Introducing this comprehensive guide for the new seasonal trial - Winter Rune Forge. This trial marks a significant improvement from previous trials in the coming New World Season 5. Notably, it features 2 distinct fights with different environments, adding an extra layer of adventure. Moreover, the rewards are quite substantial, making the trial highly rewarding.

To increase your chances of winning boss fights in Season of the Guardian, ensure you have an sufficient amount of New World Coins beforehand.

The Ice Dogs

Upon entering the room, you'll encounter a large doglike creature. Your task is to engage in combat and chip away at its health until it reaches halfway. At this point, the creature splits in 2, triggering a recurring mechanism. It's crucial to split your focus and concentrate your damage on one of the split creatures. Avoid bringing them close together, as they regenerate health when in proximity to each other. This regeneration makes the fight significantly more challenging and time-consuming. Therefore, it's imperative to keep them separated to ensure a smoother progression through the encounter.

Once you take down this boss, you’ll see that all of those dogs are going to freeze and blow up. The ground will also blow up. This will allow you to move on to the next phase of the trial in Season of the Guardian, where you’re going to land on a bridge, you’ll likely have to just jump down a bit further.

Ancient Ice Guardian

Then you’ll kind of move on to the next phase of the trial in Season of the Guardian, which is also the last phase, and that is regarding an Ancient Ice Guardian where once again, there’s some new unique mechanics that you and your team are going to have to do in order to get through this part of the trial. Once you start battling this Ancient Ice Guardian, you’re going to start to see a lot of new battle mechanics, it’s not too complicated and you can definitely get through it.

For starters, you’re going to start seeing some orange rings throughout the fight, and those are good, those are essentially buffs. This will help boost up your overall defense against ice attacks and also boost up your overall damage. At some point in the battle, the Ancient Ice Guardian is going to start spinning where you’ll then have an opportunity to pick up these ice chunks and start throwing them at these different runes on the wall.

The priority is to essentially get these to match in the Winter Rune Forge. They’re going to turn orange just like that once they actually match, and that will allow you to pick up that orange buff to help both you and your team grind through it even faster.

As you get closer and closer to grinding out this boss, attacks are going to get a bit more and more powerful, you’re going to see more ice waves, you’re going to see ice falling from the sky, but that essentially covers the overall boss battle itself. You’re going to pick up the runes to get those buffs because the buffs help not only you but your entire team, it just helps you get through this so much faster.

Once you and your team take down the Ancient Ice Guardian, you will be awarded a Winter Rune Forge Spoil, which you can get up to 2 times a week. It is 100% doing this twice a week to get these spoils not only because it’s an easy way to get some Dark Matter but also it’s your chance of getting the Tempest Fury great artifact which is essentially that spin great axe that helps you buff up that Fortifying Whirlwind ability.

Final Thought

There’s definitely some fun builds that you can utilize with new artifact in Season 5. Other than that there is a full Frostweaver set which is fantastic. Nothing too crazy but you can turn to the Mending Vortex, every 2 hits with Vortex will heal you, lots of unique items that have some good weapon perks as well that you can pick up and utilize for some of these new weapon-specific builds that people are playing with. You’ll also have the ability to get up to 5,000 Faction Tokens, some pretty interesting named items, and then a bunch of stuff that you’ll likely just end up salvaging.