Best Great Axe Build In New World

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The Great Axe hasn't been massively popular during the closed beta of Amazon's new MMO, New World. However, with a versatile set of active skills and passives, there is a place for this large, two-handed weapon.

This guide will cover some of the different playstyles for the Great Axe, the best masteries and active skills to choose, and which weapons work well alongside the CC and damage of the Axe. The full release of New World will likely see changes and balance tweaks to the meta, and we will update this guide with the full release patch notes for each weapon. The Great Axe might even get some love.

Best Great Axe Build In New World

The Great Axe is a slow two-handed weapon with two primary uses: in a tank build, or geared towards pure DPS. Because it's so slow it can be a bit of a nightmare to use in PVP, but it's a strong PVE weapon if you go for the right build. Here are a few of our suggestions.

The Reaper Great Axe Tank Build

This build is all about serious sustainability. It steers heavily into the Reaper tree, picking up Reap as the main active skill, and the passives Feed and Critical Gains to provide extra health regen. The Great Axe scales with Strength, so you want to try and max out attribute points in that tree, and works best with Heavy Armor for a tank build. Here's a rundown of the mastery trees.

Active Skills – Reaper, Charge, and Maelstrom. This provides a good balance of tank play and DPS, plus a bit of mobility from Charge.
Reaper – Reaper is a fantastic Great Axe skill for a tank build, mostly because it's taunt-gem compatible, but will also pull enemies closer to you, giving space for your other roles (healer, DPS) to carry on doing what they do best. The Hunger passive will restore 30 percent of the damage you do as health, so it also provides great sustain.
Charge – The mobility needed for any tank, Charge is a great engage skill as well as one you can use to escape. You can't be interrupted while using this skill.
Maelstrom – This is a great all-around ability that both pulls enemies towards you and deals decent damage. It falls right into that classic spin-to-win idea.

In terms of passives, you want to pick up both Feed and Critical Gains for sustain, as well as the Executioner's Speed passive to grant you a speed boost after successful light attacks.

DPS Great Axe Build

Although the Great Axe is well-suited to the tank playstyle, its pure DPS shouldn't be slept on. To expand on that idea, you mostly want to focus on the Mauler tree. This build is all about keeping your enemies close, and it works surprisingly well in solo-target PVP as long as you can land your abilities. You will be susceptible to kite builds, like a Rapier and Bow, for example, so bear that in mind.

Active Skills – Reap, Whirlwind, and Maelstrom. You could switch out Reap for Gravity Well, although the sustain from Reap is probably too good to ignore.
Whirlwind provides that extra bit of DPS compared to the full tank build. Its damage scales off the number of enemies nearby, so it works during wars and during Expeditions.
You want to keep the passives of Feed and Critical Gains (sustain!) but spec more into the Mauler tree, particularly the Center of Attention passive (more damage with multiple foes nearby), and Enduring Strike to add Grit to all Heavy Attacks, which means enemies cannot block your damage or interrupt it.

Great Axe And The Bow Build

The Bow has been one of the most popular weapons during the closed beta, and it's no surprise that players have been experimenting with the Bow and Great Axe for DPS. It's quite similar in style to the type of play you might have with the War Hammer, the other chunky two-handed weapon in the game.

You want to stick with a relatively similar Great Axe loadout to the DPS Great Axe build. You could mix and match by adding Charge instead of Whirlwind, mostly for that extra mobility.
For the Bow, you want to pick up these Active Skills: Penetrating Shot, Evade Shot, Poison Shot.
Penetrating Shot is a great skill for the bow that lets you engage from distance and get some early damage.
Poison Shot has become one of the most preferred PVP abilities in the game, as long as you can hit its AOE. The poison acts as a debuff and will interrupt a player's attempts to heal, as well as deal ticking damage over time.
Evade Shot – This is the perfect added mobility for the otherwise very slow Great Axe. It can be used to evade attacks and dodge and weave during PVP.

On the topic of one-on-one PVP, there's no reason why the Great Axe can't also work with some of the other preferred weapons, like the Hatchet or Rapier.

You can check out some of our other build guides here: