Despite what many players had hoped for New World when it launched two months ago, the state of the game is far from perfect. New World really showed its potential during the first week or two, but that's when all the game-breaking glitches hit the MMO, as well as some design issues that left players unhappy. Glitches like the duplication of Gold and materials are still one an issue, and New World players are still finding ways to break the game after fixes and changes, now forcing many to play without trading posts for days.
As far as design issues go, one of the most lamented is how hard it is to commit to Factions for long periods of time, and it is even harder to fight for them when companies overtake settlements and impose higher taxes. New World solo players are also suffering from a drought of content, as well as the problems that arose with the "Into the Void" November patch, which reduced the amount of loot to be found in the world and in chests while increasing enemy HP and decreasing spawn rates. Yet, one of the most controversial design decisions regarding New World is its stagger mechanic.
New World's Stagger Mechanic Explained
Stagger is a common mechanic for MMOs and other combat-based games, in which enemies hit players (or vice versa) with particularly powerful blows in order to make them stumble or break their guard. In New World however, this mechanic is not tied to powerful blows in the sense that it's a rare occurrence. On the contrary, it happens way too often, regardless of the character's loadout and skills. Enemies can stagger New World players quite easily, and this is especially noticeable when many of them are stacking against players.
A staggering hit in New World means players will be interrupted regardless of what they were doing unless they were using a skill or attack with the Grit buff active, even though Grit functions in a strange way and doesn't prevent staggering hits on all abilities. When staggered, players also can't perform any action - be it healing themselves through Life Staff skills or Void Gauntlet attacks, using any item from their hotbar, or even moving or dodging. This can be frustrating because a staggering hit is more dangerous than a stun due to the latter lasting only until hit again.
A single staggering hit can disrupt any player's combat flow, breaking combos, making skills go on cooldown without players actually using them, and preventing them from doing anything until their character is back on their feet. To make matters worse, New World enemies can chain staggering hits on players if more of them are nearby, and this is not an uncommon action. In similar scenarios, death is often the outcome, and even if it isn't players may feel frustrated whenever they are deprived of agency over their characters.
Stagger is not a fun mechanic in New World, and it needs to be toned down in order for players to enjoy PvE content more, especially considering builds have no effect over the stagger's duration, frequency, or intensity. As such, there are many ways to improve how the stagger mechanics work and what players can do to protect themselves.
How to Improve New World's Stagger Mechanic
Staggering hits are not affected by what type of armor the players are using, meaning that regardless of armor weight people are always staggered in the same way. New World has three armor types that vary in weight from Light to Heavy, and they do affect the players' damage potential and the way they can dodge, so it would only make sense for this to also affect staggering hits. Staggering hits could work normally against Light armor, but Medium armor users could have a brief grace period where they cannot be staggered, and this could be amplified using Heavy armor.
One of the reasons playing tank characters in New World is not as fun as in other games is that staggering hits don't take into account players using defensive sets like Sword and Shield over, say, the Fire Staff. Magic and ranged weapons should provide the least protection or mitigation from staggering hits, but melee weapons should offer some form of guard due to them requiring players be near enemies - possibly more than one.
Staggering hits can easily disrupt taunts and healing abilities in PvE content, making it hard to have flawless runs in tougher content. The problem is that this doesn't only happen in harder content, it's something that players can run into even when fighting enemies 30 levels below them. The event of an enemy or two overpowering players and staggering them shouldn't be something that happens so frequently, and it most definitely shouldn't work this way regardless of the differences in level between players and enemies.
New World is available now on PC.