Greetings, Adventurers!
New World: Aeternum Update 1.3.27 downtime will begin at 5:00 AM PT (1:00 PM UTC) on June 3rd and last approximately 1.5 hours.
Check out the full release notes, including other notable fixes, below.

Seasonal Server 2
- Seasonal Server 2 is our take on a hardcore experience. We’ve built this to reward you for flexing your mastery and knowledge of the game. Additionally, we want to open up all the content for all our players in this time limited experience. The major changes we have made for this server are:
- No Main Questline - We’ve built a new, very expedited quest line to follow. This questline will give you all the experience needed for your character to reach maximum level in approximately 6 hours. It will also introduce you to the new mechanic we’re using for progressing your character on this server, Azerite Tailings.
- Azerite Tailings - Azerite Tailings are an item that can be dropped from multiple different locations in the world and can be used to craft new types of inventory caches for yourself. These caches will be much faster to use for gearing up your character on this server than standard loot drops. These caches can provide everything you need for your characters (such as consumables, gear, and even materials for selecting perks on artifacts.)
- Artifacts Unlimited - On this server, you are able to equip as many artifacts as you would like. We don’t know exactly how powerful these can become, but we want to allow you to experiment in some new ways and try some new gameplay combinations that even we haven’t seen before.
- Death Status Effects - A new status effect will be present on your character when created on this server for tracking your Unfallen or Fallen state, and this is our attempt at a different kind of hardcore experience. Characters who have not died will be considered ‘Unfallen’ and characters who have died will be considered ‘Fallen’. Instead of a traditional hardcore model, where your character is simply deleted on death, this status effect will stack up, granting 25 bonus attributes per stack. However, some challenges can only be completed in an Unfallen state. Group up with others to tackle these objectives and remain Unfallen, but don’t be afraid to keep going if you do Fall, you’ll be getting stronger and stronger.
- War has its own unique status effect. This status effect will provide a higher potential stacking on attributes after death (as well as a damage bonus), but it also reduces your armor and absorptions while active (this is intended to help balance out some of the potential defensive power artifacts can provide). Since this is a time limited server, territory control is not the primary focus, so we wanted to give people an opportunity to experience the mode in a different way. Honestly, we’re hoping you will all go out into the field and bonk each other over the head with foam bats and cardboard tubes for a weekend.
- Earnable Rewards - You will be able to earn new rewards for your character by completing challenges in the Season Journey on this server. These new earnable rewards are Raw Orichalcite Stone which allows you to craft any artifact you want (out of all the artifacts you do not currently own), and Runewood Resin which allows you to craft any T3 trophy you want. There will also be new cosmetics and titles to earn throughout this experience. These rewards will not be claimable on your seasonal character and must be claimed on one of your primary characters.
- Important extra note about the Hardcore server: As the focus of this server is push the limit of characters to the max, including using full sets of artifacts in endgame content such as the Gorgon raid, players will be required to have the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion to participate.

Expeditions Unleashed
With the release of Expeditions Unleashed, we added a dynamic health scaling system for these encounters which will scale up and down the health of creatures and bosses in the encounter based on the number of players in the encounter area. This system has both a minimum and maximum boundary to the scaling and a per player increment. Our intention with this system is that more players should always be a benefit, but except in critically large player numbers, fight duration should be longer and more consistent than it was in past boss events.
With our initial release we set our boundaries to fairly conservative numbers to ensure the system would not have a negative impact to server health due to the longer fights. After reviewing the data from live servers and player sentiment, we’ve seen a positive impact in fight duration within our boundaries but we are seeing significantly higher numbers of players than our upper limit and as a result, the effects of the system were not as impactful as we’d like versus very large numbers of players (ie greater than 40).
With this update we decided to increase that upper boundary to accommodate larger groups of players. We are making this change cautiously to avoid strain on the servers and, depending on the outcome, we may revisit these settings again in the future.

Combat & Game Modes
- Increased the bow's damage by 1.86% and musket by 1.68% in PvP.
- Upheaval - Reduced attack damage from 200% to 180% and reduced tactician upgrade CDR from 25% to 20%.
- Vampire's Vestments - Increased lifesteal amount from 10% to 17%.
- Lich Gloves - Increased empower (6% to 10%) and reduced cooldown (5s to 3s).
- Updated the Attuned Leather Pants and Old Crown to grant 11 attributes instead of 10.
- Vital Synergy - Reduced values for the stamina regen and healing bonus from 20% to 15%.
- Fixed an issue where target dummies could become 'immune' and no longer generate damage numbers.
- OPR - Buildable items are no longer allowed to be placed at the teleport locations through Gates and Barriers.
- Fixed an issue where Vital Synergy was reducing the power of the relentless artifact perk.
- Fixed an issue where Arenas didn't have the updated PvP damage values for Blunderbuss and Fire Staff.
- Fixed an issue where the hit boxes for mounts may not have been in the correct locations.
- Fixed an issue where rending stacks didn't have a cooldown allowing repeated activations per hit.

AI/Expeditions
- Fixed an issue that allows players to climb onto Green keepers boulder attack, which would cause incorrect poison pool and boulder spawning.
- Fixed an issue where some of the Shielded Pistoleer in the world couldn’t be damaged or killed.
- Fixed an issue where Hive of the Gorgons sometimes couldn't be entered remotely.

General
- Fixed an issue where players were experiencing instability and crashes on PlayStation.
- Fixed an issue where PC players with the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion would see news to purchase it when logging into the game.
- Fixed an issue where auto-running after any melee attack and trying to perform a vault or mantle would fail.
- Fixed an issue where the character wouldn’t appear on the Character Select screen.
- Fixed some issues with the new rotational modes timers in the Activity Finder screen.
- Fixed an issue with the bottom-right queue status banner not being present when queuing for CTF.

World
- Fixed an issue with the Sandwurm encounter that could cause players colliding with the Sandwurm to fall through the world or get stuck in geometry. The Sandwurm now has impassable collision and abilities that normally allow the player to pass through an enemy will not be able to pass through the Sandwurm.
- Fixed an issue where players might push the Sandwurm off of its intended position in the arena and negatively affect subsequent spawn locations and how the Sandwurm's abilities function.
- Adjusted spawn scaling bounds in Monarchs Bluff to address boar exploit.
- Fixed Wit's Quest pin for killing Monstrous Polyphemus directing players to the general POI rather than the Elite POI.
Thanks for your support! We’ll see you in Aeternum.