Hatchet And Life Staff Combination Guide (Patch 1.3.4)

• Attributes
• Builds For Hatchet
• Builds For Life Staff
• Gear
• Gems
• Equipment Perks
• Healing Mechanics
• Consumables
• FAQ

The Hatchet is a particularly formidable weapon due to the Berserk ability, which grants you a substantial attack damage boost, and can be upgraded to increase your movement speed, give you massive health regeneration, and grant immunity to crowd control with making your attacks uninterruptible.

It has a very short range and a very small hitbox, meaning you need to be right on top of the enemy to hit. Besides, it doesn’t have much range abilities because the Throwing skill tree is pretty weak.

Life Staff is the only pure healing weapon currently in New World, which means it is the only weapon that can be efficient in areas of effect healing, single-target healing, and buffs to support allies. It has one damage skill available in its entire kit, has no crowd control or mobility tools. That’s why it can be paired with the Hatchet, combining both high surviving and damage, mainly for PvE farming.

Attributes

The Life Staff scales with Focus, while the Hatchet scales with Strength and Dexterity. Focus build is currently more efficient than any other. It gives a lot of healing and survivability while the damage bonus from Strength is not so big – besides, Hatchet has pretty high damage by itself, but you can add 50-75 Strength if you want.

There are significant breakpoints at 150 and 200 Focus:

You can use an Amber gem to convert Hatchet damage partially to Nature damage, and that converted damage will scale with Focus.

Constitution is a decent secondary Attribute, especially for PvP, 50 points will be enough to unlock 20% effectiveness to all health consumables, but you can get those 50 points with your gear or using +40 Consitution food:

Min-maxing your character for endgame PvP, you can also reach 200 Constitution breakpoint for a 20% armor increase:

Builds For Hatchet

For more information, you can check our Hatchet Guide.

1. For most PvE builds Berserk skill tree basically looks this way:

You can simply pick all the skills in Berserk tree except the Frenzied Purge.

2. PVE build with Rending Throw is also possible, but less popular. It will make everyone in your party do more damage against a single enemy for a limited time:

3. For PvP, it’s better to take more skills from the Throwing tree by sacrificing the Raging Torrent, which is pretty good but can be dodged – one step, and you’re missing all your swings. You also don’t need the Relentless Fury in this build, which works best with the Raging Torrent. Frenzied Purge is a nice, but not a necessary option for PvP, it can be taken instead.

With stamina regeneration, you can get the Infected Throw with the critical shot and headshot potential. Maxing Infected Throw is also an option. Remember, it doesn’t stack with Plagued Strikes and Plagued Crits weapon perks, so there’s no reason to have them both. This build will let you kill healers with Life Staff which are pretty unkillable otherwise:

Or you can max the Social Distancing skill line for better mobility and get 15% additional damage with critical potential or stamina regeneration with Rejuvenating Crits:

Builds For Life Staff

For more information, check our Life Staff Guide.

1. This is a flexible build, suitable for solo play, melee party gameplay in dungeons, siege, warfare, and open-world raids. This build is very positional but rewards you with an insane level of raw healing. To decrease the cooldown of the Beacon, using Refreshing Move perk is recommended.

Here we don’t take passives like Speed of Light and Magnify since they only apply if you actually heal your target, applying to all targets within the AoE – they do not work on a full health target. If you are playing in many focus groups, you will not really benefit from Spirits United passive.

2. This build is highly mobile and suitable for ranged groups and roaming mid-scale PvP.

3. This build fits most if you use Life Staff as a secondary weapon to buff yourself. If you use this weapon combination for PvE farming, it will fit best.

You have a lot of defense but don’t have any healing spells for immediate HP restoration.

4. Orb Build fits better paired with the Void Gauntlet but can also be combined with Hatchet.

Gear

Light armor gives you +20% damage bonus and the best amount of movement with a quick roll. 

Medium armor will give you more protection, +10% damage bonus and +10% length of the crowd control debuffs, but you’ll not have a quick roll. 

Heavy armor offers the best protection and +20% length of the crowd control debuffs for the price of lower mobility:

Also, you can combine different types of armor, light with medium, staying under 13 kg, or medium with heavy, staying under 23 kg. You can change your armor type by simply replacing 3 parts.

Maxed Medium Armor 22,9 lbs build (1L + 2M + 2H): Heavy Chest, Light Pants, 2 Medium and 1 Heavy piece.

Alternative Maxed Medium Armor 22,9 lbs build (2L + 1M + 2H): Heavy Chest, Heavy Pants, 1 Medium, and 1 Light piece.

Maxed Light Armor 12,7 lbs build (4L + 1M): Light Head, Medium Chest, Light Gloves, Light Pants, Light Boots.

Maxed Light Armor 12,6 lbs build (3L + 2M): Light Chest, Medium Pants, 1 Medium, and 2 Light pieces. If you need more in-depth information, how tankier you would be wearing a certain kind of armor of a certain Gear Score, feel free to use the New World Calculator by Mixed Nuts.

Armor Type	Light	Medium	Heavy
Head	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Chest	3,5 lbs	6,2 lbs	11,0 lbs
Gloves	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Pants	2,0 lbs	3,5 lbs	6,3 lbs
Boots	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Shields	2,7 lbs (Round)	5,4 lbs (Kite)	11,0 lbs (Tower)

Look for Armor with Focus or with Focus and Constitution if you need 50 points to unlock 20% effectiveness to all health consumables.

Gems

For this build, your Hatchet gem is a Cut Pristine Amber to convert Hatchet damage partially to Nature damage scaled with Focus:

For the Life Staff, the best choice is Cut Pristine Diamond, since you are likely to be in full health:

For Armor gems, you can use Cut Pristine Emerald for PvP, while fighting mostly against Bow and Musket users:

If you’re already level 60 and farming chests or mobs for gear, you need a Lucky Gem:

For other situations to provide generic damage absorption:

1. Cut Pristine Onyx:

2. Cut Pristine Malachite:

3. Cut Pristine Diamond:

Equipment Perks

If you want to check the specific weapon Skill Perks, you can check our Hatchet and Life Staff guides for more information.

1. Armor Perks

Refreshing with Resilient can be a universal choice:

Refreshing Evasion is useful if you’re dodging a lot:

Refreshing Ward:

Pretty valuable perk for PvE farming, especially in AoE situations.

Physical Aversion is useful for PvP against Musket and Bow users:

Fortifying Sacred Ground:

This perk is useful in every situation if you’re running Sacred Ground. Fortifying Sacred Ground actually will be applied with every single tick of Sacred Ground when someone is healed.

Revitalizing Beacon:

This is a great perk if you want to solo level with Life Staff, as you’ll only be healing yourself.

Refreshing Torrent is great to make your general skill rotation work smoothly:

Keen Berserk helps you crit more often when solo, where you can’t guarantee backstabs:

2. Life Staff Perks

Blessed is useful even if you have it on a lower gear score. The best option for a healer:

Refreshing Move helps a great deal with getting more skill rotations out:

3. Hatchet Perks

Rogue and Vicious increase your damage heavily, as you’ll almost always be dishing out backstabs in group play:

Refreshing Move helps a great deal with getting more skill rotations out, which make up a good chunk of your damage:

Alternatively, you can replace Refreshing Move with Enchanted or Keen and get plenty of damage that way as well:

Keenly Jagged is a nice choice since you’ll crit a lot:

For PvP against other healers, you can use Plagued Crits or Plagued Strikes. The maximum amount of healing decreasing is 24% for GS 600 weapons.

Plagued Crits require lowering the target’s health to 50% first:

Plagued Strikes don’t require anything but a heavy attack, but in PvP, it can be easily dodged, so both options are pretty situational:

Plagued Strikes can be combined with Trenchant Crits or Trenchant Strikes for more damage. Of course, you can use them without Plagued Strikes in PvE:

Trenchant Rend:

Or Trenchant Recovery for surviving:

4. Amulet Perks

Slash Protection and Thrust Protection cover most PvE and PvP incoming damage but could be adjusted depending on what faction you’re facing or if you’re going more into PvP:

Fortified Recovery grants a fairly strong 30% Fortify for 5 seconds when hit below 50% health but has a 90 cooldown for effect:

Health and Mana Recovery are nice, generally applicable options to fill the last slot:

Divine will give you more healing and health – more HP, everything is simple here:

5. Earring Perks

Focused is a strong option for helping with Mana regen, with Mana Toast being a pretty close second:

Purifying Toast and Refreshing Toast are both great utility options for open-world PvP, where health consumables tend to be used more. These all help in PvE as well:

Beloved and Evasive can both help you mitigate aggro in expeditions:

You can also grab Refreshing here if you don’t manage to get it on your armor.

6. Ring Perks

Sacred is the best perk for more extra healing:

Refreshing is also a decent Utility with the lowered cooldowns, but that’s also available on armor:

Brilliant also could be a good choice if you’re running out of mana fast:

Slash Damage and Keen Awareness are always great options, thanks to the damage they provide.

Thrust Protection can be useful against Bow and Musket users:

Hearty will add you enough Stamina for one more additional dodge. If the player has 109.5 total stamina, and each dodge takes 40 stamina (with 150 Dexterity attribute bonus), they can dodge twice (leaving the player at 39.5 stamina), wait a fraction of a second for stamina to regenerate to 41, and then dodge twice more for a total of 4 dodges:

Blood Letting works great with Keenly Jagged on your weapon:

Healing Mechanics

Healing Bonuses

Healing bonuses come in two forms, which we generally refer to as “outgoing” bonuses and “incoming” bonuses.

1. Bonuses to outgoing healing mean that any heals you cast will benefit from those bonuses. Even if you cast on yourself, you will benefit from outgoing bonuses, because YOU are still the caster.

2. Bonuses to incoming healing meaning any heals you receive. For these bonuses, you don’t have to cause the heal, you just have to be affected by it.

3. Disease also falls into the incoming healing category, but applies a negative effect instead of a bonus.

Outgoing healing bonuses affect:

1. Life Staff basic attack healing.

2. All Life Staff abilities.

3. Orb of Decay and Overflowing Essence (not the regular Essence Rupture, only the explosion at the end).

4. The “Healthy Toast” earring perk (probably a bug since outgoing healing doesn’t affect other potions).

Sources of outgoing healing include:

1. 150 Focus Perk.

2. Weapon Perk: Blessed.

3. Ring Perk: Sacred.

4. Armor Perk: Mending Protection.

5. Life Staff Skill Tree Perks: Bend Light, Protector’s Strength, Intensify.

6. Rally (Diamond slotted in weapon).

Incoming healing bonuses affect:

1. Everything that makes your health go up, including potions and lifestealing.

Sources of incoming healing include:

1. Necklace Perk: Divine.

2. Armor Perk: Revitalizing Beacon.

3. Life Staff Skill Tree Perks: Sacred Protection, Blessed (Sacred Ground).

4. Disease (negative effect).

Incoming Healing Cap & Disease

Incoming healing bonuses have a cap of +50%. This means if you are standing in Sacred Ground (+50% bonus) you instantly hit the cap and no longer benefit from other incoming healing bonuses such as Divine.

However, if you are affected by a disease, the disease will subtract from the uncapped portion first.

For example, let’s say you’re currently affected by Divine (9.7%), Sacred Protection (5%), and Sacred Ground (50%), for a total of +64.7% incoming healing.

That extra +14.7% is normally wasted, but if you’re hit with Putrefying Scream (29% Disease), the Disease debuff will subtract from +64.7% first, leaving you with +35.7% incoming healing.

+50% to +35.7% is only an effective change of -14.3%, even though you were hit with a 29% disease.

In other words, even though being above the +50% cap will not provide you extra healing, it will provide you with extra protection against Disease.

Focus Scaling

Currently, Life Staff and Void Gauntlet heal refer to “x% of weapon damage.” This is only true if the caster has 5 Focus. The more Focus the caster has, the more incorrect these tooltips become.

This is because attribute scaling for healing and weapon damage are not equal. If we use Focus damage scaling on Life Staff as our baseline (100%), heal scaling is currently 200% across the board.

This chart shows the difference between how much healing you would expect to get based on what the game tells you, versus how much healing you actually get in practice.

For simplicity, the numbers shown here don’t include any other bonuses (not even the 150 Focus bonus) but the % Difference column will stay the same regardless of how much bonus healing your character has.

Focus	Expected Heal	Actual Heal	Difference, %
5	60	60	0.00%
15	64	68	6.16%
25	68	76	11.61%
35	72	84	16.46%
45	76	92	20.80%
55	80	100	24.71%
65	84	108	28.26%
75	88	116	31.49%
85	92	124	34.44%
95	96	132	37.14%
105	100	139	39.39%
115	103	145	41.26%
125	106	152	43.02%
135	109	158	44.68%
145	112	164	46.24%
155	115	170	47.64%
165	118	176	48.91%
175	121	182	50.11%
185	124	188	51.26%
195	127	193	52.36%
205	130	199	53.35%
215	132	204	54.25%
225	135	209	55.11%
235	137	214	55.94%
245	140	219	56.74%
255	142	224	57.47%
265	144	228	58.12%
275	147	233	58.76%
285	149	237	59.37%
295	151	242	59.97%
305	153	246	60.51%
315	155	250	61.00%
325	157	253	61.47%
335	159	257	61.93%
345	161	261	62.38%
355	163	265	62.83%
365	165	269	63.26%
375	166	272	63.68%
385	168	276	64.09%
395	170	280	64.49%
405	172	284	64.88%
415	174	288	65.27%
425	176	291	65.64%

As you can see, this is a huge amount of extra healing. At 300 Focus, Life Staff heals are about 60% stronger than they should be.

It’s unclear if this will ever be fixed or “balanced” since Void Gauntlet was released with the exact same scaling issue.

It’s actually even more noticeable on Void Gauntlet, which only has 65% Focus scaling for damage, but still benefits from 200% Focus scaling when it comes to healing.

This means Void Gauntlet heals scale three times harder than they should, making 300 Focus VG heals twice as strong as the game would indicate.

Note* Even though Intelligence will cause your Void Gauntlet weapon damage to increase, your Void Gauntlet healing does not increase from raising Intelligence. All of this scaling is the result of Focus only.

Snapshotting

So far, all outgoing healing that we’ve tested has snapshotted at the time of the cast. This means whatever bonuses are active at the time of casting will persist throughout the entire effect.

For example, if you dodge to trigger Bend Light for a 20% bonus for 5 seconds, and then cast a Beacon on somebody with a 15 second duration, Beacon will benefit from the 20% bonus for the entire effect, even though your Bend Light buff wears off much sooner.

Similarly, if you cast Beacon on someone without any bonuses, then you dodge after your cast and trigger Bend Light, the 20% bonus will not apply to that Beacon. The Beacon heal is already snapshotted and doesn’t care about bonuses you’ve gained or lost after the effect has started.

This will also provide some benefit to the Divine Blessing perk at the bottom of the Life Staff Healing tree. Remember that the game only checks to see if your target is below 50% health at the start of the effect, so if you throw a heal over time on somebody at 49% health, they will continue to get a 30% bonus on the entire duration of the heal, even though they are now above 50% as the heal continues to tick.

Healing Gameplay Settings

Go to Gameplay Settings and change if needed:

To be able to heal yourself instantly, go to the Key Bindings section of the Settings. You can set any key you want, mouse button, control, etc. Hold said keybind first, then hit an ability:

Another important setting is the so-called Sticky Lock. When activated, it will always prompt for the last healed target. Most of the time, you want to heal your tank or the person who always dies in your party. 

Also, Sticky Lock changes the behavior of your Sacred Ground placement. It functions as a single target heal.

Taunt Mechanics

Taunt forces PvE foes to focus on you. But enemies will frequently finish up any animations or attacks they are already performing against other targets first, before turning their attention to you. If the taunt worked, you’ll see the border around the enemy’s health bar will turn red.

Shield Bash and Defiant Stance can taunt, but only if you have a Carnelian Gem socketed in your Sword. Damage your dealing also increases your Threat. Use everything to maximize the Threat since your role as a tank is to keep all mobs on you and not let them damage other players in your group.

Source: morrolantv.com

Consumables

In this chapter, you can find information about endgame consumables because you don’t really need most of them on low levels. You can easily find the low leveled versions of them because the names only differ by one word, except food. 

1. Regeneration

Health Regeneration Food:

Mana Regeneration Food:

Health Potions:

Mana Potions:

Regeneration Potions:

Focus Potions:

2. Attribute Food

Since Focus is your main Attribute, you might want to increase it. This food gives you an option to put 40 points from Focus to another Attribute, like Constitution:

You can also use food with both Constitution and Focus bonuses to increase your health and healing at the same time:

Focus / Constitution combination with more Focus is also available:

Also, you can use Constitution food to maximize your health:

To find more food, please check our Cooking Guide.

3. Honing Stone

Powerful Honing Stone will increase your Hatchet damage. They can be bought or crafted at Smelter if you reach 170 Weaponsmithing level:

You can use cheaper stones, like Strong Honing Stone, because the difference is only 1%.

4. Gemstone Dust

Powerful Gemstone Dust can also be bought or crafted at level 170 Jewelcrafting:

Since they’re used in the Mutated Orb crafting, you can buy Strong Gemstone Dust much cheaper:

5. Oakflesh Balm

Powerful Oakflesh Balm can be bought or crafted at 170 Armoring level as well.  It also has cheaper analogs, but usually, they don’t cost too much, and you don’t use them too often:

6. Powerful Incense

Powerful Incense requires 170 Furnishing levels to craft. Otherwise, it can be bought for cheap from the Trading Post:

7. Weapon Coatings

Weapon Coatings give a 15% damage bonus against certain types of enemies. These coatings are usually used in dungeons, where you’re fighting mostly against enemies of the same type, for example:

8. Ward Potions

Ward Potions increase your damage absorption against certain enemy types. They can help you mitigate heavy incoming damage:

9. Absorption Potions

Absorption Potions can help you not only in dungeons but also in PvP against mages. They increase absorption by 15% against a certain type of elemental damage, for example:

10. Corruption Tincture And Blight Tincture

Corruption Tincture and Blight Tincture remove afflictions and give 97,5% resistance to these afflictions for 5 minutes:

11. Infused Encumbrance Potion

Infused Encumbrance Potion will help you a bit with bringing your sack to the nearest warehouse. It lasts 3 minutes and increases the Encumbrance Limit by 100:

I know that feeling, bro, even one Flint or Green Wood must not be discarded. 

For more Potions you can check our Arcana Guide.

FAQ