New sage

Hi everyone, so I am not a healer main and sort of dabbled and leveled AST and WHM back in shadowbringers and haven't healed until yesterday. I just have a few questions regarding sage gameplay to see if im currently understanding it properly. I am also 73, so here we go.

1: if my tank is at full health but has an incoming tank buster is it bad to cast Eukrasion Diagnosis on them for the shield?

2: when is the most optimal time to use Haima? It has such a long CD it is usually only good for 1 buster on a typical boss.

3: for anyone who's played a holy paladin in wow, should I just keep Kardia on the tank all the time because of how Kardion works and Soteria or move it around constantly like beacon of light from wow?

4: I've had tanks who clearly don't understand how to use mitigators and I'm forced to spam diagnosis and Druochole. Should it always be Eukrasion or is spamming normal ok in emergencies where that half second counts?

5: I'm a little confused at when to use Pepsis. Ideally I want the shields on my party at all times so is this kind of a last resort button?

Other then those questions I feel I'm doing alright, I'm enjoying it as it's a big change from my comfort zone role. Ty in advance for any guidance and advice you all may have for me.

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Originally Posted by RinaB

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I’m a Scholar main rather than Sage but I do play it fairly often so I’ll try to answer best I can:

1. It’s not so much that Eukrasian Diagnosis shield is ‘bad’, just ‘inefficient’ for lack of a better word. Even though you get a Toxicon stack you still haven’t technically gained anything from that, since Toxicon is just the same potency as Dosis. For incoming tank busters, use skills like Taurochole or the aforementioned Haima (more on that below lol). A really good way to heal up from a tank busters is to use Krasis on the tank then Soteria. The Kardia healing will be boosted so you can heal up just by attacking. Naturally though, Eukrasian Diagnosis does have its uses, but in general try to rely on oGCDs for healing as much as possible and keep Eukrasian Diagnosis for when you really need to stack shields (like when the tank collects vuln ups lol).

2. Haima is best used anytime the tank (or party in the case of Panhaima) is taking consistently spaced damage. Think times like Harrowing Hell, the big laser at the end of M4, etc. For single target, admittedly there’s less of that outside of a few specific tank busters (I think), though it does shine in dungeons during large pulls. I tend to use it on tank busters if Soteria isn’t available, or if the tank has vuln up since it’ll protect them from auto attacks as well (not that they’re the most threatening lol). It’s also worth considering using it on DPS when they get certain DoTs, since they can benefit from each of the shields protecting from DoT hits.

3. I haven’t played WoW unfortunately but to my understanding Kardia is usually just set on the main tank and dps that need heals might lol get Addersgall heals.

4. Yeah, in times like that I always say ‘ok these guys lose their healer dps privileges’ and use every tool in my kit necessary lol. I will Physick a bitch if I have to lol. Diagnosis should always be the absolute last resort for when there’s nothing else left and you want to avoid hitting 0 MP. Which, isn’t often, but it can happen lol. It’s also worth considering using a combination of the two. If you have no Addersgall and have ran out of oGCDs to keep the tank alive, putting a shield on them then throwing out a Diagnosis while the shield lasts can sometimes be better than just spamming either the shield or the normal version.

5. Honestly I think the devs themselves are confused on when to use Pepsis lol. It’s hard to find much for it considering everything else Sage has. Sometimes if I forget to shield a raidwide aoe, I’ll use Pepsis to (try) and make up for the mitigation that was lost by making it direct healing. Its entirely unnecessary lol, especially when there’s Addersgall heals which you need to be cycling regularly to keep MP up

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Originally Posted by RinaB

Hi everyone, so I am not a healer main and sort of dabbled and leveled AST and WHM back in shadowbringers and haven't healed until yesterday. I just have a few questions regarding sage gameplay to see if im currently understanding it properly. I am also 73, so here we go.

1: if my tank is at full health but has an incoming tank buster is it bad to cast Eukrasion Diagnosis on them for the shield?

2: when is the most optimal time to use Haima? It has such a long CD it is usually only good for 1 buster on a typical boss.

3: for anyone who's played a holy paladin in wow, should I just keep Kardia on the tank all the time because of how Kardion works and Soteria or move it around constantly like beacon of light from wow?

4: I've had tanks who clearly don't understand how to use mitigators and I'm forced to spam diagnosis and Druochole. Should it always be Eukrasion or is spamming normal ok in emergencies where that half second counts?

5: I'm a little confused at when to use Pepsis. Ideally I want the shields on my party at all times so is this kind of a last resort button?

Other then those questions I feel I'm doing alright, I'm enjoying it as it's a big change from my comfort zone role. Ty in advance for any guidance and advice you all may have for me.

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1. Optimally speaking, if the tankbuster is not lethal (leaves the party member with HP remaining), then you don't use an Eukrasian shield. You just heal it up after the hit takes place. As a sage, you have many tools at your disposal to do so. Single Target skills like: Druochole, Taurochole, Soteria + Kardion hits over time, and later -- Krasis to magnify those healing actions. Toxikon is not a DPS gain during combat because it has the same potency as Dosis, but takes at minimum 2 GCDs to execute (Eukrasian Diagnosis to shield, followed up by Toxikon). You lose damage compared to using Dosis -> Weave in a healing ability -> Dosis -> Weave in a healing ability, so generally opening up with Eukrasian shields isn't the most ideal unless you need that shield to keep someone alive. Using Eukrasian shields when the tank can survive a tankbuster without your shield is basically throwing away MP.

2. Optimal time to use multi-hit barriers is effectively during big bleeds, mutli-hit attacks, or strong persistent damage. Those are instances where the barriers will persistently pop. You can see its use during wall to wall pulls because it acts as a strong lasting barrier against many hits and let your kardia proc without worries. If you can't get the full advantage of Haima, it's just planned to be used for a small shield + the heal from excess shields expiring.

3. This is situational. You can usually leave kardia on a tank because the kardia system is devoid of interactivity and the game severely lacks damage beyond what your oGCDs can cover, but if you want maximum performance, you can kardia swap to apply Soteria on a DPS to heal between attacks as well.

4. You should always be using Eukrasian shields (1s + activation with 1.5s lockout after) over diagnosis (1.5s cast with 2.5s lockout) because both of them have effectively the same cast time. Diagnosis is 100% a loss. Eukrasian shields are not only more potency per shield, you also can recup some of the DPS loss /healing through Kardion when using Toxikon and give you more room to weave oGCD healing.

5. Pepsis is just SCH's Emergency Tactics but in reverse. After applying Eukrasian shield, you can use pepsis to pop the shield, effectively giving the healing potency of an Eukrasian shield's potency as raw healing. Using Eukrasian Prognosis -> Pepsis -> Eukrasian Prognosis is how you can rapidly let the party gain some HP back without oGCDs left because the total potency of Eukrasian shields is bigger than their counterpart. The optimal use case is to apply the Eukrasian shields, take enough damage to leave a small sliver of the shield remaining, then use Pepsis to gain maximum healing potency while reducing shield waste.

Needless to say, most attacks do far more than what your Eukrasian shields will mitigate when you do need Eukrasian shields to survive lethal attacks (especially for raidwide), so the optimal use case is hard to achieve and generally have better alternatives (like the rest of your healing and mitigation toolkit) since GCD skills are more like a last resort, but it's one of those niche things you can do with Eukrasian Diagnosis's shield value to maximize the value of your Eukrasian shields.

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Originally Posted by RinaB

3: for anyone who's played a holy paladin in wow, should I just keep Kardia on the tank all the time because of how Kardion works and Soteria or move it around constantly like beacon of light from wow?

5: I'm a little confused at when to use Pepsis. Ideally I want the shields on my party at all times so is this kind of a last resort button?

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3: Its nothing like holy paladin, keep it on the main tank at all times theres no point in switching it off of it.

5: Its the answer to SCHs deployment tactics but a worse version of it since its for pure healing. Very rarely of any importance use it in emergency healing situations but your regen and ogcd aoe should be enough for the most part, theres one fight I can think of where its useful and thats the abyssal fracture for the doom mechanic where you need to heal everyone to full quickly.

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Originally Posted by RinaB

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Talking for the perspective of a Sage that has done all the savages and ultimates of the previous example:

1- Is not bad per se, just innecesary. The problem is that is highly inneficient, more often than not tank cds can take care of the damage from tankbusters and they do not need that extra shielding making you lose a GCD worth of damage while gaining very little real value out of the heal. For those situations you may want to evaluate if you can handle the damage with oGCDs and see if the tank really needs the heal.

2-I'm gonna bold this because is a common misconception, you want to use haima on any situation when continuous damage is happening. Multi hit tankbusters, bosses auto attacks, mobs packs auto attacks (here is specially good) all those situation where the tank is getting continuous damage is where haima shines since you want to break as many shield layers as possible. Don't think 2m is a long cd, the average dungeon is 15m-16m so that means you can easily get 8-9 uses per dungeon and if you save it for just the tankbusters you are getting at best 3.

This doesn't mean it can only be used when those situations happen, haima can also be used if you need a shield oGCD for someone or as a delayed heal but if you want to maximize the healing you get out of that skill you have to identify where those situations with continuous damage happen and use it there.

3-99% of the time will be on the tank but you can move it around to heal targets that may need healing, this is especially useful in low level dungeons where you dont have many aoe oGCD heals, allowing you to use single target healing to patch some damage on some party members and letting kardia heal the remaining.

4-Diagnosis is shit. The only situations where you should be using it if you have Eukrasian diagnosis is if healing needs to be done but the target already has a shield, when you are low on mp and when the target has doom and you need it to reach 100% hp, in any other situation eukrasian diagnosis is the answer. Even in speed eukrasian diagnosis is better as its 0.5s faster to cast (diagnosis has 1.5s cast time while eukrasian diagnsosis only 1s from eukrasia) but situations where that matter are rare and more often than not mean that your healing plan already failed.

5-Its an emergency button for when you need to GCD spam as you can break the shield, and immediatly cast it again allowing you to not resort to the unaugmented heals, it also helps when doom mechanics happen and you need the hp bar to go up. Other than that is one of the worst buttons of your kit and you will rarely find uses for it if you play well

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Originally Posted by RinaB

1: if my tank is at full health but has an incoming tank buster is it bad to cast Eukrasion Diagnosis on them for the shield?

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In most cases it's not worth losing a Dosis to shield the tank before a tank buster. Sage has so many free cooldown buttons that a GCD shield will almost never make a positive difference in casual content.

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2: when is the most optimal time to use Haima? It has such a long CD it is usually only good for 1 buster on a typical boss.

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Haima can be used at most the same times as any of your other single target cooldowns, but it works best when you treat it like a regen rather than a shield. You'll get the most out of it just before a multi-hit attack or a DoT, since breaking each shield stack gives you twice the compared to the unused portion blowing up all at once at the end.

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3: for anyone who's played a holy paladin in wow, should I just keep Kardia on the tank all the time because of how Kardion works and Soteria or move it around constantly like beacon of light from wow?

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You can move it around to heal folks who are taking damage if you want. Just make sure you remember to set it back on the tank when the other person doesn't need it anymore, lest you go two minutes without realizing the tank is getting lower than they should because they're not your Kardion anymore. Other people will tell you not to ever use it on anyone but the tank, but honestly you'll waste fewer cooldowns on everyone else if you aren't lazy with your Kardia. That said, sage has so many cooldowns that "just leave it on the tank" is "okay, in general".

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4: I've had tanks who clearly don't understand how to use mitigators and I'm forced to spam diagnosis and Druochole. Should it always be Eukrasion or is spamming normal ok in emergencies where that half second counts?

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It's best to pretend regular Diagnosis doesn't even exist once you learn Eukrasia. If the tank is taking so much damage that you have no choice but to spend GCDs on heals, you don't want to cost yourself even more GCDs by wasting time casting a weaker heal when they would be taking enough damage to break the shield before your next cast anyway.

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5: I'm a little confused at when to use Pepsis. Ideally I want the shields on my party at all times so is this kind of a last resort button?

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Well, first off, you don't want shields on your party at all times. Between all of sage's AoE cooldowns, you will almost never need to cast Eukrasian Prognosis. However, Pepsis is an important action whenever a boss does something like an eraser with a doom, setting everyone down to 1hp and requiring you to heal everyone to full within a certain timeframe. In that case, you should precast E.Prognosis. When the eraser goes off, everyone will drop to 1hp but they'll still have their shield, which you can convert to a group heal with Pepsis.

Outside of that, you might cast E.Prognosis after an attack that drops everyone low and then use Pepsis if everyone is still low. However, one of the many other sage cooldowns will usually handle this just fine.

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Originally Posted by RinaB

Hi everyone, so I am not a healer main and sort of dabbled and leveled AST and WHM back in shadowbringers and haven't healed until yesterday. I just have a few questions regarding sage gameplay to see if im currently understanding it properly. I am also 73, so here we go[...]

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1. It's not bad (i.e. progging ex/savage+ and you want to help the tanks somewhat until they pin down their own cd usage). It's just unnecessary (basically every other scenarios). If the idea is to mitigate, eeking out Taurochole/Kerachole or just patch up after buster in general is far better.

2. It's a button worth of a whooping 1,500 cure potency if all shield breaks within 15s. So the most 'optimal' way is to find instances that does enough damage close to that cure potency, which.. isn't many. Bleedbusters comes to mind. A wall pulling tank is a great candidate for this - it basically deletes HPS requirement by vast amount. Painful auto attacks from some EX/Savage floors is also a great candidate. Alternatively when a non-tank steps onto painful bleed, those are also good targets for Haima(s).

3. Simple answer? Yes. Longer answer? Take it as a targeted permanent fixed regen if you want to make use of that extra HPS that often gone to waste whenever bosses starts casting something (because they just can't auto attack during that lol). It's way easier to just patch up mistakes with your many extra Druocholes that you're going to overcap anyway, but the option is there if you somehow want to inflate your APM lol.

4. The only times you should be using Diagnosis is when you're trying to heal a very tight heal-doom check on a single target and is out of absolutely other options. E.Diag still trumps on the very scenario you're describing.

5. Very rarely. Partywide heal-doom check when your Physis/Philosophia (lv100)/Zoe+Pneuma (lv90)+Ixochole isn't enough to take care of that? Maybe. The only recent times I used Pepsis to deal with doom mechanic was from Orbonne's TGC Cleansing Slash. What I did was to prep an E.Prog -30s prior to the mechanic. Then hit Pepsis once everybody's HP drop down to 1, giving myself an extra partywide 350 cure potency oGCD that would've otherwise not exist under normal circumstances. This only works so long your shield remains intact (even at 1 potency remaining, you will still get a fixed 350p heal).

Another use of Pepsis is when you realized your last applied E.Prog would not last till the next mechanic you're preparing to deal with: you use Pepsis to delete all existing E.Prog to reapply your barrier once more.

Ty for all the tips, I'm just about 79 now and have gotten much smoother with the gameplay. Unfortunately I have had a string of malikas well runs with tanks who either will not or have no idea how to use mitigators so I have had to spam E.diagnosis after blowing my ogcds and Haima....very rough but it is def faster then hard casting diagnosis. Trust me I don't like being in that scenario but it's been a little crazy the amount of damage they're taking....the advice here has helped me quite a bit and hopefully my future abilities on the road to 100 are gonna make things even smoother (I don't usually preread my abilities as I want them to be a surprise). I think I also found a use for pepsis on the last boss in malikas well...it will cast multiple aoes in a row so it's not bad to use it there but I can def see how it's a very situational ability with an odd cd.

Kardia is overkill most of the time except in savage+ and only then it's with an undergeared tank. If you want to feel feisty feel free to move it around to heal low health people and conserve resources, it adds a -relatively superficial- layer of skill/engagement. Then again you should rarely if ever run out of resources to begin with, and you'll rarely be in a position when the heal from kardia is significant. So, move it around for fun.