The Life Staff is your primary way of having a healer in New World. Whoever is regularly using the Life Staff is responsible for taking care of their party members and ensuring they remain alive during combat. The primary stat associated with the Life Staff is Focus, so you’ll want to level this up pretty often if you’re planning on using it. Here’s our guide to creating an ideal Life Staff build in New World.
Best Life Staff build
You have two trees to pick from when leveling up a Life Staff: Healing and Protector. Both of these trees apply a certain amount of healing to your target. The Healing tree focuses on raw healing, whereas the Protector tree can use added buffs and benefits when healing a target in exchange for healing strength.
Healing
- Divine Embrace – Heal target for 150% weapon damage.
- Sacred Ground – Create an area on the ground that lasts for 15 seconds, and heals for 20% weapon damage every second.
- Splash of Light – You and all group members within 100m are healed for 50% weapon damage.
Recommended active abilities: Of the choices, we’ve found that Sacred Ground is highly effective at healing, especially with large parties. The more Focus your character has, the more healing power that will generate. You can find yourself not worrying about every person as often, especially given how long this effect lasts. Splash of Light can be solid, especially if you’re participating in a War or an Expedition and have too many people to focus on at the same time. While Divine Embrace is fine, the targeted healing this ability does can be beaten by other choices, and they’ll also do additional effects.
Recommended passive abilities: Holy Ground is a must for Sacred Ground, increasing the amount of mana and stamina anyone in this effect is receiving. You’ll also want to consider grabbing Desperate Speed, Sacred Protection, Blessed, Shared Recovery, and Purify.
Protector
- Orb of Protection – Shoot out a light projectile that grants 10% Fortify for 20 seconds, heals an ally for 10% weapon damage, and deals 146% weapon damage when it hits an enemy.
- Light’s Embrace – Targeted heal for 100% weapon damage, 30% more for each buff on the target.
- Beacon – Shoot out a light projectile that deals 146% weapon damage to an enemy, attaches to the target and heals allies for 20% weapon damage each second, for 10 seconds.
Recommended active abilities: The Protector tree is highly effective at healing allies and giving them additional buffs in combat. While Orb of Protection is solid, we believe it’s beaten by Light’s Embrace and Beacon. Light’s Embrace is very easy to stack with other buffs someone is using, especially a tank in the middle of a fight, increasing this ability’s healing. With Beacon, you’ll be able to damage an enemy while also healing your allies while they stand around it during a fight. You can also attach this ability to an ally. While it doesn’t harm them, it still provides healing.
Recommended passive abilities: When using Beacon, you want to increase its overall length with Infused Light and make sure it stays up longer with Radiance’s Blessing. We also recommend grabbing Spirits United, Glowing Focus, Protector’s Strength, Inspire, Connection, and Magnify. If you primarily prefer PvP, you may also consider grabbing Balance.
We’ve found that Life Staff builds benefit from doubling down on the Protector tree and dabbling in the Healing Tree with Sacred Ground. While a Life Staff does have damage, you primarily want to use this weapon for Expeditions, War, or completing party-related content. You’ll benefit greatly from having a second weapon that does much more damage, such as the Hatchet or the Rapier.
