Build Spotlight: Nature’s Grace

While there is an extensive variety of potential healing builds that a player can utilize effectively on the battlefield, often times they tend to have various drawbacks that hinder them in one form or another. Whether the hindrance is caused by immobility, high energy consumption or low healing output, there are usually notable adjustments that can be made to tweak a healer into becoming optimal in their role.

Healing with a Great Nature Staff is both engaging and very rewarding. The nature staff provides you with a very versatile tool-kit that allows you to greatly increase your allies’ survivability in a fight. It also provides you with a more ‘nimble’ healing experience, with various instant cast heals at your disposal. Energy sustainability may be a relevant issue, but it can be significantly mitigated with a proper build.

Choice of Equipment

To begin with, let’s delve into the weapon and armor set of choice that is utilized in this build.

1) Light Leather Helmet

2) Light Leather Chest

3) Light Leather Boots

4) Great Nature Staff

Armor

As you can see, the choice of armor is rather straight forward. Although this may be the case, an intricate choice of skills must be made in order to adapt to your approach towards healing. Let’s briefly discuss the skills and passives we will want to forge onto our gear before making our grand appearance on the battlefield.

Light Helmet Skill:

The main skill you will want to take on this slot is Energy Regain. Its purpose is rather self-explanatory; a channeled spell that greatly replenishes your energy. Energy Regain is one of the most important skills that most healer builds should utilize. However, it is even more relevant in this build. Great Nature Staves require a lot of energy. Without Energy Regain on your skill bar, you run the chance of running extremely low on mana and not being able to keep your allies alive. The last thing you want to see is your allies dropping like flies… right?

Light Helmet Passive:

The passive we will want to take here will be Charity – increasing the strength of your healing output by 5%.  Your focal objective as a healer is typically to maximize your healing output in order to keep your friends alive as long as possible. This objective is ultimately no different in Albion. Charity is the passive that takes you one step closer to that effectively maximizing your heals.

Light Chest Skill:

For our chest skill, things become a little trickier. The primary skill we will want to take depends on what form of player versus player (PvP) we are engaging in at the time. Blink – a short distance teleport, is an excellent choice of skill for open world action. It allows you to keep up with your allies in the open field, whilst also providing you with the utility to escape enemy crowd control, such as roots and slows.

Although blink is an excellent option for open world PvP, Ice Block is arguably stronger in terms of small-scale PvP, such as guild versus guild (GvG) fights. Being confined to a smaller area, enemies naturally have easier access in attempting to burst down a healer. In this case, Ice Block provides you with much needed invulnerability to avoid enduring as much damage as possible. This opens the door for you to focus more on healing your allies, and less on healing yourself.

The skill you will want to take here simply depends on your preference, playstyle and the form of PvP you are engaging in. Choose wisely.

Light Chest Passive:

The passive of choice here will be Charity – in this case, increasing your healing output by 10%. Again, this is important in order to efficiently weigh your healing output versus energy cost.

Light Boots Skill:

For our light boots, the skill we will want to grab is Energetic Sprint. This skill is important to pick up for various reasons. First, it provides you with an important 100% increase in movement speed for 3 seconds. Although this may seem relatively the same as other sprint options, Energetic Sprint also regenerates energy over the course of 3 seconds. This essentially negates the energy cost of using your sprint skill. Since healing with your Great Nature Staff will already be energy-intensive, mitigating the energy cost of sprinting is imperative in this build.  

Light Boots Passive:

As I’m sure you expected, the passive you ought to take on your light boots will once again be Charity. At this point, I’m sure you’re well aware as to why this is the case. Be the most efficient healer out there.

Weapon

At last, we have the most important piece of gear to discuss; the Great Nature Staff.

In order to acquire the ability to use our great nature Staff, you must first unlock fame through the archery branch in the destiny board up until the “power level 2” branch. Begin by utilizing bows up until tier 3, then swap out to 1 handed nature staves at tier 4. This will be your first experience utilizing a nature staff so take that opportunity to get accustomed to the style of healing that it provides. Following down this path will lead you to the Great Nature Staff at tier 4.2.  After you get a taste of the healing output that the Great Nature Staff has to offer, it’s hard to turn back.

It provides some of the widest variety of skill options of any weapon in Albion. Whether you would prefer to maximize your heal output, increase your allies defensive capabilities, or even cleanse your allies of harmful debuffs, the Great Nature Staff provides the utility in order to do so. Let’s briefly discuss what our best 3 options are for maximizing our healing output in this build specifically.

Rejuvenation: This skill is the bread and butter of your healing output when using a nature staff. It functions by providing a heal-over-time (HoT) tick that stacks up to 3 times on any ally or yourself. What makes this skill extremely important is the fact that it is an instant cast heal. This essentially allows you to stay mobile with your teammates, keeping their health topped-off without having to suffer the same issues that holy staff users face, with channeled or casted heals. 

Revitalize: Although there are 3 other options for your “W” skill, I would recommend putting Revitalize on your skill bar for anything PvP related. This is basically your “burst” heal – restoring a large amount of health immediately, as well as providing an additional HoT for even more sustain-heals.

Living Armor: My personal favorite skill on the Great Nature Staff, Living Armor increases your targets armor and magic resistances significantly, while also increasing incoming healing received by a considerable 39%. Naturally, this combines very well with the two aforementioned skills which we will discuss below.

Playstyle & Combos

The playstyle of a Great Nature Staff healer is one that is very agile. It is effective at sustaining your allies in a fight, regardless of how strong or weak your friends’ resistances are. Maximizing your healing efficiency per energy cost allows you to ensure that the target you’re healing can stay engaged in combat for a long time without having to flee from enemy lines. Utilizing instant-cast heals will allow you to focus healing more than one ally at a time, while also sustaining your energy through the use of Energy Regain. You also have the tools at your disposal to mitigate enemy damage your allies receive through the use of Living Armor. It is simply up to you as the individual to make wise decisions with the vast utility that the great nature staff offers.

A basic combo used by many nature healers to save the lives of those in danger starts off with providing an ally with Living Armor. This is in order to greatly increase their resistances and healing received, effectively mitigating the damage they take. This is followed up by three instant-casts of Rejuvenation that will provide an even stronger heal over time when applied in conjunction with Living Armor. If your target gets too low on health, a quick usage of Revitalize to burst their hit points back to sustainable levels can mean the difference between life and death for your ally.

Pros & Cons:

The pros and cons of this build are both noteworthy when approaching a fight with this build. A notable pro is that the build offers you the mobility to keep pace with your aggressing allies, and also focus healing more than one ally at a time with the instant-cast capabilities of Rejuvenation.

A drawback of this build is that although Energy Regain certainly helps you with energy management, you can still run into energy issues rather quickly if you are focused on healing too many allies at once. Naturally, since nature staves can heal quickly with instant casts, your energy can vanish just as fast. It’s entirely about efficient energy management.

Control the Essence of Life.

Being a wielder of the Great Nature Staff, life and death are now tangible forces within your control. Your allies await your help as they won’t get very far without a strong healer as the backbone of their survivability. You know what to do from here.

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