Tons of different weapon builds are coming out for New World, and many of them have one thing in common. They recommend that you socket a gem that modifies the damage scaling of your weapon. But what exactly does that mean? And how is the modified damage scaled specifically? We hope to answer these questions in this short guide on how gem damage scaling works in New World.
How Gem Damage Scaling Works in New World
To understand how a gem modifies damage scaling, we must first understand the different damage and gem types. Certain mob types may be weak or resistant to certain damage types. New World has two base damage types with nine different subtypes and six different gems that modify the damage scaling. Let’s take a look.
Damage Types
Each weapon comes with a specific kind of damage type. These damage types are split into two distinct groups:
- Physical Damage – Base damage for non-magical weapons
- Elemental Damage – Base damage for magical weapons
Physical damage will be the base damage type for all non-magical weapons, such as hatchets, rapiers, great axes, and the rest. The physical damage type is broken up into three different sub-types:
- Strike – War Hammer
- Slash – Hatchet, Great Axe, Sword
- Thrust – Rapier, Spear, Musket, Bow
Elemental damage will be the base damage type for all magical weapons, such as the Life Staff, Fire Staff, and Ice Gauntlets. There are six elemental damage sub-types:
- Nature
- Arcane
- Void
- Lighting
- Ice
- Fire
Gem Types
There are many different types of gems in New World, but we are interested in six specific ones:
- Topaz – Lighting Damage off INT
- Amethyst – Void Damage off INT
- Sapphire – Arcane Damage off INT
- Amber – Nature Damage off FOCUS
- Aquamarine – Ice Damage off INT
- Ruby – Fire Damage off INT
When you slot a gem from the list above into a weapon, it will take a percentage of the weapons base damage type and convert that into the gems type of elemental damage. That elemental damage will then be scaled off of the specified attribute. A gems cut is also important; higher quality gems will convert a higher percentage of damage.
- Flawed Cut – 20% damage conversion
- Regular Cut – 30% damage conversion
- Brilliant Cut – 40% damage conversion
- Pristine Cut – 50% damage conversion
Gem Damage Scaling Example
Let’s take a look at an example of how these gems work. Below we have a hatchet with an empty gem socket, and you can see that this hatchet deals 113 Slash Damage.
We will socket a Cut Amber gem into it, which will convert 30% of the damage to Nature and then scale that off our focus attribute.
You can see that our damage is now split on the weapon to 79 Slash Damage and 33 Nature Damage. This makes sense since 30% of the original 113 Slash Damage is roughly 33 (rounded down).
The 33 Nature Damage will then scale off of our Focus attribute. To demonstrate this, let’s respec a healer that has all points into Focus and hit some enemies.
With no points into Focus, you can see that we hit our enemy for 139 Slash damage and 135 Nature damage. Now let’s put our 84 available points into Focus and hit the same enemy again.
Note that when we add attribute points, our hatchet damage on the right side is not affected. This is to be expected since that number represents our effective base damage, and only the smaller nature damage portion is scaled.
You can see that now we do the same 139 Slash damage but have boosted our Nature damage to 187. This shows that we have effectively scaled the nature damage with focus attribute points.
It should be clear that the more of our base damage we can convert with our socketed gem, the more benefit we will see from our targeted attribute. As we acquire and socket more powerful gems, our damage will significantly increase.
Also, remember that the gem says it will scale off base weapon stat or FOC, whichever is higher. The hatchets base weapon stat is Strength, so if our strength attribute was higher than our Focus, it would scale off of that number.
Much more goes into the weapon damage in New World, but hopefully, this is a good review of the gem scaling specifically. We hope you found this helpful, and we will be sure to update this information if we find out more details or the systems change in the future. Also, be sure to check out our Healer and Ice Gauntlet builds that both use weapon gem socketing to change the scaling attribute.
