Welcome to this article on New World and the Best Tank Gems.

We are going to take a look at the best things to socket into your gems slots on both your armor and your weapons and give a few different options depending on where you’re at in the game.

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We’ll start off with Weapons.

You cannot be a Tank in New World if you don’t use Carnelian gems on your weapons, this is absolutely none negotiable. You should use Pristine Cut Carnelian on both of your weapons as this offers the highest percentage value of Threat. By using this gem and combining a good damage output you should never need to use the Hated perk on your gear because this offers more than enough threat.

If you are really good at maintaining aggro of enemies you could consider some Runeglass gems. With your main hand weapon I think the Energizing Carnelian is good especially on a Sword as it will return Stamina. On the off hand Leeching Carnelian works well, it returns 1% of your damage as health so this is especially useful on weapons such as the Warhammer because it’s a high damage weapon, even for a Tank.

Next we have Armor Gems
There are a few different ways to set this up and it can vary depending on which weapon abilities and gear perks you are using. For general use doing overland, bosses, elite areas and normal expeditions you simply socket Onyx gems and this will provide the most benefit.

When you begin Tanking mutated expeditions there is then the option of using different gems depending on Mutation type. There are 4 mutation types with relevant gems for each one, these include:

  • Amethyst vs Void Mutations
  • Amber vs Nature Mutations
  • Aquamarine vs Ice Mutations
  • Ruby vs Fire Mutations

It’s important to note that stacking mitigation towards a mutation type is essential and there is also a kind of cap on the amount of mitigation you can stack against each element which is 50%.

An additional way to setup for Mutated Expeditions would be to use Opal gems in all of your gear except for your amulet. You could use a specific amulet for each mutation that has an elemental protection perk for example for a Fire Mutation, you use an amulet with the Fire Protection perk and then also socket a Ruby gem then use Opal gems on the remainder of your gear.

Lastly, if you are using the Sword and Shield setup with Shield Rush and the Fortifying Shield Rush perk along with an amulet with the Fortified perk you will already be able to achieve a high value of damage absorption so when you combine your 30%+ of fortify along with the 20% elemental protection from 8 Opal gems, you’ll hit that 50% mitigation cap this way also.

So you can setup your gems in a number of ways, obviously the most cost effective way is to using a full Opal gem setup since this means you won’t have to switch the gems each week when the mutation changes to a different type.

There are no good names drops of Amulets that have elemental perks on them so you would likely have to buy these and you’d need 4 of them to rotate for the mutation type. The cheapest method is the Shield Rush and Opal Gems setup so this might appeal to a lot of people especially if you are newer to the game – for more information on setting up the Shield Rush setup make sure you check out the Sword and Shield Deep Dive article.