Ultimate Life Staff Guide (Updated Up To Patch 1.3.4)

• Attributes
• Builds For Life Staff
• Optional Passive Skills
• Life Staff Active Skills
• Gear
• Gems
• Equipment Perks
• Healing Mechanics
• Consumables
• Weapons To Combine With
• FAQ

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. 

The Life Staff has one damage skill available in its entire kit, so players will heavily rely on their offhand for damage. It also has no crowd control or mobility tools. 

Attributes

This is the only Weapon scales purely with Focus, so this is your only Attribute. You can use an Amber gem to convert the other weapon’s damage partially to Nature damage, and that converted damage will scale with Focus.

There are very important breakpoints at 150 and 200 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:

Minmaxing your character for endgame PvP you can also reach 200 Constitution breakpoint for a 20% armor increase.

Builds For Life Staff

1. This is a flexible build, suitable for 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. 

Basic Rotation:

Stick a Beacon on a dangerous enemy during boss fights, or just shoot Beacon into a tank during pools. 

Place Sacred Ground under a tank during block for healing or under yourself for mana regeneration. 

Use Light’s Embrace to target heal party members and to replenish tank stamina.

Use light and heavy attacks to get cooldown recovery, Fortify, healing bonuses, and remove debuffs. Remember that you are actually healing with your attacks as well and don’t forget to dodge to get a bonus from your dodge passive.

Leveling:

Our opening passives are Absolved, Blissful Touch, and Bent Light. These free passives are very powerful tools to benefit from simple dodge and light attack mechanics.

Next, we take Beacon and Sacred Ground. After that, we reduce their cooldowns with Revitalize and Desperate Speed. Infused Light and Radiances Blessing passives takes Beacon to a next level.

On mastery level 10, you can finally take Light’s Embrace and Inspire passive.

Take Holy Ground and Blessed passives next to gain maximum benefit from Sacred Ground.

Then, Sacred Protection, Intensify, and Mending Touch. These free passives give you increased healing potential and debuff removal but require a combination of light and heavy attacks.

After all previous investments, you can finally take Divine Blessing. This passive is pretty much a must in any build that actually goes for Sacred Ground.

And as a final touch, you can take Protector’s Touch and Protector’s Strength to increase your personal survival.

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

Basic Rotation:

In PvE dungeon scenarios, you need to expect heavy utilization of Light’s Embrace on top of Beacon to heal your tank. Orb of Protection with Fortify buff is very important damage mitigation too. You always need to anticipate incoming damage and precast orb of protection on your allies.

Leveling:

Our opening passives are Absolved, Blissful Touch, and Bend Light.

Take Beacon, Light’s Embrace, and Orb of Protection next. Then upgrade Beacon with Infused Light and Radiance’s Blessing passives to achieve cooldown recovery with Revitalize and Desperate Speed.

Upgrade Orb of Protection with all three passives next to achieve mass Fortify effect. Remember that Fortify buff stacks only up to 50%. 

Protector’s Touch and Protector’s Strength are viable additions to Orb of Protection to increase your Fortify buff.

Take Spirits United since this build probably would play in a mage group, and as a final touch, get extra buff duration with Glowing Focus and Mending Touch to have debuff removal.

3. This build fits most if you use Life Staff as a secondary weapon to buff yourself.

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, because you might get overhealed using Beacon. 

Optional Passive Skills

A bit of explanation about arguable skills.

1. Mending Touch:

Mostly PvE skill because not that many debuffs going out from other players, slow or root don’t last very long, burns from fire casters are pretty healable. Besides, you’re not going to use a heavy attack when damage is going out. But in PvE-related content, you can take off all kinds of blight, dots, burning dots slows, poisons, bleeds.

This skill is usually being taken to get to the Divine Blessing.

2. Inspire:

When you’re healing a tank with Light’s Embrace, you’ll be giving them Stamina back so that they can keep blocking. This skill fits more for expeditions or out in the world when you can give yourself a quick Light’s Embrace, and you’ll get 25 stamina back to dodge.

3. Protector’s Touch:

This one is more designed for world PvP but can also be useful in many other situations. 

4. Glowing Focus:

Usually being used in Orb of Protection builds.

Life Staff Active Skills

1. Divine Embrace:

This Ability does have a pretty long cast time, larger mana cost, and cooldown compared to the other targeted heal, Light’s Embrace. In PvE, this skill often goes unused due to the cast time and high mana cost overall.

This can be used in PvP but is not anywhere near as practical or useful as its counterpart in the Protector Tree since its passive abilities Shared Struggle and Rebound are limited to an 8 m radius.

2. Sacred Ground:

This Ability not only heals for a large amount over time, but it also can increase Stamina and mana regeneration and increases all incoming healing. Since this heals over time, you are less likely to waste any healing, and it is easily your strongest group heal.

Cooldown takes down while the ability is active, so effectively it only has a 5 seconds downtime.

Note that the tank would not actually regenerate stamina during block with holy ground passive – this passive only applies to out-of-block stamina regeneration. 

Hitting yourself with Sacred Ground to reject mana is a really nice option to save mana potion.

3. Splash of Light:

The ability has no cast time, but it has a brief pre-animation before Heal goes through. You do not need to aim it or be in the line of sight of those you heal.

This skill can be useful in chaotic mass PvP situations where you want to get a quick Heal on everyone – but the cooldown is pretty lengthy. The only real benefit of Splash of Light is party-wide debuff removal of its Purify passive.

4. Orb of Protection:

This projectile can be somewhat difficult to land if you do not have good timing and aim, but it can be used offensively as well. Once upgraded, it will apply to Heal over time, in addition, to fortifying that can affect both you and your target. 

Orb of Protection is a must-have skill for roaming PvP and dungeon composition where you have one tank, one healer, and three-light armored ranged damage dealers.

5. Light’s Embrace:

This targeted Heal is extremely strong, especially once players begin to be able to buff themselves, increasing healing. It requires good skill usage to maximize, but easily one of the most impactful healing abilities. This ability has an instant cast.

6. Beacon:

This is a nice heal-over-time that moves around with whomever you have attached it to. While you cannot stick it to yourself, you can put it on the ground right in front of you and just stand in it. 

Gear

Light armor gives you +20% damage, +30% healing bonus, and the best amount of movement with a quick roll. 

Medium armor will give you more protection, +10% damage, +15% healing 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 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

1. Life Staff Skill Perks

These perks can be found on armors and weapons but often slotted on Armor as Weapons have access to better perks overall.

Refreshing Divine Embrace:

This ability already has such a low cooldown, and the health required for it to trigger isn’t really worth it as you can get better bonuses in most places.

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.

Energizing Splash of Light:

This would be good in large-scale PvP if Splash of Light was able to affect more than your party. 

Mending Protection:

After changing the mechanic it works in patch 1.1, this Perk becomes pretty useful if you’re playing with Orb of Protection.

Accelerating Light’s Embrace:

This is a useful Perk, especially with buff duration, as it allows you to apply haste without spending a point on Speed of Light.

Revitalizing Beacon:

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

2. Armor Perks

Refreshing and Resilient can be a useful universal choice to cast the Beacon and Holy Ground back to back and decrease the receiving damage in PvP:

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

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

3. Weapon Perks

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

Refreshing Move helps a great deal with getting more skill rotations out, especially for skills with a long cooldown like Beacon:

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 self-healing:

5. Earrings 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, making you less likely to pull aggro in expeditions:

6. Rings 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:

Thrust Protection can be useful against Bow and Musket users:

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.

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. First of all, you need Health Regeneration Food in case you’re out of mana:

Mana Regeneration Food:

Health Potions:

Mana Potions:

Regeneration Potions:

Focus Potions:

2. Attribute Food

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

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 Constitution food to maximize your health:

To find more food for hybrid builds, please visit our Cooking Guide.

3. Powerful Honing Stone will increase your damage. You can apply it to the secondary weapon if you want or help your group with a bit of 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. Powerful Gemstone Dust can be also 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. Powerful Oakflesh Balm can be bought or crafted at 170 Armoring level. It also has cheaper analogs, but usually, they don’t cost too much, and you don’t use them too often:

6. Powerful Incense requires 170 Furnishing level to craft:

Otherwise, you can buy it or use Strong Incense, which often costs much less:

7. Weapon Coatings give a 15% damage bonus against certain types of enemies. These coatings are usually applied to secondary weapons since Life Staff doesn’t have a lot of damaging options:

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

9. 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 remove afflictions and give 97,5% resistance to these afflictions for 5 minutes:

11. 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.

Weapons To Combine With

1. Ice Gauntlet. If you mainly want to be a healer, place the Cut Pristine Amber in your Ice Gauntlet, making the damage scale with Focus. Or you can max Intelligence using your Ice Gauntlet as your main DPS with Life Staff as a support weapon while waiting for your spells to be off CD. It’ll give you Lots of AoE offensive skills and high survivability but relies on mana management. One downside of this combo is that the Ice Gauntlet does not provide any movement skills.
2. Rapier provides great mobility and damage. One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a healer in both PvE and PvP is getting the body blocked into a corner by foes; Fleche allows you to zip through foes and escape. One downside of this combo is that it does not provide any area crowd control or AoE damage.
3. Fire Staff, if you’ll place the Cut Pristine Amber in it, making the damage to your Fire Staff scaling with Focus. It’ll give you Lots of AoE damaging skills and mobility with Burn Out. The main downside of this build is the lack of crowd control and fast running out of mana since you don’t have mana regeneration like in the Ice Gauntlet combination.
4. War Hammer provides several crowd control options. Shockwave stuns all foes around you, Clear Out can knock them away, and Wrecking Ball can knock them down. But you don’t have any movement skills.
5. Great Axe has large damage output with area-of-effect attacks that cannot be ignored and a decent crowd control skill, as well as a gap-closing ability. For this setup, you would use an Amber gem to change the Great Axe damage scaling to Focus or put some Attribute points to Strength. While this combination does less damage than a pure Strength setup, it is difficult to kill.
6. Hatchet. This build is centered around high mobility and AoE healing while increasing the amount of healing you do and your own survivability with the use of the Hatchet as a secondary weapon. On top of that, Hatchet will also provide you with a critical ability in the form of Defy Death, which makes you invulnerable for 3s.
7. Spear can also provide several crowd control options and can even apply a powerful debuff in Rend if you are inclined to help apply some debuffs in PvE. The Spear does not provide any movement skills.
8. Sword and Shield allows you to tank and heal at the same time. Though light equipment does provide benefits to healing, you can still heal in Heavy Armor. Using Beacon and Sacred Ground and then tanking with the Sword and Shield gives you a lot of survivability. The downsides of this combination are lack of movement skill and low damage.

FAQ