The gems you add to your weapons in New World enhance their effectiveness, turning them into even better creations than the standard stats and bonuses they already give you. The gems all have varied uses, depending on your playstyle and the weapon you’re using. This guide will detain the best gems that you can use for Hatchets in New World. These can be placed on your Hatchets or in your armor.
Best gems for Hatchets
Abyssal, Arboreal, Electrified, Empowered, Ignited, or Frozen
These gems convert part of your weapon’s damage into specific elemental damage, for example, Ignited convert part of the Hatchet’s overall damage to fire. The amount of damage this is comes from the base damage of your Hatchet or your Intelligence attribute. While Intelligence is not associated with Hatchet, it does mean the default base damage of your weapon will still do plenty of damage.
Calming
When you want to deal a good amount of damage during PvE encounters, the Calming gem ensures the larger elite enemies stay off you and focus on the primary tank. While it’s not as useful in PvP combat, it’s a good way to make sure you can freely do as much damage as you want without becoming the primary target, forcing the healer to focus on you.
Cruel
With Cruel, you’ll be able to do more damage against enemies that have a Crowd Control status effect on them, such as a root, stun, or they’ve slowed down. When you’re using a Hatchet, your entire focus should be to do damage, and having this gem is always helpful. The Hatchet also has a handful of Crowd Control effects in its ability trees, which means you can still activate this gem by yourself.
Exhilarate
The Exhilarate gem is valuable when a powerful target is about to fall but still has some fight left in them. Your damage output increases when your health is less than 30%. It’s an excellent way to do a final push against any powerful elite enemy or against another player when you’re under heavy fire, and when you’re in the thick of it with a Hatchet, you can expect to not have too much health fairly often.
Gambit
You can expect to move around quite a bit with Hatchet, similar to many other DPS builds. Because you’ll be ducking and weaving often, the Gambit gem will be used pretty often where it increases your damage output when your stamina is not full. If anything, it will encourage you to dodge much more often and to be more aggressive in combat, and you benefit from that added risk.
Opportunist
When an enemy’s health is running low, you want to charge in with your best abilities. The Opportunist gem will have you doing more damage to any target that has less than 30% of their maximum health. It’s a good way to prevent an enemy player from running away and ensures you can do more damage against the final boss of a tough dungeon.
Retaliate
The final gem we’re going to recommend for your Hatchet is Retaliate. After you’ve been hit three times, your weapon damage increases for a short time. Hopefully, you’re not the one getting hit, but it’s always possible someone could have turned their focus to you during a PvP battle, or a minor enemy is attacking you in a dungeon. You can hit back hard enough to discourage them away from you or knock them down on the ground with this equipped. It’s a solid choice that we recommend for several DPS weapons.
