Coming to terms with how this system works will define your time in Enoch, especially as you make your way through the campaign.
After that, there are Challenge Tiers and… well, it gets complicated. Ultimately, these are systems with a lot of wrinkles that you can game for more efficient progress or even better loot.
This page explains World Tier rewards, how to farm World Tiers, and general advice on where and how to spend your time using these systems in the end game.
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If you’re looking into a new character, we offer our Outriders class choices.
Instead of a more traditional campaign difficulty setting that you select before starting, Outriders instead starts you at World Tier 1.
To unlock World Tiers in Outriders, as you complete encounters, you will gain progress along the top bar of your UI. Once it reaches full, you’ll unlock the next tier.
Each World Tier comes with increasing modifiers that will both help and hinder your path through Enoch. In short, World Tiers are tied to enemy levels, directly influencing the number above their head.
If you are levelling up your tiers faster than you are levelling yourself, you will likely run into significant challenges. Much like an MMO, running into a high-level encounter while underleveled will have the same effect here. Being a couple levels underleveled is tough but beatable. Being 10 is nearly impossible.
The bad news on that front is that Outriders will not only hinder but punish your progress if you find yourself failing repeatedly. If you die in an encounter you’ll lose progress on your World Tier bar, meaning that if you lose consecutively, you’ll see your bar begin to dwindle. This can become a problem on particularly hard encounters you can’t seem to beat.
The one saving grace here though is that once you have unlocked a World Tier, you can’t lose it. Your progress bar towards the next tier will be depleted, but you won’t lose any progress on the one below your current tier.
The World Tier cap in Outriders is 15. While People Can Fly have thus far been coy with their future plans for Outriders, it seems likely that any DLC or expansions would increase this tier as it is tied to character and item levels.
To demonstrate this, here are a bunch of of numbers for some of the World Tier thresholds:
Enemies will also become a little harder in numbers not shown here too. For example, on higher World Tiers, challenging enemies will spend more time frenzied and thus will not be affected by many crowd control or stun abilities.
As you can see, while World Tiers increase the level of enemies you will go up against, they also dictate the level and rarity of loot you get.
On World Tier 1 you will see a lot of Greens and Blues dropping from enemies and chests in the world, however as you approach World Tier 15, you will be getting almost exclusively purple and even Legendary gear.
The most effective method is the most obvious - play through the campaign of the game. This will give you the most reliable experience on the most consistent basis. It’s a decently long road to see out the story of Outriders, so this is your first stop.
Once you complete the campaign, make sure you complete all the side-quests which will give you a whole bunch more experience too. The nice thing about all of this is that all side-quests are repeatable. You can even grind out the Hunter, Wanted and Historic quests which guarantee you a Legendary item when you complete all 10.
A specific, targeted Outriders farm you can do resides in the Forest Enclave area. There is a sidequest there called Predator to Prey. This is a relatively short monster battle, and while it can get a little tough, if you can control the monsters, it will give you decent loot drops. This side-quest is repeatable too, so you can do it over and over again and quickly unlock World Tiers.
Inevitably you will hit a roadblock as your level falls further and further behind the demands of the World Tiers though. This is natural, and grinding though the last World Tiers will be made easier as you progress into the endgame.
However, once you reach said endgame, the question you should really be contendening with is, should you be trying to grind harder World Tiers at all? To which the answer is… kinda. To fully understand the value of World Tiers, it’s worth you understanding a little about the endgame. Let me introduce you to Expedition Challenge Tiers.
This effectively means that no matter what World Tier you finish the campaign at, it will have little bearing on your progression through the endgame.
You must grind through time-challenges to unlock higher tiers on this new tract, which will give you higher and higher loot.
While the character level maximum is 30, item levels can reach level 50 through Expeditions. You’ll have likely noticed that harder World Tiers also offer up this post-max character level gear, but only to a point.
World Tier 15 will drop loot all the way to level 42 if you are at a character level of 30. This does however mean that once you reach Expedition Challenge Tier 9, non-Expedition loot drops will always be lower than what you earn in Expeditions.
This means that once you’ve beaten the campaign, you’re likely going to be earning higher level loot much faster from the endgame content than you will doing anything else out in the world.
If you want to test yourself and find your skill ceiling, World Tiers are an engaging difficulty system that allow you to try and get better, at least before you hit the endgame.
However, if you just want the most effective method to progress through the game’s story and into the endgame, there are some things to consider.
If you just want the absolutely most efficient way to level up, you can level until you reach World Tier 8. This matches up with the highest level Expedition you can jump into once they open.
Expeditions are more reliable for grinding loot than replaying campaign content, so once they open, World Tier 8 loot will set you on a path where you can rise through the Expedition Challenge Tier solely by playing these endgame activities.
So are World Tiers useless? No. They provide a decent resource and will even out your play experience as you play through the endgame.
For example, if you played through the campaign to get to World Tier 8, got a little loot and then dropped it down to the first World Tier, your loot situation would be spotty at best. Due to world drops being affected, you will have a lot more loot to choose from if you play on higher Tiers.
Playing through the campaign on a mid World Tier will ensure you have a lot of choice and a more curated build by the time you reach Expeditions. If you proceed to play on World Tier 1, while you will fly through the campaign, you will reach the endgame with almost no usable gear.
The other major drawback is that your mod collection will be very small. Harder expeditions will require you to have exceptional builds and these will require a lot of mods. You are more likely to have a more complete collection if you have been getting a steady stream of purple loot, rather than blue.
Another nice perk of opening more challenging levels is that for every World Tier you unlock past 11, you will get a random Legendary weapon.
Finally, as Expeditions can get very tough, it can help fill holes in your mid-to-high level gear in the endgame. If you find yourself stuck on a Challenge Tier before 9 and find that some of your items are lagging behind, you can re-enter the main world. Then you can grind out content at your highest World Tier to fill in gaps and get all of the gear in your character slots up to item level 42.
Hopefully, this knowledge should simply make World Tiers less frustrating. There are definite benefits to playing on higher Tiers you’re comfortable on, especially those in and around 7-10. It does also mean that there’s little reason to push beyond that.
Unless it is a personal challenge you enjoy, choose a middle level tier that works for you and stick with it. Don’t stress if you are failing to push past your current threshold.
It also means that if you do run into a particularly challenging part of the game and find your progress halting, there is minimal loss in dropping down a couple of levels in order to push past it.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of how this system works and the benefits you can get from using it properly.
Once you realise it doesn’t ultimately factor into the endgame, the World Tier system becomes more of a ‘choose your own level of fun’ system. Getting your head around that will really help make your stay in Enoch much more pleasant.
