New World: Aeternum Just Made A Huge Change To How You Level Weapon Skills

New World: Aeternum has been live for two days now, and the team released a patch this morning that fundamentally changes how weapons are leveled in the MMO.

Historically, weapon XP was only earned while you were using the equipped weapon. While you can swap to a second weapon any time during combat, you only gain XP for the weapons used to kill an enemy. This means that players can go long stretches without leveling their secondary weapon if they never use it, and it would require players to grind and level each independently. 

For many, this really wasn't an issue, and it allowed for some experimentation to find out what combo worked best and, as MMO players are wont to do, figure out the optimal path to leveling each. Now, though, Amazon Games Orange County is fundamentally changing how weapon XP is earned.

In a patch deployed to New World: Aeternum during the most recent downtime, players will now earn weapon XP on both weapons, regardless of whether they were used in combat. This means you can slowly level an off-hand weapon without having to swap and use it as often, which is certainly a quality-of-life feature for players. Still, I do wonder why the change is being made just a few days after launch instead of the new version hitting as part of the package. 

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how this affects the leveling progression in New World: Aeternum, whether better or worse. 

We've got our initial thoughts on New World: Aeternum up now if you've been on the fence about trying out Amazon's relaunch of its 2021 MMO, with our full review of Aeternum going up soon.