Sword And Life Staff Combination Guide (Patch 1.3.4)

• Attributes
• Builds For Sword And Shield
• Builds For Life Staff
• Gear
• Gems
• Equipment Perks
• Consumables
• Healing Mechanics
• FAQ

What do you need first to become a paladin? No, not the fair Lady. No, not the celibate. And apparently not them both at the same time, but you can if you do want. Who said you need shining steel pants? Who said this? First of all, you need a shining steel Shield.

The only weapon to be paired with the Shield, the Sword offers many strong defensive options to save your shining steel pants, and it’s the best weapon for tanking – besides, only Shield can block ranged attacks from those blasted archers and mages.

In case Shield didn’t help, you need some aid. 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. 

Neither of these weapons has any mobility tools, but you don’t need them since you have your horse, right? Well, I hope you will sometimes.

Attributes

The Life Staff scales with Focus, while the Sword scales with Strength and Dexterity. Constitution and Focus build are currently more efficient than any other – it gives a lot of health, healing, and survivability while you still have your basic damage.

Usually, it goes as 200 Focus and 300 Constitution. There are very important breakpoints at 150 and 200 Focus:

As for Constitution, you need at least 50 to gain +20% of the effectiveness to all health consumables, or 200 for 20% armor increase.

But since Paladin is a hybrid class, nothing prevents you from putting all points into Constitution and getting a very fat tank for Expedition or putting all points in Focus to get an almost pure healer for a group play. Or you could even put all points into Strength and become a damaging paladin. Everything depends on your own preferences. 

Builds For Sword And Shield

There are two build options for players who like to use the Sword and Shield in New World, one that relies on offensive DPS-based gameplay and another that focuses on playing as a Tank. Most tank builds rely on Reverse Stab since if you hit 4 enemies with it, you’ll constantly refresh all cooldowns except the Reverse Stab itself.

Another important thing is Mobility use. Combining it with Sure Footing weapon perk you can move 53% faster when blocking. The following builds don’t use this skill because not every encounter needs it, but you can take it if you want. For example, on the first Eternal Pool boss, this combination is very useful.

1. This tanking build is made for hard tanking situations with heavy incoming damage:

Here you don’t have Shield Bash with additional taunt and crowd control, but instead, you have Improved Rush, an ability from Shield Rush tree, which gains 10% weakens to all enemies within 5 meters for 4 seconds. By synergizing it with a Tactician, you can constantly reduce all incoming damage by 10%. It also synergizes with an equipment perk, Fortifying Shield Rush, to get an additional Fortify, which is always nice.

2. If you do want more crowd control and, more importantly, more taunt abilities, you can use this build with Shield Bash:

Since this is a defensive build, it doesn’t have haste or damage options. You can take One With The Shield or Concussive Bash instead of Final Blow.

3. Of course, you can just grab every skill in Defender tree, for example, for solo bosses or PvP where you cannot fully realize the potential of Reverse Stab cooldown reduction or if you don’t like to use it:

4. To run Arenas and Expeditions fast you need an aggressive support tank, having pretty much of defense and offense, and a panic button Defiant Stance in addition, for example:

You can switch between Achilles’ Heel, Confidence, Mobility in the Swordmaster skill tree and Defensive Training, High Grip, and Final Blow in the Defender skill tree depending on what you need most.

It might perform pretty well in a group due to Leadership buff, giving high AoE damage resetting the ability cooldowns with Tactician (that’s why you don’t need Tactical Strike). But this build is definitely not recommended for solo playing since it has neither damage of pure DPS weapons nor the surviving of tank builds.

5. If you’re playing as a tank in a ranged group and do want Leadership since Defensive Formation is not so useful, you can take it for the price of reduced Stamina damage:

Of course, you can take Sturdy Grip instead of Defensive Training or Freeing Justice instead of Counter Attack for PvP.

Builds For Life Staff

For more information, check our Life Staff Guide.

1. This one is a flexible build, suitable for melee party gameplay in dungeons, siege, warfare, and open-world raids or solo farming. 

This build is very positional but rewards you with an insane level of raw healing.

2. This build fits most if you use Life Staff only to buff and heal yourself.

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

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

4. Orb build fits better paired with the Void Gauntlet, because you might get overhealed using Beacon, but can be used for Paladin build. 

Gear

Heavy armor offers the best protection and +20% length of the crowd control debuffs for the price of lower mobility. Of course, you can wear light or medium armor if you’re going to be mainly a healer or for some content where you need extra mobility, like farming resources or making low-level quests, for example.

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

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 and Constitution (Cleric and Nomad Gear).

The Shield offers an additional equipment slot, and all of the Attributes on both the Sword and the Shield are half of what you would get from the same Gear Score Weapon of a different type. 

Sword and Shield’s combo also grants you 6 total Perks, 3 on every item. You will only gain Attributes and Perks from your Shield when you hold it in your hand.

Shields have damage numbers on them because this is what is used to calculate the damage dealt by Shield Bash and Shield Rush. Shields are also heavy and will affect your equipment load while it is equipped.

There are three types of shields: Round, Kite, and Tower.

Round Shield has the best damage and the lowest block stability.

Tower Shields has the highest block stability and the lowest damage.

Kite Shields are the middle ground.

Block stability shows how much Stamina damage mitigation you will have when blocking with this weapon. Round Shields all have block stability of 30%, Kite Shields has 40%, and Tower Shields has 50%.

So, if you are looking to maximize the damage you are doing with your Shield-specific skills for either PvP or sheer threat generation, then you want to go with Round Shields. If you want to have an easier time absorbing damage, you will want to use a Tower Shield.

Gems

For this build, it’s nice to have two Swords, one with Cut Pristine Carnelian gem for tanking and another one with Cut Pristine Amber to convert Sword 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, 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 Sword and Shield and Life Staff Guides for more information. In this guide, you can find only defensive perks since this build is usually used for tanking due to its low damage compared with other DPS weapons.

1. Armor Perks

The best perks for Paladin are:

Fortifying 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 for solo play, as you’ll only be healing yourself.

Also pretty useful:

Fortifying Shield Rush:

Gaining Fortify is always nice because it reduces the damage you take. In PvE, even as a DPS, using Shield Rush generally means knocking most enemies out of your range. It’s a decent effect if you’re already using Shield Rush, but it doesn’t make Shield Rush a powerful skill.

In PvP, it has a bit more value, as any retaliation from an enemy will deal less damage. It’s also not rated highly due to the short duration, which does mean they can space you out until the effect ends.

Refreshing Ward:

Pretty useful perk for tanking – especially in AoE situations.

Refreshing with Resilient is a nice universal combination:

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

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. Sword And Shield Perks

Sturdy:

Nice perk for a Shield since you’ll be using block as a tank pretty often.

Hated:

Up to +15% more threat generation, which is very important for tanking.

Keenly Fortified:

More Fortify is always great.

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

Sure Footing works great with Mobility and can be useful on certain encounters where you have to move fast while blocking:

For PvP against 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:

4. Amulet Perks

Slash Protection and Thrust Protection cover most PvE and PvP incoming damage:

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:

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

5. Earring Perks

If you’re playing mostly as a healer, 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:

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

Despised:

As a tank, you want as many threat generations as you can get.

6. Ring Perks

Sacred is the best perk for more extra healing:

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

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

Thrust Protection can be useful against Bow and Musket users:

Hearty will add you enough Stamina for one more additional dodge or attack block:

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

First of all, you need Health Regeneration Food:

Mana Regeneration Food:

Health Potions:

Mana Potions:

Regeneration Potions:

Focus Potions:

2. Attribute Food

As a tank, first of all, you might want to increase your Constitution. This food gives you an option to put 40 points from Constitution to another Attribute.

You can 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 Focus food to maximize your healing:

To find more food, check our Cooking Guide.

3. Honing Stone

Powerful Honing Stone will increase your damage and, as a result, threat level. They can be bought or crafted at Smelter if you reach 170 Weaponsmithing level.

4. Gemstone Dust

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

5. Oakflesh Balm

Powerful Oakflesh Balm can be bought or crafted at 170 Armoring level as well.

6. Powerful Incense

Powerful Incense requires 170 Furnishing level 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 mainly fighting 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 certain types 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.

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

FAQ