-plus unlocks M3, and that ladder is the same no matter which of the three dungeons is featured. Seven hundred is the practical ceiling most people chase, because at 700 with good perks you can clear basically everything in the game. The push from 700 to 725 is the long grind, and it mostly matters for shaving time off M3 clears and staying comfortable in raids.

One thing that catches people: don't swap a 700 piece with great perks for a 725 piece with junk perks. The perks matter more than the last 25 score, pretty much every time.

How you actually climb is the question. The cheap path to 650 and 675 is a mix of faction vendor armor (675 base, decent filler), trading post buys, open-world loot, and chests in the high-level zones. From there, you run M1 and M2 for better drops. You won't jump straight to 700. It's a slow climb where you fill slots one at a time, and that's normal.

Artifact Weapons Worth Farming and Where to Find Them

Artifacts are the special named items with a unique perk you can't get anywhere else, and the weapon ones genuinely reshape how a build plays. Each weapon type has at least one. Here are the ones worth the farm, sorted by what you might be playing.

Melee damage

Serenity (greatsword) grants stacking empower in the offense stance, up to a nice chunk of bonus damage. It's a top pick for greatsword players. Source is the PvP rewards track, level 29 and up.

Finisher (rapier) gives bonus damage to bleeding targets plus cooldown reduction on Flourish and Finish. Pairs naturally with a bleed setup. Source is the open-world boss Monrapala the Unruled, in the northeast of Elysian Wilds.

Ranged and magic

Boltcaster (bow) converts almost all of its damage to lightning and builds toward a lightning bolt proc on basic attacks. Source is the open-world boss Annoyed Aguascia, also in the northeast of Elysian Wilds. It's one of three gorilla mobs out there.

Inferno (fire staff) scales partly off strength, which is unusual for a magic weapon, and gives a damage boost when you fight up close. Source is Commander Marius in the mutated Empyrean Forge.

Deep Freeze (ice gauntlet) makes frozen, rooted, and chilled enemies take extra damage. Source is Snorok Ice Fist in the mutated Glacial Tarn.

Tank and support

The Wall (tower shield) gives a flat damage reduction, more stamina, and less elemental damage taken, in exchange for locking out dodging. It's a cornerstone tank artifact. Source is Heru in the mutated Ennead.

Odo (flail) gives bonus damage to stunned or knocked-down foes, plus lifesteal and a heal on block. Source is Vanash in the southeast of Elysian Wilds.

Heceta (life staff) makes heavy attacks after you cast abilities grant allies a big chunk of damage absorption, and it comes with Blessed built in. Source is Parthenocissus in Restless Shore.

Bruiser options

The Abyss (great axe) converts nearly all of its damage to void, scales off both strength and intelligence, and boosts your damage when your mana runs low. A favorite bruiser pick for group content. Source is the level 65 Corrupted Breaches. You find groups for these in global chat, usually labeled something like "x portals."

Notes on the grind

The open-world bosses respawn on timers, and some only show up at night. The spear artifact, Scorpion's Sting, drops off Scorpio Supernal in Brimstone Sands, and that boss only spawns at night. A few artifacts live on the PvP rewards track or in Outpost Rush caches, so if you avoid PvP entirely you'll miss those ones.

Once you have an artifact, you upgrade it toward 725 with the Goldcursed Coconut from the weekly Cursed Mists free-for-all. The catch is that only one artifact at a time gets the upgrade resource each week, so pick what you actually use first and upgrade that one.

Building a Balanced Group Comp for Trial Bosses

The word "trial" in New World covers a few different things, so it helps to split them up. You've got 5-player expedition content, the 10-player Hive of Gorgons raid, and the big 20-player Trial of the Devourer, which is the sandworm raid. The comp rules scale with the size of the group.

The 5-player foundation

Every expedition group is built on the same skeleton. One tank, one healer, three damage dealers.

The tank holds aggro with taunt gems (a carnelian slotted in the weapon) and keeps the bosses turned away from the rest of the group. The healer keeps the tank alive and patches up the avoidable damage. The three damage slots are where you want variety, because different bosses punish different attack ranges and you always want someone who can hit the safe target.

A good mix is one melee, one ranged, and one flex. Bring rend, which is armor reduction, and some form of crowd control. A group with no rend kills things slowly. A group with no crowd control gets swarmed during the add phases. Cover both and the runs get a lot smoother.

The 10-player raid

The Hive of Gorgons raid roughly doubles the 5-player idea. Two tanks, two healers, and the rest damage, with at least one of those healers running a void gauntlet offhand for the utility it brings. The bosses here have phase transitions and enrage timers, so sustained damage matters more than burst. Make sure someone is tracking debuffs and someone else is on add cleanup, because the floor damage adds up fast if nobody is watching it.

The 20-player sandworm

The Trial of the Devourer has its own meta, and it's oddly specific. The classic comp runs in two mirrored 10-player squads. Each squad brings one or two tanks, two healers running void gauntlet for the lights mechanic, and around four bow damage dealers, with the rest as melee.

The worm fight actually favors a ranged tank setup, meaning a bow or mage with a carnelian gem and taunts, because the boss mechanics punish melee positioning. Across the full 20 people you're looking at roughly two to four tanks, four healers, eight or so ranged, and the remaining slots as melee.

Coordination is the whole fight. Lights need to be called and cleansed on a kick order, off-tanks wrangle the add phase, and the main tank holds the boss on a fixed spot. A raid full of great individual players but no communication wipes. A raid with okay players and a clear call structure clears. The sandworm rewards the group that talks more than the group that gear-checks.

Across all three sizes, the rule is the same. Cover your roles, bring rend and crowd control, and never stack the same damage type if the boss or the week's mutation resists it. Adapt the comp to the encounter instead of running one setup for everything.

Umbral Shards and Named Gear Progression After Level 65

Quick honesty note up front, because this trips up returning players. The old umbral shard system that long-time vets remember got replaced when the level cap moved to 65 and the gear score cap shifted to 700. People still call the endgame upgrade grind "the shard grind" out of habit, and a lot of older guides still use that word. The current system does the same job, just through the Gypsum Kiln and a currency called Chromatic Seals.

Here's how it actually works now.

Getting named drops to 700

Named items are the fixed-perk loot that drops from expedition bosses, and they're the backbone of an endgame build because the perks never roll random. You always know what you're getting. The catch is that they drop at a gear score you have to push up.

The Gypsum Kiln is where that happens. You feed it materia, about a thousand per named item, and the Kiln crafts that piece at 700 gear score. You get materia from the daily expedition quests, which hand out roughly a thousand each, so one daily quest funds one named craft. That's a clean loop. Run your daily expedition, bank the materia, craft a named piece at 700.

Pushing toward 725 with Chromatic Seals

From 700, the climb to the 725 cap runs on Chromatic Seals. Each named item needs three seals to finish the push, and seals cost gold plus faction tokens, around 5,000 gold and 20,000 tokens apiece. The real gate is that you can only buy one seal per day from the vendor.

That daily limit is the actual bottleneck, not the gold or the tokens. Start buying seals early, even before you have the gear to spend them on, because the thing slowing you down is how fast the vendor restocks. Earning the currency is the easy part.

Artifacts and heartrunes

Artifacts skip the materia path entirely. You upgrade those with the weekly Goldcursed Coconut from the Cursed Mists free-for-all, one coconut per artifact per week, straight to 725. Heartrunes, which are your big cooldown ability items, use gypsum orbs and matrices from the same orb system.

Gypsum orbs are the flexible currency here, so keep a steady supply of them. They feed matrices, named upgrades, artifact work, and heartrunes all at once, which makes them the thing you never want to run out of.

Where to spend your effort

Don't try to max everything at once. Pick one build, get every slot to 700 with good perks, then push that build to 725. Only then start on a second role. Players who spread their seals across five half-finished builds end up with nothing fully usable.

The fastest currency loop is two mutated expeditions a day for the gold and materia, the three daily regular expeditions, your bonus faction missions, and one Chromatic Seal purchase. Run that loop and the gear climbs on its own over a few weeks.

One last thing that saves gold. Check the trading post before you craft a named piece. Sometimes a named item is listed cheap by someone who doesn't know what they have, and buying it beats spending a week of materia and seals to make your own. The endgame is long, but it's steady, and the 725 set fills in piece by piece if you just show up each day.