First things first: sorry for the long post.If you want a tl;dr just read the bold quotes.

I've joined New World in the current beta and it has been a blast! I love both PVE and PVP and specially the design choices around combat! I am new so I don't really understand all the fuzz about scaling or stagger, thus this post will be made from the perspective of someone who is just really amazed by the game! I do have several hundred hours in Albion online which is the closes to this kind of game I have ever played.

About my experience so far: I leveled my way to 25 as a regular person, doing quests and avoiding most of PvP engagements, I was too affraid to even turn the flag on and be stomped by higher level players. When I reached level 25, with the new faction gear, I decided it was time to take a PvP adventure and got my ass handled to me several times by higher level players. Once I got better I started winning 1v1s and slowly started winning 2v1s to a point I even won a 4v1 against people at my level! I was even able to win against a level 46 player, despite being only level 26! Hurray, skill oriented combat does feel good!

There are several bugs related to combat right now and most of them are really feels bad. Slopes are a problem for some attacks, lag is a very serious issue and the netcode seems to be written in order to gain hardware performance instead of being written to provide the most precise experience to the players. That said, this has been discussed by multiple people and it's not the goal for this post.

We could talk balance, but after 50h of pretty much PvPing my way from 25 to 30 I still don't think I can point any balance changes, simply because I haven't tested weapons by myself and I ran into amazing players at pretty much all of them. As a grain of salt, it's safe to say Hatchet/Great Axe/Lance are probably the easiest melee weapons (even if not the strongest ones), while the same seems to be true for Ice Gauntlet/Rifle in the ranged category. I love the combat system and really don't think much more effort is required to polish it... Maybe some small balance changes here and there, but that should be it!

Blabbering above | Actual content below

The major issue I have with the combat system right now is Quality of Life.There are several things that could improve player experience, specially related to PvP.

Feedback on your own faction members PvPers

I'll start with the most jarring one... Enemies have jarring difference between those who have the PvP flag on and those who don't. Their names not only turn into red, but they also gain a red marker above their head! It's very easy to see at distance and a lot of cool mechanics revolve around it, that's a really good design choices.

But I lost count of how many times I thought I was going to take a fair and square 1v1 and didn't realise the member of my faction right next to me was also PvP flagged. I lost count of how many times I ran away from a mob of other faction before I realise I was not 5v1ing them, it was actually a 5v4.

The solution for that one is simple... Tint our allies nicknames blue or green when they are PvP flagged so we know who we can count on! This one is the most mind boggling feature to not exist in the game imo, since it gives a very good sense of partnership and companionship which is all an MMO really wants to achieve.

Feedback on when to stop running away

I feel like this one is going to be the most controversial one of all the topics. But I genuinely believe the game has very little feedback on when someone is chasing you, I've lost count on how many times a group of people would hunt me and I'd run for my life for minutes, just to eventually look back and realise they were gone.

This is very menacing for a lot of people and from personal experience it's one of the turn downs of PvP... Not being able to notice when a chase has ended is frustrating. The chase itself is a natural aspect of the game, but being bound to your own will to look back and see if they are gone and perhaps die in the process is infuriating.

There are a bunch of solutions, such as giving you a feedback when people are looking at you or counting how many enemies are in your general area, but I believe both would affect large PvP too much. The simpler and nicest solution would be to implement a button to free the camera rotation even while running. A lot of third person shooters have this... You hold Alt/Ctrl while moving to freely rotate your camera regardless of the direction you are running to.

Edit: Apparently this is already in the game, but it's bugged for me. I'll try to reinstall and see if it fixes the problem.

Feedback on Gear Score disparity

After playing against a lot of players I realised level doesn't really matter as much as Gear Score! Not only that but it seems that the rewards from killing someone in PvP are calculated based off gear score and not level! I've killed people way higher level than me that didn't net as much XP as some people around my level.

Gear Score is so important that I would argue that it's the main thing you should have access to properly evaluate if you can or can't win a fight. I feel that it would be a good way to incentivize lower level players to actually engage combat against higher level players and at the same time provide them a warranty that they are not entering an unfair fight. While in the other hand letting stronger players know that they won't gain nothing (literally) from attacking that low Gear Score newbie.

That said, a bit of mistery is good. Knowing exactly the Gear Score of someone could lead to toxicity just the same as knowing other people level do. Thus showing the raw Gear Score is not the way I would like it to go, instead we can use markers that are already in the game. Add some icons next to the players nicknames that represent their Gear Score, a sprout (like in FFXIV) would do for lower ones and a skull (like in PvE mobs) for higher ones should do the trick.

https://preview.redd.it/5aznona4dld71.jpg?width=601&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=bceb7bb7782ecc3ddebf14b859979b491d303c20

Feedback on monsters back side

Now... Take this one with a grain of salt. I come from FFXIV and positionals is something very important for many classes there so the feedback on monster rotation in that game is super well done as it needs it to be! But after running a few dungeons with my friends I realised that this game's PvE could highly benefit from adding rotational markers in the mobs, even if this takes away a bit of the immersion! This is NOT Dark Souls where you can take your time and position yourself properly, this is a fast paced MMO.

My initial suggestion would be to implement a feedback like FFXIV one to the foot of the monsters, at least in dungeons. But after some thought, maybe the best solution would be to retexture the dungeon monsters so that the weak spot is jarring. I am aware that this is actually a lot of work and probably would not be feasible from a developer PoV, but still, that's how I'd like it to be.

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That's pretty much my wish for feedback changes as a new player.