Life Staff PvP Guide

In PvP, health is one of the most important resources that a player has because it dictates whether a player is alive (functioning) or dead (not functioning). In New World, the life staff is the only weapon that has the capability to directly heal player characters, making it uniquely powerful and positioned well in PvP.

Sacred Ground

Sacred Ground is one of the life staff’s most powerful healing spells in PvP. The reason it performs so well is because the ability persists through weapon swaps, allowing the user to heal while dealing damage with a secondary weapon. An ability that has a high Mana to Heal ratio, persists through weapon swaps, and gives extra perks to players standing inside of it with the Holy Ground and Blessed passives makes Sacred Ground a go-to ability.

Passives

• Holy Ground
  • Regenerate Stamina and Mana 100% faster while in Sacred Ground
• Blessed
  • While allies are in Sacred Ground they are healed for 50% more from all healing

Holy Ground and Blessed are an easy pick-up due to the power level each passive. The fact that there is no cap on the amount of players that benefit from these buffs makes them infinitely valuable.

Orb of Protection

Being the only damaging ability on the life staff and providing buffs to the user and their team,  Orb of Protection can be a very important tool, especially in small-scale PvP. The buffs that Orb of Protection provides will help to activate passives like Protector’s Strength as well as our direct heal, Light’s Embrace. For this reason, Protector’s Blessing and Shared Protection are both passives that are taken in this build, allowing Orb of Protection to immediately apply 2 buffs to teammates and the life staff user, specifically buffing the Light’s Embrace heal by 60%.

Passives

• Protector’s Blessing
  • If Orb of Protection hits an ally they gain Recovery for 10 seconds.
• Shared Protection
  • If you successfully heal an ally with Orb of Protection, you also gain Fortify and Recovery.

Light’s Embrace

In PvP, burst damage is king. Since there are many ways to regenerate health in New World, it is more effective to kill a player quickly. Killing an opponent before they are able to use a number of consumables and weapon abilities that heal, will dramatically reduce the total amount of damage that is needed to kill that opponent. As the average skill level of players inevitably increases, the time that it takes for players to kill each other should decrease. This is because players will continue to find better ways to deal heavy amounts of damage within a smaller and smaller window while also becoming more consistent with basic attacks and abilities.

Knowing that burst damage is important in eliminating other players, life staff users must understand this principle and expect their opponents to want to do the same. This means that being able to heal through burst damage whether on the player themselves or teammates will be very important for life staff users in PvP. Light’s Embrace fits this single-target burst healing theme very well with high weapon damage scaling (100%+ 30% PER BUFF ON TARGET) as well as an amazingly strong PvP weapon ability perk Accelerating Light’s Embrace and a powerful passive, Inspire. Every 4 seconds (cooldown) players healed with Light’s Embrace get 25 stamina and a 23% movement speed bonus for 3 seconds. With only a 4 second cooldown, this ability brings so much value with a high up-time.

Passives

• Inspire
  • When you heal a target with Light’s Embrace target receives 25 stamina

Inspire is the only passive that we take under Light’s Embrace for obvious reasons. 25 stamina can give healed players an extra dodge that could help them avoid damage or place themselves into a better position.

This particular selection of abilities gives a life staff user a great foundation, providing AoE heals (Sacred Ground), direct healing (Light’s Embrace), buffs, as well as some damage with Orb of Protection. In this PvP build, Life Staff players should be looking to keep teammates and themselves chock-full of buffs in order to help mitigate as much damage as possible. A 15% Fortify bonus from Protector’s Touch is a buff that reduces the incoming damage that an ally takes by the percentage amount. However, it can also be thought of as a heal over time ability,  healing the player for the amount of damage mitigated from the buff, since the life staff player won’t have to heal that damage later. Extra buffs on targets also means that Light’s Embrace heals for much higher (30% per buff on the target).

When healing only themselves, the life staff user’s job becomes fairly easy. The life staff is likely not the player’s main weapon, so before switching to the main damage dealing weapon, life staff user will want to use every ability on themselves:

1. Use Orb of Protection on the ground underneath themselves for the 15% fortify bonus and Protector’s Blessing recovery buff.
2. Place Sacred Ground underneath themselves for an AoE healing over time that persists through the weapon swap.
3. Heal themselves with Light’s Embrace to top off, regen 25 stamina, as well as proc Accelerating Light’s Embrace, a mandatory weapon ability perk that provides a 23% haste bonus for 3 seconds (shown in weapon ability perks section).

Players will switch back and forth between their weapons when life staff abilities are off of cooldown, making full use of all abilities, especially Sacred Ground which persists through a weapon swap which makes it ultra powerful.

The life staff fully scales off of the Focus attribute at 1.0X. This means that for every point in Focus, the life staff will gain 1 full weapon damage. In a 500 attribute total build, the recommended attribute distribution is:

• 250 Focus
• 250 Constitution

This attribute distribution will give you these attribute bonuses:

Focus

1. 50: +10% Mana regen rate
2. 100: +20 to Mana pool
3. 150: +20% healing output
4. 200: +20% duration on casted buffs
5. 250: +30 Mana on any self or group kill

Constitution

1. 50: All consumables are +20% stronger
2. 100: Increase max health by 10% of physical armor
3. 150: 10% reduction to crit damage taken
4. 200: +20% increase to armor
5. 250: -80% damage reduction when full health (60 second cooldown)

250 Focus and 250 Constitution will give life staff users a great blend of both a larger health pool as well as the power to effectively utilize and heal with that amount of health. Life staff users can truly take advantage of the 250 Constitution bonus by having a reliable way to heal to full health regularly. An ability like Reap for example, can heal a greataxe user, but it will likely not be enough healing to top up a player to take benefit from a bonus like this. With the combination of the Absolved passive, and passives that increase healing like Bend Light, or Protector’s Strength paired with the 50, 100, 150, and 250 Focus attribute bonuses, life staff users will be very mana efficient.

Weapon Ability Perks are generated perks that can be found or applied to:

• Weapons
• Chests
• Helmets
• Gloves
• Pants
• Shoes

These weapon ability perks augment the power level of a weapon ability in a positive way. Currently, each weapon has 6 ability perks available to players, one for each active ability. Below are all of the weapon ability perks currently available to the life staff and pertain to this build.

Fortifying Sacred Ground

Allies healed by Sacred Ground gain Fortify, increasing damage absorption by 14% for 5 seconds.

Mending Protection

Increase healing power by 37% for 5 seconds if Orb of Protection heals an ally with no active buffs.

Accelerating Light’s Embrace

Allies below full health gain Haste when hit with Light’s Embrace, increasing movement speed by 23% for 3 Seconds.

All three weapon ability perks for this particular PvP build provide immense value in different situations. 

Accelerating Light’s Embrace is a mandatory ability perk that is made for PvP. With a 4 second ability cooldown and a 3 second 23% haste bonus, Accelerating Light’s Embrace has an amazingly high up-time. Fortifying Sacred Ground gives an already heavily furnished ability an extra reason to run it. With a great Mana to Heal ratio (300% weapon damage heal over 15 seconds for 15 Mana), 100% Stamina and Mana regen, an extra 50% healing from all sources, and the ability perks 14% fortify, Sacred Ground is a hard ability to pass up.