New World Aeternum Season 9 Tank Builds For PvE & PvP: How To Craft?
Posted: Aug 19, 2025 Views: 20
Whichever season you're in New World Aeternum, and whether you prefer farming resources in PvE or enjoying real-person battles in PvP, crafting and utilizing your builds is essential, as it significantly improves your combat efficiency.
However, it's important to note that when choosing a build, in addition to ensuring it matches your class skills and gear, you should also consider your role in combat: DPS (ranged/melee), healer, or tank.
To this end, this time, we'll introduce a tank build crafting method that's nearly universally suitable for both PvE and PvP modes, incorporating the latest features of Season 9. Read on if you're interested!
What Are The Best Weapons?
First and foremost, you need to understand that a tank's primary role in combat is to control the battlefield, distract the enemy, and absorb incoming damage, thereby better protecting allies.
Therefore, tank roles often invest most of their time in close proximity to enemies in combat, so that their weapon selection should primarily focus on melee weapons.
Sword And Shield
While as a tank, you may already have superior defense compared to your teammates from the start, weapons that can further enhance this defense are definitely better!
For this reason, the sword and shield combination is the best starting weapon, providing both a fun gameplay experience and additional defensive capabilities.
Specifically, this weapon can withstand blocks in combat, continuously reducing incoming enemy damage and preventing you from taking increased damage from critical hits.
Note that the sword and shield also have two skill branches: Swordmaster and Defender. While their specific effects differ, both attract or control aggro, making them ideal for tanks. You can choose the one you prefer.
Greatsword
This weapon boasts a boost to both strength and agility, allowing you to further specialize in either attribute. For tank roles, we recommend upgrading strength.
You can also choose between two combat stances to upgrade your character's strength through weapons. Defiance Stance, ideal for tanks, reduces both the damage you take and the damage you deal, providing additional defensive measures. Its features include:
- Automatically blocks attacks when you land a critical hit.
- This helps you survive as a tank in expeditions or large-scale PvP battles.
What Perks Can Be Combined?
Perks in New World Aeternum consist of gems and special bonus effects. Some of these perks can be dropped in combat, while others require consuming New World Aeternum coins to get. For tank builds, we recommend the following perks:
- Leeching Taunt Gem: Generates 250% additional threat and heals 3% of the damage you deal.
- Keen Perk: Increases your chance to deal critical hits with your weapon or ring.
- Regenerating Perk: Increases your health by 0.53% per second.
- Enchanted Ward Perk: Reduces damage taken from enemy light and heavy attacks by 4%.
- Sturdy Energy perk: When you block an attack while your health is below 30%, you gain 42% health regeneration for 6 seconds. This effect disappears if you become exhausted.
When crafting your own New World Aeternum Season 9 tank builds, you can freely choose and combine our recommended perks based on your weapon type to create the build that best suits your combat style.
Reliable Gear
When choosing gear, you still need to stick to one goal: fulfill your tanking responsibilities, which means attracting enemy aggro and sharing more damage with your teammates.
While you can also dish out some damage when the time is right, that shouldn't be your primary responsibility - don't take credit for DPS! For this reason, the following gear are good choices.
Great Helm of the Frigid Dawn:
- +32 Magnify.
- Enchanted Ward: Reduces light and heavy attack damage taken by 3.4%.
- Empty Socket: You can attach gems to increase the effectiveness of your gear.
- Elemental Aversion: Reduces damage from ranged elemental attacks by 3.8%.
- Random Perk.
Void Darkplate:
- +32 Magnify.
- Dark Reinforced: Increases your armor effectiveness by 20%.
- Empty Socket: You can attach gems to gear to increase its effectiveness.
- Enchanted Ward: Reduces damage from light and heavy attacks by 4%.
- Physical Aversion: Reduces damage from ranged physical attacks by 4.5%.
- Random Perk.
Which Attributes Should You Enhance?
In New World Aeternum, you can acquire attributes such as strength, dexterity, intelligence, focus, and constitution. Each attribute unlocks additional perks upon reaching a certain point threshold, and weapon damage is also adjusted based on that attribute.
From there, you can earn attribute points through leveling up or through attribute bonuses from gear, and then allocate them to improve specific attributes, up to a maximum of 250 points per attribute.
For tank characters and their builds, it's recommended to prioritize improving their strength and constitution attributes. Improving your constitution increases your health pool and prolongs your survival time.
Strength is generally associated with melee weapon damage, making it ideal for tank characters. While dealing damage isn't your primary focus, it's always helpful to have more.
Choosing The Best Abilities
The game has different ability trees, each allowing you to unlock different abilities for specific benefits. For tank characters, the following trees and their corresponding abilities are recommended:
Flail's Cleric tree - focuses on arcane damage and healing
- Arcane Smite
- Arcane Vortex
- Arcane Eruption
Swordmaster skill tree - focuses on maximizing offensive capabilities
- Upheaval
- Whirling Blade
- Leadership
If you find the above information helpful for your Season 9 craft tank builds, please try it out in-game! Have fun!
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