New World Animation Cancel & Weapon Swap Changes Next Patch - New Ways To Increase Damage & Cancel Animations

The next New World patch is around the corner, there are some changes many of the mechanics related that we want to talk about today. Quite a few of them have very direct implications on PVP and PVE damage output, so this should be interesting for a lot of you. Along with that, there are also some announcements for new server matches, animation cancels, weapon swap, and more. 

Read more: How To Increase Gear Score in Solo New World

New World PTR New Changes - Animation Cancels, Damage Adjustments, Weapon Swap & Server Mages

There are a bunch of upcoming changes on the New World PTR that aren't fully explained in the patch notes. Weapon swapping and ability cancels see massive improvements that make them a lot easier. The Throwing Hatchet gets buffs and especially Social Distance gets a lot better in multiple ways. The Brutal Heartrune of Detonate gets a nerf, while all Heartrune of Cannon Blast get a damage buff. Heartrune of Bile Bomb gets a description fix. The next round of Server merges was also announced.

1. Weapon Swap & Cancel Improvements

The first change was noted in the patch notes as follows:

- Updated all magic weapon buffers for weapon swapping. Swapping from magic weapons should be more predictable. 

There's actually a lot more to this one, swapping from magic weapons is a lot easier and it doesn't feel as clunky and that is great 100%. But this change goes way deeper, beyond that, weapon swapping as a whole was completely changed. So what happens is when you're in the animation for an ability and you press the weapon swap button, it will now lock this weapon swap in that moment. So previously, what would happen is if you did it late enough in the animation, then the swap would happen otherwise it wouldn't but still could also cause problems and so on. Now the swap is pretty much guaranteed unless you use it super early in a very long animation like Crosscut for example. This is strong because it massively Buffs attack combos between different weapons. Take for example, the great sword where both set first strike and Relentless Rush can to some degree benefit from quickly swapping to your other weapon. By doing so, you cut down the post animation of these attacks, but also other ways to do that. But this is a very quick and easy way and if you then immediately swapped another weapon with the right timing, you could get a very quick attack cancel onto the other weapon. That is now super easy to do, you just use the ability, press weapon swap at any point of it and then left click around the end of it, so that the attack from the other weapon will go through and the game does the rest for you.

2. Throwing Hatchet Changes & Burst Increase

- On the topic of hatchet and combos, the throwing side of the hatchet was also buffed. This is something that is known to most of you, but what's probably not as known are the implications of this for the mechanics. Because these changes result in a very interesting damage increase. 

- The first part of the changes was to rending throw, making it so that running throw will no longer interrupt the player movement during the throw. You can see that you still get slowed down a little bit using it, but it's very negligible compared to how much more impactful it was overall. 

- Another change is that the social distancing is not interrupting player movement during the throw, if the player is moving forwards/sideways, but if they are strafing backwards or standing idle, they will perform the backwards dodge. 

- On the topic of social distancing, they also say they adjusted the timing of the attack and the cancer winners to better fit the functionality while moving, they removed the stagger from social distancing and they gave it a damage increase from 100 to 115% weapon damage instead, increase the slow from 25 to 30%. On the topic of playing aggressive, there is something that's not really explained fully and that's the adjusted timing and cancel windows. Because what happens now is that hitting this is actually different depending on which version you use and this is very important, you can somewhere what to see this, you probably have to feel it yourself to understand the difference and this is on very high ping, so this is not the best example of how well this can work. But basically, what happens when you use social distancing to jump backwards is you start moving backwards and the projectile seems to come out at some point of you moving backwards, but it doesn't seem to come out right away.

It explains why social distancing always felt a little bit more sluggish when it comes to dpsing with it, aside of it also having a very long window afterwards until you recover. But when using the ability while moving forward, you don't have that same issue because the projectile now comes out from your body which is moving forward and not at some point of the backwards travel. That means if you're using a combo with the right click Hatchet throw, maybe while moving sideways or forward and you throw the right click Hatchet and then immediately cancel into social distancing, the attacks will connect almost at the same time on the other hand using the same thing while standing still or moving backwards there is a significant delay before the social distancing throw hits which not only slows down your damage, but also means there is more chance to miss because it takes longer for the projectile to reach the enemy. The same is also true when using it outside of the combo if you're just running at someone using social distancing, it is much easier to confirm the damage part of it, because the projectile just has a shorter travel range.

3. Heartrune Nerfs & Buffs

The next change is one that happened later on the PTR and it concerns a variety of heartrunes.

- The Canon Blast damage was increased and it says the damage was -increased by a 20%. What is actually means is this now has the same base damage as detonate. 

- Detonate simultaneously gets a nerf, the critical damage multiplier is reduced from 1.3 to 1.2.

- Along with that, the escalating explosion damage is decreased from 30% to 20%. 

Escalating explosion is the perk that you get on the Brutal Heartrune of Detonate, and this is now a much more significant trade-off. Your explosion damage is increased by 20%, but you take 15% more damage while charging, that part is unchanged. Overall, that's definitely a much more significant trade-off for this rune.

4. Shirking Fortification Nerf

Another change that happened is the shirking fortification nerf, reducing the duration of the buff from 6 seconds to 4 seconds. Shirking fortification will still have a lot of value in many situations, but you have to time your dodges a little bit better now and can't just burn stem and always rely on it being up. 

5. Server merges

There is one more thing to talk about and that is the server merges. There are quite a few servers that will be merged on December 1st or December 2nd depending on your time zone and there will be a two and a half hour downtime for that. This particular merge is at least very good for the Australian servers because Delos and Irido roughly have the same population as one of the current Fresh Start servers, so this should bring the population into a more balanced state.