The Blood of Dawnwalker New Game Plus Confirmed: Essential Armor, Missable Trophies, and Quest Choices

With the dust settling on launch week, players are rapidly approaching the conclusion of their first playthroughs in The Blood of Dawnwalker. Navigating Coen’s dual life—human by day, beast by night—under the pressure of a ticking 30-day clock has proven to be a stressful but rewarding endeavor. Now, the community can breathe a collective sigh of relief: developer Rebel Wolves has officially confirmed the upcoming addition of a New Game Plus (NG+) mode.

This confirmation significantly alters how you should approach the endgame. Knowing that you will soon be able to carry your hard-earned progression into a new save file means you should spend your remaining in-game days securing the best possible gear, wrapping up obscure side quests, and resolving lingering moral dilemmas.

Here is exactly what you need to prioritize before rolling the credits and storing your save file for the NG+ update.

Securing the Best Armor Loadouts

Your survival in Vale Sangora depends heavily on min-maxing your equipment. Once NG+ arrives, the early-game difficulty spike will likely scale to match your level, meaning you cannot rely on low-tier gear to breeze through the prologue. Depending on your chosen playstyle, there are specific late-game armor sets you need to hunt down.

The Swordmastery Focus

For players who lean heavily into physical combat, parrying, and stamina management, swordmastery armor is non-negotiable. As many players have noted since launch, directional blocking in Dawnwalker demands absolute precision. Early encounters against standard soldiers—especially Brencis and his vampire officers who overwhelm you in packs during the daylight hours—will drain your stamina instantly if you lack proper defensive stats. Top-tier swordmastery gear provides crucial stamina retention and widens parry windows, ensuring that you can hold your ground when outnumbered.

The Vampirism Focus

If you prefer to operate under the cover of darkness, vampirism-focused armor sets are your best investment. These pieces directly enhance your nocturnal capabilities, modifying how your blood surges function and reducing the penalties associated with shifting forms. Relying on vampire powers leaves you heavily exposed to sunlight damage and specific elemental weaknesses, but high-end vampiric armor mitigates these risks. Securing these sets ensures you can start NG+ as an absolute terror of the night right from day one.

The Witchcraft Focus

Magic users face their own unique hurdles, primarily tied to the corruption system. Casting powerful hexes drains your resources and steadily increases your corruption levels, which can lead to disastrous consequences if left unchecked. The best witchcraft armor specifically targets these corruption costs, lowering the threshold required to unleash Anca’s most devastating spells. Carrying this gear into NG+ will allow you to maintain a heavy spell-casting rotation without constantly micro-managing your corruption meters.

Navigating the Sanzhani: The Tsarina’s Favourite Human

Trophy hunters and completionists have been tearing their hair out over “The Tsarina’s Favourite Human” achievement. The requirements for this trophy are notoriously easy to fail because they rely on a strict sequence of events tied to the Sanzhani burrows and Tsarinas.

To successfully earn this trophy, you must complete a chain of five specific quests, but the exact order of operation is the community’s biggest stumbling block. The quests are:

• Good Home
• Come Hither
• Burrow Sorrows
• Pearly and Precious
• Tiny Dancer

Critical Warning: You must initiate and complete “Good Home” before progressing the other four. If you wander too deeply into the Sanzhani questlines and trigger events related to the other four quests before finishing “Good Home,” the quest chain breaks, locking you out of the trophy for the remainder of your playthrough.

If you have already failed this sequence on your current save, the upcoming NG+ mode will be your saving grace. For those still early enough in their 30-day timeline, tread carefully around the burrow regions until you have secured the initial quest.

The Midnight Reckoning: Managing the Dark Urge

One of the most praised aspects of The Blood of Dawnwalker is its uncompromising approach to narrative consequences, heavily influenced by Coen’s monstrous nature. This is most apparent in the tension surrounding the local vampire ruler, Ambrus.

Ambrus has been systematically rounding up the citizens of Vale Sangora, bottling their blood to create a massive stockpile of sustenance. Disrupting this operation is the core focus of the “Midnight Reckoning” questline.

What makes this quest particularly harrowing is the game’s hunger mechanic. IGN recently compared this system to the infamous “Dark Urge” origin in Baldur’s Gate 3. As Coen, you are not just a noble savior; you are a creature driven by a visceral thirst. Exploring Ambrus’s operation forces you into situations where resisting the urge to consume the very civilians you are trying to save requires immense willpower (and specific stat checks). Successfully navigating “Midnight Reckoning” without succumbing to the beast is a massive accomplishment, and resolving this storyline should be a top priority before you finalize your endgame save.

Crucial Crossroads: Kill or Spare Xanthe?

Throughout your journey, the game frequently forces your hand regarding the fates of key antagonists and allies. The confrontation with Xanthe remains one of the most debated crossroads in the community.

You are ultimately forced to decide whether to kill or spare Xanthe, and neither choice offers a clean conscience.

• Executing Xanthe: Opting for the lethal route permanently removes a highly capable wildcard from the board. This path reportedly grants immediate, high-value material rewards and unique loot that can directly bolster your combat and hex magic builds.
• Sparing Xanthe: Choosing mercy is the long-game strategy. While you sacrifice immediate loot, sparing key figures in Dawnwalker often alters the balance of power in the final acts, potentially shifting faction allegiances or unlocking unique dialogue paths during the epilogue.

With NG+ on the horizon, the pressure of this decision is vastly reduced. If you executed Xanthe in your current run, you can look forward to seeing the narrative ripples of her survival in your next playthrough.

PC Performance Update: The Grainy Visuals Bug

While the console versions of the game have stabilized nicely, a vocal segment of the PC player base is currently battling visual artifacts. Players running mid-to-high tier setups (such as the RTX 4060 paired with modern processors) are reporting a persistent grainy or noisy overlay affecting the image quality.

Extensive community testing suggests this issue remains present regardless of how you tweak the standard graphics options. The current consensus points toward aggressive Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) implementation or a hard-coded film grain filter that fails to scale properly with specific upscaling methods (like DLSS or FSR).

Rebel Wolves has not yet deployed a definitive hotfix for this specific visual quirk. Until an official patch arrives, players are experimenting with forcing alternative anti-aliasing methods via their GPU control panels, though results remain inconsistent. If your screen looks unusually granular, rest assured it is likely a software bug rather than failing hardware.

Final Thoughts

The Blood of Dawnwalker demands a lot of its players, forcing difficult compromises under a strict time limit. The impending arrival of New Game Plus changes the meta entirely. Use your final days in Vale Sangora wisely. Farm the heavy swordmastery armor, secure your witchcraft sets, and make sure your narrative choices are locked in exactly how you want them. When the NG+ update finally drops, you will be fully prepared to unleash the beast all over again.