New World Fire Staff build – Fire Staff and Ice Gauntlet

The Fire Staff is one of two primary caster DPS weapons in New World, and its two trees are Fire Mage and Pyromancer. It is a weapon that boasts high burst damage and a large area of effect, making it an excellent addition to any expedition team composition or open-world party. In this guide, we will take a look at the best New World Fire Staff build, including the weapons, skills, and gear to focus on for your character.

This build will mainly focus on two abilities while picking up lots of passive perks to boost our overall damage. While there are six abilities in total to choose from, they are very mana intensive, so two will do the trick just fine. Your light and heavy attacks will also act as primary damage dealers in this New World Fire Staff build, making it sort of pointless to consider picking up a third skill.

Before diving into our New World Fire Staff build, please note that there are many viable mage builds you can run with this weapon. A lot of what’s “best” will depend on your preferred playstyle. We’re looking to optimize our basic attacks for this build while making the most out of the Burn damage over time from Incinerate and Burnout. 

New World Fire Staff build

Here are the best weapons, skills, and attributes to use for your New World Fire Staff build:

• Fire Staff: Incinerate, Burnout
• Ice Gauntlet: Entombed, Ice Shower, Ice Storm
• Attributes: Intelligence

Fire Staff

Incinerate is one of the primary AoE damage dealers for a Fire Staff user. In addition to an initial burst with knockback, it also adds burning damage over time to all enemies hit. 

Burn Out is a mobility skill that applies burn damage to a group of targets caught in your path. So not only can you use it in high-density monster scenarios, but you can also use it to close the gap between you and an enemy or as an escape move if you’re in danger.

• Incinerate – Cause a fiery explosion dealing 130% weapon damage and knocking back all enemies three meters. Catches enemies on fire dealing 3% weapon damage each second for six seconds.
• Burn Out – Dash through targets dealing 129% weapon damage on hit. Passing through a target will catch the target on fire, applying a Burn that deals 10% weapon damage each second for eight seconds.

To buff these abilities further, we’ll be picking up the following passive skills:

• Scorched – Each hit of Incinerate causes an additional stack of burning.
• Cauterize Wounds – Restore 20% of damage dealt by Incinerate.
• Flame Out – Incinerate hits twice.

The most important passive skill to pick up here is Flame Out. Incinerate is already great on its own, but Flame Out makes it strike twice, effectively doubling the initial damage along with the burst damage, for a total of 260% weapon damage plus another 72% damage over time. The more enemies you hit, the more overall damage you’re doing, which can scale well in dungeons and high-density areas.

Ice Gauntlet

The Ice Gauntlet pairs well with the Fire Staff and is the most popular secondary weapon choice aside from the Rapier. It scales with the same primary attribute, and it has some nice synergies that work with the Fire Staff for a powerful mage build.

The Ice Gauntlet excels at zoning out enemies and crowd control, which means you can keep enemies at a distance while they burn to death from your fire abilities. Like the Fire Staff, it also has nice AoE abilities, so you can constantly pump out the damage on large groups of mobs. Here are the skills we’ll be picking up:

• Entombed – Player can entomb themselves in ice to become invulnerable and increase mana regeneration. The Ice Tomb has a lifetime of ten second and can be destroyed.
• Ice Shower – Summon a shower of ice that creates a frosted area of 1 by 5 meters. Enemies inside Ice Shower get Frostbite, rooting them for one second and blocking sprint and dodge, slowing speed by 50%, and remaining for 3 second after exiting Ice Shower. Ice Shower lasts for four seconds.
• Ice Storm – A ranged attack that deals 17% weapon damage every 0.25 seconds, slowing enemies within a five meter radius frosted area. 25% slow, 20 meters range, and 5 second duration.

Using a Rapier is another option if you prefer to be more mobile and mix in some melee. Dashing around and pumping out fire damage is always fun, but you will be fairly squishy if you get caught in a bad position without your cooldowns.

Attributes

As a Fire Staff user, your primary attribute should be intelligence. The nice thing here is that if you choose to pair your Fire Staff with an Ice Gauntlet, you’re also getting the damage scaling for that weapon. All attributes in New World give you bonus passive stats for every fifty points invested. Here are the Intelligence bonuses:

• 50 points – 10% damage to light and heavy magic attacks, 10% harvest speed
• 100 points – 10% critical damage, 5% chance for 1 Azoth when harvesting
• 150 points – 10% elemental damage, -10% decreased in weight of harvested items 
• 200 points – 10% mana after a dodge, 10% harvesting speed
• 250 points – 30% duration to DoT spells, 10% yield increase when harvesting
• 300 points – 30% damage on first hit of full health target, 10% reduction in Azoth travel cost

You have a few options here. Ideally, you’ll probably want to invest most if not all of your points into Intelligence. Your damage scales with it, so it’s the most important skill. You need to ask yourself how much you want to prioritize your health pool, and your answer will determine how many points you invest into Constitution.

The 30% damage on the first hit to full health targets bonus at 300 Intelligence points is massive. Your damage output will increase significantly if you can reach this milestone. At the bare minimum, I would recommend aiming for at least 250 points in Intelligence to snag the 30% increased DoT spell bonus, which will increase all of your burn damage.

Dump your remaining points into Constitution, or adjust your priorities along the way. If you primarily run dungeons/expeditions and have a good reliable tank to help, you don’t need to worry about your health all that much. However, if you are a solo player who prefers leveling in the open world, you may find yourself needing a bit more Consitution.

Gear

For your mage gear, you’ll want to go with a mix of heavy and medium armor. Some players opt for an overall Equip Load of “Medium” for the bonus damage and debuff length increase. Other players prefer a “Heavy” Equip Load for more armor and longer crowd control debuffs. It’s personal preference here, so pick based on your playstyle.

• Medium Armor – While wearing a medium-weight armor, your dodge is a quick hop. You deal 10% bonus damage and healing. Crowd control debuffs you apply last 10% longer.
• Heavy Armor – While wearing heavy armor, your dodge is a slow sidestep. Your block stability increases by 15% and crowd control debuffs you apply last 20% longer.

It may sound counterintuitive since most MMORPG caster classes are restricted to wearing light armor. However, New World’s class setup is different from other games, and the mage class is inherently a bit more of a “Battle Mage” due to the short-range abilities.

The role of a Caster DPS Class in New World

Using this New World Fire Staff build, your primary role is damage per second (DPS). Your job is to pump out as much damage as possible to assist in clearing dungeons quickly and efficiently. In basically any MMORPG, a good party includes a couple of damage dealers, a healer, and a tank. 

You will need to manage your threat as a damage dealer. For new MMO players, this means your damage output may be limited by the amount of threat your group’s tank can generate to hold aggro of the monsters. To make your healer’s life easy, you will want to ensure you are not “pulling threat” and causing monsters to focus on your instead of the tank.

As a class that primarily deals lots of area of effect damage, you will inevitably pull a mob at one point or another, but try to manage your damage wisely. With a good tank that can hold threat properly, you won’t need to worry too much about this, but keep it in mind if you join random pick-up groups to run expeditions and dungeons.

We will be sure to update this build as the New World meta evolves and skill changes take effect. In the meantime, you can check out some new related content in our New World section.