In this guide, our team has prepared New World rapier build content for you. Follow the guide step by step. You can find other new world builds on our website.
The official version of New World is out today. Thanks to the beta testing phases, players have an idea about the weapon selections in the game and what is best for them.
The Rapier is a PVP duelist’s dream in New World, Amazon’s brand-new MMO. In this construct guide, we cover masteries, weapon pairings, and gameplay ideas. The Rapier continues to be a quite popular weapon and saw extensive use in the closed and open betas of New World. Its potentially enormous damage output cements it as a PvP’ers dream weapon, although its lack of protective capabilities does indicate you might be taking some big hits.
With severe movement, a lot of damage, and damage-over-time active skills, the Rapier is best fit for those who choose not getting hit instead of attempting to absorb damage. Here’s our extensive guide to the very best Rapier develop, with weapon pairings, attributes, and gameplay suggestions.
New World Rapier Build
When considering the best possible build for a rapier, it’s important to consider four aspects of your character: personal attributes, weapon mastery, equipped armor, and second weapon.
In New World, every player has five core attributes. Each weapon is made to work well with a particular attribute (or even two). Meanwhile, your weapon mastery determines what active and passive abilities your character has when using a specific weapon. Your character can equip up to two weapons at a time, so it’s important to consider what other weapon might pair well with what you’re using.
Here is everything you need to know to put together the best rapier build in New World.
Rapier Personal Attributes
The rapier comes from two stats, Dexterity and Intelligence. While Dexterity is its main attribute, you may veer toward putting points into Intelligence if your second weapon doesn’t benefit from Dexterity.
If you’re making the rapier your main weapon, you will want to load up all of your points into Dexterity as you level to maximize the damage you can do with the weapon.
Once you’ve reached 300 points in Dexterity, you can start to put points into either Intelligence or Constitution. Intelligence will increase your rapier damage further, and Constitution will give you more health so you aren’t too much of a glass cannon.
Rapier Second Weapon and Armor
The rapier is a high damage weapon that lacks much in the way of crowd control and cannot be used at range.
While some players might look to pair a rapier with something that has crowd control capabilities, it will typically be more beneficial to pair it with a ranged weapon.
Pairing your rapier with a musket or bow will be ideal because the two benefit from Dexterity as a main stat.
Using these weapons, you can open up on your enemy from range with a couple of shots before swapping to your rapier at close range.
You’ll want your armor to fit into the “light” weight category. While it protects you less than heavy armor, light armor gives you more mobility and damage.
Being in the light armor category makes it so your character rolls when they dodge, a level of mobility that’s essential to the rapier’s effectiveness. Meanwhile, it gives a 20-percent bonus to your damage, making you that much more lethal.
New World Rapier Best Skills (Masterys)
The rapier’s two skill trees are divided between evasive abilities and high damage abilities.
Whatever specific abilities you end up personally using will depend on the content you’re trying to play, but a few of them will be a lock no matter what you’re doing.
Tondo is the rapier’s primary bleed ability. Not only does it debuff your opponent, dealing damage over time, but its range is slightly further than most melee abilities, letting you use it from a safe range.
In the Blood tree, your other active abilities have high potential for damage, but because of your light armor, you will want to grab abilities from the Grace tree to improve your survivability.
Evade is the lowest cooldown ability you get using a rapier and effectively serves as an extra dodge. It also makes you invulnerable for a split second.
The last ability you’ll want to spec into is either Fleche or Riposte.
Riposte’s short stun is the best crowd control you can get with a rapier, and it provides will be useful in PvP and solo PvE content. The only downside to Riposte is that it only works if an enemy hits you. If you have a teammate to tank enemy NPCs, it won’t be of any use.
Fleche is a perfect combination of mobility and damage. Spiraling forward 10 meters, you can use this to get to a target, get away, or even go through an enemy. If you use it to hit an enemy, it can be devastating.
Most players will spec into Tondo and use it as an opening ability. From there, they will Grace abilities and light attacks in-between Tondo cooldowns, restacking Tondo bleeds as much as possible.
For this reason, players will want to spec into passive abilities that reduce their cooldowns so they can stack bleeds from Tondo.
New World Rapier Skill Tree
Here is an example of what you might want your Mastery Tree to look like:
Rapier Best Masteries
The Rapier is all about evasion, dodging, and dealing damage with Bleed. Here are the best active skills for this build.
- Tondo – Applies bleed damage that stacks over time, up to three times. The And Again passive increases damage against a single target, which makes this even better for close-quarters one-on-one PVP.
- Tondo complements the Heavy Puncture passive well. This passive means extra hits against the target with bleed will extend their bleed. Very strong for denying your opponent heals and to stack ticking damage that can’t be blocked.
- Evade – This active ability makes the Rapier so fun to play with. You can dance and skip all over, getting out of trouble, mostly. You will also receive a movement speed buff from the Allegro passive.
- Riposte – This is a great “Okay, let’s slow down for a second” active ability. It places you into a defensive stance. If you’re attacked during this short period, you’ll instantly stun the enemy. You can then dance backward with your bow, apply poison, or deal bleed damage. Very strong if you can land it.