Life Stuff offers a great mix of Heals and Buffs that will keep your teammates alive and kicking. It gives you access to Healing and Protector skill trees, and you'll utilize abilities and passives from both to achieve the best results. All six of the Life Staff's active abilities find their uses, however, we recommend Sacred Ground, Orb of Protection, and Beacon. Also, if you want to focus more on burst healing, you can swap Orb of Protection for Light's Embrace. 

Active Skills:

1. Sacred Ground (Healing): Creates a ground-based AoE that heals every ally in range for 20% weapon damage every second; it lasts for 15 seconds. This is great for Healing melee DPS and will also help you keep the Tank alive. You should also take both of the corresponding passives. Holy Ground will double Mana and Stamina regen of all allies inside of the AoE, and Blessed will increase all healing received by affected allies by 50%, which is massive. 
2. Orb of Protection (Protector): A versatile Ability that allows you to Fortify (Fortify reduces damage taken) and Heal an ally, or deal 146% Weapon damage to an enemy. This is best used on a Tank, but don't underestimate its damage-dealing part. You should also invest in all three corresponding passives as they turn it into an AoE, increase its effectiveness, and make it apply the Heal and the Fortify effect to you as well as the targets. 
3. Beacon (Protector): A Damaging ability that debuffs the target, making it heal all your nearby allies by 20% weapon damage per second for 10 seconds. This couples well with both holy Ground and Orb of Protection, allowing you to maximize your AoE Heals. We recommend both of the corresponding passives as they increase Beacon's AoE by 50% and make it last for 5 seconds longer. 

Core Passives:

1. Desperate Speed (Healing): Whenever you heal an ally that is below 50% health, your Life Staff's cooldowns are reduced by 50% (this cannot occur more than once every 5 seconds). Cooldown reduction is always nice, and you don't even have to think about triggering this on purpose (but you can). 
2. Sacred Protection (Healing): While holding a Life Staff, the base health of all allies in your group is increased by 10%. A powerful passive, however, it won't work after you switch to Hatchet. 
3. Protector's Strength (Protector): A powerful passive that increases your healing done by 10% whenever you have a buff active on you. This passive is a great reason to take Shared Protection passive for Orb of Protection. 
4. Glowing Focus (Protector): Increases the duration of your buffs by 20%. This will make all the positive effects you apply more powerful by maximizing their uptime. 

We propose an extremely simple, yet effective Hatchet setup for this build. Mainly, we recommend that you just max out the Throwing Skill tree. Doing so will give you three powerful ranged support abilities and unlock a few useful passives. As for the usage of Hatcher's Skills - remember that this is your secondary weapon, you should use it only in situations where Healing is not immediately needed (so, minimize downtime by applying hatchet debuffs instead of idling).  

Active Skills:

1. Rending Throw (Throwing): A thrown attack that deals 110% Weapon Damage and applies a Rend that reduces the target's damage absorption by 10% for 10 seconds. It has a 15s cooldown. This is great for debuffing bosses and making them take more damage. You should take all three of the corresponding passives to make Rending Throw much more effective. 
2. Social Distancing (Throwing): A thrown attack that also makes you dodge backward. It deals 130% Weapon damage and slows targets by 15% for 3 seconds. Improving Social Distancing with both corresponding CDs will turn it into a great defensive tool. 
3. Infected Throw (Throwing): A thrown attack that deals 150% weapon damage and applies two debuffs - disease and weakness. The disease reduces the target's healing efficiency by 30% and weakness reduces the target's damage done by 10%. You should also unlock the Aerial Transmission passive as it will turn the Infected Throw's debuffs into AoE. 

Core Passives:

1. Rejuvenating Crits (Throwing): This passive makes you regain 10 stamina whenever you Crit with Light Attacks or Aimed Throws. 
2. Refreshing Throws (Throwing): With this, throwing hatchets at targets with an active debuff will reduce all your cooldowns by 5%. Cooldown reduction is always nice; if you have time, throw a hatchet or two to benefit from this. 
3. Adrenaline Rush (Throwing): With this, a Dodge made within 2 seconds of triggering an ability costs 25% less Stamina. 
4. Persistent Hindrance (Throwing): Succesful throwing hatchet hits extend all hatchet debuff durations by 30%. Because of this passive, you should always throw a hatchet after using your Hatcher Abilities (doing so will also trigger the Refreshing Throws' effect). 

First and foremost, you should try to get 300 total Focus points. After you do that, you'll have two options: push Focus even higher, or get some Constitution. If you choose the first option, you'll become an ultimate (but squishy) healing machine. If you choose the second, you'll lose on HPS but will gain some much-needed staying power. As for Armor Weight, you should primarily use Heavy Armor as it will make you tankier - the damage bonus from Light and Medium armors does not seem to work on Healing, sadly. 

We are obviously going to update this section when the full game is released, and we have more time to get familiar with all the Perks, Gems, and specific attributes of higher rarity equipment. Any changes to this guide will be described on top of the page in Build notes. 

END NOTE

This is the initial version of our New World Life Staff/Hatchet Healer build. We tried to include all the important information on how to set up a character to run it, while also trying to keep the guide as compact as possible. If we've missed something of importance, please let us know! 

If you have any Build requests, please post them in the Comments section below. We will be happy to cover your most requested builds in the future! Also, we hope that you have found this guide useful and informative. Also, we will be happy to receive constructive criticism that will help us improve our future work, so don't hesitate to give us your feedback.