New World Healing Build – PvE Hatchet and Life Staff

In most MMORPGs, players avoid playing the healer like the plague. The gameplay is generally boring, and if you’re stuck soloing, the game could get very tedious and difficult quickly. New World has a nice solution to this by not locking you into a predefined class. You are open to customizing builds for your playstyle, and we have an excellent build for any healers out there doing some solo PvE. This guide will look at what we believe to be the best New World healing build for solo PvE.

New World healing build for PvE

Here is what I believe to be one of the best PVE Solo Healing builds in New World. The weapons, skills, and attributes are all listed below.

• Playstyle and Skill Rotation
• Primary Weapon: Lifestaff
• Secondary Weapon: Hatchet
• Attributes
• Gear

Playstyle and Skill Rotation

With this build, we are going to be pulling and killing large mobs. Our skill and attack rotation is relatively simple. We will pull enemies using the impressive range and accuracy of our Life Staff. As the mobs approach, we will drop Sacred Ground in front of us and dodge into it. Because we have Bend Light speced, the dodge will provide us a 20% healing boost for 5 seconds. Once we are inside our Sacred Ground, we switch to the hatchet and activate Berserker. The rest is history, unleash on the enemies, and you will make quick work of them. The skill rotation will look something like this.

1. Collect mob with Life Staff
2. Drop Sacred Ground
3. Dodge into Sacred Ground
4. Pop Berserker
5. Melt Enemies
6. Dodge back into Sacred Ground if the enemies move you out

Now let’s take a look at how we put this build together. 

Life Staff

Our Life Staff build revolves around Sacred Ground, it’s basically the best healing move in the game overall and will pair up with your hatchet Berserk.

Spec the entire Sacred Ground tree as soon as possible. Of course, always pick up Absolved to remove the mana consumption for light and heavy attacks. The important skill in the Sacred Ground tree is Blessed.

• Blessed – Whenever you are standing in Sacred Ground, you are healed 50% more from all sources of healing. This includes Berserking Refresh from the hatchet.

From the Protector tree, we add up Bend Light to get a nice healing boost from dodge. After putting down Sacred Ground, we will dodge roll into it and dodge roll back in anytime we get moved out of it. 

To add up some extra healing, we will add Beacon. The rest of the Life Staff tree is up to you and your playstyle. This build is very forgiving after picking up Sacred Ground. 

Hatchet

Although your first weapon choice is pretty obvious, the life staff, your secondary weapon, may not be so clear. My choice is the hatchet. With its Berserk move, we will be able to dish out some serious damage and keep ourselves alive while doing it. 

Let’s look at the primary abilities for both of our weapons that will make this build viable. These are just the cornerstone points you will need to have to execute the attack flow. From there, the rest of your weapon mastery points can be distributed however you prefer.

For the hatchet, we are going to go all-in on Berserker. Overall, Berzerk is one of the best moves in the game, and it’s going to pair with our Life Staff wonderfully. We want to spec down the entire Berzerker tree, and two moves will make this work specifically. 

• Berserking Refresh – Refresh will give you some boosted health regen while in Berserk. This regen will be boosted by Blessed in the Sacred Ground tree.
• Uninterruptible Berserk – This will prevent enemies from knocking you out of your Sacred Ground circle. The build will be difficult to pull off without Uninterruptible Berserk.

For the rest of the Hatchet mastery, we add up as much damage as possible. Since our strategy revolves around pulling large mobs, Against All Odds is a clutch pickup. Adding up Accumulated Power and Raging Torrent gives us a nice DMG boost as well. 

Attributes

For your attributes, you will be going all out into Focus. Depending on the gear you get over time, you could also put some points into Constitution to be a bit more tanky. Here are the bonuses you will receive for Focus point milestones. 

• 50 points  – +10% mana regen, +10% fishing tension
• 100 points – +20 to mana pool, +10% yield increase when salvaging 
• 150 points – +20% healing output (big one), -10% decrease in weight of fishing items
• 200 points – +20% duration on casted buffs, +10% fishing line tension
• 250 points – +30 mana on any self or group kill, +10% increase to caught fish size
• 300 points – when mana hits zero, gain 200% mana regen for 10 seconds (60s cooldown), 10% cooldown reduction for Inn fast travel.

Getting to 150 points into Focus is a bare minimum as it gives you a massive 20% healing output bonus. 

Gear

For this build, you will want to stick to either Light or Medium armor. Medium armor will provide you with a 10% bonus for damage and healing while still maintaining some mobility, and light armor will give you a 20% damage boost and a faster-rolling dodge.

As you level deeper into the game, you will want to get a hatchet with a gem slot. Stick an Amber gem into this slot, and a portion of your hatchet damage will scale off of your focus attribute. This gives you a fantastic DMG boost and really completes the build. You can check out our gem damage scaling guide to see exactly how this scaling works. As a bonus, if you can find a hatchet with Chain Lighting, you can add even more AOE damage and become truly unstoppable. For the rest of your gear, focus on adding up Focus and Constitution stats.

There you have it. A simple and effective Solo PVE Healer build for New World. You can start executing this build pretty early on, and it will carry you into the late game. We will update this build as things change in the game or if we find a more powerful build. Let us know if you like this guide, and stay tuned for a Support Healer build for PVP and Dungeons.